Can you help me analyze this poem? I'm awfully terrible and unexperienced so any help would be much appreciated.
Quote:
In a hard intellectual light I will kill all delight, And I will build a citadel Too beautiful to tell
O too austere to tell And far too beautiful to see, Whose evident distance I will call the best of me.
And this light of intellect Will shine on all my desires,
It will my flest protect And flare my bold constant fires,
For the hard intellectual light Will lay the flesh with nails. And it will keep the world bright And closed the body's soft jails.
And from this fair edifice I shall see, as my eyes blaze, The moral grandeur of man Animating all his days.
And peace will marry purpose, And purity married to grace Will make the human absolute As sweet as the human face.
Until my hard vision blears, And Poverty and Death return In organ music like the years, Making the spirit leap, and burn
For the hard intellectual light That kills all delight And brings the solemn, inward pain Of truth into the heart again
Ok there's the poem, it seems pretty straight-forward so I'll show you my shot of explain the gist of it, maybe you could help fill in any spots you see important that I missed or anything that I misinterpreted, thanks.
I think what he means by a hard intellectual light, is that being intellectual is not the natural state of being, being intellectual has a set of rules to it, it's a discipline oppose to being non-intellectual, and in this world where the two most abundant things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity...an intellectual light amongst the background of non-intellectual light would give a hard appearance, because it's bold and distinct...
The next line "I will kill all delight", by this I think he means that anything in the world that gives delight under an intellectual light would be destroyed, because intellectuals tend to reduce everything. In example, if you ask a scientist what is love....it wouldn't be unexpected to get an answer like "chemical reactions in the brain letting the body know when it's time to reproduce".
"And I will build a citadel Too beautiful to tell"
A citadel is a fortress, so I am under the impression that the product of his thoughts are going to build a fortress of some kind that is there to fend off the non-intellectual light from whatever treasures lie within.
"O too austere to tell And far too beautiful to see, Whose evident distance I will call the best of me."
The first question that aroused after this "whose evident distance is the best of me" was, the distance from what? And I came to the conclusion that it's the distance from the non-intellectual light, so I'm thinking that, the distance of the citadel from the non-intellectual light is the best of him because the farther away from the non-intellectual light he can get the citadel represents the greatness of the intellectual light and thus represents the best of him, or something.
I'll stop here, cause I dont want to blabber on about the whole poem if I am on a bad start.....so ....
any help would be great
thanks
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