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...