Thursday, March 13, 2008

Poetry Critique

To Help the Monkey Cross the River,Thomas Lux
which he must cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts, to help him I sit with my rifle on a platform high in a tree, same side of the river as the hungry monkey. How does this assist him? When he swims for itI look first upriver: predators move faster with the current than against it. If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey and an anaconda from downriver burns with the same ambition, I do the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey ,croc- and snake-speed, and if, i fit looks as though the anaconda or the croc will reach the monkey before he attains the river’s far bank, I raise my rifle and fire one, two, three, even four times into the river just behind the monkey to hurry him up a little. Shoot the snake, the crocodile? They’re just doing their jobs, but the monkey, the monkey has little hands like a child’s, and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.

(http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/058.html)
The reason why I chose “To Help the Monkey Cross the River,” by Thomas Lux was for various reasons. The first that even led me to open up the poem was the title itself. The title seemed interesting and fun and I wanted to check it out. The poem rhymed here and there which was fun to read and the light mood and almost comical story told by it. The title describes what the poem is telling the readers and seeing the word monkey in the title of a poem seems to always be an eye catcher. One of the things that first jumped out to me was rhyme, and the lack of it. At certain lines the author would make rhyme where as other lines he wouldn’t. The rhyming seems to be used primarily to end an idea with an “ah ha” kind of moment. Like an extra something that shows he’s proven his point and successfully told his story. Also, the monkey for the author may be a metaphor to people. Things are always pestering us and bothering us and sometimes we can be oblivious to everything around us like the monkey to the predator and even with someone guiding us or helping us they can’t do everything for us. At the end when he says, “...and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile,” the author communicates that only when settled down and taught how to act/behave can we be “smarter” as the monkey who learned to smile. The tone is light and playful but the words are chosen carefully. There’s no shift in the poem because the narrator is steady and still like most people patiently waiting with a gun and looking to aim for targets(in this case snakes and crocs). The words are simple, shorter words, and minimal alliteration help the poem also run at a face pace removing deep and emotional effects from the poem. Though I do not know much about the poet, the poem seems more like an observation of a monkey in it’s surroundings with someone over top watching over him and a practical application to humans.

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