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Here's another poem that I had to analyze for my midterm poetry class.

by Wallace Sevens
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"Domination of Black"

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,

In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry--the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

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Now, personally, I didn't like this one as much as "In Blackwater Woods,", but I had to pick two of the four poems and analyze them together. So I did. And

green wanted to read my analysis, so here it is.

The poems “Domination of Black” by Wallace Stevens and “In the Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver both use transitions in nature to represent and allude to transitions in life. The speakers of both poems have anxiety toward the idea of change: one fears death and the change it represents; one fears the changing relationship between lovers, and the eventual loss.

In “Domination of Black,” the images of nature allude to death. The speaker stands in a room looking at a fire, and in that fire sees “the fallen leaves” (3) and compares to “the color of heavy hemlocks” (8), which is a poisonous plant, the same famous poison that killed the philosopher Socrates. Other elements of the deadly or threatening sides of nature are brought up: “flames,” “wind,” “twilight,” “night,” and “dark.” Wind, fire, and hemlock are symbols of death in the poem, and as such the symbols of change. In lines 21-25, stanza 3, there is repetition of the word “turning” (a synonym for “change”) in the “loud fire”, creating a figurative description conflagration, in which the leaves are changing, and the peacocks are crying out, and the speaker’s anxiety is high. The speaker’s fear of change in the form of death is symbolized in the “cry of the peacocks,” which seem to haunt him in this poem. Line 19 says “Was it a cry against the twilight/ Or against the leaves themselves.” Is it a cry against change represented by twilight or death, or against the things that change, represented by the leaves? In the final stanza, the Speaker says “I saw how the night came,” meaning how death [change] comes, “came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks./I felt afraid. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.” The speaker has feared death before, and remembers that fear as he experiences it again. The “night” that comes approaches the way poison does, and so too the speaker fears that death/change is approaching him. The speaker fears change, having seen how the leaves have already changed so much, seemingly consumed by fire and wind as they did so. The word “black” is used in the title, a word often synonymous with death. The title could be translated out of symbolism to mean “domination of change.” This theme is apparent in the poem, as the speaker fear s and waits for death/change, imagines it coming at him from all sides like a fire, the night.

The change in “In Blackwater Woods” is of a different sort, and though it holds great anxiety for the speaker as does change in “Domination of Black,” the anxiety is for a loss to come. At first seeming a poem about the “Blackwater Woods,” as the title suggest, upon a second reading its clear that the poem is about love, passion, and losing that love. The descriptions of the woods and the water are like the descriptions of a body, and the act of making love. Lines “their own bodies/ into pillars” is a literal description of trees, but a figurative description of human bodies. The ponds have “blue shoulders” (12), as human lovers do. The words “turning” and “fulfillment” have heavy sexual innuendo, and the line “bursting and floating away” (11) represents orgasmic release. Lines 13-17, where every pond is described as “nameless now” harkens back to the idea that sex and love are things that all people do, and that it’s such a basic animal behavior that we are alike (nameless) while making love. The sense of change through coming loss is primarily in the second half of the poem, where the subject shifts to philosophical rather than natural description. Everything the speaker has learned in life leads back to “the fires/ and the black river of loss.” As if the speaker has experienced the loss of a lover before, as in line 37 when the speaker describes a life lesson as “to let it go,” and feels that anxiety again, knowing that this person they love, too, will eventually have to be let go, lost. The tone of anxiety over this future loss (represented in a sort of clinging and desperate description of the act of love) is present throughout the whole poem, but most clear in lines 32-35: “to hold it/ against your bones knowing/ your own life depends on it.” The speaker doesn’t want to lose his/her lover, but knows the adage “If you love it, let it go,” and even seems to understand it as if it had happened before, with “the fires” (passionate love) and the “black river of loss.” The words “Every year” (18) convey a sense of passing time (years are measured in seasons, which can be measured in nature and trees), and is one of the 3 capitalized line beginnings. I believe the capitalized words divide the poem into three sections: description of love, reflection on past experience of lost love, and finally the quiet anxiety knowing that the current love, no matter how deep, will eventually have to be let go.

Both poems are descriptive of things in nature, using changes in nature as an allegory for the significant changes in one’s life.

For green!

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