Thematic Analysis: Irony and the Futility of Existence in the Poems of Stephen Crane and Louise Gluck

Both the poets Stephen Crane and Louise Gluck address themes of angst and despair in their works as can be seen in Crane's "Four Poems" and Gluck's "Snowdrops." However, while Crane addresses this theme in a humorous and ironic fashion, Gluck does so in a much more personal manner. Crane uses a sense of poetic distance between himself and the subject matter to make the topic more bearable while Gluck uses personal anecdotes and speaks with a world-weary voice of personal experience.

"Four Poems" unfolds in a series of short, disconnected anecdotes with a similar theme designed to underline the futility of human existence. The first poem depicts an imaginary dialogue between a man who clearly stands in for all of humanity and the universe:

A man said to the universe:

"Sir I exist!" ?

"However," replied the universe, ?

"The fact has not created in me ?

A sense of obligation."

In other words, human beings have a profound sense of their own self-importance and specialness in the universe, but there is no real reason to think this is really the case. The universe has no sense of obligation to humanity. To stress this point, Crane depicts this in a literal fashion, with a human being insisting to the universe very directly that he exists and is therefore important. The fact that the man is not named and the simplicity of his statement makes him a symbolic everyman. Crane's voice is deliberately irreligious and irreverent and his meaning is conveyed not with a sense of despair but with humor and irony. Although the poet speaks directly to the reader in the second short stanza, this has a similar quality of making a general statement about humanity through a symbolic construction:

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man.

"It is futile," I said, ?

"You can never --"?

"You lie," he cried, ?

And ran on.

The poet knows that the man is engaged in an impossible task -- namely to catch the horizon, which is something that constantly changes, depending on...

This symbolizes how people are always setting new goals for themselves and are always yearning after impossible dreams. To be unsatisfied is to be human. Our perspective suggests that the horizon can be reached but that is not the case, it is only an illusion.
Louise Gluck, on the other hand, phrases her musings on despair and loneliness in the context of a very specific personal dilemma, namely that of lost love, and uses natural metaphors, like the coldness of winter, rather than Crane's storytelling format. Her approach stresses that it is she -- the poetic 'I' -- who is suffering, not necessarily all of humanity like Crane. In her poem "Snowdrops" she writes:

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.

The "you" she is addressing in the poem is not some unnamed man but a man she clearly had a relationship with, who is causing her despair. The first sentence of the poem reads like an accusation and it has an almost angry tone. Gluck exhibits despair about life but in a very personal way in regards to a specific incident, being left by her previous lover, unlike Crane. Crane is making a general statement about humanity while Gluck is dissecting a particular relationship.

The winter is a metaphor for the coldness Gluck felt about her relationships with men, and the melting of the ice is a metaphor for how the man is unfreezing the sense of sorrow she felt after the end of a relationship.

I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn't expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again

The poem ends on a hopeful note, however, as Gluck expresses the idea that once she is "among you again / crying yes risk joy" she can again experience hope. The poem affirms the hope of establishing a new relationship as a way of counteracting the despair people often feel in the face of loss. Although the poem is about despair, it also has a sense of possibility as implicit in the metaphor of winter is the hope of a new beginning in the form of spring.

Crane's "Four Poems," simply uses different incidents which reinforce the same theme of despair in a variety of contexts. There is no hope of progression. Crane refuses to give…