Charles Simic's Poem Watermelons

Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, to his parents George and Helen, on May 9, 1938. This was about a year before World War II began in Europe. The war immensely altered Simic’s childhood. His family was often forced to evacuate their home to escape bombings. In addition, Simic’s father was arrested by Nazi authorities multiple times and eventually fled to Italy in 1944, where he was thrown in jail again. Despite his mother’s attempts to escape Yugoslavia with her two sons, the Communist authorities did not grant them passports until 1953 (Simic). At the age of fifteen, Charles’ mother moved the family to Paris for a year. When Simic was sixteen, his family left for America, where they were to reunite with their father. Sadly, after
His works contain cruel honesty expressed through mainly simple words that most people can comprehend. Unlike most poems, one does not need to open a dictionary to discover the meaning of every other word. His basic language makes the poems more attractive to people of many reading levels. Furthermore, Simic’s use of metaphors and the personification of inanimate objects facilitate the delivery of his messages. For example, in his poem “Watermelons,” Simic uses a common fruit to express his opinion that humans should enjoy and take the good parts out of life and “spit out” the bad. In addition, his poetry is often based off of historical events, as in World War II, during which he grew up. His genuine and traumatic experiences bring the reader back in time to a period of war, danger, and fear. Peter Stitt in the Georgia Review claimed that Simic’s most persistent concern “is with the effect of cruel political structures upon ordinary human life....The world of Simic’s poems is frightening, mysterious, hostile, dangerous” (qtd in “Charles Simic”). However, his writing style is an inevitable result of his youth. Simic had to live in ceaseless fear of Nazis, was separated from his father, and constantly had to move to abscond bombings. War and poverty heavily influenced Simic’s poems because that was all he knew growing up and a part of himself that he could never forget. However, Stitt added that, “Even the most
In his poems about war, it is clear they were influenced by his childhood. For example, the poem “Butcher Shop” compares Simic’s life in Belgrade to that of the bloody kitchen of a butcher. “Blood in the streets was not a figure of speech, but something I saw again and again. There’s no question that all that had a lot to do with my outlook on life” (qtd. in Simic). Since Charles Simic and his family were displaced persons when they moved to France, the themes of deracination and loneliness are common in his poems (Simic). Simic also mentioned in an interview he had to memorize and recite poems to his class while living in Paris, which also sparked his interest in poetry (Simic). Charles Simic’s father largely impacted his writing as well. For example, in his book of essays Wonderful Words, Silent Truth, Simic discusses his love of jazz music. As Charles Simic once stated in an