The Piazza

I just finnished reading this story, and I found it quite interesting. It is the first thing I have read by Melville thus far. I thought the beginning half of the story, he did over do it a bit with the mythology metaphors and references. After a while it just got to be a bit much.

Though I really enjoyed the discriptions which were given of the four different directions, while he was trying to decide where to have his piazza constcututed, and he dicussed the view each side would offer before he made his choice. He did paint some very beautiful images of the enviroment and the scenery. Though sometimes it did get a bit overhwealming at times.

The first half of the story was written almost like prose poetry I thought.

When the narrator of the story is making his way to the little cabin in the woods, and talking about his jouney to fairy-land, it did remind me a lot of the Poe poem Fairy-Land

The other thing I found interesting, was the woman in the woods, was called Marianna which made me think of the Tennyson's Mariana, and there were some similarites between the two, particuarly in the way in which the old cabin was described from Marianna's point of view, and the shadows, and flies, and the old dirty window.

When it got to the point where he reached Marianna's cabin, I really got into the story more, and I loved the play on illusion, and the sort of grass is greener on the other side, idea, which the story took, while both of them, look at wonder from a distance at the other's homes, and create thier own fantasies which they might find there in order to escape thier own lives.

The story also made me wonder about Melville's ideas about nature, becasue of the connection the narrator in the story seemed to have to the land, and his views of it.