Ari Lindquist
Under Pressure
By: Tomas Tranströmer
The blue sky’s engine-drone is deafening.
We’re living here on a shuddering work-site
where the ocean depths can suddenly open up
shells and telephones hiss.
You can see beauty only from the side, hastily.
The dense grain on the field, many colours in a yellow stream.
The restless shadows in my head are drawn there.
They want to creep into the grain and turn to gold.
Darkness falls. At midnight I go to bed.
The smaller boat puts out from the larger boat.
You are alone on the water.
Society’s dark hull drifts further and further away.
The Connection Between the Painting and the poem
The poem has this sense of stress and depression, which complements the painting. The painting has a yellowish brown colour to it, giving a slow and depressed feel.
ABOUT THE POET
- In Tomas early career, he wrote poems that were about mainly about nature and the area surrounding him. However, in his later years he discussed more darker and personal thoughts that correlated his poems and his real life.
- He went to a university in the United States, being a foreign exchange student from Sweden, He read physiological books, that would soon later help him with the deep messages in his poems.
- He became a physiologist at a juvenile prison, and he studied the child prisoners and their crimes.
- In 2011 he received a Nobel Prize for literature, along with several other awards, such as the Nudest International Prize, Overalids Prize, and the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum.
Summary
The poem is discribing the emotions in a visual way of what anxiety feels like to a person. It's describe as similar to a deep blue ocean (thought) that opens up (allowing more anxiety, and unneeded thoughts in). The anxiety that is given is similar to the feeling as something is being weighed down on one, hence the title "Under Pressure." The speaker is a person who has undergone multiple emotional pressure. The speaker describes the emotion that they go through, and how a few days are up lifting similar to a golden grain field, and some are down; the feelings cannot be helped. There is a lot of symbolism within this poem, for example the line, "The restless shadows in my head are drawn there." That line describes how the speaker anxiety mind, restless shadows, tries to reach to the happy and simple thoughts. However, the later the poem is read you see a turn, with more darker symbolism, such as, "You are alone in the water. Society's dark hull drifts further and further away." This line describes in a more philosophical sense that, when you leave your mind alone with thought rushing through, the dark thoughts come into play. There isn't any appeared sentence form in this poem. It's really loose, and open for your interpretation. The one major form I could consider is the shift of tone in the poem. The tone of the poem is very calm, however it gives this sense of unsteadiness. It starts out very calm, and seems like it's just a poem about the relaxation, then the turn occurs. The tone shifts, and you start to feel stress out a little, as if this is how you were feeling. The theme is even though there are light moments, if let it, dark thoughts can pear over. The theme follows the poems story as well, it starts out nice and sweet, and then you get more of a dark turn.
I totally agree with how you related the painting to the poem. The painting has like a dull,and depressed feel to it due to the yellowish brownish color that is used within the painting. The painting also seems to have a sense of emptiness within it because there isn't really any sense of life being expressed within the painting.I think that the artist did a really good job of showing this emptiness by using the color black within the painting. Usually when I think of the color black I think of something being empty or something that's missing within something else.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you said about the time putting a pressured feeling, anxious and sadness when you read it and I agree with your thoughts on the shift of the tone in the poem
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