Where as the poem‘Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful in a Mercedes’, the rich-poor divide, the culture of the rich and how it differs to the culture of the poor. The “Beautiful people” in the title is perhaps written with a mild sense of irony. The couple in the poem are not beautiful people in this sense but wealthy and elegant. In the poem the two cultures are juxtaposed and it almost seems for a moment as if they might mix and interact. However, at the end they are still divided. Ferlinghetti contrasts the people in various ways. The wealthy couple are
On their way to the man's place of work, while the “scavengers” are coming home, having worked through the early hours. The couple in the Mercedes are clean and cool; the scavengers are dirty and dingy. But while one scavenger is old, hunched and with grey hair, the other is about the same age as the Mercedes driver and, like him, has long hair and sunglasses. The older man is depicted as the opposite of beautiful - he is compared both to a gargoyle and to Quasimodo (the name means “almost human”) the main character in Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
On the other hand the poem ‘Island Man’ by Grace Nichols opens with daybreak, as the island man seems to hear the sound of surf - and perhaps to imagine he sees it, since we are told the color. This is followed by simple images: the fishermen pushing their boat out, the sun climbing in the sky, The island, emerald green.
The island man always returns to the island, in his mind, but in thinking of it he must “always” come “back” literally to his immediate surroundings - hearing the traffic on London's North Circular Road. Grace Nichols ends the poem with the image of coming up out of the sea - but the reality is the bed, and the waves are only the folds of a “crumpled pillow”. The last line of the poem is presented as the harsh reality.
Notice in the poem ‘Blessing’ how the poem builds from its first two-line stanza to the central incident and the commotion.
This build up of rhythm and pace is also created by the end stopping of the first two lines – the full stops after ‘pod’ and ‘water’, and the commas and end-stopping of the second stanza; three commas and a full-stop in four lines. The third stanza swells and runs into the fourth, imitating the bursting over of the water. The movement and energy doesn’t stop from line 11 to the full-stop that ends the poem.
The ‘Island Man’ poem is written as free verse - it is a quite loose sequence of vivid images. The poet relies on effects of sound - contrasting the breaking of the surf with the roar of traffic. There are a few rhymes and repetitions. Grace Nichols also refers to color - blue for surf (surely an error - the surf is the white foam of the blue sea), emerald (green) for the island and grey for the traffic.
The form of the poem is striking on the page - Ferlinghetti begins a new line with a capital letter, but splits most lines to mark pauses, while he omits punctuation other than hyphens in compound-words, full stops in abbreviations and occasional ampersands (the & symbol).
In the poem ‘Blessing’ we have a clear sense of the writer's world - in her culture water is valued, as life depends upon the supply: in the west, we take it for granted. This is a culture in which belief in “a kindly god” is seen as natural, but the poet does not express this in terms of any established religion (note the lower-case “g” on “god”). She suggests a vague and general religious belief, or superstition. The poem ends with a picture of children - “naked” and “screaming”. The sense of their beauty (“highlights polished to perfection”) is balanced by the idea of their fragility, as the “blessing sings/over their small bones”.
