City Limits
In the poem entitled "City Limits’’ the author describes the light that is ever present and can reveal anything hidden at a first glance. The light reaches every hidden corner and brings forth gruesome things. In the second stanza, the author mentions the bones of birds which lay in the open for everyone to see. Birds are common in cities and thus the bones of birds could symbolize here the small secrets everyone has and are sometimes ignored because they are considered as being unimportant.
The light also has the power to penetrate one’s heart and to reach inside it and reveal a person’s true intentions. The light is not scared of the things it discovers and continued to reveal the darkest ideas and thought one might hide. The tone used in the poem becomes darker when the narrator describes the excrements on the road and how they are covered in flies. The poem ends with the narrator claiming light shines and reveals both wonderful things and despicable ones in equal manner.
Muse
The next poem is entitled "Muse’’ and the narrator begins with noting how from darkness he rose to shine and change into a "brilliant shape’’. After being transformed, the poet is able to let his mind sing, or in other words create art or poetry.
The author reveals how the creative process is not an easy one and how he broke himself many times just to be able to write. Pain helps the author find his inspiration and the stanza ends with the author mentioning how he finds inspiration after suffering for a long time. The narrator compares poems to houses and inspiration to materials he must gather to build his house. This suggests that the creative process is not an easy one and that it takes a lot of time and effort to create a good piece of literature.
Easter Morning
The poem "Easter Morning’’ is a meditative poem on life and on life’s meaning. The narrator imagines himself having two lives, one resembling a child he must hold close to himself as time passes by. The narrator tries to keep the child from growing up until he realizes that he must also take the child into the grave with him.
He mentions people he once knew and how they all died. He was among the only ones left alive in the end and he stayed by their graves, as a small child, unsure how to go on next with his life.
The tone of the poem changes and it becomes much more optimistic, describing an idyllic scene near the narrator. He is surrounded by wonderful nature and he sees two birds flying near him. The poem ends with the narrator describing the two birds plunging to capture something they saw on the ground.
Poetics
In the first stanza of the poem the narrator sees himself looking at the circle from which everything is generated from. In the second stanza the author mentions the birch tree as being the result of the creative process and the result of what was generated by the central point in the first stanza.
The narrator mentions once more how he looks at darkness and waits for something good to emerge from it. The narrator even calls darkness as being the "black veils of possibility’’.
In the next stanza the narrator notes how the most important thing is the meaning something has, not its shape on the paper.
In the last stanza the narrator highlights once more how not the shape is important but rather the meaning and message it transmits to the reader.
Mule Song
In the poem entitled "Mule Song’’, the main character is a mule named Silver. The mule is described as sitting in a filed, not caring about happens around her. The mule worked the fields for a long time and the narrator mentions how the mule worked in the summer as well as in the winter. He notes however how many mules are sold eventually and killed by strangers in a strange land, away from the place where they were born and where they lived and worked.
Corsons Inlet
The poem "Corsons Inlet’’ begins with the description of a walk the narrator took. The narrator went along the dunes until he reached the sea and then returned back. The weather is described as being ideal for a walk, with sun and yet not exceptionally hot.
The narrator feels liberated by the walk he took and the walk allowed him to think about the meaning of his life and work. The narrator talks about his own memories and how some details are blurry and he can’t find the true meaning behind them. He notes how everything is much simpler in nature and how there are no such problems in nature. He mentions how there are no lines in nature in comparison with the lines that exist within humans.
The narrator watches the birds fearing on the sea-creatures that ended up on the beaches and the way in which the scene is described is quite violent and disturbing. The narrator notes how every creature is only focuses on surviving and how this applies in nature as well.
The narrator reveals the time he is describing, autumn and how the birds are preparing to fly to faraway lands. He notices ho the birds are all flying as a single unit, as a "congregation’’. The narrator notes how there is an apparent order in nature but how the order is sometimes just an illusion and how more that often everything crumbles and falls. In nature there is no terror like in the society we live in and the narrator praises this.
