"Medusa" first appeared in Carol Ann Duffy's 1999 collection The World's Wife. The poem is a dramatic monologue written in the voice of Medusa, a mythical figure with venomous snakes for hair and whose stare turns people to stone. Medusa is both terrifying and sympathetic in the poem, a woman transformed into a monster by her anger over her husband's affairs. The poem points to the destructive potential of jealousy and rage, and to the way that men use women, only to discard them when they're no longer young and beautiful.
The poem opens up with one of the aforementioned tricolons. This commonly used, rhetorical device is a tool to emphasise a point, in this case, the emotions being felt by medusa, those pertaining to jealousy. The narrator then speaks metaphorically about how these emotions have turned her into a Medusa-like character. (Medusa was a character in Greek mythology with snakes for hair, that could turn a person to stone just by looking at them) in this first stanza, Duffy uses the S-sound to make a reader imagine a hissing, the kind of noise one would associate with serpents.
medusa poem essay
This stanza continues much in the vein of the previous, detailing the things medusa is turning to stone. Once again the things she is transforming grow in stature. There are some elements of black humour here as the cat turns to stone and shatters the dish it was drinking from and the pig is transformed into a boulder and rolls into a pile of faeces. This humour helps to ease the tension after the drama of the third stanza and creates a lull before a further harrowing crescendo. In essence, bringing the reader a slight calmness before the big scare, much like a horror director would.
Brandon Shimoda knows his way around the dead. He has summoned them, followed their lead, faced their despair, soothed them. Or was it the other way around? The poems and essays in Hydra Medusa embody the irrevocable connection between the dead and the living, dreaming and wakefulness, past and present, writing and reading. Delicate and sharp, vociferous when need be, always incisive, these poems interrogate the proliferating terror of everyday life while veering, tenaciously and fiercely, even tenderly, toward the love, vigilance, and responsibility needed to keep our ancestors close and alive.
The poem Medusa by Louise Bogan is a piece of writing which describes the situation when a speaker came to the house of Medusa and stoned. The poem repeats the myth about Medusa, a beautiful Gorgon, who made people stoned when they looked at her. The author retells the myths, however, it is possible to predict that Gorgon and the possibility to make people stoned is just a good symbol the author uses trying to express her personal vision of how people are to read her poems. During the whole poem the speaker wants to have a look at the famous hair of Medusa, however, when she does it, she becomes a stone and the whole surrounding world enters an entire activity which never stops however, which is stable,
Having read the poem for several times, it is possible to predict that being stoned the author wanted to show how people perceive her poetry and staying like a shadow is the metaphoric presentation of the idea that her poetry cannot leave people indifferent and the shadow of the author and her ideas will always stay with the reader. The poems of the reader seem to be symbolic and philosophic, they make people think about their lives, about the surrounding worlds, etc. Such dare preposition is based on the last lines,
Remembering the myth, the author hints the reader about the consequences of looking at the hair of Medusa. The same happens with those who read the poems by Louise Bogan. The first feeling is a great desire to read and to understand the poems. When the reader manages to understand it, he/she sees a real meaning and a reader becomes influenced. This is the idea which comes to my mind reading this poem.
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These questions make the reader view Medusa as a victim, rather then the common portrayal of her as a evil monster Duffy creates the air of innocence throughout the poem by having the character relate to human feelings such as love .
The three poems I have analysed and many others in the book put a humorous slant on feminism and suggest that the relationship between the genders and the sexes is not defined by a hierarchical of power, resulting in the impression that men are always oppressors with women as their helpless victims.
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This essay examines Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem 'Aspecta Medusa' (1870) as an instance of Rossetti's complicated relationship to nineteenth-century ideas about the educational value of poetry. Divided between Victorian notions of poetry as improvement, and the continental model of l'art pour l'art, Rossetti seeks to have it both ways. The poem ostensibly teaches a lesson about the dangers of forbidden knowledge; but it also questions the possibility of using poetry to teach any lesson. And as such, it raises significant questions about Rossetti's relation to Victorian poetic and pedagogical theory.
Rossetti's poem is constructed according to a parabolic model of example and precept, where the poetic image illustrates a discursive lesson. The first stanza depicts Perseus bowing to the curiosity of his bride Andromeda, and showing her the head of the Medusa reflected in a fountain. The second stanza draws a lesson from this depiction: 'Let not thine eyes know / Any forbidden thing itself.' The conventional way of interpreting this precept is moral, as a warning against seeking forbidden knowledge. I argue, however, that Rossetti's allusion in the poem to two traditional figurative mirrors-the Mirror for Princes and the Platonic mirror of mimesis-points to a pedagogical 'lesson' that shadows the more obvious moral lesson of the poem.
Rossetti makes reference to the Mirror for Princes tradition by means of an allusion to Dante. The poem, I argue, is modeled on a crucial moment from the Inferno, in which Dante and Virgil confront the Medusa. Virgil covers the pilgrim's eyes, and, in a rare direct address to the reader, which distinctly recalls that of Rossetti's poem, Dante warns against privileging the letter of his poem over its spiritual message. Rossetti's own address to the reader exactly reverses Dante's advice, telling us not to look beyond the 'shadow' to the thing itself. This aestheticist lesson questions both the allegorical model of Dante's work, and the parabolic model of the poem itself. For both models rely upon the reader's ability to look beyond the example to its meaning.
Rossetti also questions the possibility of teaching through poetry in his allusion to two key analogies for mimesis from Plato's Republic. These two analogies compare mimesis first to a mirror, and then to the reflections in water. According to the Platonic model, mimesis presents merely the form of things and not their reality. As such, it is a threat to knowledge. Rossetti's 'depiction' of the Medusa, by contrast, implicitly argues that mimesis constitutes an independent order of knowledge, for according to ancient myth, one can only know the Gorgon's head as a reflection. The same thing is true, I argue, of the mythic scene Rossetti's poem depicts, which is in fact Rossetti's own invention rather than a retelling of an existing story. In both cases, the poetic image cannot be reduced to a prior 'original' that defines its lesson; instead, the image presents something that cannot be seen or known in any other way.
2) Although ekphrasis as a genre had been largely dormant since the early fourth and fifth centuries, when Christian writers had used it as a way of celebrating the elaborate architecture of Byzantine churches, it underwent a revival in the eighteenth century.[4] The writings of Winckelmann and Lessing, combined with the excavations (some would say pilferings) of Lord Elgin helped to stimulate a resurgent interest in sculpture as well as in the visual arts generally. Starting with Matthew Prior's "Picture of Seneca Dying in a Bath: By Jordain" (1720), the period witnessed a steady industry in ekphrasis. Among the better known pieces were John Dyer's "Epistle to a Famous Painter", Edward Young's "On Michael Angelo's Famous Piece of the Crucifixion", John Byrom's "Verses written under a Print, representing the Salutation of the Blessed Virgin", and Henry Hart Milman's "The Apollo Belvedere", which was reprinted several times, most famously in the Annals of tbe Fine Arts.[5] An indication that the genre had been wholly revived by the Romantic period was the decision in 1806 by both Cambridge and Oxford universities to sponsor a competition for the best poem on a work of art or on ancient culture. [6]
3) Shelley's "On the Medusa" properly belongs to a tributary of this popular current, the portrait ekphrasis, inaugurated by Alexander Pope in "Epistle: To a Lady" (1735). During the eighteenth century, it became increasingly common for male poets to write poems celebrating portraits of beautiful women. Thomas Tickell's "On a Lady's Picture"[7] stands as a typical example of a form which was devoted to a laudatory inspection and cataloguing of female accoutrements. Towards the latter half of the century, poems on portraits began to appear more and more frequently in the fashionable collections of fugitive poetry and in the popular magazines of the day--particularly Gentleman's, Universal, and London. 2ff7e9595c
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