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Critical Analysis #1
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Poertree
Senior Member
since 1999-11-05
Posts 1359
UK

0 posted 1999-12-16 03:26 PM


..... and then again I couldn't really loathe the power that lay beneath
the ravaged torn and shattered mask of my grief,
And time's curdled place beside our throne
fires my turgid breath and blasts my bone.

Violence upon violence heaped, a silvered grain of pain
dibbed deep into translucent flesh and barbed remains
to take the threaded hope of my gassed joy,
coagulate my pasts love-burst destroy.

Ruined rain slides hot upon my chest, whiskering a vapid roll,
So future's dice and spotted mocks my pall,
To tattoo beat a wave of porous hope
upon my empty ribs and parchment coat.

Life; so coppiced in a prime, so hacked and hewn
and rendered over-ripe and blown,
Bleeds and shoots a multitude of Springs  
against the frosty cut of death's keen cling.

.... but then again I couldn't really loathe the love which lost; grieves me.
Balm my riddled brain with sweet inanity,
Dam and comfrey up my running loss,
That no seep of history leaden my cross.

© Copyright 1999 Poertree - All Rights Reserved
haze
Senior Member
since 1999-11-03
Posts 528
Bethlehem, PA USA
1 posted 1999-12-16 03:47 PM


chilling...truly chilling

I might take out some unnecessary words (maybe not) rhyme (any rhyme) is not my forte so I will try...

"..... and then again I couldn't loathe  power beneath
the ravaged torn and shattered mask of grief,
Time's curdled place beside our throne
fires my turgid breath and blasts my bone.
Violence upon violence heaped, a silvered grain of pain
dibbed deep into translucent flesh and barbed remains
to take the threaded hope of my gassed joy,
coagulate my pasts love-burst destroy.

Ruined rain slides hot upon my chest, whiskering a vapid roll,
So future's dice and spotted mocks my pall,
To tattoo beat a wave of porous hope
upon my empty ribs and parchment coat.

Life; so coppiced in a prime, so hacked and hewn
and rendered over-ripe and blown,
Bleeds and shoots a multitude of Springs  
against the frosty cut of death's keen cling.

.... but then again I couldn't loathe love once lost to grieve me.
Balm my riddled brain with sweet inanity,
Dam and comfrey up my running loss,
That no seep of history leaden my cross."

and so I tried to tighten it... you have some deep and tangible emotion here...A devouring plot...KUDOS Philip...KUDOS!


Severn
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-07-17
Posts 7704

2 posted 1999-12-16 04:44 PM


Phillip - this is powerful stuff, with a unique word choice.

I read it out loud and it does flow well (You'll soon see I am obssessed with flow!)

I'm not entirely sure of the first sentence.
I can see what your aim is - by starting with 'and then again' it is quite conversationalist, yet I feel it does perhaps go on a little bit too long and lacks the drive that such a powerful poem should have.

Yet, if flow and meter and rhythm were your primary concerns this does work well with those.

I take it 'gassed' is pronounced gass-ed? Two syllables?

The last verse - not too sure of the rhythm in this. Just seems a little off beat.

Otherwise, this is great! I do love your word choice, and your overall structure. 'Love-burst...' fantastic

K - the FV girl. (So in other words, if this is following some poetical structure to the letter do educate me!!!)



Not A Poet
Member Elite
since 1999-11-03
Posts 3885
Oklahoma, USA
3 posted 1999-12-17 10:23 AM


Very deep thoughts and raw emotions. I stumbled a little over some of the lines, probably because some of the words were over my head. But with practice and rereading, I can follow it well. I don't usually have much to say about the poetry I find in here because I am not qualified to critique. I do, however, try to comment when I find one I like and this is one of those. Thanks for your efforts.

hoot_owl_rn
Member Patricius
since 1999-07-05
Posts 10750
Glen Hope, PA USA
4 posted 1999-12-17 05:55 PM


Philip...this is a powerful poem with a very good selection of words in it. I found myself stumbling on a few lines here and there, very gently stumbling though. One thing I really noted that I myself did not care for was the first and seventeenth lines or at least the way you have them.
line number one
"... and then again I couldn't really loathe the power that lay beneath"
Now that makes me wonder what went on beforehand and if I missed something. I'd prefer to see it set up as
Again,I couldn't really loathe the power that lay beneath
same again with line seventeen
" .... but then again I couldn't really loathe the love which lost; grieves me."
Then again, I couldn't really loathe the love which lost; grieves me"



[This message has been edited by hoot_owl_rn (edited 12-17-1999).]

Willem
Member
since 1999-11-18
Posts 139
Inverness, FL, USA
5 posted 1999-12-17 10:55 PM


Heavy, Philip, heavy...  I like the sound of
it, the somber mood, the language, but don't
get a message.  It's as if I'm looking at a
beautiful surrealist picture trying to guess
what it means...  Is there such a thing as
surrealist poetry?

Willem

warmhrt
Senior Member
since 1999-12-18
Posts 1563

6 posted 1999-12-18 11:19 AM


Hello, I am a newbie here. I just wanted to let you know that I enjoyed this piece very much. It reminded me a bit of the styling of some early nineteenth century poets. I love that style, but, try as I might, I cannot write in that manner. My humble opinion is that you did quite a good job with it.

warmhrt



[This message has been edited by warmhrt (edited 02-29-2000).]

jbouder
Member Elite
since 1999-09-18
Posts 2534
Whole Sort Of Genl Mish Mash
7 posted 1999-12-18 01:41 PM


PHILIP:

I read your poem several times before reading what others have said and these are my initial observations:

  • Your opening line, in my opinion, was complimentary to the overall effect of the poem.  I think you wanted to give us a look into the mind of one on the brink of insanity.  The subject's story being told in the first person was, for me, the cake and beginning the poem as you did, giving us a "snipit", of sorts, of the subject's thoughts was the icing.

  • The wording, while ponderous at times (had to use the dictionary quite a bit ... still can't find "whiskering" though) adds immeasurably to the quality of the poem.

    "..... and then again I couldn't really loathe the power that lay beneath
    the ravaged torn and shattered mask of my grief,"

    This line took me several readings to understand (assuming I am understanding it correctly) not because the language is unclear but because the language is so vivid.  The significance of his(?) grief being a mask was almost lost to me, at first, amongst "loath", "power", "ravaged", "torn", and "shattered".  This, I think, is not a bad thing.  There is a sense of profundity I think I see in the subject's discovery of this and I think my having to contemplate the first line's meaning helped me to recognize this profundity.

    "And time's curdled place beside our throne
    fires my turgid breath and blasts my bone."

    I am not sure what you mean by "turgid breath".  Are you referring to the subject's embellished language in his ravings?

    "Violence upon violence heaped, a silvered grain of pain
    dibbed deep into translucent flesh and barbed remains
    to take the threaded hope of my gassed joy,
    coagulate my pasts love-burst destroy."

    I had difficulty understanding the meaning of this paragraph primarily because of the sentence structure.  I tried to connect "Violence upon violence heaped" with "coagulate my pasts love-burst destroy" because of your placement of the other line between commas.  If that is the case, then "coagulate" should be "coagulates", I think. It reads easier for me that way, anyway.  And did you mean for "pasts" to be plural or possessive?  And was "silvered" intended to be "slivered"?

    Now for the meaning ... it is a little sketchy to me but I think it is referring to the subject's desensitization to the ultimate violence of the murder, perhaps because the violence that killed was something that was reoccurring (to a lesser degree, of course) before the murder.  Maybe his violence bothered him once before, but now he is somewhat calloused to it and this is why he is finding the murder easier to deal with.  Just slap me if I am totally off.

    "Ruined rain slides hot upon my chest, whiskering a vapid roll,"

    I am afraid the meaning of "whiskering" is lossed to me.  

    "So future's dice and spotted mocks my pall,
    To tattoo beat a wave of porous hope
    upon my empty ribs and parchment coat."

    Is "empty ribs" indicative of "heartlessness"?  Just wondering.  I like the wording here.  I think, dispite the impending insanity, the subject knows he is not getting away with what he's done (unless he hires A Dream Team of lawyers and stands trial before a California jury, naturally).

    "Life; so coppiced in a prime, so hacked and hewn and rendered over-ripe and blown Bleeds and shoots a multitude of Springs against the frosty cut of death's keen cling.,"

    This is beautiful imagery.  Perhaps a momentary return to lucidity in the subject's thoughts?  Suddenly he becomes reflective and maybe even regretful.  

    "... but then again I couldn't really loathe the love which lost; grieves me.
    Balm my riddled brain with sweet inanity,
    Dam and comfrey up my running loss,
    That no seep of history leaden my cross."

    I am going to have to side with Ruth, in part, on Line 17.  I've already mentioned my liking of the effect Line 1 had on my reading of this poem.  But Line 17 seems (by the use of elipses, I think) to break up the flow unnecessarily.  I think you can repeat "then again I couldn't really loathe" in Line 17 without the elipses and make it more clear that the final paragraph is part of the same "stream of thought" as the rest of the poem (assuming, of course, that it is meant to be understood as such).

    The semi-colon placement seems a bit unusual to me.  I was taught (perhaps incorrectly) that semi-colons serve a sentence in much the same way conjunctions do.  Do you mean for "grieves me" to be separated from the preceding line or for it to be a continuation of that preceding thought?

    I believe the last paragraph is worded beautifully.  The subject SHOULD be tired and want his mind to be balmed with emptiness after all of that!  I sure am and do!    

    I know this turned out quite long. The others rightly pointed out the chilling mood of the piece and I thought that some attention to the work's detail was warranted (actually I think attention to the details was deserved ... this is a very good poem).  

    Good work.  Is this, perhaps, some evidence of some Dylan Thomas influences?  Again, just wondering.

    < !signature-->

     Jim

    "If I rest, I rust."  - Martin Luther





    [This message has been edited by jbouder (edited 12-18-1999).]
  • Poertree
    Senior Member
    since 1999-11-05
    Posts 1359
    UK
    8 posted 1999-12-18 04:13 PM


    Thanks to all who have read and commented .. I reckoned anyone who tried to tease out a meaning from this had to be either brave or mad .. lol .. which is it Jim?

    I started writing this the best part of 2 months ago during a period when I was reading Dylan Thomas almost exclusively (Kudos .. Jim).  I don't know whether it happens to the rest of you, but I often wake up in the night with a line or two in my head, but can't be bothered to get up and jot it down.  By morning it all seems like a dream and I can remember the words anyway.  On this particular occasion though I scrabbled for a pencil and paper, handily placed under my wife's head , and scrawled the words "and then again I couldn't really fault the power which lay beneath the ravaged torn and shattered mask of my grief".  Next morning I began to think I was metamorphosing into D Thomas because poised with the toothbrush halfway to my mouth (strawberry flavoured btw .. v nice) I suddenly got "to take the threaded hope of my gassed joy".  With these cheerful lines reverberating in my mind I set off to work, but no sooner had I pulled out of the drive than, "time's curdled place" had me grabbing for a pencil again.  The "poem" then sat around for a few days while I tried to figure a meaning for what I had written ....  Lol.

    A week or so on and I was sitting around one evening when a whole string of ideas started to come and I more or less just wrote the first three stanzas without pausing.  Even at that stage I wasn't too sure what the poem was about I just liked the sound and the imagery in much the same way as I had begun to like the feel of DT's poetry without necessarily understanding much of it.  It was already clear to me that some of the words I had used were unusual to say the least in the context in which I had placed them, but somehow they seemed to convey a "picture" or "feel" without necessarily having a conventional meaning.  In one case, as Jim rightly points out, I had actually invented a word I think - "whiskering", although in that case I was very sure what I was trying to convey (more later).

    Now then .. maybe pieces like this should just be left to mean whatever happens to come into the reader's mind while reading them, but as this poem was a kind of experiment and as Jim especially has put so much effort into his response I feel obliged to try and explain what was in my mind as it was developed.  

    From quite early on I knew it was going to be about death.  Sometimes when I am not sure about the direction of a piece I find it helps to make a note of what I think the overall poem is going to do or say.  For instance a very early note in my notebook when I was doing the villanelle reads "Theme - the impotency and unreality of time in the face of spiritual understanding".  For this present poem I wrote "This is a poem about the violent loss of a loved one, the grief, and feeling that the speaker himself is dying, then the renewal of hope".  

    Well it didn't quite turn out that way maybe, but I think it helped to focus my thoughts and to manipulate the phrases I had.  I very quickly realised that the lines I got in the middle of the night were different to those, more obscure, phrases developed later.  I seriously thought about removing the first line completely as it proved difficult to fit it in to the overall scheme of things.  I suspect this is the same feeling that causes Haze,Kamla and Ruth to have doubts about lines 1 and 17.  Probably, if I had intended this to be anything other than an experiment, I would indeed have removed that line, but instead I tried to fit it.

    My thought was that the speaker need to be in the grip of some terrible trauma - what better than the immediate aftermath of the violent killing of a partner.  The word "and" at the start of the first line coupled with its difference from the rest of the poem made me think that rather than hide the different why not create the feeling that the poem is breaking into the middle of the musings of someone on the brink of insanity at a fairly (comparatively) lucid moment .. hence the lowercase "and" and the relatively easily understood first stanza.

    Jim, I think you understood more or less exactly what I was trying to do, in this respect.

    Also Jim you picked up on the word which gave me the most trouble in the entire piece - the word "mask".  That word must have been in and out of the drafts of the poem about five times .. lol.. because I realised the potential it had to confuse meaning.  Which is interestingly is exactly what happened.  I think, Jim, that  you took "mask" to indicate that the speaker's grief was not genuine because he was in fact the murderer and the grief merely a mask to hide his feelings.  This was an entirely understandable approach and I think it is a measure of the effort you put into thinking about the poem that you came up with this interpretation and sustained it in your mind.

    I, however, did not have the speaker as the murderer and it was at this point that I changed the word "fault" in the first line to "loathe".  

    The central element of the poem is that the speaker is mad with grief and in his lucid moments realises that the grief which drives him to madness arises because of the great love he previously had for his wife.  In his madness he then rationalises that but for the love he once had he would not now be mortally hurt, and therefore that very historic love should be the target of his hate and loathing now.  The opening line then becomes a moment of clarity where he sees the futility of such thoughts and hence "he couldn't really loathe the power (love)".  But further than this he sees sufficiently clearly to know that love will eventually triumph, that the present grief is merely a mask concealing the "power of love".  His face may be ravaged, torn and shattered at present .. but love is there beneath and will one day break through.  

    And that for a while is the end of lucidity and the speaker quickly lapses into semi-insanity.

    From that point on for a while you have to appreciate that the words used were chosen as much for their sound and the atmosphere they create as the strict meaning.  Having said that I think I just about stuck close enough to conventional meaning not to make the piece a total nonsense .. lol.  

    So the last two lines of the first stanza were a reference to time appearing to stand still in the home of the bereaved speaker and the terrible effect of the tragedy on his physical well-being.  "Turgid" incidentally was picked for sound and to try and convey heavy over inflated "swollen" laboured breathing or sighing.

    The next two stanzas were what I might call the "total madness" stanzas.  The images of his love's death fill his mind "violence upon violence" .. the initial killing followed by the awful "violence" done to his own person and mind as the one left behind.  The "pain" is the subject of the next set of images.  I saw pain as a silver bullet or grain of metal pushed into frail and unhealthy flesh and unkindly "barbed" - impossible to withdraw without further great damage.

    The last two lines of that stanza ..  "Threaded hope" - a tenuous thread of hope .. "gassed joy" - yes well I'm afraid I deliberately intended to make an image of Belsen etc flash up.  The last line literally means "draw together all my past experiences ("pasts" plural to indicate different experiences as "different lives") and as my love is destroyed so is my past and me" .. kind of like herding a number of people together and then destroying them in one hit - I'm afraid another reference to "gassed".

    Next stanza "ruined rain" - tears.  Disinterested tears rolling down an unshaven beard onto a man's chest.  "Whiskering" had a kind of sinister feel to it so I left it.  Next line is a reference to the uncertainty of the speaker's future and his possible (probable) death from grief, and then onto another reference to loss of all hope.  Jim you were right about "empty ribs" although obviously in a different overall context - I intended "loss of the ability to feel love - heartless" and "parchment coat" - yet another reference to the desiccated condition of the speaker's health and skin.


    Jim you are again on the right lines with your comment about the fourth stanza.  There is a beginning of a return to lucidity here in that the speaker at least recognises that his life has been chopped and reduced, but I intended the word "coppiced" to indicate that there would be a reaction to this destruction .. and a strong one at that.  In other words the harder you cut me the stronger I will return.  The speaker's reserves of strength are deeper than he knows (his roots) and these continue to pump up energy to fuel a recovery.  The metaphor is of course entirely concentrated on willow or poplar coppicing.

    I had a long think about how to start the final stanza.  I knew I wanted to return to sanity and to have a plea for comfort and healing so I sort of naturally thought I should revert to a repetition of the first line of the poem and retain the musing atmosphere.  As if the speaker had drifted into madness and was now drifting out again.  This was also the reason for the pause at the end of the first line of the final stanza ... I think Haze, Kamla, Ruth and Jim that maybe if you heard me read the last stanza you would be more convinced by the format.  It is kind of like the speaker has been in a hypnotic  reverie and the words "but then again I couldn't really loathe the love which lost ...." trigger him out of it .. imagine him then blinking awake and saying quietly and sanely after a long pause "grieves me".

    Then with lucid understanding he goes on with a quiet plea for healing and help, and most of all an eradication of memory to alleviate his suffering.

    You may have noticed the change of meter in the final line.  I read it in a lilting way as:

    that NO seep of HIS tor y LEAD en my CROSS.

    It is definitely different to the remainder of the piece but the lilt I thought added an undercurrent of lightness to the ending which kind of reflected the underlying idea that love might in the end triumph .  Way too obscure I suppose? .. lol.

    Oh well it was all a bit of an experiment .. I'm not usually that dour ...  And thanks to all for your responses and especially to you Jim for that mammoth effort.

    Philip




    [This message has been edited by Poertree (edited 12-19-1999).]

    jbouder
    Member Elite
    since 1999-09-18
    Posts 2534
    Whole Sort Of Genl Mish Mash
    9 posted 1999-12-18 04:31 PM


    "I reckoned anyone who tried to tease out a meaning from this had to be either brave or mad .. lol .. which is it Jim?"

    Why does this have to be an either or question, Philip?  And if you had to be brave and/or mad to tease meaning out if this one, what of the one who penned it?

    Thanks for the detailed explanation.  Again, I found this poem very interesting (could it be I am headed to Barnes & Noble in a few minutes to invest in some Dylan Thomas?).  Ruth, you truly may have made a poetic madman out of me!

    It is encouraging, anyway, that my "mammoth effort", as you call it, wasn't so far off target.  Not bad for a Yank of humble birth with a meager 30 years under his belt, huh?  

     Jim

    "If I rest, I rust." - Martin Luther


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