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Grove
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Flames, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Grief and Human Connection
Nature vs. Human Effort
Sexism
Love and Respect
Summary
Analysis
The Cloud God’s downpour hits the gorge first and spreads outward across the nearby farms and forests. The rain bloats the island’s rivers and floods towns and suburbs, destroying buildings and yachts. Eventually, the rain fills the Melaleuca tin mine, sending a flock of cormorants spiraling into the sky, along with a “foul and broken,” fleshy, feathery body. The Cloud God is weeping so fiercely because of the smoke that rose from the golden pelt, which confirmed that her love, the Esk God, had died. In her sorrow, she tries to drown the whole island.
The Cloud God’s downpour is a demonstration of grief, which suggests that grief is not an isolated human emotion but vast, primal, and inevitable, much like any other natural process. The god’s mourning in the form of a flood emphasizes that grief overwhelms its bearer and transcends what people may consider acceptable limits: when fully released, grief affects every part of one’s life—or in this case, every pocket of the island.
Themes
