"Viewing the Body," "After Experience Taught Me...," "Love Lamp" by W.D. Snodgrass

W.D. Snodgrass's lines in "Viewing The Body," are enriched with strong images such as, "Flowers like a gangster's funeral/Eye shadow like a whore/..gray as a mouse crept." He writes about a girl who was never noticed by anyone, not even by her mother, "Never got taken out/Was scarcely looked at/The dark halls at her mother's," while she was alive. And now that she's dead, everyone notices her and even find her beautiful inside the casket, "All yes and a place of honor/They all say isn't she beautiful," how ironic. I really like Snodgrass's use of irony in this poem. Also, I noticed how he indents every other line throughout the poem. I'm not quite sure what Snodgrass intended, but it works for me.

In "After Experience Taught Me...," he speaks (the speaker of the poem) with a sense of authority, philosophy and wisdom, "No virtue can be thought to have priority/No man can desire to act rightly, to be blessed/Wishing to be, to act, to live. He must ask," sounds philosophical. Also, the speaker addresses the reader, "you" and tells him/her what to do--a step by step process, "Take the first two fingers of this hand/Fork them out--kind of a 'V for Victory'/And jam them into the eyes of your enemy." Snodgrass writes philosophical lines on every other stanza, and the rest of the other stanzas are part of a step process--telling the reader what to do, especially in the second page, 471. Each stanza contains two lines, except the last one, which contains four. The last stanza sounds like the speaker is with the reader at a confessional. First, the speaker insults the reader and then he wants him/her to confess his/her sins-that's how it sounds to me, "And you, whiner, who wastes your time/What evil, what unspeakable crime/Have you made your life worth?" I noticed how Sodgrass wrote, "And you, whiner, who...," and not "And you whiner, who..." It sounds stronger when the reader makes a pause (with a comma) before "whiner." The word, "whiner" stands out more, sounds as if the speaker is yelling at the reader.

In "Love Lamp," I like the way Snodgrass relates the lamp to love making, "And the rays of its glass panels played/On our entangled legs and shoulders." I also like his use of imagery, "...sailor's red and blue tattoos/...cathedral stained glass alters. I find Snodgrass's capitalization on every line on this poem very distracting. I didn't like some of his line breaks because I felt that these interrupted the flow of the lines, "What could that frail lamp see/To prowlers..." and "Only scattered grey fur, some broken/Feathers..." I like his rhyme on the lines, "Chilled from the wet grass, we scratched/A match restoring our..."