For the most part I am terrible at interpreting poems and class on Friday definitely let me know that I am worse than I thought. The Underground Stream was the most confusing poem out of the James Dickey poems for me to interpret. I think this was because we didn’t have the end of the poem to let us in on the details about the brother but regardless it was difficult to understand. Hearing the ending of the poem gave me a better understanding of why the poem was written and how it should really have been interpreted. Let’s see if I understand this a little bit better.
The poem is about the guilt that the narrator has concerning his brother’s death. When Dickey describes this smile and the long and drawn out journey that it takes makes me think that maybe it took the narrator a long time to finally be able to get over the death of his brother and also finally be able to smile. It kind of shows the reader that he is not completely over the death of his brother and that he feels guilty about something concerning the death. The smile is portrayed as being mysterious which helps the reader to understand that the smile was hard to reach and that the narrator has nothing to smile about anymore. The overall tone of the poem is gloomy and melancholy. Towards the ending of the poem the tone switches from gloomy to more intense tone. We as the readers can see that the narrator is beginning to realize that his brother is dead and he shouldn’t be feeling guilty about his death in any way. Once I finally understood all of the subtleties and just what exactly the poem was supposed to mean, I actually liked it. I like the overall subject of the poem because everyone can relate to it. I felt the same way that the narrator felt when my grandfather died.
5 comments:
I feel the same way that you do when it comes to interpreting poetry. I found it very difficult to understand a poem if you don't understand it from the first stanza. The first stanza, to me, gives you the main focus, and therefore if you miss it or take it the wrong way, the rest of the poem is not going to make sense. In most cases, this is what happens to me when I read poetry, so when we review the poems in class, they seem so much easier to understand because we get the main ideas being explained in the first stanza and the rest that follow.
Yeah, I dind't understand that poem at all when I first read it. Even after we went over it it was still a little fuzzy in my mind. Perhaps the real confusion was the missing part of the poem, but even if it was there I don't think I would have fully understood it. Anyways, I do think that this is a somewhat interesting poem once I realized what it was all about. I know that I too would feel sad if I had had a brother or sister pass away, but I find it odd that the narrator seems so upset by it. Maybe I misunderstood but it seemed like the brother died before the narrator even knew him, so it's hard for me to think of mourning someone so passionately when you hardly knew them. Perhaps it's the situation though, I'm not sure because I've never been in that situation.
I am glad that we went over this poem in class. It made much more sense after I figured out what it was really about. I thought it was one of his more powerful poems because of intense guilt that Dickey felt. I thought that it became real for Dickey by the way he seemed to see and feel his brother in the well. He wanted to escape the guilt and the pain that his brother's death was causing him.
I liked that you said you liked the poem once you finally figured out what Dickey meant. I also kind of like these poems but I don't really like having to take a class just to figure out what he is saying. I agree that (almost) everybody can relate to this poem because it is really hard to get back to being yourself after the loss of someone close to you, but if you can't do that then you might as well be dead too.
Colleen,
I felt that you made an interesting point about the smile and how you thought it represents the fact that it “took the narrator a long time to finally be able to get over the death of his brother and also finally be able to smile.” I was thinking however, not to play devils advocate, but it might represent the long journey ahead that he still has to finish in order to get over his brother’ death. I also thought that maybe it is not that he has nothing to smile about anymore and that is why the smile is far from him, but that since the death of his brother might linger over the family, he might have grown accustomed to not smiling. Therefore, the smile would represent a time when he was young, when his brother was still alive and he was capable of smiling. A time that he feels is long gone. I agree that this poem is very gloomy and melancholy, for this should be expected when it comes to thinking about a loved one’s death. Especially when it comes to a brother, I can not imagine losing one of mine and would be the saddest person alive if anything happened to them.
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