creative writing Q & A 5

Refrain by Allen Ginsberg

The air is dark, the night is sad,
I lie sleepless and I groan.
Nobody cares when a man goes mad:
He is sorry, God is glad.
Shadow changes into bone.

Every shadow has a name;
When I think of mine I moan,
I hear rumors of such fame.
Not for pride, but only shame,
Shadow changes into bone.

When I blush I weep for joy,
And laughter drops from me like a stone:
The aging laughter of the boy
To see the ageless dead so coy.
Shadow changes into bone.

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/allen_ginsberg/poems/8340

2. I selected this poem mostly for its author. E.E. Cummings was fairly modern compared to the pool of famous poets I was selecting from. The poem itself wasn't to long but it wasn't to short. Although I think fragments of the poem are controversial, the perspective it takes is intresting and it isn't content you would here of everyday.

3. The title of them poem is Refrain. I see this title could mean one of two things. My first idea is to refrain from feeling this way. The second meaning it may posses is it could be a warning. A warning that something dark waits for all of us or our shadow represents more then just an absence of light. It is possible that it could mean both.

4. One example of personification is in the very first line "the night is sad", this is obviously a human emotion that translates into a dreary night. It also translate into a night without light (via clouds over stars, no full moon). One metaphor I found was "laughter drops from me like a stone". Since it uses like, I have doubts if its a metaphor but perhaps a similie? either way, we often assume that when we drop a rock in lake, we know it will sink. This might be a device to help the situation seem gloomier by saying the mans laughter droped or vanished quickly.

5. Cummings creates a sad gloomy tone in his play, Refrain. He creates the tone by using words such as moan or groan and ends all his passages with "Shadow changes into bone". Another system he seems to use in his poem is the effect of creating a darker tone with his use of O compared to the use of A or I, it seems much more frequent.