This is a brilliant poem to look at. It is easy with the
poems of this author to be distracted by the conversational, everyday tone that he
adopts as he relates experiences and discusses themes to miss the deeper meaning in his
poetry. This poem, for example, starts off with a simple narration of an experience that
the speaker had when he was on a train at night forty-two years ago. Note what excited
the speaker about the "Holes, punched in the sky," which are described as being
"intolerably bright":
which excited me partly because
Of
their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks
How very far
off they were, it seemed their light
Had left them (some at least) long years
before I was.
Part of the
speaker's fascination with the stars then stems from the way that the light that he is
seeing now actually was first emitted from the stars before he even existed as a human
being. Note how this theme of time and mortality is developed in the second stanza as
the speaker talks about the distance and time of the speed of
light:
which
light when
It does get here may find that there is not
Anyone left
alive
To run from side to side in a late night train
Admiring it and
adding noughts in vain.
What
appears to have struck the speaker is a sense of his own mortality and that of humanity
as a whole. As he contemplates the starry universe, he is forced into a realisation of
how aeons of time go by in the galaxy, and how man has only been around for such a short
time and will probably not be around for much longer from that perspective. There seems
to be a note of futility in the "adding noughts in vain." Perhaps the speaker is
suggesting that instead of contemplating our mortality and trying to calculate
equations, we should just focus on admiring the wonderful, transcendent beauty of the
stars and live in the moment--because that, as a species, is all we
have.
No comments:
Post a Comment