Famous Poet
Stare at the monster: remark How difficult it is to define just what Amounts to monstrosity in that Very ordinary appearance. Neither thin nor fat, Hair between light and dark, And the general air Of an apprentice--- say, an apprentice house- Painter amid an assembly of famous Architects: the demeanour is of mouse, Yet is he monster. First scrutinize those eyes For the spark, the effulgence, nothing. Nothing there But the haggard stony exhaustion of a near- Finished variety artist. He slumps in his chair Like a badly hurt man, half life-size. It is his dreg-boozed inner demon Still tankarding from tissue and follicle The vital fire, the spirit electrical That puts the gloss on the normal hearty male? Or is it women? The truth---bring it on With black drapery, drums and funeral thread Like a great man's coffin --- no, no, he is not dead But in this truth surely half-buried: Once, the humiliation Of youth and obscurity, The autoclave of heady ambition trapped, The fermenting of the yeasty heart stopped- Burst with such pyrotechnics the dull world gaped And “Repeat that!” still they cry. But all his efforts to concoct The old heroic bang from their money and praise From the parent’s pointing finger and the child’s amaze, Even from the burning of his wreathed bays, Have left him wrecked: wrecked, And monstrous, so, As a Stegosaurus, a lumbering obsolete Arsenal of gigantic horn and plate From a time when half the world still burned, set To blink behind bars at the zoo.
Famous Poet - meaning Summary
Fame's Exhausted Captive
The poem presents a celebrated poet as outwardly ordinary but inwardly distorted by the pressures of ambition, public admiration, and the demand to repeat past success. His early breakthrough has become a burden: attempts to recreate it leave him exhausted and diminished. The final image of a prehistoric animal behind zoo bars suggests that fame has made him both a spectacle and an obsolete captive of others' expectations.
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