Poem+Comparison

 Captivity

How falling snow takes a town at night in its muffle, takes you, too, standing there under the street light alone watching giant shadows silently crash down. And you stay there so long your ears pick up the tiny tinkle-tink-tink above you of snowflakes breaking on the metal lamp-shade. Squeak-slap squeak-slap squeak-slap someone in galoshes walks by then fades utterly into the thickness of whiteness of darkness. Snowflakes falling on your face, melting in your eyes, filling your footprints with stillness. Two streets away a truck with loose chains clanks rhythmically into soft oblivion. Where the Sidewalk Ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight To cool in the peppermint wind. Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black And the dark street winds and bends. Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And watch where the chalk-white arrows go To the place where the sidewalk ends. Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go, For the children, they mark, and the children, they know The place where the sidewalk ends. Poem Comparison: Theme & Style I chose to compare these poems because they have similar themes, but in completely different styles. Mostly they are both about getting lost, figuratively. Captivity is about getting lost in the wonder of reality (snow, sounds) and returning to reality at the end, where as Where The Sidewalk Ends (WTSE) is about getting lost in your imagination and seeing reality through a child's colourful imagination. When I first read them I got the same sense of wonder and distance but the theme's messages seem to be going in two different directions, Captivity back to reality and WTSE farther away from it. As for the styles of the poems, I think they reflect the themes. Captivity is in free verse with lots of onomatopoeia which makes it seem more real and mysterious, but WTSE uses rhyming patterns, repetition, and metaphors to make it seem more whimsical. But, that said, they both have great use of imagery, although in different ways. Captivity, for example, uses the oxymoron 'whiteness of darkness' which makes me see not so much the actual setting but the thoughts of the person in it and how they are at the same time blank (white) and clouded and jumbled (dark). WTSE has lines like ' Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black And the dark street winds and bends. Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And watch where the chalk-white arrows go' so the reader can see the contrast between reality and imagination. The part about the 'chalk-white arrows' I think is a metaphor for imagination that makes me picture the direction that it is going in and following it, which is the theme. All together, these two poems are both about getting lost and finding yourself and truth in the losing, through different techniques and styles.