From Modern Love

From Modern Love

  • Submitted By: tarryn151
  • Date Submitted: 11/06/2008 12:20 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 457
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 402

think this poem is all about the speaker, the “I am talking about myself” in stanza one, and the author part of him who’s incessant about describing an experience. The author being described as a demiurge, for me, changes the struggle between the two personas(the “I,” and the author part of the “I”) to almost a divinely struggle of urges. It is the urges: one for sleep, and the other for needing to describe an experience he’s having. The weight of the struggle, and the two personas identities can be witnessed in description leading up to, and the clouds themselves: “barefoot, palms, washed-out creation,” certainly these are words with religious implications; but also words which hint at an imaginative/creative struggle as well. “One cloud being his and the other’s an adversary,” initially creates a good/evil relationship; then comes the phrase “which depends on the wind,” which totally throws any identification as to whether the author part of him, or him too, is good or evil.
Even the poem itself seems written with moments of poetic flow(even overflow), and moments of vague, choppiness. To start off the poem with a line which flows as gracefully as the image of the moon itself rolling over the roof and falling behind his house, and to take the image back with “the moon does neither of these things,” is to literally halt the flow that had just begun. I think there’s what’s called assonance happening in the first line. The poem seems set up in a struggle where you get alternative switching between creative urge and the urge to leave thoughts as it is and go to bed. I think the poem is set up in this fashion. Although I have to tell you, as you’d already pointed out, the multiple occasions in which enjambment is used makes it difficult to identify spots where the urges switch.
In stanza five, the sentence that start off “Not unaccountably…” sets up as almost a mathematical equation, where two negatives(words in this case) equals a positive. So the sentence...

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