Cook's Mountain Poem Analysis

806 Words4 Pages
The Paradox of Language: An Explication of P.K. Page’s “Cook’s Mountains”* As the title of the poem suggests, P.K. Page’s “Cook’s Mountains” is a poem about possession. It is also about the transition from a pre-verbal state to a “named” or verbal state. The poem points to the paradox of naming: while naming is creative and powerful, it is also limiting. Once named, an object snaps into focus. But the name interferes as well: it comes between us and the object. We can think of the object now only through the name that has been attached to it. The opening line of the poem, “By naming them he made them,” connects “naming” with making (Page line 1). The idea—that naming makes an object—is paradoxical since the “making” is both creative and destructive. Naming reduces the range of possible meanings that exist when the object is understood only through the senses. By naming the mountains Cook has changed them; this alteration is emphasized in the rhyming of “nam[e]” (1), “came” (3), and “not the same” (4).…show more content…
When “he saw” (7) the mountains, Cook “glazed” them (6); that is, he turned them to glass. The shortness of the line “He saw” (7) emphasizes the importance of both Cook and the act of seeing; he did all this by seeing. The line “the Glass House Mountains in his glass” (8) associates Cook’s way of seeing—looking through a spyglass—with what he sees. In other words, the mountains may look like glass to Cook because he is looking at them through glass. From now on, this is what the name “Glass House Mountains” will do (8). It determines what we can see. The appropriateness of the name seems to be proclaimed by the final short line in the stanza: “They shone”
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