Week 2: Response to "The Marvel" "The Tempest" and "The Snowman"

Easily my favorite of the three poems, Douglas' "The Marvel" has this kind of grotesque majesty that I love, gritty yet grand and full of paradoxes. He depicts a tragic scene of a once beautiful creature slaughtered, "spreadeagled" in a mockery of it's former grace. In contrast to the fish, which Douglas calls a "strong traveller", "lord" of the dark reaches of the sea where it once ruled, the sailors seem low, so greedy that even their boat is described as "thirsty", as its deck soaks up the fish's blood. They take out the noble swordfish's eye - once the tool of a hunter - and desecrating it from its intended purpose, using it to write the name of a prostitute in the wood.
Yet, by the end, the poet seems to tell us what the eye itself has seen, countless sailors just like these, "rotted into ghosts/digested by the gluttonous tides" in "their forgotten ships/with fishes going over the tall masts" -  which gives me the impression that though the sailors may steal from the sea, in retribution the ocean takes even more in return. My favorite line: "Let them be your hosts". Simple, yet ominous, it gives a strong implication that the sailor - or maybe even the reader -  will be the next to succumb to those "gluttonous tides"

"The Tempest" took me a couple of readings to begin to grasp, and even now I'm not sure what exactly is happening, but I know how it makes me feel. Everything about it seems distressed, almost painful. The imagery is disjointed, yet also alludes to some very specific things - the husks of last seasons' lilacs, the shore of the Mississippi, "exercise books" like the kind you used in grade school, the 'knife on the balustrade", a green sweater. These specifics are contrasted with intentional vagueness, including a vagueness felt by the speaker about the environment, as the poem opens with her trying to make out the shape of a building through the "shimmer", what I interpreted as an early morning fog, as well as the nebulous "The private acts become strange/when subjected to inquiry." - What private acts? Do they imply some sort of intimate relationship, or something mundane, which nonetheless you wouldn't do if you knew someone was watching?
The sudden shift in person in the next stanza emphasizes the abruptness of the action - leaving on a bus, and in turn the scenery we just experienced. The setting seems to jump around a bit, giving a sense of confusion. The "last cigarette/that must last a lifetime" implies to me worry, stress, anxiety - how to make it last? The person who picks up the telephone seems at ease, but whoever is on the other end is almost desperate for their voice, longing for them to "say,/so sweetly"

"The Snowman" at first reading did not capture me, as I was a bit surprised at the tone of it in relation to something as jolly as a snowman. It seems almost cynical, the way Stevens describes the trees "shagged" or "crusted", "rough" with frost, harsh, cacophonous words that don't quite conjure up the image of a winter wonderland. Neither does the "misery in the sound of the wind" which is blowing the land bare. Eventually I realized, the speaker implies that to be able to "behold the junipers shagged with ice" or "not think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind" that one must have "a mind of winter" and have "been cold a long time"; meaning of course, the only person admiring the harsh landscape is the snowman itself, unperturbed by the cold because he is made of it, smiling because that is how his face was made. A snowman listens, and watches, but "beholds/Nothing that is not there and nothing that is".