In the first few lines of Thralldom, Saeed Jones uses hunger as a metaphor for desire. He says he “survived on mouthfuls of hyacinth,” which may not be poisonous in small quantities, but in the context of consuming for extreme hunger, would most likely be poisonous to the human body. It gives the idea of purposefully poisoning oneself for the sake of fulfilling desires. Running with the idea of hunger, Jones would not have been able to survive if he didn’t eat something but he chose to eat this plant that could poison him because at the very least it satisfied him. The poem is talking about the sexual experience between two men. In this case it seems to be saying that the speaker had such desires that it didn’t matter to them how the desires were filled. They took the fulfillment in any way they could, even if it was not conducive or practical. With alluding to the hyacinth, the speaker makes this connection of felling like you are nourishing or being productive to yourself in the short term, but in the long term you may actually be hurting yourself. I think there is also an interesting contrast with the idea of beauty. The hyacinth is generally a pretty flower and in many cases may not be seen to be dangerous, but can in fact be deadly. There is this same idea with desire and pleasure, which may seem beautiful from a distance, but can be truly destructive in certain circumstances. I think a lot of kids who grow up not knowing or figuring out their sexuality have a harder time deciphering this because they begin their experience a little later after spending that time figuring out and accepting themselves. This makes it easier to end up in a harmful situation that may seem beautiful because there is this desire and impatience for those experiences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the first few lines of Thralldom, Saeed Jones uses hunger as a metaphor for desire. He says he “survived on mouthfuls of hyacinth,” which may not be poisonous in small quantities, but in the context of consuming for extreme hunger, would most likely be poisonous to the human body. It gives the idea of … Continue reading Hyacinth<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5003,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5003"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}