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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.

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