08-10-2013, 08:33 PM
Thank you for all of your feedback! Billy, thank you for the edit - much appreciated!
Ray and Chris, you've given me so much to think about, thank you for taking the time to read this. My reasoning behind the use of Troy, Carthage, Valhalla - though I understand if to a reader the use seems obscure - is to draw attention to the space as both presence and absence: the walls of Troy and Carthage are only respectively mythologically or historically tall, and exist now only in our imaginations. When I talk about the walls of the room being taller than those of Troy and Carthage, I am talking of psychological not literal space. I'm not sure if I've expressed that very well here or in the poem itself - apologies! Also, apologies if the intertextual references here are somewhat dense - I composed this while rereading Eliot, and I feel that Preludes and The Waste Land fed into this poem quite a bit...
Ray and Chris, you've given me so much to think about, thank you for taking the time to read this. My reasoning behind the use of Troy, Carthage, Valhalla - though I understand if to a reader the use seems obscure - is to draw attention to the space as both presence and absence: the walls of Troy and Carthage are only respectively mythologically or historically tall, and exist now only in our imaginations. When I talk about the walls of the room being taller than those of Troy and Carthage, I am talking of psychological not literal space. I'm not sure if I've expressed that very well here or in the poem itself - apologies! Also, apologies if the intertextual references here are somewhat dense - I composed this while rereading Eliot, and I feel that Preludes and The Waste Land fed into this poem quite a bit...