by Tom Adam

The pendulum of poetic taste has swung in many directions over the years. While much surviving poetry comes to us in anthologies — and is given to us as representative — we really have no way of knowing what all the poets from any given time period were writing.

Today, with so many poets able to participate in the conversation about art, it is much easier to see the wide variety of poetic styles people practice. One continuum that swing can be measured on is the use of figurative language. Some poetic styles eschew it, favoring direct speech, rhetorical statements or literal images. Others (without even taking into consideration the Surrealists) use metaphor and simile to express more by connotation.

Here are two poems that, while not at entirely opposite ends of that spectrum, are definitely on opposite sides:

Ozymandias of Egypt
by P. B. Shelley ¹

I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Shelley has used a direct accounting, a narrative structure that is rooted in concrete images to express his theme: the transity of human efforts. Amy Lowell explores a similar theme:

A Gift
By Amy Lowell ²

SEE! I give myself to you, Beloved!
My words are little jars
For you to take and put upon a shelf.
Their shapes are quaint and beautiful,
And they have many pleasant colors and lustres
To recommend them.
Also the scent from them fills the room
With sweetness of flowers and crushed grasses.

When I shall have given you the last one
You will have the whole of me,
But I shall be dead.

While “Ozymandias” has the feeling someone could just go to Egypt and see the “vast and trunkless legs of stone,” nobody would expect to find Amy Lowell’s “little jars” of words.

Your prompt for this week is to consider these two poems³ and how they use somewhat opposite techniques to explore the same theme; pick the style that appeals least to you and write in that manner about the same theme they wrote on. For people who like to collaborate, I suggest finding someone who would be doing the opposite style (concrete vs. metaphorical) and build poems using similar images and language that end up as different as possible.

Note: If you think this prompt seems rather dark for the dawn of the new year, consider I wrote this at the end of December, a much more fitting, somber time.

1. From Palgrave, Francis T. The Golden Treasury. London: Macmillan, 1875; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/106/. [Last Accessed 29 December 2007].
2. From Monroe, Harriet; Henderson, Alice Corbin, eds. The New Poetry: An Anthology. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917; Bartleby.com, 2002. www.bartleby.com/265/. [Last Accessed 29 December 2007].
3. You may also want to read the poem “In Egypt’s Sandy Silence” by Horace Smith. It was written with many of the same images as “Ozymandias,” but goes in a different direction.

Poem on!

Get Your Poem On #10 will be open and accepting links to you poems based on this prompt — or any other inspiration — next Sunday, Jan. 20.