This poem is about a foghorn, the poem's title.
Read the poem slowly, visualizing and hearing the foghorn.
I need help with the following poem analysis, I do not know what it is saying!
FOGHORN
Surely that moan is not the thing
That men thought they were making, when they
Put it there, for their own necessities
That throat does not call to anything human
But to something men had forgotten, That stirs under the fog. Who wounded that beast
Incurably, or from whose pasture
Was it lost, full grown, and time close round it
With no way back? Who tethered its tongue
So that its voice could never come
To speak out in the light of clear day,
But only when the shifting blindness
Descends and is acknowledged among us,
As though from under a floor it is heard,
Or as though from behind a wall, always
Nearer than we had remembered it? If it
Was we who gave tongue to this cry
What does it bespeak in us, repeating
And repeating, insisting on something
That we never meant? We only put it there
To give warning of something we dare not
Ignore, lest we should come upon it
Too suddenly, recognize it too late,
As our cries were swallowed up and all hands lost.
W. S. Merwin, 1958
ANY HELP IS APPRECIATED!!
6 answers
There is a deeper meaning to the poem and I am supposed to analyze the poem using Jung's theory of the psyche !
Is the foghorn an archetype?
That is the idea that was proposed...I just don't understand the poem and its context in order to apply Jung's theory.
This may help.
http://www.thesap.org.uk/jung-s-model-of-the-psyche
http://www.thesap.org.uk/jung-s-model-of-the-psyche
Is the foghorn an archetype then ? I'm just really lost in this whole poem. Because archetypes are suppressed in the unconscious, so they talk about something they never intended is that what is meant ?
1 answer