Deborah Digges‟ “Trapeze”
Trapeze
By Deborah Digges
See how the first dark takes the city in its arms1
And carries it into what yesterday we called the future.
O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,
Or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum2 between eternity and evening,
Diving, recovering, balancing3 the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,
Wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.
Don't call them back, don't call them4 in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.
1: This is personification because the writer describes the dark as a person by
giving it arms to hold the city.
2: The writer uses a simile to compare how the two objects sing back and forth.
3: The writer uses rhythm by adding the –ing to the end of the words
4: The writer uses hyperbole because it is exaggerating the emotion on one
person.
Setting: The setting of this place would be in a city during the night
and somewhere near the ocean.
The speaker of this story would be the darkness and how it takes over the city
when the sun has gone to the other side of the planet. The speakers talks about
how everything is moving and about the people. The audience would be the town
and how the dark hold it’s in its arm once everyone has gone to bed. The writer
uses this type of language to get the reader to understand from his side of the
story. The purpose of the story is to let peoples know how some cities can be
really colorful when all the lights are out and when the sun is gone. The
author’s tone of this poem is a tone that seems really nice and kind and just
the way she talks about it. Her mood is a happy mood because of the way she
compares things and the way she talks about it.
شرح اخر
Trapeze
Deborah Digges
See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.
O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,
or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,
diving, recovering, balancing the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,
wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.
Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.
This hit me like a sock in the jaw--it seems to get the mood of a writer who
has an intense sense of that all manner of gravity, both natural and moral, has
ceased to exist that the material world and the conduct of the population was
now free to play, wander , roam, let themselves go into a an vertiginous , all
embrace void. These very much resembles Yeats, and the ringing rhetorical and
hard edged images resound like "Easter 1916". The difference between
the two, of course, is that Yeats' poem was a prophecy, and his poem was
apprehensive because everything old was being made new with new uses, new
meanings, remolded from a new philosophy. Terrible in the unknown and beautiful
in the sense that life processes cannot be stopped, only made into something
new , different. Digges gives the feeling of the floor, the sidewalk, the
street giving way from under you , that the conditions of conduct are suspended
or revoked outright, and that the life goes to an inevitable, ecstatic end.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.
Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.
These last lines get the pitch exactly, the pull toward a personal apocalypse
being so strong that the bounds of reason, protocol, faith are undone. It's a
seduction to the darkest yearning, to enter a sphere where there is no
contradiction, no agitation, no weighted arguments with the balance of one's
universe. To become nothing. It's a plea, as well, for the families, the
friends, the passers by to cease heroic efforts to prevent the inevitable and
accept one's decision to be raptured.The nihilistic lure is overpowering here,
and one is made to feel that there is nothing for this speaker to do but to
surrender to natural forces, to embrace the inevitable end.
What gets me in the poem is how it makes the Big Sleep, the Large Nod, the
Humongous Nap an attractive state; life consists mostly of temporary problems
requiring our wits and ingenuity with which to engineer remedies. It's a
wearying task as the years go on, and Digges , it seems to me, writes from a
point of view of someone approaching their nadir, the breaking point when what
passes for ironic disengagement, the activity of minimizing one's labors in
just getting through the day, becomes an encroaching obsession for a permanent
solution . The narrator seems envious of the dead, as you say, but I think
there's a real desire here to leave this sphere of being. The weightlessness
and unboundedness of the dead suggests desire, a deferred longing . The
narrator sounds like she is desirous of what the dead get to do in the universe
as we understand it, which is nothing. The desire is to do nothing and to be
nothing in turn.The foreknowledge that every living thing dies finally crowds
the poem like a Bosch painting--one last intense set of indulgences of the
human senses, and then ride the sensual tide to a darkness one cannot report
back from. This is beautiful, unnerving, slightly scary.
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