Witholding Omni

Poets become types of overlookers... From their poetic and authorial position, each writer tends to disconnect himself from society at large, and through this disconnection, delve into each individual world enhancing their unique perception and grasp of a broader base of people without negating such an understanding to one large group. Instead, these poets separate, than zoom. “The Village Blacksmith”, for example, hones on the life of a single worker, a blacksmith by trade, and through metricality and poetic imagery, expresses how his individual life (both his perception and outside perceptions of him) form his world, which remains different from everyone else’s. One interesting aspect to “The Village Blacksmith” is, essentially, repetitious behavior without phrase repetition.

“Week in, week out, from morn till night,

                You can hear his bellows blow;

You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,

                With measured beat and slow…”

This powerful image, one of a muscular blacksmith laboring over his work, repetitiously swinging his sledge day in till day out, becomes central to the poetic theme. It is this very life cycle, over and over again, which the poet seeks to capture. However, there is no banality to this existence, nor to the poem seeking to replicate and unfold. There is no precise repetition, no identical phrases; instead a repeated metrical poeticism, a thematic recycling of sorts, similar though never identical.

Another example of this cycle, and furthermore a poet attempting to interrelate one’s own experience with another living creature, is exemplified in “An Incident.” Here, rather than a human perspective, the poet details her encounter with an eagle. Formally an acatalectic sonnet, repetition is found through the metricality and images. An eagle, soaring above, with its wings continually and monotonously rising and falling like waves, releases a plume which dwindles to the speaker.

“And eagle, high above the darkling fir,

With steady flight, seemed there to take his fill

Of that pure ether breathed by him alone.

O noble bird! Why didst thou loose for me

Thy eagle plum?”

The speaker attempts to grapple with a foundational premise of several poets. Namely,

 how to analyze omnipotence; how to realign and withhold omniscient perspective.