Late_Ferry_Notes___Robert_Grey

The Late ferry “Late ferry” by Robert gray, is a poem about a person watching a ferry move across a harbour in Sydney. The poem relates to dreams are reality as dreams can be identified as extensions of reality, the ferry and the harbour described in the text have been imbued with additions to augment reality with imaginary aspects. The poet does this by using various metaphors and similes such as “The tomato stake patch”, and “amongst a silvery blizzard of light”. Metaphors such as this add a hyper-descriptive quality to the text, to not only show the reader of what the poet sees when he looks at the harbour, but show the reader what the poet is thinking when he looks at the harbour. Beside metaphors and similes the poet makes extensive use of imagery such as the frequent use of colours which create a twilight effect. “Dark harbour”, “Orange lights”, “Neon redness”, “Silvery blizzard”, and “Yellow light” are all examples of this usage of colour. The final stanza presents the reader with a feeling of irony, This is delivered by the lines “The ferry wades now into the broad open harbour to be lost soon amongst a silvery blizzard of light” and the lines “I’ll loose sight of the ferry soon, I can see it while its on darkness”, as he can see the ferry when it is floating in darkness. But when it approaches light it becomes lost in the luminescence of it. This further relates to dreams and reality, as it appears to extend the imaginary component of the poem, and then ties it back to reality with the usage of irony. The poem as a whole provides the insight on dreams and reality as it shows the poet, Robert gray turning a fairly ordinary scene into a very different scene, imbued with imaginary aspects and descriptions which would hardly suit the scene naturally, but in the poem work to change the atmosphere of the scene into an extraordinary one. Robert gray is uses this style of writing in “flames and dangling wire” also as he turns what is seen as a visit to the dump, into an expansive concept of human nature, the environment and the future. 'Late Ferry': an analysis The discretion in Robert Gray's use of imagery distinguishes him from the "Martian" approach to composing poetry. The…attempt to refresh the description of commonplace objects as though viewing them through the detached eyes of a planetary visitor…suffers from the self-consciousness of its enterprise. Too often the voice in a "Martian" poem will betray a clever graduate trying to persuade us he sees the world through innocent eyes. The innocent perceiver in Gray's poems predates the Martian experiment and has a naturalness…that the Martian speaker is too educated to allow…We read "Late Ferry", trusting that we are going to be shown the harbour and not that we are going to have something proved about it. The second thing to note is the painterly naivety of the speaker's perception of the scene. The ferry goes "up" the harbour, rather than "away". The intellect, with its knowledge of what the ferry is actually doing, does not mediate what the senses say the ferry is appearing to do…We have been persuaded, temporarily to view the world as though we were naifs, with the result that we have had reawakened a childlike sense of the numinous individuality of things and the artless simplicity with which language appears to be able to evoke them….The art in Gray's best poetry lies in persuading us that naivety need be neither a means of evading subject's complexity, nor a mask behind which it is being manipulated toward some intellectual purpose. Rather, it is one means of enhancing perception, one means of achieving candour. Simile is Gray's most characteristic descriptive instrument…From his using simile so often and so powerfully, we gain the sense in Gray's poems of a world of unlimited correspondences between things….simile is…an instrument for unifying the diversity of phenomena, for establishing, not only the lines of connection between things, but the idea of the entire unity that these connections create. Though Gray is a descriptive and quietist poet rather than a dramatic or interpretive one, and mostly confines himself to description, description does not confine his understanding. Behind many poems - "Late Ferry", "Flames and Dangling Wire", "The Sea-shell", for example - the scrupulous accumulation of the visual evidence points to a vision of the way all objects and moments integrate with one another in a Creation that is both marvelous and innocent.