“I mean to say,” Ferlinghetti writes, that “she took off her shoes / and found no feet.” She is “ASTOUNDED” to witness her corporal incompleteness. Street artists on a Sunday afternoon seek a model, but when one woman volunteers and begins to disrobe, she finds the uncovered parts of her body absent. Ferlinghetti admits that the setting for the poem could be “anyplace,” but it is in fact London. “London,” which is titled “18” in Pictures of the Gone World, pursues the fantastic rather than the realistic. In recognition of the fulfillment that the picnickers finally experience, “night’s trees” stand up. Ferlinghetti says that Spanish Impressionists admired Sorolla’s works, particularly “the way the light played on them,” but Ferlinghetti doubts the realism of Sorolla’s painting, noting “illusions / of love.” Ferlinghetti’s own memory of his own experience seems more realistic to him as he describes the lovemaking of “the last picnickers,” who exquisitely delay the culmi-nation of their engagement. Ferlinghetti opens his poem with a reference to the women with large hats in Promenade on the Beach (1907), a painting by Joaquin Sorolla. Another poem of special interest in Pictures of the Gone World is “8,” also known as “Sorolla’s Women in Their Picture Hats.” The poem reveals Ferlinghetti’s frequently used technique of referring to famous works of visual art to create a springboard for his own imaginative flight. Among the most familiar poems in Pictures of the Gone World are “Away above a Harborful,” “The World Is a Beautiful Place,” and “Reading Yeats.” Because these poems are included in A Coney Island of the Mind, discussion of these poems is found in the entry for A Coney Island of the Mind. Second, the title refers to the “Gone World,” invoking the hip idiom and its sense of “gone,” which can connote a positive sort of craziness but can also suggest a desperate emptiness. In that sense, the poems are like paintings or photographs-in the tradition of the imagists, the poems are meant to convey a strong visual impression.
First, the poems are meant to be pictures. The title of the collection is apparently based on two key ideas.
0 kommentar(er)
