Thursday, February 6, 2014

A Glimpse of a Car Shop

Walt Whitman's "A Glimpse" really shifts its reader back to the time period of when the poet himself lived. Lines such as "Of a crowd and of workmen and drivers in a bar room around the stove late of a winter's night" and "amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest" really personify the surroundings for the time period. Whitman does a wonderful job at putting us in that small town bar where all the drivers and workers go to relax and take a load off. Although short, Whitman cuts  right to the point of his poem when he uses a small child as the object of attention. In the very last line "There we, two content, in happy being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word" draws the eye of affection and completely changes the direction of the poem. When Whitman puts the last few lines in, he gets the point across of having an emotion so innocent that doesn't fit in the surroundings that it touches the reader.
In comparison, a blog I came across  posted a series of poems written by Krystal Languell. One of her poems named "Hydraulic" really caught my eye. She writes a situational poem about sitting in a car shop and waiting for the full report about what is wrong with his or her car. Along with this, she writes that a discussion is taking place between the men fixing the car. The men have fixed the car but the person in the poem learns their lesson about taking their car to be fixed in with places that do not claim sales tax.
Although the poem in this situation doesn't match up to the formalness of Whitman's, they do show similarities. One of the major one's is the situational poetry used by both poets. As mentioned before, they both take the reader into the situation and make them feel as if they were actually there.

Languell's poem: http://lemonhound.com/2013/09/27/krystal-languell-five-poems/

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