Perspectival Shifting

            One of the first questions novice readers of poetry are taught to ask themselves is, “Who is the speaker?” Because this at first seems to be such a basic approach to analysis, I usually overlook its potency as a tool for poetic study. However, repeatedly throughout our discussions in this course (both in-person and online), I found that returning to this “basic” question was not only a fruitful means of study, but one that was absolutely necessary to reaching the ‘heart’ of the works we covered. As a method to explore the importance of speaker point-of-view (perspective) in poetry, I revisited works from our syllabus that exhibited more than one perspective within them. I felt that these shifts would be ripe for study of the effect of perspectival choice by authors. I found four poems particularly suited to this project, both for the level of interest they generated in our course and for the pivotal role perspectival shifting played in the poems’ interpretation. Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” Andrew Feld’s “Cascade Raptor Center: Capture,” and Edmund Spenser’s “Sonnet #75” serve as the focus of my analysis.

“Ozymandias”

            Percy Shelley’s 1818 sonnet, “Ozymandias,” may appear upon first reading (or through blurred memory) to be a poem documenting an experience with discovered statue remains in the desert. However, as my fellow poster “kebin” astutely covered in his post, “The Traveler’s poem to ‘I’”, tucked away within the first of the fourteen lines lies the key to understanding the poem’s otherworldly, almost mythological effect: the narrative is filtered through a second source. “Ozymandias” is told through the first person perspective—it begins with the line, “I met a traveler from an antique land” (1)—but the meaty chunk of the poem, which is the actual depiction of the statue, is shared secondhand from the supposed original source (“a traveler”). Although the speaker could be said to be the first person “I” throughout the poem, the perspective quickly shifts within it to embody that of the one who has actually seen the pharaoh’s statue firsthand. The effect of this choice by Shelley, to have his speaker only relay a story that has been told to him, is sophisticated and memorable. It allows the reader to more willingly “believe” the conclusions that are hinted at by the narrative: that power fades, that civilizations crumble into dust, that the “Mighty” will look without despair upon all works, no matter how grand, as they vanish. It is likely that without the filter of the second perspective, these delicately-imparted themes would have been too blunt in their impact, and would thus be left more open to criticism or disbelief. In adding a filter to the narrative, Shelley deftly distracts from the fact that there are any filters present.

            Atop this structure lies an even more shining element: the voice of the pharaoh, Ozymandias himself. Lines 10 and 11, spoken not from the “I” nor the “traveler,” but from the deceased ruler (through his sculptor’s hand), provide the ironic statement from which the conclusions of the sonnet may be drawn. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings” (10) the inscription (allegedly) reads, in a line that is no less impactful for the fact that it lays silently in the “boundless and bare” (13) desert. The voice of the pharaoh, filtered through those of the traveler and the speaker, unwittingly condemns itself much more effectively than either of the previous perspectives could.

            Below, I’ve included a chart of the different perspectives represented in this short poem, and a breakdown of the space devoted to each. Notice the balance of speakers, and the resulting impact by contrast of Ozymandias’s two short lines.

[For comparison of a treatment of the same subject (the statue of Ozymandias) and similar themes, but one that does not begin filtered through a second perspective, see Horace Smith's "On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below." Smith employs both the pharaoh's voice and that of an alternative perspective (in this case, a wandering hunter's), but being without the framed narrative and the immediate inclusion of a second perspective, his sonnet was unable to overtake Shelley's in competition.]

“A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon”

            Gwendolyn Brooks’s ballad is another example of a poem that wrings great impact out of a seemingly minor perspective within it. Although the poem is told within a third-person omniscient point of view, the majority of the composition is closely aligned with the wife’s perspective. By making quick reference to the “four-line stanzas of the ballads she had never quite / understood” (4-5), then immediately flowing through Free Indirect Style (following the signal phrase, “Herself:” [6]) to the wife’s inner thoughts, Brooks anchors the poem within the viewpoint of the wife/mother of the house depicted. The ballad moves through the minutia of the wife’s experience, from her breakfast cooking to her application of lipstick, to her proximity to political events that drastically widens the scope of the narrative’s theme. By focusing in such an intimate and detailed manner on the individual experience of this one woman, Brooks imitates the detailed, gory, and deeply personal image of Emmett Till that, through its very undeniable “realness” as an actual image of an actual murdered child, sparked political outrage and revolution in America. (Till was one among seven politically motivated murders in 1955 Mississippi, but the photographs that circulated following his death proved to be a unique catalyst.)

            Brooks’s choice to focus so narrowly on the woman’s perspective also has the effect (similar to Shelley’s) of putting greater emphasis on the few lines given to other characters. Again through free indirect style, the narrative slips into the husband’s perspective for a brief section near Lines 60-76. Through harsh language such as “intruders” (67), “snappy-eyed” (68), “sassy” (69), and “kill them all” (65), the reader uncomfortably experiences the venomous, racially-motivated hatred of the husband. The husband’s perspective is rendered in ballad form, both brief and repetitious, to lulling effect as he indirectly reassures himself: “Nothing could stop Mississippi. / HE knew that. Big Fella / Knew that” (70-72).

            Only one line (out of 128) is given in the greater, thematic perspective: “And, what was so good, Mississippi knew that” (73). 

This singular line is all Gwendolyn Brooks needed to make clear that this is not simply a poem about domestic relations; it is a poem about the political landscape of America during this time.

“Cascade Raptor Center: Capture”

            Andrew Feld’s speaker in “Cascade Raptor Center: Capture” tries desperately to overcome his initial fury at a child who shoots a hawk by exploring the child’s perspective in the incident. The first-person speaker self-consciously displays his unbridled anger through the epigraph (“I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk” [page 4]), through words that reveal his reaction to the boy’s mistake (such as “punishment”), and through the blatantly hyperbolic assertion that “if he’d killed a man we’d all / have been the more compassionate, the less appalled” (5). The poet structures the first half of the poem by beginning each stanza with a repetition of the poem’s only snippet of the child’s actual vocalized perspective, that “He hadn’t meant to hit the bird.” My classmate “Sea Bass Chin” notes that the speaker layers his own perspective atop the child’s words by placing italicized emphasis on different words through each repetition, thus exploring the implications and possibilities of each.

            The speaker follows his antagonistic first section, in which the child is separated both linguistically and physically from the group of angry adults, with a softened second attempt to empathetically explore the child’s perspective in greater detail. The author takes care to emphasize throughout the section, however, that the child’s perspective is still being rendered through the speaker’s imagination: “The image I have of them” (6), “I can’t keep my mind out of the front seat,” and, “When I started this poem I was concerned / with shame” (7) all signal to the reader that the poet has not officially shifted speakers. The speaker’s attempt to empathetically merge his perspective with the child’s is successful, however, in one line of the second-to-last stanza, in which he describes the bird’s bullet wound as a “mark of its contact / with us” (9). Here, humanity links the boy and the speaker as part of a larger “us,” a pronoun from which the boy was excluded in the first section of the poem. This inclusion has the effect of at least partially redeeming the speaker's previous mercilessness.

“Sonnet #75”

            Spenser’s “Sonnet 75” is similarly told from a singular perspective, with only one quotation from another to add perspectival dimension. In this case, the speaker’s love voices her active dissent, calling him a “vayne man” (5) for his efforts to immortalize her. “Vayne” is followed by the assertion that his attempt to write her name in sand is “in vaine,” a pun that emphasizes two barbs in her statement: that he is “vayne,” or “devoid of sense or wisdom; foolish, silly, thoughtless,” and that his actions are “in vaine,” or “of no effect, force, or power; fruitless, futile, unavailing” (Oxford English Dictionary). Through this pun, the weight the lover’s claim is effectively doubled, which (as intended) gives even greater power to the disproof the speaker lobbies back in his final word. A graphic representation of this back-and-forth would be:

In this sonnet, the love’s interjection serves only as a contrasting viewpoint the speaker can disprove. Thus, her objections merely pad the alleged greatness of his poetic abilities (since, after all, those abilities overcame dissent even from the lover herself in their capacity to “immortalize” [6]). Ironically but perhaps unintentionally, all that survives of the lover within this “immortalizing” poem is her resistance to the speaker’s ability to represent her, rather than “[her] vertues rare” (11) or even “[her] glorious name” (12).

            The poets we have studied achieved their effects through various perspectives, speakers, spatial allotment, and methods of direct or indirect representation. Each poem here gained totality through the perspectival shifting within it. It is through this tool that larger issues could be explored than simply those representable by one, single perspective.