Monday, March 28, 2011

The Colossus - BK

I understood the Colossus to be a statue, which she compares to her father.

The statue is in pieces and the speaker admits "I shall never get you put together entirely, / Pieced, glued, and properly jointed." This is congruent with the plea to her father later in the poem "O father, all by yourself / You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum."

All throughout the poem there is a mythical element that made me think of old Roman and Greek culture, "great", "oracle", "god", "skull-plates", "Roman Forum", "cypress (which sounds like the island), and "old anarchy".

It seems as though the speaker is trying to put together her father in her memory "Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol", but the damage is too much, "It would take more than a lightning-stroke / To create such a ruin."

Therefore the speaker isn't able to recreate her father in her head, so her "hours are married to shadow", or she is all alone.

The last two lines "No longer do I listen for the scape of a keel / On the blank stones of the landing," I took to refer to the actual statue of the Colossus of Rhodes, which constantly hears the sounds of ships (keel is the hull of a ship) coming in and out of shore.

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