insanelysane said:
Hi, i am currently in year 11 and studying robert gray's poetry as a prescribed text. I was wondering if anyone else studying his poetry has any related material for them. Your help is greatly appreciated.
We did Robert Gray Poem
'Late Ferry': an analysis
The discretion in Robert Gray's use of imagery distinguishes him from the "Martian" approach to composing poetry. The…attempt to refresh the description of commonplace objects as though viewing them through the detached eyes of a planetary visitor…suffers from the self-consciousness of its enterprise. Too often the voice in a "Martian" poem will betray a clever graduate trying to persuade us he sees the world through innocent eyes. The innocent perceiver in Gray's poems predates the Martian experiment and has a naturalness…that the Martian speaker is too educated to allow…We read "Late Ferry", trusting that we are going to be shown the harbour and not that we are going to have something proved about it.
The second thing to note is the painterly naivety of the speaker's perception of the scene. The ferry goes "up" the harbour, rather than "away". The intellect, with its knowledge of what the ferry is actually doing, does not mediate what the senses say the ferry is appearing to do…We have been persuaded, temporarily to view the world as though we were naifs, with the result that we have had reawakened a childlike sense of the numinous individuality of things and the artless simplicity with which language appears to be able to evoke them….The art in Gray's best poetry lies in persuading us that naivety need be neither a means of evading subject's complexity, nor a mask behind which it is being manipulated toward some intellectual purpose. Rather, it is one means of enhancing perception, one means of achieving candour.
Simile is Gray's most characteristic descriptive instrument…From his using simile so often and so powerfully, we gain the sense in Gray's poems of a world of unlimited correspondences between things….simile is…an instrument for unifying the diversity of phenomena, for establishing, not only the lines of connection between things, but the idea of the entire unity that these connections create.
Though Gray is a descriptive and quietist poet rather than a dramatic or interpretive one, and mostly confines himself to description, description does not confine his understanding. Behind many poems - "Late Ferry", "Flames and Dangling Wire", "The Sea-shell", for example - the scrupulous accumulation of the visual evidence points to a vision of the way all objects and moments integrate with one another in a Creation that is both marvelous and innocent.
And some other ones which I've forgotten.