Flames and Dangling Wire

Symbolic of transition, the unknown and uncertain

Title: Ominous, conveys a strange sense of chaos and destruction. Post apocalyptic environment.

Symbolic: Consumerist society, material waste.

Simile: unclean and dirty, a mark on the landscape

On a highway over the marshland.

Off to one side, the smoke of different fires in a row,

like fingers spread and dragged to smudge.

It is a rubbish dump, always burning.

Shifting perception: what we create moves exists beyond the material.

Going on, I notice an old radio, that spills

its dangling wire –

and I realise that somewhere the voices it received

are still travelling,

Perpetual source of decay.

Disassociation with place.

Schism between urban environment and domestic waste.

Simile: negative connotation of city, distant, obtrusive, violent.

Implies permanency of human endeavor. Things die but ideas live on.

Behind us, the city

driven like stakes into the earth.

A waterbird lifts above this swamp

as a turtle moves on the Galapagos shore.

Allusion: Dump is almost primeval, primitive and distinct. Juxtaposed to perception of city.

Romantic composer: symbolic of free expression, creativity, relationship to nature.

skidding away, riddled, around the arc of the universe;

and with them, the horse-laughs, and the Chopin

which was the sound or the curtains lifting,

one time, to a coast of light.

Final image: ambiguous, both hopeful (human potential/creativity) and despondent (loss of something beautiful)

Flames and Dangling Wire

Alliteration (rims, red) Simile: denote pain and suffering, our suffering.

Rare moment of human contact

and so we speak. The rims beneath his eyes are wet

as an oyster, and red.

Knowing all that he does about us,

how can he avoid a hatred of men?

Collective pronoun: acknowledging a shared blame

Rhetorical question: challenging who we are and what we've become.

Suggests we are entering a very different kind of space. Distorted world

We turn off down a gravel road,

approaching the dump. All the air wobbles

in a cheap mirror.

There is a fog over the hot sun.

Metaphor: nature seems distorted here. Signifies a surreal environment.

Alliteration/juxtaposition: highlights contrasting worlds.

Robert Gray

Sense of nature transformed.Apocalyptic image.

Simile: environment of death and decay

Now the distant buildings are stencilled in the smoke.

And we come to a landscape of tin cans,

of cars like skulls,

that is rolling in its sand dune shapes.

Metaphor: sense of an artificial landscape, replaced nature.

Metaphor: smoke seems to have engulfed this world

Descriptive: unidentifiable as human

A labourer hoists an unidentifiable mulch

on his fork, throws it in the flame:

something flaps

like the rag held up in ‘The Raft of the Medusa’.

Simile/ Allusion to Greek Mythology. Adds to surreal-like quality of dump.

Amongst these vast grey plastic sheets of heat,

shadowy figures

who seem engaged in identifying the dead –

they are the attendants, in overalls and goggles,

Metaphor: humanity present but unrecognisable.

Motif: reinforces idea of a place that is blurred, obscured.

Extended metaphor: allusion to classical mythology continues. Heightens notion of a place that seems damned.

We approach another, through the smoke,

and for a moment he seems that demon with the long barge pole.

- It is a man, wiping his eyes.

Someone who worked here would have to weep,

Back to reality, acknowledgment of the human. Sad image of humanity.

Symbolic: smoke as a lingering entity, motif.

Imagery: death and decay

forking over rubbish on the dampened fires.

A sour smoke

is hauled out everywhere,

thin, like rope. And there are others moving – scavengers.

Alliteration: Emphasises pity and sorrow.

Descriptive language/ adjectives: create a scene that is overwhelming.

We get out and move about also.

The smell is huge,

blasting the mouth dry:

the tons of rotten newspaper, and great cuds of cloth...

Use of ellipsis: sense of refuse being perpetual and infinite.

As in hell the devils

might poke about through our souls, after scraps

of appetite

with which to stimulate themselves,

Simile/ extended metaphor: allusion of dump to hell. Workers seem to move further from the human. Landscape completely other worldly.

Tone/mood of doom.

Each stanza takes the reader further into a place that seems damned and therefore, inescapable.

Metaphor: city barely acknowledge/real here

Significant moment in poem: drawn inward to affect on speaker. brings us back to the human.

Epiphany: point of realisation where the speaker tries to make sense of this place

And standing where I see the mirage of the city

I realise I am in the future.

This is how it shall be after men have gone.

It will be made of things that worked.

Past tense/modal verb "will", very deliberate. World extinction, only garbage left to identify us.

so these figures

seem to be wandering, in despondence, with an eternity

where they could find

some peculiar sensation.

Tone: scoffing/despondent, sense that humanity has lost.