Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Psalm IV

The word psalms means, "song sung to a harp". I looked at the titles of many poems written by Allen Ginsberg. The poem entitled "Psalm IV" jumped out at me. The title alone stirred my interest because I attributed it to something not only religious but sacred, perhaps personal. I read the poem through a few times... a lot of times actually. I even read a few other poems by Allen Ginsberg to see if there was any easier ones to interpret. To my surprise I felt all of them were long and difficult. So, I came back to "Psalm IV" and began to play with an idea. Perhaps the poem is about God. I thought on it and agreed with myself imediately. This has to be one of the meanings of this poem, especially when the piece itself is entitled psalm four. I keep feeling that this poem is about desire, especially the desire for God. I then looked for a critique of the work and found, while I wasn't off, I wasn't very on point. There are things in this poem that need a lot of research to be done to link every line together and understand it. There are references to other works or myths in the poem. With or without know;edge of the references, the poem is very esoteric. However, I think I like it. The desire for God is an interesting subject especially for poetry.

1 comment:

  1. The devil is always in the details. The speaker plays against the usual sense of a psalm as a devotional pean to a Christian god; the spiritual frame of mind is stimulated here by a combination of reading poetry and masturbation. The "God" here is Blake, certainly no fan of established religions, but a true spiritual visionary. the language of the poem also parodies the more extravagant language of some of he psalms. The poem's sensibility is more Buddhist than christian--the references to the Harlem row houses, down to the individual bricks, being part of a universal mind. See AG's "Sunfower Sutra" for the sunflower ref.

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