"Tan-Aw Ra Ba, Ibog Ka!"

The Look

Strephon kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.

Strephon's kiss was lost in jest,
Robin's lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin's eyes
Haunts me night and day.

n Sara Teasdale

This is a two stanza poem by Sara Teasdale. This poem, even though it is short it has a deep and big meaning if you will really scrutinize each stanza and if combined, you will have a generalization which is meaningful.

In the first stanza, Strephon and Robin kissed the girl but Colin expressing his love not by a kiss but through a look in her eyes.

In the second stanza, Strephon and Robin’s kiss got lost suddenly just because of Colin’s look in her eyes. The persona in the story longs for Colin’s expression of love after she saw that look.

I believe in the saying that the eyes are the windows of our soul. Maybe because the eyes are not only for seeing things but also for commanding our feelings. When we talk about soul, it is somewhat connected to our feelings and emotions because we cannot see soul but rather we feel that we have soul because without our soul, we cannot do things or even move. We will be futile if we have no soul. It is also the same if you’re ask if you can see things in your mind like mental pictures. Do mental pictures really exist in your brain? The answer is that we can’t see it but rather we experience and feel that we have mental pictures in our head.

In the selection the saying, “Eyes are the windows of our soul”, is the theme of this story. I will not elaborate much on love because this saying tells it all. I believe that all of us experience this kind of feeling like in the two-stanza poem. For me, just a look in the eyes has a deep meaning to me rather than a kiss. But I’m not saying that I’m a “feeler”. We can’t really deny that. A “look” is very meaningful even just for a second. I think that it is an instinct of a person to feel something with just one look. A look like I said has a lot of meaning and it depends on us on how we react on that thing.

Looking is much more sincere than actions and words. Like for example, we can tell if a person is sincere, if we can see in his/her eyes that he is really sincere and only our instincts can determine that.

It is our eye that sees everything and it is also our eye that connects us all. It is hard for us to answer why a look is more significant than expressing things through actions or words. Maybe because, we are not aware of it. We are unconscious about it and for me; it is really sincere if we don’t have an idea about it. Just like in love, for example, if we are to ask why we love that person and we don’t know the reason, we can really tell that we are sincere because we don’t let our brain think but rather we trust our feelings and we rather follow them. It is our feeling that makes a thing special.

Once again, to summarize it all, the selection only tells us that it is more memorable for us of a look than an action or a word. Like a picture, painting a thousand words, a look says a lot of things. It is window to our soul, thus by looking, it enters our soul thus having a deep meaning for us that only we can understand and appreciate.

That’s all and thank you!