Arrival
Arrival - meaning Summary
Arriving Into Indifferent City
The poem describes a speaker arriving in a new city and responding with a mix of wonder and reticence. Bright morning images suggest freshness and potential, while sensory details evoke the city’s separate, busy life. The speaker values the city’s current ignorance of him as a temporary innocence he does not yet wish to violate. He hopes to remain passive and absorb the place before his presence inevitably alters and diminishes it.
Read Complete AnalysesMorning, a glass door, flashes Gold names off the new city, Whose white shelves and domes travel The slow sky all day. I land to stay here; And the windows flock open And the curtains fly out like doves And a past dries in a wind. Now let me lie down, under A wide-branched indifference, Shovel-faces like pennies Down the back of the mind, Find voices coined to An argot of motor-horns, And let the cluttered-up houses Keep their thick lives to themselves. For this ignorance of me Seems a kind of innocence. Fast enough I shall wound it: Let me breathe till then Its milk-aired Eden, Till my own life impound it- Slow-falling; grey-veil-hung; a theft, A style of dying only.
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