Analysis of "Rodin, 'The Walking Man'" by Peter Cooley

 

The Walking Man, Rodin

The above image is what this eckphrastic poem is talking about. The poem takes on the physical features of the image in the first two lines, "But when the body stands here, one foot back, / one forward, the flesh flexed in motion,". Note how the alliteration in the second line, to me, adds a sense of movement to the reader -- where your eyes travel to -- those "flexed" moments.

Again the poem refers back to the reader, "You forget your equivocating past / only to recall it the next second."  There's a sense of vagueness with these lines: what is there to recall?  What is there to equivocate on?

"It is essential that he is headless / Admit it: you'd be staring at his face."  the headlessness of the artwork makes it stay an artwork.  When the speaker asks the reader to confess, they are asking them to acknowledge attraction on a human level, and an art level -- a kind of forced separation of the personal and the aesthetic.

"This is our walk between eternities, / the one we think we know, the one we can't."  The past version of me wrote "Schrodinger's Paradox"  -- what does "eternities" mean?  Especially in the context of this separation between objectification and humanization.  

But that's the point, the discussion.  The speaker is pointing out art as art, art as desire, art as personal, art as object where we can't "know" the meaning, but have to feel we "know."