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At the San Francisco Airport by Yvor Winters
Here's the poem, browse over it first before looking at the question below it.
At the San Francisco Airport
to my daughter,1954
This is the terminal: the light
Gives perfect vision, false and hard;
The metal glitters, deep and bright/
Great planes are waiting in the yard-
They are already in the night.
And you are here beside me, small.
Containted and fragile, and intent
On things that I but half recall-
Yet going whither you are bent.
I am the past, and that is all.
But you and I in part are one:
The frightened brain, the nervous will,
The knowledge of what must be done,
The passion to acquire the skill
To face that which you dare not shun.
The rain of matter upon sense
Destroys me momently. The score:
There comes what will come. The expense
Is what one thought, and something more-
One's being and intelligence.
This is the terminal, the break.
Beyond this point, on lines of air,
You take the way that you must take;
And I remain in light and stare-
In light, and nothing else, awake.
What can u say about the poem? Any comments on its structure, imagery and symbolism???
If u guys would give an answer ASAP i would greatly appreciate it! So far here's what i found out when i was researching:
Each stanza feels, and is, different.
In the first, we have five free-standing statements, three of them coextensive with the lines in which they are made.
In the second, the presentation of her flows forward through four lines, none of them free-standing.
In the third, an analytical parallelism helps in defining common features of the two of them.
In the fourth— syntactically the most fractured—there is no formulaic wisdom-of-the-books summarizing. Instead there’s a momentary disintegration of “mind”—as can indeed happen when one is simply overloaded sensorily, especially in the shadowless fluorescent light of airports—and a che sera sera acceptance of what has had to go into the fathering that has led up to this point.
In the last stanza, again, we’re back to the physical details, including the public externality of airline systems, and the absoluteness (for the moment at least) of the physical separation.
I am absolutely open to all your comments!
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Humans are doomed to repeat their mistakes because they are so short lived, but no other race has produced as many catalysts for change. That is a single individual with the will and strength to transform the world.
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