Wednesday, March 25, 2015
The Dominant Primordial Beast
Like we've observed in Keats and Shelly Clampitt's poem is getting at the freedom of the animal. "In Its Element" structurally complements this idea in its stanzas, enjambments, and rhymes. The animal is free to be itself. It doesn't have to consider it's next move. Without hesitation it plunges into an entirely new element (the water). The poem is wild with its structure. Enjambment takes over every line of the poem, the eleventh line even nosedives straight into the next stanza without hesitation. This poem is now the bird, it is an account of the bird. This poem, and its structure represent the magic the animal world. Humanity's greatest advantage over the animal world is our mind (we have even dubbed the whole of our species the sapien, the "wise"). Animals fascinate us because they are not wise. Their behavior can be predicted, but is simultaneously foreign. Clampitt understands this, she understands the "dive" of the animal which has no preconceptions. Her poem is not a dive, it is not a thrusting into an unknown. Her enjambment serves to enjamb us. She seeks to take us and steal our attention, just as magic steals our focus and makes us forget all science and objectivity.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The Clampitt poem is one that is interesting to read out loud (as it is my assigned poem). The structure is much like the bird itself, taking predictive but odd dives, which make it not the easiest to read. I do like the fact that you connected all the elements to the the behaviors of the animals, something humans can grasp yet not completely understand.
ReplyDeleteWonderful observations about form here! I would question the final assessment: does the the poem ask us to forget objectivity, or to admit that we can never be objective? There is a difference here. The poem is emphatically empirical: its descriptions are rendering movements and behavior as would a scientific description. But the final line puts pressure on this act of representation: can human beings ever do anything, describe anything, without "ego, guilt, ambition, or even money"?
ReplyDelete