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Showing posts with the label ambiguous nouns

Analysis of "Waiting on the Corners" by Donald Hall

Original poem reprinted online here: "Waiting on the Corners" by Donald Hall Originally read: December 25, 2012? More information about the Poet: Donald Hal l I wrote a lot of "I like" for this poem.   Funnily enough there's a lot of grammar issues within the poem that would make English majors wince.  However, grammar is a tool to standardize communication, but in a poem, miscommunications bring a sort of insight. For example the first line: "Glass, air, ice, light, and winter cold."  Even though I wrote that "this collection of verbs [they are nouns past me -- you dolt] are mundane."  There's a sense of  two things with the first line -- immediacy (the nouns are right in front of the) and disorder (without a complete sentence there is a lack of context. As we get further down into the poem there's ambiguous pronouns "They" in line three could refer to the items above or a group of people -- the line has a sense of duality ...