Trolling for Blues (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Richard Wilbur
- First Published: 1987
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry, Meditation
- Subjects: Psychology or psychologists, Poetry or poets, Consciousness, Intellect, Fishes
“Trolling for Blues” could be styled a work whose metaphor takes over the poem and changes it into something other than what it started out to be. It is written in a five-line stanza of loose pentameters without rhyme. As it begins the poet talks to himself about metaphors: The “dapper terns” and the cloud that “moils in the sky” like an embryo are seen in human terms—humanity is projected upon them. (Only a person could be “dapper.”) Wilbur then analyzes his fish-is-like-man metaphor. Humans make the fish, he points out, a “mirror of our kind.” Immediately he...
[The entire page is 534 words long]
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