Thursday, April 12, 2012

blah blah allegory for the rhythms of life, etc.

Moore's a real jerk about making me play by poetry's rules. I have been reading and rereading "The Fish" to no intellectual avail, and have thus been forced to acknowledge my brain's own futility in parsing out this poem. I have nothing left to talk about but my own feelings, a fact which leaves me feeling sufficiently vulnerable and annoyed. With that in mind, here goes:

What I sense occuring in the "The Fish" is a battle between that which is passively steadfast and that with is actively regular. The cliff becomes aged and weathered by the sea--is, in fact, killed by it--but seems to derive its life from that very destruction. Yes, the mussel-shells are adjusting "ash-heaps" and the fish are "wad[ing]/ through black jade," but they are living fish and mussels, nonetheless. There is a strange, unidentifiable tension between life and death that remains unrevealed by the ambiguity of the final line; is it the cliff that "can live/ on what can not revive/ its youth," or the sea? Or the combination of the two? The final "it" of the poem suggests it is the cliff face that prevails, but can it be so easily extracted from the sea? The cliff is dead but, paradoxically, also teeming with life. The sea is ruthless and infinitely regular, but "grows old," anyway. It seems to me that the seat of life in this poem is within the sea's invariable abuse of the cliff. Even the regularity of the poem's structure seems to suggest this; there is some comfort in this regularity, even as the poem marks the regularity of the sea as abusive.

2 comments:

  1. So tired of reading this poetry.
    Must... Find... Noelle... Post...
    Was not disappointed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is lovely, Noelle, so I don't know what you're complaining about. Except that I think the "it" at the end is the fish.

    ReplyDelete