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Mina Loy

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In reading Sketch of a Man on a Platform by Mina Loy, my views of the poem changed from the first time I read it and the second. When I first read the poem, I was focused on finding the correct hidden meaning, however after reading Holbrook and learning that the way I read it is also correct I was able to come up with my own understanding of the poem. When I first read the poem it seemed like Loy was simply describing one man she saw at a train station. When she was describing him I noticed that she pointed out a few of his strengths and flaws. His flaws being that he is “fundamentally unreliable” and that his “genius is so much less in his brain than in his body.” When I read it for the second time I felt as though she described him a …show more content…

In the first stanza my view of the man did not change, he was simply a strong man that was comparable to a tree. In the next stanza she softens his appearance, making him seem both strong and graceful, saying that he is “unassailable savor of the airy-fairy of the ballet.” Again my view did not change too much from the first time I read it. In the third stanza when I first read it, I thought of the man as a soldier who had just come off a battlefield, “has meddled in the more serious business of the battle-field,” but the second time I read it I thought of him also trying to find a girl because he, “snuffles the trail of the female and the comfortable passing odors of love.” The fourth stanza was simply a criticism of him stating that while he was handsome he was not intelligent. In the fifth stanza when I first read it I did not really think much of it, just a man going through his day, but the second time I thought more about the word THINGS and felt that it referred to people. The writer states that he is “ pushing THINGS in the opposite direction to that which they are lethargically willing to go,” meaning that his attitude is so strong that it pushes others into doing things the way he wants them done even if that is not what they had originally planned. In the sixth stanza I think it implies that the man is your average man that pushes his ideas on

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