Medusa Poem Essay
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Medusa Poem Essay
"Medusa" first appeared in Carol Ann Duffy's 1999 collection The World's Wife. The poem is a dramatic monologue written in the voice of Medusa, a mythical figure with venomous snakes for hair and whose stare turns people to stone. Medusa is both terrifying and sympathetic in the poem, a woman transformed into a monster by her anger over her husband's affairs. The poem points to the destructive potential of jealousy and rage, and to the way that men use women, only to discard them when they're no longer young and beautiful.
The poem opens up with one of the aforementioned tricolons. This commonly used, rhetorical device is a tool to emphasise a point, in this case, the emotions being felt by medusa, those pertaining to jealousy. The narrator then speaks metaphorically about how these emotions have turned her into a Medusa-like character. (Medusa was a character in Greek mythology with snakes for hair, that could turn a person to stone just by looking at them) in this first stanza, Duffy uses the S-sound to make a reader imagine a hissing, the kind of noise one would associate with serpents.
This stanza continues much in the vein of the previous, detailing the things medusa is turning to stone. Once again the things she is transforming grow in stature. There are some elements of black humour here as the cat turns to stone and shatters the dish it was drinking from and the pig is transformed into a boulder and rolls into a pile of faeces. This humour helps to ease the tension after the drama of the third stanza and creates a lull before a further harrowing crescendo. In essence, bringing the reader a slight calmness before the big scare, much like a horror director would.
Brandon Shimoda knows his way around the dead. He has summoned them, followed their lead, faced their despair, soothed them. Or was it the other way around The poems and essays in Hydra Medusa embody the irrevocable connection between the dead and the living, dreaming and wakefulness, past and present, writing and reading. Delicate and sharp, vociferous when need be, always incisive, these poems interrogate the proliferating terror of everyday life while veering, tenaciously and fiercely, even tenderly, toward the love, vigilance, and responsibility needed to keep our ancestors close and alive.
The poem Medusa by Louise Bogan is a piece of writing which describes the situation when a speaker came to the house of Medusa and stoned. The poem repeats the myth about Medusa, a beautiful Gorgon, who made people stoned when they looked at her. The author retells the myths, however, it is possible to predict that Gorgon and the possibility to make people stoned is just a good symbol the author uses trying to express her personal vision of how people are to read her poems. During the whole poem the speaker wants to have a look at the famous hair of Medusa, however, when she does it, she becomes a stone and the whole surrounding world enters an entire activity which never stops however, which is stable,
Having read the poem for several times, it is possible to predict that being stoned the author wanted to show how people perceive her poetry and staying like a shadow is the metaphoric presentation of the idea that her poetry cannot leave people indifferent and the shadow of the author and her ideas will always stay with the reader. The poems of the reader seem to be symbolic and philosophic, they make people think about their lives, about the surrounding worlds, etc. Such dare preposition is based on the last lines,
Remembering the myth, the author hints the reader about the consequences of looking at the hair of Medusa. The same happens with those who read the poems by Louise Bogan. The first feeling is a great desire to read and to understand the poems. When the reader manages to understand it, he/she sees a real meaning and a reader becomes influenced. This is the idea which comes to my mind reading this poem.
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