I need to remember to pick up the sheet of poems I'm supposed to be looking at. This project is being sabotaged by my forgetfulness and procrastination...

Blog Views

So, apparently more people from the US have viewed my blog than have Canadians. As well, an Indonesian and a German have seen fit to view it. Who might you people be? XD

The Shark

The Shark - Edwin John Pratt

I chose this poem from the list based on it's name, which seemed interesting to me. Upon observing it amongst the others, I immediately thought of the song "Mack the Knife", which compares a criminal to a shark, and was written in the same decade as this poem. The thought that they might have something in common spurred me to Google it, upon doing so, I discovered that it was not the case, but the poem did seem quite interesting, so I selected it as a blog post.

The poem is short, and descriptive: It narrates a shark swimming through a harbor, eating a dead fish, and then departing, whilst describing through the use of highly visual language that almost makes the shark seem mechanical, like a submarine: "His body was tubular
And tapered
And smoke-blue"

"And I saw the flash of a white throat,
And a double row of white teeth,
And eyes of metallic grey,
Hard and narrow and slit".

Simile is used in the first stanza of the poem, declaring the shark's fin to be "like a sheet of iron", again playing to the sort of mechanical theme.


The poem also employs the use of metaphoric language, describing the creature as: "Part Vulture, Part Wolf, and Part Neither, for it's blood was cold."

Personally, I find the poem to be somewhat plain, and perhaps overrated. The first stanza is good, but the second merely elaborates on it, and the third repeats the first, and second. 

 It seems that the author wrote a poem about a shark swimming around a harbor, and then replaced many of the words with larger, unnecessary ones. this made me think back to the Orwell essay;"Politics and the English Language", in  which he decries the use of literary tools such as: "pretentious diction", using words that are excessive, and unnecessarily grand to describe or narrate something when smaller words could be used to get it done. Admittedly, I am sometimes guilty of breaking this rule, but not too often.


 EJ's poem clearly breaks Orwell's rules and yet it is not a book, or an essay, a manifesto of some sort. It is a poem. This brings us(well, me really)to the question: do Orwell's rules apply to poetry? One could argue either way. In one case, that poetry is in fact literature, and thus Orwell's rules apply as they do to anything else. However-One could also argue that the use of flowing, grand, descriptive language is integral to the art of Poetry, that without such devices, poetry would be dull, and boring! That it would lose its spirit, and cease to adhere to its foundation as an art form.


 This brings me to another poem I have been examining: Chicago, by Carl Sandburg. This poem is radically different from Shark, both in terms of Topic/subject, and writing style. The poem is essentially an ode to the great American City of Chicago:

"Hog Butcher for the World, 
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, 
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; 
Stormy, husky, brawling, 
City of the Big Shoulders"

Using the same sort of descriptive language, and heavy use of personification: "They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I 
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps 
luring the farm boys. 
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it 
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to 
kill again."

Simile: Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning 
as a savage pitted against the wilderness"

For me this poem also reflects the use of "excessive" language in poetry, but I feel that it has a rightful place in this poem, which does wonders in conjuring up a picture of Chicago in the 1910s. I can almost see the stockyards, smoke rising from the chimneys of the packing plants...After contrasting two poems with this language I concede that Orwell's rules must not apply to poetry, as the very things that they obsess about are necessary as poetic devices.