Poem Found Here: "In My Long Night" by Charles Simic
An outsider living in the same place. This poem plays with the symbolism of images regarding fealty to the church, the same church, and not fitting in. Note how each stanza is end-stopped as thought to encapsulate an idea or time. After rereading this poem a couple of times, it's difficult to break up individual lines since the each stanza is powerful as a whole.
However, the poem starts with a small image that expands outward:
The initial simile compares the speaker to a spider in a web which is subsumed by "the dome of a church" and then moves to tormented, upraised eyes of a martyrs. For me, the expanse of it all gets to me. The church being such an overwhelming visual and emotional figure. This sets up the speakers viewpoint.
The reference to "spring" and "war" makes me think of "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot, but only as a reference to time. What these lines mean to me is that the parents needed to bring their child to be baptized since "the rumors of war" can be actual war. Everything lost but the soul being saved. This stanza contrasts with the next one based on age.
So here's another perspective of the church. Even though the people that the speaker's grandmother buried would, technically, find salvation along with the grandmother, the focus of the lines is the physical actuality of burying loved ones. And from the speaker's perspective, the grandmother values the actual due to the "pleased" look. In context though, wouldn't the grandmother be happier to meet her loved ones in the afterlife?
This is the struggle that comes forth as grave images in the final stanza.
The struggle is between this image of the crow versus the speaker as a spider. The crow image is "lured" by light, gold and candles. But the crow is only lured to the physical aspects. There's no genuflecting by the crow or awe reverence, the speaker doesn't place emotions on the crow -- only the crow interacting with the real; Meanwhile, the speaker as a spider is playing with the idiom of "dangling by a thread," It's a pun that devalues the existential curiosity of the church and that's the struggle. How serious is the afterlife if the real has so much more impact?
An outsider living in the same place. This poem plays with the symbolism of images regarding fealty to the church, the same church, and not fitting in. Note how each stanza is end-stopped as thought to encapsulate an idea or time. After rereading this poem a couple of times, it's difficult to break up individual lines since the each stanza is powerful as a whole.
However, the poem starts with a small image that expands outward:
I have toiled like a spider at this web
In the dome of a church
Where only the upraised eyes of martyrs
In their torments could see me.
The initial simile compares the speaker to a spider in a web which is subsumed by "the dome of a church" and then moves to tormented, upraised eyes of a martyrs. For me, the expanse of it all gets to me. The church being such an overwhelming visual and emotional figure. This sets up the speakers viewpoint.
Where one cold spring day,
With rumors of war in the air,
My young parents brought me
To be baptized by the priest
The reference to "spring" and "war" makes me think of "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot, but only as a reference to time. What these lines mean to me is that the parents needed to bring their child to be baptized since "the rumors of war" can be actual war. Everything lost but the soul being saved. This stanza contrasts with the next one based on age.
Where years after, my grandmother
Was to lie in an open coffin
Looking pleased to be done with
Having to bury other people.
So here's another perspective of the church. Even though the people that the speaker's grandmother buried would, technically, find salvation along with the grandmother, the focus of the lines is the physical actuality of burying loved ones. And from the speaker's perspective, the grandmother values the actual due to the "pleased" look. In context though, wouldn't the grandmother be happier to meet her loved ones in the afterlife?
This is the struggle that comes forth as grave images in the final stanza.
Where I once saw a crow walk in,
Lured by the gold on the alter
And the light the candles cast,
While I dangled up there by a thread.
The struggle is between this image of the crow versus the speaker as a spider. The crow image is "lured" by light, gold and candles. But the crow is only lured to the physical aspects. There's no genuflecting by the crow or awe reverence, the speaker doesn't place emotions on the crow -- only the crow interacting with the real; Meanwhile, the speaker as a spider is playing with the idiom of "dangling by a thread," It's a pun that devalues the existential curiosity of the church and that's the struggle. How serious is the afterlife if the real has so much more impact?
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