Time is precious. The more time passes, the more troubling aging and time become. Through the juxtaposition of evocative imagery in “35/10”, Sharon Olds portrays the distressing reality of time and age. Age is a recurring theme in the poem. The first line we see, the title “35/10”, is a reference to and a comparison of the age of the speaker and her growing daughter. The speaker introduces tactile and visual imagery of the “daughter’s dark / silken hair” and “the grey gleaming” on her head, identifying herself as “the silver-haired servant”(Olds, 1-4). This juxtaposition of the youthfulness of the daughter and the aging of the (speaker) mother demonstrates how the speaker feels about aging. The word “gleaming” expresses how the speaker negatively views her age; her grey hair puts it on display. Her positive imagery of her daughter’s hair emphasizes the glory and …show more content…
The speaker asks why as her generation gets older the younger generation becomes more pleasant looking: “The fold in my neck clarifying as the fine bones of her hips sharpen?” (6-8) Her daughter is becoming a woman, more shapely. She, on the other hand, is becoming heavier and losing her youthful figure. She is deeply troubled by this transformation. She even speaks of the dryness of her skin and contrasts that with comparing her daughter with the beautiful image of a flower blooming from a cactus (8-10). The imagery of the new flower coming from a harsh, prickly object such as a cactus represents the fresh woman blossoming from the roughness of childhood into the grace of the adult world. As her daughter becomes a woman, the speaker is noting the changes the daughter’s body is going through as well as her own bodily changes as she ages. She acknowledges her “last chances to bare a child are falling through (her) body… her purse full of eggs, round