Connection Between Stevens And Kong example essay topic

Form: Four stanzas and a final couplet in irregular meter, un rhyming. Line-by-Line Analysis: This poem is in the form of a psychodrama in which the two figures of the title represent two aspects or faculties of the poet. It is, the situation suggests, the product of their tense interaction. It is structured upon a series of antitheses between Wallace Stevens and King Kong. 1-2: The meeting between the two antithetical images-King Kong and Wallace Stevens-occurs not simply in the juxtaposing of their photographs but also within Stevens's mind.

Kong becomes an aspect of Stevens himself, his shadow self. 3: The poem also suggests playfully that Stevens is not the only poet with a shadow self. After all, the speaker of the poem asks humorously "Is it significant that I eat bananas as I write this?" In view of the almost symbiotic relationship between Stevens and Kong, there can only be one answer. Despite the parenthetical nature of the question, the "bananas" allude comically to the speaker's Kong-like aspect. Ondaatje and Stevens are also linked by Ondaatje's use of his subject's imagery. Similarly the telltale "bananas" may owe as much to Stevens's "Floral Decorations for Bananas" as to King Kong's diet.

4-7: Wallace Stevens is a businessman, large but unassuming in appearance, whose "thought [is] in him" (line 7). This connection between Stevens and Kong is present in the image of Stevens's "dark thick hands" (line 6) which, at the poem's end, "drain from his jacket, / pose in the murderer's shadow" (lines 19, 20). The "dark thick hands", hinting at violence, may owe something to "My hands such sharp imagined things" ("The Weeping Burgher"), though there is also the possibility that Ondaatje is recalling Margaret Atwood's "The Green Man" ("They did not look / in his green pockets, where he kept / his hands changing their shape"). 8-13: The figure of Kong, whose "mind is nowhere" (line 11), is one of direct able energy as this stanza's structure and imagery suggest. 14-18: Stevens "fences"chaos" (line 15) and "lock [s] blood" (line 18) within himself. Notice that no comma or conjunction appears between the two clauses of "is thinking chaos is thinking fences" (line 15 because the poem is suggesting the problematic simultaneity of both "chaos" and "fences" in Stevens's "thinking".

If Kong and chaos or blood are synonymous, then the entire stanza points to Kong's simultaneous presence within Stevens himself: both the containing form and the contained energy are within the mind of the businessman who is also a poet. 19-20: The poem closes on the alarming association between Stevens and "the murderer's shadow" (line 20) which can only be his own. He is a murderer because he has subdued his "chaos" (line 15) /"blood" (line 18), his unconscious self. Commentary: 1.

Kong represents a problematically constitutive aspect of ourselves that links us through the unconscious or through our dreams with non-human life. What Kong represents is an essential component of the poetic act. Seen this way, he is indeed a savage redeemer if we believe that poetry has redemptive value. The poet, and this is made explicit in the poem, is the "connoisseur of chaos" whose creativity is inseparable from his dark side. 2. The poem indicates that both poet's within it, Ondaatje and Stevens, are in creative contact with everything that the ostensibly antithetical Kong represents; but they are able to transform, control, and shape this "chaos" within the self into an aesthetic construct, into poetry.

There is also a lingering suggestion, however, that some of the "chaos" will resist and even escape the poet's act of transformation. Both "the bellow of locked blood" and "hands drain from his jacket" raise this possibility.