Flare Themes
Man and the Natural World
For the speaker of "Flare," the natural world is where it's at. Need a break from the hustle and bustle of your responsibilities? Frolic in a field. Need some solace from your sorrows? Take a hike....
Death
"Nothing lasts," or so the speaker of "Flare" tells us, right off the bat. In fact, she spends a good deal of the poem exploring death and how we relate to it. There's the death of her parents, the...
Sadness
The speaker of "Flare" has a pretty deep understanding of grief, sorrow, misery—of all sorts of sadness, really. She knows that grief is unavoidable and advises us to let it be our sister. Despit...
Literature and Writing
"Flare" explores the way poetry relates to the world, while being, itself, a poem. Nifty, no? What can we say? It's a complicated relationship: a poem is not the things it refers to—it is not the...