Rate a Poem: "Titanic" by David R. Slavitt

[MacAllister]

We haven't done this in a while, so I thought I'd post one. Someone mentioned a line from this poem (which I hadn't read) a week or so ago, and it jabbed me until I'd looked it up and read the whole thing.



Titanic (http://silvertitanic.tripod.com/)

Who does not love the Titanic?
If they sold passage tomorrow for that same crossing,
who would not buy?

To go down...We all go down, mostly
alone. But with crowds of people, friends, servants,
well fed, with music, with lights!Ah!

And the world, shocked, mourns, as it ought to do
and almost never does. There will be the books and movies
to remind our grandchildren who we were
and how we died, and give them a good cry.

Not so bad, after all. The cold
water is anesthetic and very quick.
The cries on all sides must be a comfort.

We all go: only a few, first class.



About David Slavitt (http://silvertitanic.tripod.com/davidrslavitt/id9.html)



A thought for further discussion -- Slavitt is known and respected as a satirist. To what extent does that information change your reading of the poem?

[William Haskins]

the satire leaps from the first line. i have some marginal awareness of slavitt so perhaps i was looking for it. nevertheless, by the end of the first strophe, you're basically being asked if you'd die for the immortality and perpetual empathy western culture extends to often faceless victims of well-publicized tragedies.

my favorite, and least favorite, turns of phrase occur in the span of two lines:

And the world, shocked, mourns, as it ought to do
and almost never does. There will be the books and movies

the first line-and-a-half is stirring and laden with an undeniable truth. but the pedestrian "books and movies" part is anticlimactic and too "telling" for my taste.

overall, it's one of those little poems that holds a mirror up in front of our faces and forces us to confront exactly in what context we place our thoughts of self-image, mortality and community.

thanks for posting this.

[MacAllister]

The whole first stanza, I think, sparkles. It's evocative and yes, undeniably true.

I agree that it loses momentum and impact, with the introduction of the elements of books and movies -- it mostly serves as a reminder of the difference between experience and observation, I think, and serves as a bit of a slap, designed to draw attention to the alienation inherent in pop-cultural vicarious experience.

The last line seemed anticlimactic and dangerously near preachy to me, in that reading, then.

Overall, I do like it very much, though.

[Unique]

I like it. It's like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick to the blind eye of our culture.

See, dammit. See!