Who can decrypt this poem??

[literaturefan66]

I have a new poem:

By Robert Frost

The road not taken is the path to life. Thats plato.

[blp]

Who's it by?

[nps_marina]

Mmmh, I read it and I can say I liked it, but there's not much I can add to what all of you probably thought- the attraction of a pretty girl eating an ice cream, all the men looking at her... and all the similes between fish and men/girl with ice cream and white rock

it catches the sun, at the bottom of the sea which is usually a pretty drak place
it reflects the beauty, that's why people/fish are attracted to it.

i liked it but then the last stanza sets you off balance: the ice cream is finished: the beauty was only in the sensuality of the pretty girl eating ice cream? There's nothing more to her than that sensuality? And the rock is only worth something to the collector who picks it up from the bottom of the sea... the rest of the people/fish don't care but for the glimpse of beauty.

It sounds a lot like 'sure, she's a beauty, but that's all that there is to it... once the beauty is gone, nobody really cares'

That's how it sounds.

Poor white beautiful rock in the bottom of the sea

[Scheherazade]

Who's it by?
Keith Douglas:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1236058,00.html

[Quoth-the-Raven]

To my mind, a tone of irony pervades this poem. Take the title, for example, "The Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea Garden". The poet does not merely compare the men's reaction to the woman's beauty to the fish's reaction to the white stone. He draws attention to the fact that if we study the species "men", we see that they behave in certain predictable patterns, like fish and other animals -- a predictable behaviour someone could exploit.

The woman in this poem knows about these men and what makes them tick. She is seated in an Egyptian tea-house, presumably on a cushion on the floor, "drawing down" the men's glances; she takes the inferior position, allowing the men look down on her. But she does so deliberately, "slyly". Notice how calculated her actions are; how carefully she moves her red lip; how she savours the ice-cream; how she puts her carmined fingernails on display. She knows how to attract these men. She is a seductress. (The description of her hands as "white as milky stone" may remind us of that great Egyptian seductress, Cleopatra.)

So the bait is out, but there is not much prey. The cotton magnate, old and experienced, knows what game she is playing, and merely stays to watch others take the bait. The "crustacean old man" is bitter and impotent. The captain on leave merely visits the tea garden before he must go back to his ship. The flat-eyed flatfish is the creepiest of the lot, sucking and staring from the distance; we don't know what kind of man hides behind the comparison, but he's the only one that's denied the masculine pronoun, and instead given the "its". The gallants want to turn the tables; they see the woman as their prey; they nibble and tug, trying to seduce her.

But she does not give in to the gallants' advances, for she is not after a handsome charmer. She lets them pay for her ice-cream, that's what they are good for, but she missed her real goal: to find herself "a collector, a rich man". When the men take a break, enjoying the pleasures of the tea garden, that's her time of work; when the men "swim off on business", her business is over.

That's how I read the poem. I don't know whether it is her decision to attract rich men, or whether she is forced to do so by someone else. She seems to be well-versed in the ways of seduction, so she's probably been at it for quite some time; yet she has not managed to find herself a man. No wonder, then, that she feels "alone" and "useless". She may be as pretty as the white stone at the bottom of the sea, but she realises, too, that her life is just as lonely and lifeless.