Response 2: Jan. 31st

Taking a place (location) and giving it new life, writers use various techniques in order to achieve their goals. While reading the poems for this week, I became especially interested in how Duat uses symbolism to elevate the meaning and representation of place in the poetry.

In my reading of this poem, the human becomes a symbol for place (among other things). We are never given specifics about people, this is purposely left open and once we get to the end of the poem, this decision is understood a bit more clearly. Looking at this poem, place begins to take on new life due to the way the poet associates the individual human (person) to concepts such as class, war and the negative effects of a people forgotten.

The first stanza of the poem sets up the individual merely as a worker whose purpose is the serve the rich – this dehumanizes the individual and helps to highlight the opinion that in the world the poet has created, the individual is merely a symbol, a concept used to bring attention to something else. As we move throughout the poem, that something else becomes a bit clearer to me. The second stanza moves to position the individual next to something forcefully taken, something damaged, but something that still hungers (essence of humanity?).

However, the final 2 stanzas of the poem seem to set up the individual as representative of the aftermath of war and the result of ‘out with the old, in with the new’. We see a new line of workers, one in which our symbolic individual does not fit – our symbol is being replaced by something more relevant and more useful. We see a glimpse of the reasoning behind this change in the last stanza – war. Here, the symbol is finally noticed, but still unnamed. The individual of war is scarred, broken, yet holds resolve. The beauty of this poem is that the concept of place in the poem is held within the individual (symbol) itself. The occupation of the individual constantly reminds us of place, the way in which the individual is met with oppression and seems to be expendable, reminds the reader of place. Duat intricately weaves this concept throughout the piece in a way that easily allows a reader to imagine and visualize place both as a physical and social/emotional space.