Robert Gray Essay

443 Words2 Pages
Robert Gray’s “Late Ferry” is a poem about an imaginative life journey and how sensitive human life is to the environment surrounding it. Gray employs a persona in his poem to add insight. Through the persona, Gray articulates his life beliefs, and as such, the persona acts as a catalyst for his thoughts throughout the poem. By using “I” in the first stanza, Gray breaks the fourth wall, not wasting time to pull audiences in, and giving them a sense of involvement in this poem. Being an imagist, Gray is no stranger to using imagery in his works, and this is no exception. The first stanza of the poem paints a visual image for audiences: “from the balcony, as it goes up onto the huge dark harbor” – the size of the harbor and ferry juxtapose each other; the enormity of the harbor is capitalized and it threatens to engulf the helpless ferry. The ferry is an embodiment of human life; how vulnerable it is in the face of terror. Gray also uses sound devices to demonstrate the flow of the poem. In the eighth stanza, Gray employs alliteration with ‘Busky Berkeley’, and ‘frenzied, far-off’ which shows the pace of the persona’s journey, and how it is steady throughout the poem. Contrast is used to show the capacity of objects. In the ninth stanza, Gray writes, “One does seem in a movie theater: that boat is small as a moth wandering through the projector’s beam, seeing it float beneath the city” – here, Gray uses a simile ‘small as a moth’ to suggest that the boat is fragile in comparison to the things around it – the hypothetical movie theater juxtaposes the harbor as Gray likens the ferry to a moth. The beam also metaphorically acts as a signal to guide the ferry on its physical journey. The seventh and last stanza are very significant parts of the poem, allowing the persona to reach an epiphany in his journey and being able to let go of his concerns and
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