Wild Orphan
Wild Orphan - meaning Summary
Orphaned Longing and Myth-making
Ginsberg's poem follows a boy abandoned by a charismatic father who daydreams about cars and invents a mythic lineage to fill emotional absence. His imagination creates gods, nostalgic recollections, and a sense of lost heritage that substitute for real inheritance. The poem moves between the boy's visionary solitude and the father's distant grief, implying a shared but unrecognized longing and the fragile consolation of imagined identity for those left behind.
Read Complete AnalysesBlandly mother takes him strolling by railroad and by river -he's the son of the absconded hot rod angel- and he imagines cars and rides them in his dreams, so lonely growing up among the imaginary automobiles and dead souls of Tarrytown to create out of his own imagination the beauty of his wild forebears-a mythology he cannot inherit. Will he later hallucinate his gods? Waking among mysteries with an insane gleam of recollection? The recognition- something so rare in his soul, met only in dreams -nostalgias of another life. A question of the soul. And the injured losing their injury in their innocence -a cock, a cross, an excellence of love. And the father grieves in flophouse complexities of memory a thousand miles away, unknowing of the unexpected youthful stranger bumming toward his door.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.