DDCPoetry

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: 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 da...

Original poem reprinted online here:   "Empire of Dreams" by Charles Simic Originally read: October 29, 2013 More information about the Poet: Charles Simic Another dream sequence type of poem, but this one has different implications.  Yes, in a dream, everything is possible, but in an empire of dreams, what is the structure? The conceit is stated in the beginning, "On the first page of my dreambook" and so this isn't only about dreams, this is what the speaker experiences after the dream -- waking up and recording a dream.  The conceit is a dream empire looked back upon. "It's always evening / In an occupied country."  Heavy language here, but this is a dream landscape where the word "occupied" could mean various things.  Sure occupied could have that militaristic sense, but who is really there -- only the speaker.      Hour before the curfew.      A small provincial town.      The houses all dark.     ...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Heights of Folly" by Charles Simic Originally read: May 27, 2013 More information about the Poet: Charles Simic So the title foreshadows a sense of tragedy and a sense of the hyperbole.  Heights of folly relates to the idea of hamartia -- the tragic flaw.  And through the title, the flaw could be an overly naive sense of place.  The first line harkens back to a more naive person, "O Crows circling over my head and cawing!"  Two things of note here, the usage of "O" in the beginning references both the time frame and sense of the naive; furthermore, the seen punctuated with an exclamation brings a sense of importance to the scene -- the crows circling above the head and cawing isn't a great sign. The first stanza plays with this foreboding doom, "I admit to being, at times, / Suddenly, and without the slightest warning".  The understatement at the end of the line "without the slightest warning" ...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Fear" and "Note Slipped under a Door" by Charles Simic Originally read: March 18, 2013 More information about the Poet:  Charles Simic So Poetry Daily does this sometimes -- put up two poems up by the same author.  I found things interesting with both.  In "Fear" it  is the way the speaker sets up the a comparison .  In "Note Slipped under a Door" it is how the speaker uses anaphora and observation to confirm multiple but "separate" images. "Fear" The first thing of note is how the metaphor works in the first stanza.  Yes, the metaphor applies to "fear" as a concept, but the undertone here is the idea of "unknowing"  how the concept transfers like how a leaf passes its "shudder" to another. So this unknowing fear fear, compared to with a natural occurrence, works as a synecdoche as the final two lines of the poem goes from leaf to tree, "All at once the w...