Hi Cally--
Nice to meet you and thank you so much for your supportive comments on my poem. I'm still working on it, so will thank you (and others) more properly with next revision.
In the meantime, thank you for sharing this challenging work, aptly placed in the Deep End. I'm going to make a confession, which is that I don't think I understand it. It may be that is your intention, and, if so, I win! But I thought it might be interesting to you to hear the ways in which I go lost and see if they are the intended ways.
First, thanks for the wide line spacing. For me, this gives a visual clue that I will want to read this with a long pause after each line. During this pause, I try and let the line firm up into either an image or an emotional response. I think the poem would not function as well without those spaces since each line requires (for me) a lot of processing time.
Second, as I work through the seven lines of the first strophe, the first four lines (door, footprint, keeper, tears) all strike me as having an ominous undertone. Things are going awry in the speaker's world. But then the next couple lines (circus, Etna) strike me as, in turns, hopefulness and even exuberance. Here comes the circus! Isn't Etna doing something truly fascinating? Finally, I arrive at the most ambiguous line of all... "Who is watching over you"
This 7th line threw me for a loop, because three answers presented themselves almost simultaneously: God, Big Brother, or no one. So, one way to read this is a sort of devotional tone (God is always there for you). Another is that your overlords (google? government?) are monitoring, and another is that you are all alone sister.
So, while holding these three possibilities simultaneously in mind, I enter the second strophe hopeful for some resolution from the poet as to whether we are living here in the world of God, Orwell, or Sartre.
Now, the second strophe's themes are quite impenetrable to me, as I'm not sure what to make of something like "whimsy bolts the clown" though it sounds quite exciting and cool. Similarly with the next couple of lines. But the last four lines of the second strophe push me strongly toward the Orwellian interpretation. The speaker is in the world of the Overlord.
Having achieved this point of clarity, as a reader, I grow excited! The puzzle is coming clear. But then, the third strophe throws me off again. It seems that the speaker is immune to the overlord's reach due to their comfort with the natural world? Basically, none of the interpretative work I did in the first two strophes seems to help me penetrate the resolution of this poem. What on earth is the knight representing?
All that to say, that sometimes I wonder if I lack some sense organ that allows one to see hidden things in words that others seem to get intuitively right off the bat. I'm sorry, I just don't get it, and I've tried. I see that others got it right away, which makes me feel a little bad actually.
I'm not sure if any of that's helpful, but after this poem sat and taunted me for a week, I thought I'd take advantage of the fact that the author is actually in reach for commentary and make my solemn confession. Is it meant to be as interpretatively ambiguous as I've read it?
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