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poetry; the canon of literature is chock-full of excellent examples. A master of images, poet Sylvia Plath, Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.
revolutionized the poetry world with works like Daddy, where she utilizes harsh Holocaust imagery to dissect her feelings towards her father. Let's take a look at an Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
excerpt: are moving across the landscapes,
…Not a God but a swastika over the prairies and the deep trees,
So black no sky could squeak through. the mountains and the rivers.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
Completely opposite in tone from Plath's Daddy, Wild Geese is a quiet poem that explores a human's relationship with nature and our similarities to an animal. While, most
The boot in the face, the brute of these images give us a visual experience, 'clear pebbles of the rain' is a description we can use our sense of sound to imagine. Also, because Oliver visually moves us
Brute heart of a brute like you. across so many landscapes - prairies, deep trees, mountains, and rivers - she has essentially opened the entire world for us by the end of the poem and laid it at our feet.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy, REFERENCES
In the picture I have of you,
-Robert Frost
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
-K.C.Sethi
But no less a devil for that, no not
-Angela Gentry
Any less the black man who
-Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
Bio- Mrs. Aditi Jamwal is budding poetry writer. Her poems have appeared and have been awarded in various online poetry groups. Few had their place in National and
I was ten when they buried you.
International newspapers. International poetry digest and so on, she is a teacher by profession and has done Masters in English.
At twenty I tried to die
and get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do…
In this particular excerpt, we can see how individual images provide us with a snapshot - 'the boot in the face' and 'you stand at the blackboard, daddy' are examples of
visual images. We can see the boot. We can see the blackboard. However, when we read these series of images together, we gain horrifying emotional impressions of
oppression, neglect, and spite.
Taken at one time, Plath's images do conjure up specific snapshots in our minds. However, when taken together, we see that Plath is actually talking about her father,
Adolf Hitler, and men in her life, in general. When a poet represents several experiences with a series of images or one poem, we call it a conflation.
Let's look at the imagery in the poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver for another example:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
130 K.C. Sethi, Sunita Sethi Bliss 131

