Ted Kooser's Blind Woman

Ted Kooser’s “A Blind Woman” is a good poem to study personal restraint, the authorial voice subordinated to the poem’s other. The focus of the poem is clearly on the blind woman, but the imprint of the authorial voice is nevertheless visible in the way she is described.

A poem is a record of a person looking from a window outward to the world, asserts Kooser in The Poetry Home Repair Manual. The poem records the moment in the voice or presence of the speaker. To follow Kooser’s metaphor is to examine a continuum from subjectivity to objectivity depending on how the author “control[s] the amount of light outside” (31). For example, the highly subjective poem turns “down the light on the world” so that the reflection in the glass is brightened while the highly objective poem brightens the light outside so the “reflection all but disappears.” The “double image” whether faint or pronounced is the presence in the poem.

In “A Blind Woman,” Kooser shines the light directly on the movement of the woman in the first half of the poem. The description is basically expository in that she moves forward with her smiling face turned upward. She wears a sweatshirt and brown shoes, but the objectivity of the description stops there. The “double image,” the telltale signature of the authorial voice becomes apparent in the metaphorical use of light and rain in the description. The woman is said to be moving in a “rain of light” which “trickles down her forehead and into her eyes.” This “rain of light” runs into the neck of her sweatshirt, wetting the “white tops of her breasts,” and her “brown shoes splashed on/ into the light.” When the narrator of the poem moves from the objective description to applying the rain/light metaphor, he reveals his reflection in the window of the poem. That she gives herself to light like a happy child gives herself to a walk in the rain carries just a trace of the author’s attitude, his distinct vision and appreciation of the woman’s indomitable spirit.

In the last half of the poem, the “double image” of presence becomes even more pronounced with the simile chosen to counterbalance the description of the woman’s movement. The moment in time is compared to the movement of a circus wagon, the woman walking behind, the world inside. The simile heightens the sense of relished life that the narrator sees in the woman. Childlike, she is said to poke and prod the animal within the rolling cage with her cane. While the circus wagon rolls through the “puddles of light,” the world is said to have “cowered back in a corner.” The narrator renders a value judgment in his insistence in this figure that understanding comes through adversity and that ironically those on the other side of adversity may be the ones imprisoned like circus animals.

Granted the subjectivity that would have been present had the narrator stepped into the poem and told his reader exactly what the woman made him feel is not there, but the reader sees through the restraint of the “double image.” The focus is on the blind woman but the reflected presence of the narrator can also be seen in the window.