Lot's Wife

The five senses occur throughout the poem, making them motifs, while their presence in the poem as a whole symbolizes how humankind makes sense of the larger world. Actions that occur through smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing send critical information to the brain. This process allows humans to orient themselves and navigate their surroundings.

Two additional senses, balance and spatial awareness, aren’t explicitly present in “Lot’s Wife,” but the case can be made for their implicit inclusion. When the rain in the poem renders the world “a steel engraving” (Line 8), the speaker further describes the rainy view as “soft fadings and faint distances” (Line 9). The changing landscape, and the speaker’s perception of the landscape’s details, suggests spatial awareness on the speaker’s part. Balance appears symbolically in the act of looking back, where indulging memories and looking back become a symbolic balancing act between the past and present.

The speaker calls rain a “graphite veil” (Line 7). This graphite turns the world into “a steel engraving” (Line 8), which suggests that the heavy rainfall captures the world—at least in this moment—like one takes a photograph or engraves a picture as a physical token of recollection. Steel engraving became popular in the 1800s, and steel quickly replaced copper as the preferred method for engraving plates.