Broken bricks and distant singers

[EileenGreay]

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...

My pleasure Eileen. However, your use of Troy and Carthage were not obscure. My comment was suggesting that you consider picking one or the other, because there were so many dual choices herein (remember, I took the time to make a list). I thought that committing to one or the either might strengthen the poem in my opinion. Having this many twin alternatives, I did ask you if these were poetic device. Maybe you are using them to convey the ambivalence of the protagonist, that she was torn between multiple choices or between a Scylla and Charybdis. I had no doubt that your wall was a psychological one. My damsel in the tower reference inferred the same. When I read you poem again, I tried to hear your music. Hence the likening to the Pink Floyd’s metaphorical wall. The bricks fit for me, so I used them. I had hoped that you would have addressed some of these comments, but I realize that my review may have been too playful to be taken serious.

Yes, I noted your comments on my lists of dualities: they were, indeed, there to convey a sense of ambivalence and rapid substitution (the sense of blue washing into brown, a clown distorting into the image of a tomb). I think maybe you are correct that in the 'Troy/Carthage' duality one could do, I will think about this.

Fascinated by your reading of the poem in the light of Pink Floyd - the distant singers I was thinking of were more operatic and Wagnerian, but also a reference to Wordsworth. Not sure if you are familiar with The Solitary Reaper, a great great poem. Contains these lines:

Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:

Broken bricks suggest an inability to create as well as a shattering of boundaries; distant singers, when read in the context of Wordsworth, suggest a detachment from beauty, and an inability to connect. Both the woman of the final stanza and the speaker (I don't believe I ever specify the speaker's gender) are singing, but this only emphasises the distance between them, and their inability to connect.

This doesn't cover all of your comments, I'm aware...I shall think more.