The Game of Chess
The Game of Chess - meaning Summary
Chess as Living Color
Pound’s poem imagines a chess game as a kinetic, visual spectacle. Pieces are rendered as living, colored forces whose moves create shifting patterns and clashes. The language emphasizes motion, angles, and collisions—leaps, strikes, vortexes—turning strategy into physical and chromatic conflict. The final image stresses interruption and renewal: checkmate is violent but part of an ongoing contest, with escapes and reconfiguration implying repetition rather than finality.
Read Complete AnalysesRed knights, brown bishops, bright queens, Striking the board, falling in strong ‘L's of colour. Reaching and striking in angles, holding lines in one colour. This board is alive with light; these pieces are living in form, Their moves break and reform the pattern: luminous green from the rooks, Clashing with ‘X's of queens, looped with the knight-leaps. ‘Y' pawns, cleaving, embanking! Whirl ! Centripetal ! Mate ! King down in the vortex, Clash, leaping of bands, straight strips of hard colour, Blocked lights working in. Escapes. Renewal of contest.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.