Well I won’t lie I wasn’t looking forward to reading another one of Jericho Brown’s poems after the first one I read was rather suicidal. I was going through the list of his poems and I noticed one titled, “Dear Dr. Frankenstein”. This obviously caught my attention as we have just recently finished our read-through of Frankenstein, so I felt I would be better at recognizing the connections. The poem begins with a very stark connection the book, “I, too, know the science of building men out of fragments in little light”. It seems as though Brown knows how to create a monster. His idea of a monster is not made out of scraps like Victor’s was, but rather out of a “thief’s thumb” and a “murder’s arm”. This monster is made from people who act as monsters.
The poem then goes on a tangent about Adam and Eve, and while there is most likely purpose to those words, they were meaningless with my interpretation of the poem. I know that Brown is indeed a very religious person so I just assumed that this was the logic behind including the two stanzas about that. With the final stanza, however, Brown does make one last connection to Frankenstein. “No science. No design. Nothing taken gently into his hand or your hand or mine, Nothing we erect is our own.” This is Brown trying to say that the monster that you can create doesn’t have to define you. People also view themselves more harshly as these “monsters” when that is not the case in real life.
That's very interesting. If you think he's very religious, maybe "nothing we erect is our own," is also a reference to his belief that God's will controls everything or some other religious sentiment like that.
ReplyDeleteIt's so cool that you found a poem by chance that so heavily references Frankenstein! I think that the idea of a monster made of pieces of real life monsters is so brilliant. It's unfortunately easy to imagine a man made of all the bad bits of the world around us.
ReplyDeleteIt's so interesting that you found a poem that relates to something we just did in class, and how it actually helped you analyze the poem.
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