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Close reading of Allen Ginsberg
Form Of Poetry (ENGH 564)
George Mason University
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MALIHA HAMDAN STRECKFUS CLOSE READING OF Allen Ginsberg WORD COUNT: 977 poem is one that has always stuck with me, and it was a poem I found myself reading over and over again because I could never get a full grasp on it. The poem is not the poem one thinks of when they think Allen Ginsberg but to me it has always stood out as a favorite. It that it sound like a Ginsberg poem, it is that the subject matter is a bit different from other poems in the collection Howl. feels like a ballad, it feels like a love poem in that when I read it, I feel like I am reading The love poem. Starting with the first stanzas weight of the Right from the start there is a clear point of love being at the center of life, but more importantly there is a clear depiction of love as being heavy and all consuming. It is in fact weight and troublesome to people at times. the the of I want to point out these and how they utilize the lines breaks. The are so short and seem to break off at crucial points in the sentence. I believe this is done to make the reader feels a sense of anxiousness or uncertainty, because these are the emotions that come into play when we deal with love and things that get to the deepest parts of us. Love is scary because most of the time it is fleeting. Feeling love for someone especially when it is felt so strongly does produce anxiousness and feelings of uncertainty because it makes us fragile and takes away a layer of protection. The type of skeletal form of the poem and how the appear on the page reinforce the uncertainty. The way the poem is laid out it looks like it could fly away at any moment. The poem begins to take on a surreal and dream like quality in the stanzas that follow, and there are images that develop and transfer the essential base meaning of the poem into tangible objects for the reader to observe. I feel like I always find elements of surrealism in work but that it happens in subtle ways. The way the lines break in this particular poem is interesting to me because as I metioned previously there is an extra weight and suspense added. In the second stanza there is a type of continuation from the first, and the word choice is similar. It seems like this repetition is done to reinforce the overall meaning of the poem and to really get the reader to pick up on the feeling. To return back to the surrealistic aspects, when we reach the fourth stanza the images of a dream come into play, and love is talked about as something that invades our sleep, almost like we escape in even in our subconscious minds. can it the I wanted to focus on these lines because the way the body is described as connected to thoughts shows a connection between the mind and matter, and this better illustrates the mood of the poem , which is that love is connected to every part of our existence. Though it is a something I felt the poem was trying to convey is that love cures? Or if not this than at least that it is an essential part of being human, and that it is something we cannot evade. In the sixth stanza of the poem the idea of love being connected to everything is reestablished, it is saying that as burdensome as it can be it is essential. rest without no sleep without I think that is represented with the above lines because when we bring in the sleep without lines we are presented with the idea that sleep cannot exist itself, dreams must come with it, even if at times we do not want dreams or the thoughts that plague us because of them. They key point is that we cannot live without the things that have the potential to harm us. Again in the sixth stanza Ginsberg provides imagery: mad or with angels or
Close reading of Allen Ginsberg
Course: Form Of Poetry (ENGH 564)
University: George Mason University
