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!
