Poem Comparison
James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry Ohio on December 13, 1927. The poverty he has experienced as a child greatly influenced his writing and he used his poetry as a means of discussing his social and political concerns. Wright first emerged in the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a winner of the Yale Series of Poets Award in 1957. His book which contains most of his first collection, The Green Wall (1957), and all of his next ones, Saint Judas (1959), The Branch Will Not Break (1963), and Shall We Gather at the River? (1968) with other translations and other unpublished works won a Pulitzer prize which established his reputation.
Wright’s works include men and women who have lost love or have been marginalized due to poverty and sexual orientation. His works invite the reader to experience the pain of such isolation. His works are modeled after Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, whom he admired for their profound engagement on human issues and emotions. Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in March 26, 1874. Like Wright, his works are inspired from his rural life in New England using the setting to explore various social and philosophical themes. He is a popular and highly quoted poet honored for his Pulitzer prizes. Frost lived as a city boy and published his first poem in Lawrence, Massachusetts. His poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” first appeared in the 1923 volume, New Hampshire which is his first book to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Nothing Gold can Stay and Lying in a hammock at William Duffy’s farm in Pine Island Minnesota are brief poems. James Wright’s Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island Minnesota is only thirteen lines long and consisted of 83 words. Nothing Gold Can Stay is also a brief poem which is only eight lines long and consisted of forty words. The diction is very simple consisting of words no longer than two syllables. Most of the words used are monosyllabic.
Another similarity of the poems was the theme. Both are nature poems which describes the beauty of things in their natural order. Frost’s work though was focused on a single aspect of nature as with the imagery of leaves while Wright interplayed with butterflies, cowbells, droppings horses and the flying of the chicken hawk. The poems also included the natural cycle of day and night. Wright cited the “darkening of the night” while Frost cited the “the dawn goes dawn to day”. Both poems also suddenly leaped from one setting to another. Wright’s conclusion was interesting as he shifted into the knowledge of himself. Frost on the other hand leaped into associating human emotion of grief to the description of nature.
In terms of writing style James Wright’s poem is simple and poetic. The typical theme he explored in his poems is the rural America versus the modern urban America of the middle class with their political power and control over the oppressed. Such theme is particularly significant in America during the 1960s and the 1970s when Wright wrote his poems. The ‘how’ of the poem by Wright is inherent to the ‘what’. Wright participates in a deep image movement. This is illustrated in the poem Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
The setting is in the farm of the poet’s friend. He is lying in a hammock where his mind is operating in a dream like manner. Various personifications obscuring the boundaries between human and non human life are found in the poem. Examples of such personification are: the butterfly is asleep and blowing like a leaf. Images illustrate the free play of mind as the poet move from the sight of the butterfly to the sound of the cowbells, to the droppings of the horses to the darkening of the evening and the flying of the chicken hawk.
The timing of the images and their interplay are crucial part pf the process. They are images of beauty and of things in their natural setting. The title though tells the reader that the poet is not in his usual location but on the farm of a friend. It appeared as though he was deeply consumed and drawn to the things surrounding him. The poem then suddenly concludes with the line “I have wasted my life”. He leaped from his reverie to the sudden knowledge of himself.
The mock conclusion that the poet ‘wasted his life’ is a puzzling statement. It indicates the realization that he pursued the wrong goals and that living could have been much simpler if had he lived a simple farm life. The poem could have been an illustration of the poet’s life. Much of Wright’s life was subject to depression. He drank too much which produced irresponsible behavior. Eventually, he stopped writing and did only some translations. The influences of Robert Frost and Robinson were set aside when he came back to his writing. When he began writing again, the poems are different and are intensely personal poems about a man trying to put himself back together. He often used his friend’s farm to depict his contentment and tended to idealize nature excessively.
On the other hand, Frost’s poem was also about nature. The movement of the poem is also simple and evocative. As a nature poem, it presents a moment during the early spring when vegetations are beginning to blossom. The imagery describes how the leaves emerge as yellow or golden before they develop into green leaves. The leaf’s blossom though was very brief as it lasted “but only so an hour”. Subsequently, the poet reveals the nature’s fall after a brief hour, “then the leaf subsides to leaf”. His imagery was a description of the natural world.
Suddenly the poem takes the surprising leap after presenting the natural world. It offered a simile describing the leaf’s change from gold to green, “so Eden sank to grief”. The use of the word grief indicates that the transition was painful and unfortunate. The subject is brought back to the natural world, “so the dawn goes dawn to day”. This time the words point to the cycle of night and day rather than the cycle of seasons. It concludes by saying that “nothing gold can stay”.
Generally, the poems are similar in terms of theme and style. The influence of Robert Frost on Wright could have explained such similarities. Although simplistic, Wright’s poem is more complex as he used various elements in the poem. Their poems both illustrated the beauty of nature although Wright’s conclusion was more intriguing. Frost concluded his poem simply by illustrating the fleeting moment of beauty and its fall.
References
0 comments:
Post a Comment