Wednesday, February 7, 2007

“Looking into History” by Richard Wilbur [pg. 126-128]

Like Wilbur’s other poems, he uses end rhymes and four lined stanzas. In this poem, the rhyme pattern is abab. The gives structure gives an air of formal writing: the verses are neat and particularly organized. The formality of the poem is more expressed by capitalizing every letter in the beginning of each line. The overall feeling that the speaker has is a sense of lost. I see the speaker looking at an old picture of soldiers. This object triggers the emotion that the speaker goes through. It is also the element of the speaker’s thinking. Wilbur alludes to other literature and history in his poem. In the first line, Mathew Brady, a Civil War photographer, is mentioned. This gives the clue that the speaker knows the details of the Civil War, or at least the photograph. The speaker refers to himself as Hamlet, referencing Shakespeare, to convey his internal emotions of confusion. The pictures act as a barrier separating the speaker from the men in the picture. The speaker can only wonder the thoughts of the soldiers captures on camera. Wilbur also alludes to Macbeth in mentioning the illusion of Birnam Wood. He uses the reference to describe the situation he pictures the soldiers in. The first part of the poem focuses on him looking at the picture. It is the most distant kind of interaction with the soldiers. The second part has the speaker imagining him at the location of the soldiers. It gets closer in the third part, when the speaker understands his feelings for the soldiers. The speaker feels as if time separates him from the past.

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