People say that poetry is beyond interpretation. We read poems by feelings. So it's silly to ask what aimage symbolizes. Actually a professor in my university iritated a poet by keeping asking such questions in a series of poetry reading by the poet.
Well, what can I say? I agree.
But what if we express our feelings by an essay rather than a poet? So let's play a game. I put two short poems here, and let's express what the poets' want to express by prose to see what the differences between prose and verse are.
Let's have the fun:
River
by Ted Hughes
Fallen from heaven, lies across
The lap of his mother, broken by world.
But water will go on
Issuing from heaven
In dumbness uttering spirit brightness
Through its broken mouths
Scattered in a million pieces and burried
Its dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,
At a rendering of veils.
It will rise, in a time after times,
After swallowing death and the pit
It will return stainless
For the deliverry of this world.
So the river is a god
Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,
Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam
It is a god, and inviolable.
Immortal. And will wash itself of all deaths.
who remembers his house
by Robert Berold
who remembers his house
its moss and stone
who rode on bare trucks
who slept on cement
chopped food on cement floors
who ate his fellow animals
pools of stars
lights of desire
who connected cables
with the other world