Rate-a-Poem: All is Not Lost When Dreams Are

It's beautiful, but perplexing. I've started a reply three times now and have had to go away and mull.

There are some elegant images and delicious words (votive tiles, corkscrew of smoke), and a repeated use of simile (the word "like" appears four times!).

It shows two sides of watery death: the drowned passengers ("I could not rescue them/a dirge reaches my ears...", recalling the band playing as the Titanic went down), the caught fish disfigured as it cooks. The last line is ironic: being the one that got away is not preferable in the case of the Titanic. But for the fish, it's a fate devoutly to be wished.

Clearly, to the poet, drowning is the more tragic and romantic of the deaths, if only because of the notion of dreams disintegrating.

Not a quick read for me, nor a 5 (and those two are not correlated), but it is beautiful and rewarding.

I

feel like

poetinahat

and wish that I could write

like that

I'm going to have to come back to this when I'm less tired. I can't focus.

I'm no smart person, I just see stuff when I read poetry. I don't know if it's what the author intended, it's just what I see.

In this one, I see a fatalistic, Dali kind of picture. I see a dude high or tripping out on the patio watching those little floating candles in a big container of water. And, he's so loaded he "trips" on when they finish and make funny sounds and smoke when they go out in the liquid. Have you ever seen them?
And, because he was tripping with his own melancholy, he projects into the candles the "going up in smoke" his own dreams. He, himself, feels like "a fish out of water", strange and out of place in this world and is, in fact, envious of the Titanic because "they got away" and escaped the torture of this world that the author sees himself suffering through. The author is the fish in Novia Scotia with his pearly eye popped out, his seeing eye, little good that it does him to have that pearly eye.

It is the way they sing
going down that I envy

Those are the only lines that I particularly liked in this one. Not much over all, is it?

I interpreted the poem as saying, essentially, that man is defined by his consciousness, his dreams. At least that's what I got from Part 1 and the lines below.

Long ago a fish forgot what fins were good for
And flew out of the stream
It was not dreaming
It had no ambition but confusion

But then the remainder of the poem sank it [and no, I didn't mean that as a Titanic pun.] The stanza about the fish being broiled worked within the theme, but the tone was completely different from what came before it. And the last line meant nothing to me. I gave the poem a 2 [rather than a 1] for the flying fish stanza, which could probably be a poem on its own.

I'll have to read it again and think on what poetinahat said about it. I re-read it several times, as well, and I didn't like it any better having done so.

I should mention that this one made my head hurt.

I like the first section. Great imagery and emotion.

Part two brings me back to frustrating days where I was the only sober person in a smoke filled room and my high as a kite friends said things they thought were deep and profound but their words were merely the ostentatious ramblings of chemically altered, barely functioning minds. So frickin' irritating.

storygirl said:

I like the first section. Great imagery and emotion.

Part two brings me back to frustrating days where I was the only sober person in a smoke filled room and my high as a kite friends said things they thought were deep and profound but their words were merely the ostentatious ramblings of chemically altered, barely functioning minds. So frickin' irritating.

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I whole-heartedly agree. I give it a 2.

I liked the imagery but not the message. It flowed beautifully, I thought, and definitely made an emotional impact on me (even if it wasn't something I particularly wanted to feel.) I gave it a 4.