Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Shadows! Oh Shadows!!" by Robert Desnos is an extraordinary voyage through the surreal, a poem that revels in the paradoxical beauty and terror of the subconscious. Desnos crafts a world where natural and unnatural elements blend, creating a landscape rich with vivid, often jarring imagery that challenges the boundaries of reality. This poem, like much of Desnos’s work, is imbued with the spirit of Surrealism, embracing the unexpected and the inexplicable to explore the depths of human emotion and perception.

The poem opens with a sense of alarm and wonder, invoking a "Frightened sycamore famous division of time flower of animal silence," immediately setting the stage for a narrative that defies linear logic. This line, dense with imagery, suggests a collision of the natural world with abstract concepts of time and silence, hinting at the complex interplay between reality and the unseen forces that shape it.

Desnos’s use of color—"Oh red red and blue red and yellow silex"—and his reference to "the hollow of the hands of nights and plains" evoke a primal, elemental landscape that is both beautiful and menacing. The poem weaves together images of ferocity, adoration, and acrobatics, suggesting a dynamic, ever-changing universe that is alive with possibilities and dangers.

The "acrobatic armpit or towers raised from the very depths of the abyss" and the "voice that says I adore it" introduce human elements into this surreal landscape, blending bodily and architectural imagery to suggest a form of love or admiration that transcends conventional expression. This love is as grand and mysterious as towers emerging from an abyss, a sentiment that is as physical as it is abstract.

Desnos’s appeal to "Friends, let's fall silent before the great enclosed abysses" underscores the poem’s thematic exploration of the unknown and the unknowable. The mention of the "widow in crepe de chine" adds a layer of mourning and elegance, suggesting loss and beauty intertwined in the fabric of the surreal landscape Desnos has conjured.

The poem delves into a series of commands and invitations, from storks and snakes summoned at midnight to flowers blooming under a gaslight. These images create a sense of ritual and magic, where the mundane and the fantastical intersect, and where the natural world is imbued with a sense of otherworldly power.

Desnos’s use of contrasts and contradictions—such as the "shattered bottle folding flower" and the eyes and hands of a volcano—emphasizes the poem's engagement with themes of creation and destruction, beauty and violence. The final lines, pondering the possibility of a microscopic lens evolving in a cloudless sky meeting a comet or a crow, encapsulate the poem's fascination with the intersection of the microscopic and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite.

"Shadows! Oh Shadows!!" is a testament to Desnos’s mastery of surreal imagery and his ability to evoke a world where the boundaries between the real and the imagined blur, where beauty and terror coexist, and where the mysteries of existence are laid bare in all their complexity and contradiction. Through this poem, Desnos invites readers to explore the shadows of their own consciousness, to revel in the obscurity of silence and forgetting, and to find wonder in the inexplicable.

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