Conversations are also usually not told from one side with the other person as the main character or rather the receiver of information. Jim Morrison’s poems are written this way with, essentially, no solid characters at all. The closest things to characters in them are references to general people or types of people as in the poem “Lessons on Becoming.” This poem has a perfect example of a Morrison (stereotype) “character” in this line.
This is really no character at all, but rather a mentioned person. Morrison’s poems are not stories, so they have no need for characters. Although some proverbs do have them, they do not need them. This is hard to say for stories.
It is true that proverbs don’t need characters, but they all most certainly do need subject matter. The poetry of Jim Morrison is no exception. Like symbolic proverbs, Jim Morrison’s poetry has surface subject matter and then it has underlying subject matter. The poem “In this Dim Cave,” supposedly is about a cave with “bags of gold,” and “Horses,” but these things are not what the poem really means. As in many of Morrison’s poems these are just symbolic terms that, in actuality, mean something else. In the case of this poem, the literal “story” is of some people at the back end of a cave where there are bags of gold, horses, curtains, scarves, a theater, and actors. The metaphorical message is that people place entertainment and luxury higher on their list of priorities than work. Morrison is questioning this, but also confessing that he, too, is one of these people as not to appear hypocritical (for he is a musician). This poem is packed with allegorical subject matter, as do most of Morrison’s.
Jim Morrison’s poetry is very proverbial indeed, with intellectual vocabulary, almost no *real* characters, and metaphorical subject matter. All of these three things contribute to making these poems into analytical comments about the way we live. Vocabulary sets the tone, the lack of characters gets rid of an unneeded story element, and the subject matter injects the proverbial punch line. Or it could be that Morrison’s poetry is just a lot of big words and intriguing lines that don’t really mean anything.
