Frogs Eat Butterflies, Snakes Eat Frogs, Hogs Eat Snakes, Men Eat Hogs
Frogs Eat Butterflies, Snakes Eat Frogs, Hogs Eat Snakes, Men Eat Hogs - meaning Summary
Rivers as Swine
The poem likens a stagnating summer landscape to swine: rivers root and grunt at their banks, air is heavy and listless, and thunder creates a clumsy, repetitive noise. The farmer who built and tended the field is passive and unfamiliar with such grotesque imagery; his days are arid, indolent, and self-sustaining in their dullness. Stevens sketches a cyclical, almost consumptive scene of natural torpor that mirrors human inertia.
Read Complete AnalysesIt is true that the rivers went nosing like swine, Tugging at banks, until they seemed Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs, That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine, The breath of turgid summer, and Heavy with thunder’s rattapallax, That the man who erected this cabin, planted This field, and tended it awhile, Knew not the quirks of imagery, That the hours of his indolent, arid days, Grotesque with this nosing in banks, This somnolence and rattapallax, Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being, As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves While they went seaward to the sea-mouths.
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