Poetry In Motion- Train Rising out of the Sea by John Ashbery

I found this confusing mess on the B- Train line. My first initial reaction to this poem was what is the speaker trying to tell me because i am very lost. I had to do a lot of reread, out loud and to myself. I couldn’t really make out who the speaker really was but i believe the subject of the poem is how do we make more use of the day and time. The title of the poem didn’t help me much, in fact it made me more confused and made me wonder why the author decided to make that the title of the poem.  Until i broke the poem down stanza by stanza.

In the first stanza the speaker is trying to say that we don’t have much time in the day. Not being about to conquer the day at full capacity or fulfill the little time we have to become the best us possible. ” We need more night for the sky, more blue for the daylight” (Line 1) , i view this as, if there was more time in the day more can be accomplish.  Sometime the little time we have gets placed else where and that doesn’t benefit us in the long-run or we’re not fully involved in. Losing sight of you and what special gift you bring to the world. ” Like an island just off the shore, one of many, that no one Notices, though it has a certain function, though an abstract one” (Line 9-10) , those lines in the poem make me think that the person uniqueness is being overlooked and being over looked can cause you to lose yourself. The theme I get from the poem is Time and the poem does connect to the title. The train is your life you have different stops and delays but the sea is the world. The train is coming out the sea rising and showing what it is capable of.

2 thoughts on “Poetry In Motion- Train Rising out of the Sea by John Ashbery

  1. Whitney L Bourne

    I couldn’t agree more with your evaluation of this poem. it initially seems extremely confusing and not ambiguous, but then when going through it stanza by stanza, I understood what you got. time is something that we all feel there isn’t enough of, it is also something we don’t appreciate or take advantage of.

    Reply
  2. Whitney L Bourne

    I couldn’t agree more with your evaluation of this poem. it initially seems extremely confusing and not ambiguous, but then when going through it stanza by stanza, I understood what you got. time is something that we all feel there isn’t enough of, it is also something we don’t appreciate or take advantage of.

    Reply

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