Allen Ginsberg poem title A Supermarket in California a very unique poem. This poem doesn't fellow a normal or traditional poetry form, meaning there is no stanza or rhyme scheme. As a result the poem does demonstrate an enrich amount of imagery and emotional effect on you.
In the opening line of the poem we meet a person name Walt Whitman. Whitman is hungry and fatigue, so he proceed to walk into a neon fruit market.(Ginsberg 3-5) Inside the fruit market Whitman said he "shopping for images". I believe he meant by this that he is really looking for familiar faces to come across. But instead in lines 6-8 which stated:
Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?
Its here we see the supermarket is crowed at night and Whitman does end up see a familiar face named Garica Lorca. After doing sum digging I learn that Garica Lorca is also a famous latin poet.
Finally, we can determine Walt Whitman character and some what sexuality from these lines:
childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
To conclude the poem ends with these lines:
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
I believe these lines meant that his soul or spirit is lose within himself and is at a cross road in his life between life and death or forgetting who he really is in the world.
Finally, I feel this way because in my study in Greek Mythology Charon was the ferryman who carried the dead into the underworld and Lethe was a different river in the underworld, which caused you to forget if you drank its waters. I end with this or can it be just a normal night out at a local supermarket? I gladly appericate everyone input!
I really enjoyed reading your thoughts: there is def familiar feelings in what I interpreted,looking for Images gave me the same sense familiar faces or persons you see in the neighborhood.
ReplyDeleteSee the study materials on this poem. It will help to note that Walt Whitman is a well known, mid-late 19th century American poet. Read some of WW's poems (check the usual places)--it's Walt Whitman's, perhaps somewhat romanticized, version of America, that is called into question, here, vis a vis contemporary American culture--certainly, much seems to have been lost. Partly, the poem plays a "what if" game--what if Whitman were alive today? would contemporary American culture have a "place" for Whitman's vision, and for Whitman? Or would it distort that poet's vision? How would Whitman, and Whitman's vision, and the value system he represents, fare in today's America?
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