The poet is clearly influenced by the conventions of Imagist poetry. Almost a haiku in its startlingly evocative terseness, the poem tackles the theme of the bleakness of travelling and arriving home to unwelcoming weather.
For the poet, ever malleable by the atmosphere, the tempestuous storm and grim environment is a barometer to his psyche, and hope initially seems absent. This is bolstered through the poet's diction: not only is the weather 'dark', it is also 'sunless'. No empty reinforcment, the repetition here crisply evinces the clear hopelessness of the situation.
Unlike the Imagist school however, the final section is deliberately ambiguous. Is the narrator akin to a correspondent promising 'more [i.e. more information on the situation] tomorrow', and thus imbuing the final lines with hope? Or is the narrator finally devoid of all hope, and forecasting that his current 'dark', 'stormy', and 'sunless' situation is doomed to be repeated ad infinitum? That is, he can foresee that the situation can only continue or deteriorate: there will certainly be 'more [i.e., more of this bleak weather] tomorrow'.
A haunting denouement, sullied only by the sheer effectiveness of the nebulousness of the final words, which leaves the reader not only with the narrator's accutely conveyed sense of dual hope/hopelessness, but also simultaneously leaving the reader with an excitemement that more poetry of this quality may in the future stem from Kerrigan.
Like the storm of which he writes so eloquently, Kerrigan as poet is clearly a force to be reckoned with.
2 comments:
mornin' Stu. Why. Talking. Like. Captain. Kirk?
The poet is clearly influenced by the conventions of Imagist poetry. Almost a haiku in its startlingly evocative terseness, the poem tackles the theme of the bleakness of travelling and arriving home to unwelcoming weather.
For the poet, ever malleable by the atmosphere, the tempestuous storm and grim environment is a barometer to his psyche, and hope initially seems absent. This is bolstered through the poet's diction: not only is the weather 'dark', it is also 'sunless'. No empty reinforcment, the repetition here crisply evinces the clear hopelessness of the situation.
Unlike the Imagist school however, the final section is deliberately ambiguous. Is the narrator akin to a correspondent promising 'more [i.e. more information on the situation] tomorrow', and thus imbuing the final lines with hope? Or is the narrator finally devoid of all hope, and forecasting that his current 'dark', 'stormy', and 'sunless' situation is doomed to be repeated ad infinitum? That is, he can foresee that the situation can only continue or deteriorate: there will certainly be 'more [i.e., more of this bleak weather] tomorrow'.
A haunting denouement, sullied only by the sheer effectiveness of the nebulousness of the final words, which leaves the reader not only with the narrator's accutely conveyed sense of dual hope/hopelessness, but also simultaneously leaving the reader with an excitemement that more poetry of this quality may in the future stem from Kerrigan.
Like the storm of which he writes so eloquently, Kerrigan as poet is clearly a force to be reckoned with.
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