Thursday, March 3, 2011

Claim Paragraph

The unadorned, yet seemingly complex style that John Ashbery presents in his writing of, “At North Farm,” helps paint a picture of marvel and uneasiness. In the beginning of this poem Ashbery creates a feeling of anxiety and fear when he says, “Somewhere someone is travelling furiously toward you”. In the next stanza, he moves on and says, “Hardly anything grows here, yet the granaries are bursting with meal”, which is an amusing paradox. It generates a sense of wonder in that if hardly anything grows, then how are the granaries still full? In this dictum the speaker alludes to a force that is greater than ourselves that provides for us. He also gives more examples such as “The sacs of meal piled to the rafters,” and “the streams run with sweetness, fattening fish” to emphasis the fullness of nature. This poem is ends with a puzzling question that could have many possible answers. He asks, “Is it enough that we think of him sometimes”, which is almost trying to make the reader feel guilty in a way, and implies that we must think of “him” more than just sometimes. The most perplexing part of this poem is how the speaker ends that question with “sometimes and always, with mixed feelings”. The speaker’s thought toward other humans is that we are ambivalent and modulated in our feelings.

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