The Visitor by Gibbons Ruark – Commentary

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The Visitor by Gibbons Ruark – Commentary The visitor’ is a poem written by Gibbons Ruark in first person narrative from the persona or the husband’s point of view. The Visitor describes how a blind piano tuner comes to the persona’s house to tune his piano and also how he makes a change in the speaker’s life. In the first line itself the protagonist, the “blind Piano tuner” is introduced in a way to show how he is completely dependent on his helper as the persona says that the blind piano tuner came to his house “holding the arm of his helper” which shows the readers of the persona’s point of view of what he thinks about the protagonist. The interpretation by the persona is also ironic to me as he describes a piano tuner as “blind” which when said to us, we would not probably believe it as we would think that the person who tunes the piano needs his eyes to work and tune the piano. The first line creates an image of a normal blind person in reader’s mind as he is shown to be reliant on his helper. In the second line, the mentioning of the word “our” has quite a lot of significance as this is where another character is introduced into the poem that is the persona’s wife who plays the piano later in the poem. In the third line, again the persona describes the blind person act like a normal blind person who is quite slow to start off the job he wants to do as the persona says “he hesitates at first” showing how slow to act as to what he needs to do first to tune the piano. Until this line, the persona thinks that the protagonist is completely blind and is behaving like a blind man does but after this we see how the persona’s opinion changes about the blind man as how he uses his other senses to tune his piano. The persona uses the conjunction “but” to separate his views about the blind piano tuner before this and after hesitating. In the next three lines, the
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