Wrangell - St. Elias __ [english] Poem by Fabrizio Frosini

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Travelling through Canada (British Columbia, Yukon, North-West Territories) and Alaska.


The text above is the English adaptation of my poem 'Wrangell - St. Elias', (written in 2013) which I originally wrote in my native language [Italian].

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As an interpretive key for the readers, I post here my answers to Daniel Brick's notes on my poem:

POEM: ''Wrangell - St. Elias'' by Fabrizio Frosini

COMMENT by D.J.Brick [Jan.20,2015]

'The first time I read through WRANGELL - ST. ELIAS I felt an expansion of my vision and a deep intake of energizing breath. The opening stanza is, as we say in English, worth the price of admission.
'SCEPTERS OF MOUNTAINS' (communicates effortlessly the analogy of the) sharp point of a scepter and the tapering cone of a high glacier.
I love the sheer presence of geographic features of the northern landscape in the first stanza and then the animals in the second. Walt Whitman showed long ago that a list of things can be eloquent!
In fact, those two lists have distracted me from the psychological dimensions.
And I think the reference to the glacier's gradual melting away in the third stanza totally held my attention, BUT I did not realize the last line is self-referential.
The reference to self is THE NEURAL PATHS [= the subject's mind], in line 2; then there are 13 lines without any other human presence, self or otherwise [until line 16]. How do we connect the self-references in line 2 and line 16? Let's get right to the heart of things.
If I reduce the poem to its grammatical units minus details like direct objects, it would look like this:
1) ALL NIGHT ON THE NEURAL PATHS HAVE RUSHED - SHINY -
THE SHAPES OF THE WORLD, YEARNING FOR..
A list of 6 geographic features follows, illustrating features of the landscapes
2) YET IT WOULD NOT BE..
There are 3 animal species listed
3) TO GET YOU BACK TO LIFE.
Is this a reference to the glacier itself? Or is there a human character to be resurrected? ' [D.J.Brick]

And here are my answers to Daniel's questions:

'TO GET YOU BACK TO LIFE' is a direct reference to the subject's psychological condition; I want to mean that even going back to those wonderful places, he wouldn't find 'himself' again.

Between line 1 and line 16 - between each couple of references - a sense of 'personal vacuum' [a 'space' devoid of a human character] is needed because that void has to be filled with Nature (landscapes and animals) .

The psychological point is my constant pursuit of a contrast (a contraposition - and somehow a conflict) between the subject's inner world and the real world - outside of the subject's mind..

(Fabrizio Frosini)


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