Visual Poetry
For visual poetry, I visualized Amy Lowell's "The Taxi" in a simple Flash animation . Here is the full text. (Also on page 577 of textbook)
(I cannot legally put the poem here, sorry)
The narrator of the poem sounds like a women to me, perhaps it’s because the author is also a women. She is in her twenties, perhaps early thirties, because she has a lover ("you" in line 1 of the poem) who is not living with her for some conflict not disclosed in the poem. Perhaps she is already married to another man, and she is not happy with this marriage (metaphor to the streets and city lamps). Notice how only the title alone gave us the hint that she is traveling using a taxi; she could very well be walking, biking, or even on a train. The fact that she is on a taxi suggests that she lives in a relatively urban area with packed streets (line 6, 7). The fact that she uses a taxi suggests that this relationship is also happening in secret (to hide her destination of travel), and she obviously spends time visiting “you” – her lover.
It is very interesting that without any description, I can imagine her sitting in the back seat of the taxi, looking out the back windshield at her lover as he/she gets smaller and smaller (line 8-10). Lowell ended the entire poem with a rhetorical question, as if she already knew the answer; she have no choice but to leave her lover, even though the reason is not specifically outlined in the poem.
(I cannot legally put the poem here, sorry)
The narrator of the poem sounds like a women to me, perhaps it’s because the author is also a women. She is in her twenties, perhaps early thirties, because she has a lover ("you" in line 1 of the poem) who is not living with her for some conflict not disclosed in the poem. Perhaps she is already married to another man, and she is not happy with this marriage (metaphor to the streets and city lamps). Notice how only the title alone gave us the hint that she is traveling using a taxi; she could very well be walking, biking, or even on a train. The fact that she is on a taxi suggests that she lives in a relatively urban area with packed streets (line 6, 7). The fact that she uses a taxi suggests that this relationship is also happening in secret (to hide her destination of travel), and she obviously spends time visiting “you” – her lover.
It is very interesting that without any description, I can imagine her sitting in the back seat of the taxi, looking out the back windshield at her lover as he/she gets smaller and smaller (line 8-10). Lowell ended the entire poem with a rhetorical question, as if she already knew the answer; she have no choice but to leave her lover, even though the reason is not specifically outlined in the poem.