Postcards from the Imagination

Final update (Mon, 4:06pm): finished the paper at around 11:45 this morning and handed it in at 1:00pm. I need to figure out why my mind only kicks into high gear in the twenty-four hours before something like this is due. I used to think it was just procrastination, but it's more like an engine that won't turn over until it absolutely has to. It took me an entire weekend to write the first page, and then a few hours to do the remaining five!

Update (Sun, 10:50am):  this is all I've got so far...

"W.S. Merwin’s “The Drunk in the Furnace” is at once a celebration of the individual, and an indictment of small-town religiosity. The title’s drunk is a homeless alcoholic who has taken up residence in a junked smelting furnace on the outskirts of a Protestant town. Though a reviled outsider in the eyes of the townspeople, he becomes a Christ-like figure to their children, who “flock” to his dwelling on Sunday afternoons. For the poet, much of the anecdote’s power lies in its inversion—enacted not by authorial will, but by life itself—of a time-worn metaphor. In Paradise Lost, Milton describes hell as a “dungeon horrible, on all sides round, / As one great furnace flamed” (61-62). The drunk’s furnace, however, is something altogether unlike perdition, and Merwin avails himself of the opportunity it presents to subvert traditional Christian dichotomies. Throughout the poem, he blurs the hard lines drawn by the townspeople between opposing qualities—good versus bad, insiders versus outsiders, etc.—by mixing high diction with low; merging religious language and imagery with the idiom of the iron works; and in the poem’s final stanza, yoking allusions out of several disparate literary traditions."

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is for a course called Studies in Poetry, a major requirement that I'm forced to take rather late in my career because I'm a transfer student.  It's just not all that interesting, and right now my most serious academic weakness--an inability to focus when I'm bored--is flaring up big time. Blogging about it is just another excuse...

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Writing on diction and figuration in this one for a paper due Monday...

The Drunk in the Furnace

       For a good decade
The furnace stood in the naked gully, fireless
And vacant as any hat. Then when it was
No more to them than a hulking black fossil
To erode unnoticed with the rest of the junk-hill
By the poisonous creek, and rapidly to be added
       To their ignorance, 

       They were afterwards astonished
To confirm, one morning, a twist of smoke like a pale
Resurrection, staggering out of its chewed hole,
And to remark then other tokens that someone,
Cozily bolted behind the eye-holed iron
Door of the drafty burner, had there established
       His bad castle. 

       Where he gets his spirits
It’s a mystery. But the stuff keeps him musical:
Hammer-and-anviling with poker and bottle
To his jugged bellowings, till the last groaning clang
As he collapses onto the rioting
Springs of a litter of car-seats ranged on the grates,
       To sleep like an iron pig. 

       In their tar-paper church
On a text about stoke-holes that are sated never
Their Reverend lingers. They nod and hate trespassers.
When the furnace wakes, though, all afternoon
Their witless offspring flock like piped rats to its siren
Crescendo, and agape on the crumbling ridge
       Stand in a row and learn.