Poetic Devices in After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
Karah Joye
Corbin Lockmiller
1302 English
18 July, 2013
Poetic Device Paper In the poem “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”, Galway Kinnell creates the speaker in a way to really portray what he believes true love to be once “long-married”. The author gives great sensory details, engulfing you into the night that he produced from these fickle meters. The speaker in the poem puts family high on this list of priorities as the author shows a significant amount of importance to them from using a few clever poetic devices. Although Kinnell could have put a little more thought into scansion to create even more of a deeper meaning, this poem is very emotional and touching to the senses as well as giving great morality to what a man should perceive “making love” to be. In the beginning of this poem, the speaker talks about how he could choose to spend his night sleeping, interact in a personal hobby like “playing loud music” or chatting it up with some friends(Kinnell 953). However “ Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep”, meaning his abilities and strength will only fade into his meaningless night that will go by in one flash. Yet, if his wife were to “cry anywhere in the house” or call out for his love, he would “wrench himself awake “and stop in his tracks to comfort her desires as they are his too (their desire being to make love) (Kinnell 953). This shows how the speaker gives a level of unimportance to those things compared to his wife. Once this desire has been satisfied , they lay quietly ,holding each other ”touching along the length of [their] bodies” ,showing admiration of one another until their son walks through the door in his baseball pajamas(Kinnell 953). Then the speaker observes the child’s attire, and how small the neck hole is compared to the boys head. Making him “wonder about the mental capacity of baseball players” and his son as the reader begins to see the importance of this child to the speaker (Kinnell 953). The
Corbin Lockmiller
1302 English
18 July, 2013
Poetic Device Paper In the poem “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”, Galway Kinnell creates the speaker in a way to really portray what he believes true love to be once “long-married”. The author gives great sensory details, engulfing you into the night that he produced from these fickle meters. The speaker in the poem puts family high on this list of priorities as the author shows a significant amount of importance to them from using a few clever poetic devices. Although Kinnell could have put a little more thought into scansion to create even more of a deeper meaning, this poem is very emotional and touching to the senses as well as giving great morality to what a man should perceive “making love” to be. In the beginning of this poem, the speaker talks about how he could choose to spend his night sleeping, interact in a personal hobby like “playing loud music” or chatting it up with some friends(Kinnell 953). However “ Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep”, meaning his abilities and strength will only fade into his meaningless night that will go by in one flash. Yet, if his wife were to “cry anywhere in the house” or call out for his love, he would “wrench himself awake “and stop in his tracks to comfort her desires as they are his too (their desire being to make love) (Kinnell 953). This shows how the speaker gives a level of unimportance to those things compared to his wife. Once this desire has been satisfied , they lay quietly ,holding each other ”touching along the length of [their] bodies” ,showing admiration of one another until their son walks through the door in his baseball pajamas(Kinnell 953). Then the speaker observes the child’s attire, and how small the neck hole is compared to the boys head. Making him “wonder about the mental capacity of baseball players” and his son as the reader begins to see the importance of this child to the speaker (Kinnell 953). The
Cited: Page Kinnell, Galway. “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”. Literature: The Human Experience, Reading and Writing. Ed.Bedford/St. Martin’s 10th Edition. Boston, New York 2010. 953-954. Print.