"Elephant in the Room"(author unknown)
There's an elephant in the room.
It is large and squatting, so it is hard to get around it.
Yet we squeeze by with, "How are you?" and "I'm fine," and a thousand other
forms of trivial chatter. We talk about the weather. We talk about work.
We talk about everything else, except the elephant in the room.
There's an elephant in the room. We all know it's there. We are thinking about
the elephant as we talk together.
It is constantly on our minds. For, you see, it is a very large elephant.
It has hurt us all.
But we don't talk about the elephant.
Oh, please, let's talk about the elephant in the room.
For if I cannot, you are leaving me....
alone....
in a room....
with an elephant.
Analysis
What I think the poem means is that there is truth, that everybody ignores, or plainly just doesn't want to talk about it. But that person who it happened to needs to talk about it in order top not feel more troubled, or suffocated. The poem could apply to the novel, Speak, because Melinda has a secret, an experience that happened to her at the party and she can't tell anybody. Maybe she feels that if she told someone about it, they would try to go on as if nothing had happened to her and not want to talk about it. Or that they won't believe her and would start ignoring her.
