Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: I’m martyr to a motion not my own; What’s freedom for? To know eternity. I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. But who would count eternity in days? These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: (I measure time by how a body sways). Source: Roethke, Theodore. “I Knew a Woman.” The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. New York: Random House Inc., 1961. Poetry Foundation. Web. 9 June 2011. Which excerpt is a simile that indicates a thoughtful mood? “Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:” “(I measure time by how a body sways).” “These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:” “I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.”
Answers
The beauty of the female body has generated lyrical outpourings from poets and songwriters since language began. My favourite poet of the joyous and playful appreciation of female charm and sexual attraction is Theodore Roethke, an American poet who died in 1963. Harold Bloom wrote of him: "There is no poetry anywhere that is so valuable conscious of the human body as Roethke’s . . . . He more than any other is a poet of pure being . . . . When you read him, you realize with a great surge of astonishment and joy that, truly, you are not yet dead" (Bloom 117-118).
The same playfulness displayed in his elegy for a student appears in his poem about sexual attraction “I Knew a Woman.” The verb of the title indicates that the relationship, vital earlier, no longer exists. Roethke’s opening line is arresting in its artful refutation of the cliché about beauty being “only skin deep.”
Certainly, the verb of line one is intended to be interpreted in the biblical sense of carnal knowledge as well as simple acquaintance. “Lovely in her bones” is a phrase so compressed that it beggars extended translation. Suffice it to say that her loveliness was both exterior and interior, a structural quality rather than a façade. Line 2 indicates her empathic relationship with nature. It is a mere pause before the mind-stopping line describing her movements. Various denotations of movement are soon to be played upon, but the first suggestion is that her lovely bones in motion are an emotionally moving sight to behold.
I sense a smile when the poet writes of the “shapes a bright container can contain.” The verb “can” is also a noun describing a container of light-reflecting metal but one that cannot change shape. At another level of meaning the container is the woman’s flesh within which her bones are located and which is capable of graceful movement and shape change. The ensuing mention of gods and English poets learned in Greek lends an elevation that prevents a reader’s attaching slang meanings to “can” and “cheek to cheek.” Almost.
hope it helps you
Answer :
Cambridge English Dictionary defines 'simile' as '(the use of) an expression comparing one thing with another, always including the words "as" or "like."'
In the given excerpt from Theodore's poem “I Knew a Woman,” the line “I swear she cast a shadow white as stone” is a simile that indicates a thoughtful mood.
In this line, the woman's shadow has been compared to a white stone.