Personality Of The Clown By Elizabeth Jennings

personality of the clown. Is she a performer like the clown? Or is she a clumsy artist? The inherent contrast is seen in these lines: “Yet my pain will start/because I wound. The clown prevails in art; /gently as his balloon, my pity falls” (103) In spite of the detachment, the poet knows that what the inner feelings of the clown are, for her fears are the same; both are seen in hiding behind the mask.
Though the clown is contrasted in the first poem, the poet shares many of her feelings with him in the other five. She finds reasons to treat the clown as a projection of her own self. The second poem, in rhymed couplets, describes the various acts he performs and the way he makes a profession of his art. The third poem explores the social obligation

The religious poems are applied to her personal experiences as we see in the direct references as one critic puts it, “a human weight of intelligence and feminine sensibility.” From the point of view of her art, Jennings’ Catholic faith brings a gathering strength and new colors to her poetry. Yet she does not see religion as an isolated aspect in her own life or in life or life of the people she wrote about. The same idea is in her book of poetry “Christianity and Poetry”, “We have to remember that all poetry, however unconsciously, is created against a background of philosophy…..Poetry never, when it is healthy, works in isolation.”(Jennings, Christianity and Poetry 47). Even at the centre of a religious idea or theme, Jennings always reveals her own identity as being interested in ordinary life and living it honestly; this helps her maintain an artistic balance in her poetry, however abstract her themes may be.
The last poem, “A Visit to a Friend in Hospital, “is like a door through which Jennings enters through; as in the later collections of poems, the visit turns into a stay. In the poem here the poet describes her hatreds and fears, feelings of insecurity within the walls of the hospital. Though it is a friend who is visited, the visit is, in reality, to an unexplored, unexplained region of the poet’s consciousness. “I walk upright and strong, yet I am weak,/While you who lie in pain have all the power, “is the way in which the friend is