Randolph

Victor Randolph

Brent Russo

English 28A

February 17, 2009

                                I Love the Way You Move

Amy Lowell’s “The Pike” is a smooth, fast poem that mirrors its subject. Its form reflects it content. Its meter is irregular and the poem does not rhyme; but it contains within it a certain musical quality which is drawn from word choice and the occasional alliteration. This technique was emphasized by the early imagist poet, Ezra Pound, in his “Three Rules.”  The poem, read aloud, produces a delightful cadence which serves to impress upon the reader a certain response to the pike’s rhythm. As an imagist poet, Lowell’s description of the sudden flicker of the pike’s movement expounds sensations. The poem repeats phrases of color, action, light and refraction to produce very vivid bursts of natural imagery. Lowell juxtaposes brown and green, darkness and gleam as well as a pair of metallic elements: silver and copper. These juxtapositions serve to represent the fish through an objective lens. The descriptions are brief, yet seem to perfectly encapsulate a fleeting flash of transit in a tiny eco-system. Lowell’s poem combines a fiercely eloquent id with a calm and graceful ego, but rejects the notion that “thinking” is of a higher order than “feeling.”  It presents that “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”

The first stanza serves to frame the poem’s primary action; the flicker of a pike in a pool. Lowell immediately uses very potent words of sensation to begin her poem. The reader can see “the brown water, Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine”. This is the primary image of the first two lines of the poem. It is a simple, universal image that can be easily observed, smelt, heard and even felt. A reader could dip a hand in this image and feel it on their fingertips. The day is bright; the reader is brought to a small pool, and the soft ambient sounds of nature surround them. The second two lines of the first sentence introduce the titular pike. The speaker’s first description is “A pike dozed” which gives the impression that the environment is exceptionally quiet. Establishing the pike with this image is curious; the imagery combined with the following “Lost among the shadows of stems He lay unnoticed” suspends the pike outside a linear temporality. To doze, to be lost and unnoticed is to be outside the realm of sensation. The rhythm of the two sentences also functions to disrupt the speed and tempo of the rest of the poem. The final sentence of the first stanza as well as the two sentences in the second stanza expresses acceleration in the poem. The pike’s sudden flicker, his brightness and his run hasten the poem’s pace. So while both stanzas are identical in length - each is nine lines - the second sentence in the first stanza drags the rhythm. That drag works to make the second stanza that much more distinctive in its speed.

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Throughout the poem the fish is never particularly personified, but rather romanticized as pure light; as brightness and flash, as a gleam. This kind of romanticization is alternative, however, to Coleridge’s Nightingale, as the speaker does not attach any grandiosity to the pike’s nature. The deft mobility of the pike through the thick water is clearly seen and faintly heard, and that is all it is. Whereas “The Nightingale” seeks to reframe the bird’s literary texture, “The Pike” is detached from that phenomenology. Coleridge interacts personally with the Nightingale; he mediates its reality through his own perception. Lowell and her pike ...

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