A Poetic Analysis Essay, Research Paper

Poet and philosopher Archibald Lampman (1861-1899)

led not a life of his own, but an existance forced upon him by peers and an

unfeeling and cold society. Dying far before his time, Lampman led a life

of misery. He was supported only by a few close friends and his immortal poetry.

This essay is founded around one particular of his works but I feel it

necessary to discuss the conditions in which he lived in order to fully

understand what he was trying to express and/or symbolize.

Lampman really hated his day to day life, he lived only for his friends and

his works. Trapped in a city for which he had no love, he often reflected

his loathing of it in his numerous works situated in cities. A lover of

nature, Lampmans poems often immediately assumed a tone of life, mirth,

and a feeling of pleasure and warmth; the others formed a picture of death,

hell, and hate all held together by the one problem that is always present,

Man.

With few close friends like Duncan Campell Scott, and other that were poetically

inclinded, Lampman formed a group through-out collage that met frequently

to write and discuss. Close friends like that influenced him to write such

popular pieces as “Heat” and “A sunset at Les Eboulements” and yet in his

darkest moments we get the main topic of this essay “The City of The End of Things”.

Like most great poets, Lampmans moods and feelings had a direct effect on the

nature and topic of his poetry. Lampman chief poetry was done after a great

joy in his life, or a great sadness. Sadly, Archibald was not a rich man

and lived not a happy life, and most of his poetry reflects that.

“The City of The End of Things” was written in a time of great sadness and hate

for the world. Published one year after his death many people fail to realize

the direct connection to themselves in the poem.

Lampmans poetry was divided into two moods, saddness and joy, each primarly

involed with nature or cities. Let us discuss the tools used in “The City of The End of Things”.

Dubed “The Apocalypic City” by Many experts, these mutations of the

apocalypic city shows how much Lampmans visions shifted with his moods. He

was passionatly committed to social change, but in extreme he identified

redemption with paralyzed oblivion (N.G Guthrie)

The infernal features of the City are so many inversions of the values that

Lampmans saw in natural landscape. Its roaring furnaces, its “ceaseless round”

of mechanical action, and its “inhuman music” are the demonic counterparts

of the sun imagery, the seasonal cycles and the hymm of nature in “Heat”

are gone, this poem focuses on the specters who preside over the dammed cities

decline.

But now of that prodigious race,

Three only in an iron tower,

Set like carved idols face to face,

Remain the master of its power’

And at the city gate a fourth,

Gigantic and with dreadful eyes,

Sits looking toward the lightless north,

Beyond the reach of memories,

Fast rooted to the lurid floor

A bulk that never moves a jot,

In his pale body dwells no more

Or mind or soul,–an idiot!

I take this strange group to mean two things: a divorce of intellect

and coporeality, to the corruption or both; and a division of society’s

destructive implications for individuals and societies alike.

It hath no name that rings;

But I have heard it called in dreams

The City of The End of Things

When the poet sayshe hears of the city “in dreams”, he

is suggesting that the imagination that shapes our lives has gone awry.

The city is a projection fo current impulises (to that time).

“Its roofs and iron towers have grown/None knowth how high within the night,

shrowed in darkness, this shows death fulmost grasp on the city and its

former hosts. The tower, mentioned three times in the poem, is its most

preminent symbol. As an image of pride mocked by a ghasty claim it has

overtones of Babil, but it could have other meanings. In Romantic

poems, towers symbolize the human consciousnes, which becomes a fortress

and a prison of its own beliefs.

The second chief symbol is that of a wheel. Used in Lampmans other

poems to be a symbol of divine purity, it has now been corrupted to that of

a symbol of impurities and death.

A stillness absolute as death

Along the slacking wheels shall lie

Almost the counterpart of the sun. Lampman has tendency to think in terms

of a split between body:

Housed in earth palaces are we

Over smouldering fires,

Wherethrough the fumes creep witheringly

Doubts and hot desire

And spirit

Yet each palace-thus we know-

hath one central tome;

round about it breathe and blow

Winds for every hour’

Find its spire through either river

Enters heaven

-(taken from “Emancipation”)

Ironically, this rather conventional dualism is precisely what

Lampmans poems call into question. The inhabitants of the city of the

end of things have internalized a mechanical model of existence to the

point of of exterpating the feeling and creativity necessary for self-renewal.

As the City deteriorates the fires that “moulder out and die” reflect the

extinictions of imaginative energy that has long since doomed its residents.

The visionary faculty is eclipsed, and with it the source and song that

make us human. Lampman’s emphasis on the inhuman character of the place

amplifies the horror as a grim transfiguration of our own society.

In this city of the damned, behavior follows neither instinct nor intelligence,

but comforms to an imposed pattern, much like a computer.

‘Tis builded in the leafless tracts

And valleys huge of Tartarus.

Lurid and lofty and vast it seems;

This opening of course immediatly gives the reader a picture that this

city will resemble hell in some way and makes you form a picture of hell and fire

into your mind before you are even past the first lines. And what place on

earth has been built up to terrify more than Hell?

From out a thousand furnace doors

And all the while an awful sound

Keeps roaring on continually,

And crashes in the ceaseless round

Of a gigantic Harmony.

Harmony, this word is usually a very positive tone, but not so here,

this now shows a ghastly noise of crashing madness and inhuman noise, made

without feeling or soul. Gigantic, man is usually terrified of that which is

bigger than he, here Lampman uses a number a terms to show the intensity of

the City.

A dreadful and monotonous cry;

And whoso of our mortal race

Should find that City unaware

Lean death would smite him face to face

Whoso indeed! For to man that hath created such a City and yet

it is to bring about his death, that is irony. Lampman most definatly is

quite opposed to techology, and shows how we shall lose our humanity to

techology.

The fires shall moulder out and die,

The roar shall vanish at its height,

And over that tremendous town

The silence of eternal night

Thall gather close and settle down.

All its grim grandeur, towers and hall

Shall be abondoned uttery

And into rust and dust shall fall

In this large script, we see more examples of what I stated earlier,

the fact that night and darkness are taking hold of things and becoming

human. Lampman uses a personifacation of night through-out the poem to show

nature is far more alive than any machine, for he gives the machines no

human characters what so ever. Also he keeps the image of a large,

tremendous city, used to give the reader a place much larger than they should

normally image.

But sometime in the end those three

Shall perish and thier hands be still,

And with masters touch shall flee

Their incommunable skill.

A stillness as absolute as death.

Again we see the author giving character to death, but this passage

focuses on another topic. The topic is machine vs Man. The “Master’s touch”

shall flee, their “incommunable” skill, here we see Lampman show that he

believes machines can never have the qualities that man has. Man can never

program a machine to act as he does, and if he even does, the masters shall

flee, and the machine will rule for a little while, then wither and fall

apart. Thus Lampman gives a mircocasem of the world today and a world to come,

We must prevent this.

For Lampman, landscape offers an environment sympathic to emotional and

aesthetic capacities that are starved or preserved in the city. The infinitely

varied complexion of nature fosters without feeling, and its sublime qualities

inspire the human spirit to rise about itself. Above all nature signifies the

creative vitality that sustains human freedom against arbitrary rule. By

contrast, the city is oppressive, ugly and ephemeral. The City shows no sign

of nature, only man made atrositic metal.

“The City of The End of Things” is a prophetic vision that reflects his

interpretation of the condition of his age. Now, my final exscript, the end

of the poem:

One thing the hand of time shall spare,

For the grim idiot at the gate

Is deathless and eternal there.

The Grim Idiot. Mentioned twice in the poem now, he symbolizes not one man

or any men, but the whole world in which we live. An idiot, why? Mainly because

even if we wreck and destroy most of it, the idiot is powerless to stop us.

It is there, watching but never acting. It has remained for many years, seen

races come and go, and is truly the only thing eternal on earth, it is the earth

it self.

By perscripting the night, the wheel, and the tower, Lampman gives and shows

great fear and terror to the reader, hoping not only will you enjoy it, but learn from

it. In four stanzas this poem has the character of an old poem and modern.

Archibald Lampman left us with many joyful poems, and scary ones, but lets us

not dwell in the horror, but in the message and thoughts he left us. We do not

have to become the city of the end of things, we must reform our ways, for the good of us

all.