Roethke Vs. Goya Case

I chose the villanelle poem The Waking by Theodore Roethke on page 11 of Strand and the painting The Giant by Francisco Goya on page 488 of Gombrich. This poem and painting have many similarities and differences between them, but how a person interprets a poem is very similar to the way they interpret a painting.

The Waking by Theodore Roethke on page 11 of Strand. Is a villanelle and was written in 1953. A villanelle has five three-lined stanzas ending with a quatrain. The rhyme scheme follows as A, B, A, A, B, A. For the first few stanzas it follows this pattern but then changes on the fifth stanza, which ends the poem. The line "I learn where I have to go" appears in the first, third, and final stanza and is an example of how one wishes to understand something that is beyond comprehension.

The painting The Giant by Francisco Goya, which is also called The Colossus, is a burnished aquatint etching. Goya produced a great number of etchings and this technique called aquatint allows not only etched lines but also shaded patches too. Goya's prints are either biblical, historical, or visions of apparitions. This painting could represent a nightmare or a haunting in his dream. The figure of the giant is sitting on the edge of the world in the moonlight like an evil demon or monster of your dreams. You can definitely make your own imagination play around with this apparition.

In the poem the speaker finds himself stuck in a routine and wants to understand the meaning behind it. The poem is about wanting to know the meaning of life and that humans learn the importance of their existence while awake and asleep. The line, "I wake to sleep and take my waking slow, I feel my fate in what I cannot fear." Sleep becomes a metaphor for death in this poem. If waking is seen as mortality and sleep is the idea of immorality, then death is being compared to sleep, God, and nature. The giant in the painting could be searching for the meaning of life as well, with his blank stare into the moonlight of the sky. The painting is probably a haunting from on of Goya's dreams and in his dream he could have been thinking about life and death. The speaker tries to become one with nature for instance, in the fourth stanza "light makes the tree; but who can tell us how?" You get a sense that the tree is not a tree at all and is an example of something that is magnificent than what we would think of.

In addition, the poem may also suggest that the decisions people make will represent their personal heaven and hell. Since the giant is seen to be a monster or an evil spirit it might be that the painting is Goya's a dream of what his personal hell is like. When someone is dreaming they may only be asleep last for a couple minutes, but spend an endless amount of time in their dream state. Dreams may not be just be a random shot of energy, but it might be a glimpse into ones eternity. For example, in the line "what falls away is always. And is near." This suggests that the speaker wakes up and questions what he sees around him is reality or perhaps he is still asleep. "Waking to sleep" is a paradox that conflicts with itself in the villanelle poem. The repetition of this paradox has an effect on the meaning