Nuremberg
The poem “Nuremberg” is composed of five stanzas and has a fixed form when compared with other poems written by the author. The first stanza describes a room, large and filed with sun, a room in which no one dares to talk and only the noise made by a clock can be heard. The same noise is described in the second stanza, this time coming from the outside and being made by a much bigger clock, an horologe found in the middle of the city.
In the third stanza, the action moves outside the room, inside the city. The buildings are compared with trees, hiding the rest of the town from the view of the narrator. Only smoke can be seen coming from the other buildings and the narrator then imagines the people living inside those homes, happy and without having to worry about too many things. The poem then ends with the narrator describing the city as being clueless of the nature of truth and pain.
Cannibal Street
The poem begins with a peddler, screaming on the streets, offering his goods for sale. Among the things put for sale are parts of dead people, beggars and kings alike as well as mythical creatures. The last thing offered for sale by the peddler is his own heart, described as being shriveled and old. He then goes to explain how all the money in the world cannot replace the feeling of loving someone and being loved, thus proving how happiness can be found only through a deep connection with another human being.
Winter Dawn
The action in the poem takes place over the course of a single morning. The poem is narrated from the perspective of a first person narrator who described his routine. The narrator looks out of his window at five in the morning and then continues watching as the sun slowly rises over the town covered by “mist”. Snow appears and slowly settles on the roofs of the buildings but quickly melts into nothingness.
The town is described as being “dead”, no one daring to go outside. The harsh state of the outside world is also described through the adjectives “acid” and “cold”, used by the narrator to further emphasize state of the winter morning. The houses are also described as being tombs in which men and women sleep their eternal slumber. This image then prompts the narrator meditation upon death and the realization that everyone will eventually die and be forgotten.
The last part of the poem describes an empty town in which not even vegetation exists any longer. The sun rises over the town once more but no one is awake or no one exists anymore to see it light the world once more buried under a layer of mist.
