Little City

945 Words2 Pages

Little City, written by Robert Horan is a literary piece about a spider that spins its web, in order to trap ‘gold visitor(S)’ and ‘coppery captive(S)’ amongst other casualties, so to feed. The title of the poem is inconsistent. Habitually, the descriptive adjective ‘little’ is not paired up with the concrete noun ‘city’. Thus Horan’s choice of words is ambiguous. The unusual heading might confuse the reader or help the elocutionist build a more fertile imagination, so to assume what these lines are about. The poet lays out his creation in an open form, comprising six stanzas, each having a different number of verses. There are fourteen sentences in all; hence the metric level does not equate the syntactic level. These verses have no rhyme, thus one cannot help notice the two rhyming words in the last part of the fourth stanza, ‘wires’, ‘flutters’ and the other in the final part, ‘walking’ ,’rocking’. The difference between the two sets of rhyming words is that, in the fourth stanza, Horan writes, consecutively, the two verses, so create the illusion of a fast flow, whereas in the final division, he chooses to write another line in between the two similar sounding line-ending words. The poet might have included this forced rhyme so to make his piece sound a little melodic in the end, as well as to amplify the lack of heartbeat; since rhyming words give the poem a pace that sounds like that of a heart, when read out loud, of the victims the spider feeds on. The rhythm is mostly fast, with the exception of the fourth and fifth stanzas. Both parts include several pauses due to the full-stops added at the end of almost each verse. Thus these punctuation marks help the reader pause and take in what Horan is writing. This has the eff... ... middle of paper ... ...un-on lines in the second division, which shift to end-stopped verses in the fourth part. This style helps to increase momentum to convey the poet’s skilful way with word so as to bring to life such scene and magnify the pedantic tone. The metre is mainly trochaic, ‘Spider, from his flaming sleep’, having a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. Such verse is composed of three trochaic feet with the last foot stressed. However there are some exceptions, ‘Fat hero, burnished cannibal’, which is iambic, that is having an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. With the scope of the open form, the poem depends mainly on the intrinsic tone, lucid diction and developed and elaborate imagery so to achieve such a detailed literary piece. These are the fine techniques that make Robert Horan such a brilliant poet. Works Cited Little City - Robert Horan

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