Larry's Paper
The Internal and External Aspects of Poetry
Poetry in general can pertain to many different aspects. Some may focus the poetic descriptions on feelings and emotions and some may describe a physical location. These poems will much of the time use these feelings and emotions by the descriptions of physical locations, for an example, a line such as “the punch in my face changed my appearance like an urban area changed the face of the landscape”. Poems that contain lines that contains a focus such as this, there is an occasion of a internal life being described by using an external life. Many poems can take the descriptions, what ever they may be, and have these addressed either an internal or external source of the authors’ views. These internal and external subjects of a poem come from the discretion of the poets/authors life. For an example, if an author writes a poem focusing on an internal source, then the poem will be about his/her life’s feelings and emotions, and an external being about the social, physical life’s experiences. Poems from Tony Hoagland and Adrienne Rich can be dissected to view this example in the use of internal and external life.
Transitions from external to internal and visa versa are visible in the poem titled ‘Suicide Song’ by the famous modern American poet Tony Hoagland. Tony places an obvious line that must be used to model the thesis, /killing yourself is wasteful, like spilling oil at sea…/ (line 12). The difference between internal and external life is drawn out in a discernible matter. The part where Hoagland is mentioning suicide being wasteful is an expression of his opinion of it. Thus it is the internal life of Tony Hoagland’s or what he feels about suicide. The part where he compares it to spilling oil at sea is the internal life. Many metaphors appear in poetry of all types. These metaphors make it easy to determine the internal and external life of the poem.
This metaphor deserves going a bit deeper into in order to explain possibly why Hoagland used it. Other examples in the poem will explain it. He possibly feels that suicide is wasteful because it may be selfish and be hurtful to others close to them, /but people would squirm, it would hurt them in some way, and I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely/ (line 5). Tony is sensitive to the loved ones around that would suffer if he was to commit suicide. He has lived long enough to gain enough knowledge toward understanding that hurting loved ones would be the shear reason why he would never commit suicide. This examination of the poem exemplifies the internal life of Tony Hoagland.
Tony blames the extinction of adolescence in his life. He claims he has grown old enough to ‘know better’. While he has grown past the stage of youthfulness that leads to crazy behavior, Hoagland no longer has this to blame for any type of suicidal tendencies. In the poem he mentions /no longer do I live by the law of me, no longer having the excuse of youth or craziness,/ (line 7). Then Tony goes on to use this internal description and uses an external one to explain his point, his point being against suicide. In the line following the previous, /and dying you know shows a serious ingratitude for sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated pickles they place at the edge of your plate./ (line 9). Tony use these inessential items to explain even the little things in life will be missed if one was to kill themselves. These particular items, sunsets, hairdos and pickles become the external life of the poems line. These internal life feelings toward suicide are put together with the use of external, physical life are a great example toward the given thesis.
In the poem titled ‘Diving into the Wreck’, there are internal and external examples of life used. The author, Adrienne Rich, a multi award winner, uses mainly an external physical focus with the occasional use of internal mental example.
This poem goes into many physical descriptions of scuba diving. While reading the poem, the details given tail a story of Rich’s passion for diving. The line reads /there is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment./ (line 13). Rich performs a load of description in the external life. As she starts the decent into the ocean, she witnesses the ladder as being a portion of the boat. This ladder being exactly what it is, a piece of equipment that has no internal feeling, thus the reason why Adrienne Rich does no internal description of the piece of maritime floss. With the use of fancy vocabulary, Rich describes a ladder.
While making the descent down to ship wreck, Rich makes many descriptive lines toward the visual appearances of it. Several lines down the poem she starts to make a shift toward an internal life of the poem. /this is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he/ (line 70). She begins to relate to the wreck in an internal life, an emotional manner. She imagines herself in becoming a mermaid/merman, the connection to the sea. The feeling of unity for the underwater environment is an example of internal life. The division of gender is also apparent. This is manifested most likely because she is a known lesbian. The release of gender possibly describes the attention she is trying to take off of her own consciousness. She no longer feels that the external or physical life of her existence in the water is the same now that her descent toward the wreck has been achieved and she has arrived. The external and internal life has now turned its focus on the wreck itself.
In conclusion, Tony Hoagland and Adrienne Rich use external and internal life in their poems.