Frost, Cummings & Bogan
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In Louise Bogan’s Medusa, we get contrasting images of stasis and motion. The paradox serves to underscore the theme of the poem which is about an ideal world in which death does not take away the idealism of youthful illusions of eternity. The author uses the symbol of Medusa, because Medusa was a goddess who could stop time and decay. In order to tap into a similar power, the speaker of the poem searches for the goddess, “I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,/Facing a sheer sky./Everything moved,-a bell hung ready to strike,/Sun and reflection wheeled by…When the bare eyes were before me/And the hissing hair,/Held up at a window, seen through a door./The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead/Formed in the air” (Bogan 4). The speaker then returns to eternal youth with imagery of water and green grass, much like when we are young we try to evade the concept of mortality. Yet, because of Medusa the processes of time are stopped so that the speaker has her cake and can eat it to with respect to the stopping of the processes of time. For in Medusa the water will always fall but does not fall, and the grass always grows no matter how it is mown down for hay, “The water will always fall, and will not fall,/And the tipped bell make no sound” (Bogan 4).Thus, we get a paradox affect in Medusa that expresses the dualistic nature of life-it is always alive even though it is also always filled with death. In a similar manner, w
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ths, these ladies never experience life to its fullest capacity, in fact, they could care less is “the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy” (Cummings 58). In pity this busy monster, manunkind, cummings once again deals with mortality. Progress is viewed as comfortable disease by the speaker because he accepts it is the only eternal reality. This is why he suggests we might pity the things that are made and will erode, but never the ultimate life force that makes us all in time its victim, “A world made/is not a world of born-pity poor flesh/and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this/fine specimen of hypermagical/ultraomnipotence” (Cummings 397).
The poetry of Frost also explores the death and decaying process of time. In An Old Man’s Winter Night, the speaker is isolated, alienated and alone in his cold, quiet farmhouse. There are no signs of spring or summer (youth), no children, spouse or friends. It is even hard to remember what brought the speaker to this house at his age. Thus, a man aged is even poor company for his own house, “One aged man-one man-can’t keep a house,/A farm, a countryside, or if he can,/It’s thus he does it of a winter night” (Frost 135). The cold winter night is similar to the col
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1454
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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