Poetry--Extended Analysis

Slumber

The mind is a vault
to wander through
aimlessly or charted,

For a time, I stealthily searched the
depths
of my own

holding the lantern aloft
as I peered through each
cryptic door.

Some rooms are empty,
waiting patiently, sometimes
for eternity
a spark to fill it.

A spark to torch the room
to fill it with the blaze of knowledge.

Each night, as I wander down each corridor,
through each chamber,
and into each hollow,

my own smallness is
realized,
As I, wrapped

in a blanket of thoughts,
dance under a sky full of dreams…

I tried to make this poem Mary Oliver-esque, but I may have failed. I know she normally themes her poems around nature but there are some instances where she doesn't, and I thought this would be one of those instances. I tried to make the language seem like her and I think I did a reasonable job at capturing her voice in that light, but I couldn't acheive the proper flow. My inspiration for this was my own exhaustion at first (namely, the inspiration for the title). But once I got going I kept picturing the mind more and more like a giant storage space with millions of rooms waiting to be filled; after realizing that I remembered an episode of Yu Gi Oh I saw (yes I know, but I promise I only watched it a couple of times out of sheer Saturday Morning Boredom). In the episode their wandering around in a schizophrenic character's mind which contained a hallway and two areas; the first area was the area of the little boy, filled with toys and the like, the other area was that of a complex character, full of locked doors and stairs. In short it was cool and I liked the idea. More succintly, I tried.