Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In "Evil: 4," Charles Olson explores evil as a consuming, invasive force with the desire to define and control. The stone—cold, solid, and “immaculate”—speaks with an eerie authority: “I am empty. I will be fill.” This statement echoes a chilling self-awareness; the stone acknowledges its hollowness and expresses an insatiable desire to fill itself with the essence of others. Olson portrays evil not as an overtly destructive force but as one marked by emptiness, one that attempts to subsume and possess whatever surrounds it to compensate for its own void.

The stone's subsequent statements intensify this theme of possession and domination. By declaring, “I will fill me of you,” the stone signals an intent to consume others, to make them an extension of itself. The use of the pronoun “you” implies a direct address to the reader or a potential victim, making the stone’s words feel personally invasive. This form of evil, then, is not content merely to exist but actively seeks to subsume individuality, to erase boundaries, and to claim the identity of others as its own.

Olson furthers this theme of domination with the line, “You are who I say you are.” Here, the stone usurps the power to define another's existence, stripping its subjects of agency and identity. This line underscores a psychological manipulation where evil seeks control not just over physical beings but over their very sense of self, enforcing its definitions upon them. By attempting to impose its own identity onto others, the stone’s malevolent nature becomes a symbolic critique of oppressive forces that refuse to acknowledge individual autonomy, reducing others to mere extensions of itself.

The repeated phrase “You are mine” solidifies the stone’s possessive intent, echoing a profound and chilling commitment to total ownership. The term “immaculate” to describe the stone serves as a final, paradoxical touch, suggesting a twisted purity in the stone’s emptiness. This purity is not life-giving but sterile and cold, an image of a form of evil that sees itself as faultless, untainted by the life it seeks to dominate. The stone’s immaculateness is thus not a virtue but a disturbing absence of warmth, empathy, or life—a state of being that sees all other forms of existence as resources to be absorbed.

In "Evil: 4," Olson thus presents evil as an all-consuming void with a will to possess and dominate. The stone embodies a force that recognizes its own emptiness and seeks to fill it by assimilating others, imposing its own identity over them. Olson’s portrayal here is a stark exploration of an evil rooted in psychological control and erasure of individuality, where possession is less about physical domination than about existential consumption. This haunting portrayal captures the horror of an invasive evil that, in its relentless pursuit to “fill,” threatens to consume the world around it, erasing distinction and absorbing all into its own cold, immaculate emptiness.

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