Reflection (#1)

Dan Aloisio

My first reaction to almost every modern piece of poetry is a sort of awe at the poem’s pithiness. I am nearly always surprised by the brevity of each poem, and further still by the content that that poem managed to contain in such an efficient way. The poems I read were very direct, and generally commented on everyday things, places, people, and events. Because of this, I sometimes felt myself rereading poems as if to look for something with an extraordinary air to it, something “big,” so to speak. For example, C.P. Cavafy’s poem, “An Old Man,” has no war—no death even, no torrid love affair or dramatic moment. Though this may suggest a poor poem according to Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D (see Dead Poet’s Society), I actually enjoyed the poem for its mundane topic. The old man’s plight, though only briefly illustrated and mundane, is infinitely relatable and genuine. I found many of the poems rang true for me in this way.

The European Modernist poems that I looked at used techniques to compress meaning into small spaces. After all, a ninety-one word prose piece about candles could never simultaneously convey the meaning and effect of an enjoyable life moving too quickly. However, C.P. Cavafy’s poem, “Candles,” does just this. This is accomplished, in the customary manner of European Modernist poems (in my experience, at least) by the use of metaphors and imagery to create an effect, meter and lack of rhyme to create a pace that also seems brief, and action working as a conceit to show the meaning of the poem. In this case, the imagery of “golden, warm, and vivid candles” of the future contrasts with the “cold, melted, and bent” candles of the past. The meter of this poem changes by stanza, creating separation of life stages illustrated in each, while the lack of rhyme quickens the pace of the poem. The action of the poem is of the speaker not wanting to turn and see the “snuffed-out candles proliferate,” which acts as an elaborate metaphor to show the meaning of the poem.

Another aspect of the European Modernist poems that I read was that the role of the individual was stressed especially. The majority of the poems that I read were from the perspective of the first-person. This is most prevalent in Fernando Pessoa’s edict of “I Know, I Alone.” This poem is a prime example of the way that European Modernist poems somehow use an introspective approach towards a very external issue or a very real thing. While the speaker stresses how much his/her heart hurts, and how he/she alone knows that, it seems that this introspection was a ploy to get at the nature of feeling, which is explicated at the end of the poem, “Because feeling is like the sky- / Seen, nothing in it to see.”

European Modernist poems seem to have a common tone of reflection and observation—often without any normative statement forthcoming from that inspection. It is possible that this commonality is coincidental, or that I simply read all the poems in a particular state of mind, but this is unlikely. Each poem that I read seems bent on getting at what some thing is—no matter how mundane, lofty, boring, exciting, calm, or violent. This alleged disregard for subject suggests that this group was not simply looking around them to find inspiration because there was none elsewhere, but that they were looking at society from its very foundations upward.