Three Varieties of Bathtubs :: Jeffrey Harrison Literature Essays

3 Varieties of Bathtubs Past, present and future are the simplest ways in which humans perceive time. We recognize the knightly through our memories and our recall of events that already have happened. When look into the future, we can only look at whither we are now in order to guess what our fate might be in the future. Or else we only have our dreams and goals that we look forward to one- daytime accomplishing. When viewing the present, however, everything around us is not an view or remembering in our head, notwithstanding a reality that we use our senses to see, feel, touch, smell or hear. We are using our bodys functions to live and take in what is around us at the moment. When living in the present (as one would say to person who is constantly aware of the moment and what is around them), there is less befall to miss whats in front of us rather than always looking behind or too far ahead. Jeffrey Harrison, in his poem Bathtubs, Three Varieties, seems to feel the sam e way about living in the here and the now. The three varieties of bathtubs Harrison writes about were separated into three stanzas according to their design and their excogitation now, in the present. In the first stanza of the poem Harrison describes an grey- fashioned bathtub, one that was brocaded off the floor by porcelain animal paws that extended off each(prenominal) corner. The particular bathtubs that he was describing were no longer serving their intended design, but rather were outside in a yard like an old car that was once ones hotrod, now scrap metal. These bathtubs, retired from their original purpose, now sightly sat through the seasons and let outside forces such as the withstand and changes in other living things like the walnut tree stock up on without regard to their presence. In the description of these bathtubs, Harrison shows something that although is still here, is part of the past and really does not have a life of its own any longer except just ly ing underneath the walnut tree. This is very lots like a person whose thoughts are caught up in the past, because they, too, are still trying to live something that is over and then lose purpose in the present. Harrison also relates these bathtubs twice to sheep, which are commonly viewed as animals that comply each other, never really having a choice or idea of their own.