Hospital Window | The Key Roles of Structure and Plot
In the following
essay, the author discusses the key roles that structure
and plot play in “The Hospital Window.”
The line “I have just come down from my father”
both begins and ends a poem that on the surface
seems to be about a speaker who is in the street
below, looking up at his father’s hospital window
after visiting him. He is trying to see his father behind
the sun-glare reflected in the window. Upon
seeing him, the speaker experiences a complex
epiphany that is anticipated stanza by stanza
through careful plotting. Using puns, syntactic
structure, and references to movement, color, and
light imagery, Dickey provides four simultaneous
levels of plot—the means by which the poem gets
from...
[The entire page is 1729 words long]
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