Medallion
Medallion - meaning Summary
Uncanny Stillness of Death
The speaker examines a dead bronze snake like a small, beautiful relic. Close looking turns metallic ornamentation into vivid, jewel-like images while also revealing decay and grotesque interior life. The poem balances fascination and revulsion: the object is ornamental and inert yet suggests past movement, digestion, and a private, chaste kind of death. The narrator’s attention transforms a tossed yard curiosity into an eerie, living memory of mortality.
Read Complete AnalysesBy the gate with star and moon Worked into the peeled orange wood The bronze snake lay in the sun Inert as a shoelace; dead But pliable still, his jaw Unhinged and his grin crooked, Tongue a rose-colored arrow. Over my hand I hung him. His little vermilion eye Ignited with a glassed flame As I turned him in the light; When I split a rock one time The garnet bits burned like that. Bust dulled his back to ocher The way sun ruins a trout. Yet his belly kept its fire Going under the chainmail, The old jewels smoldering there In each opaque belly-scale: Sunset looked at through milk glass. And I saw white maggots coil Thin as pins in the dark bruise Where innards bulged as if He were digesting a mouse. Knifelike, he was chaste enough, Pure death's-metal. The yard-man's Flung brick perfected his laugh.
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