Critical analysis of the poem Ode by Pedro Pietri to a grass jumper

The poem can be analyzed from various schools of thought. Let us consider further criticism. The new criticism focuses on the aesthetic aspect, the tropes used in it. An unexpected grasshopper staring at the poet’s thoughts is personification. The telephone that has a mind of its own is again rhetorically an embodiment. Miracle on 53rd Street is magical realism. You take care of your own affairs and I will not ask you any questions, again poetry is steeped in personification. My non-existent brushes are a metaphor that suggests that grass does not grow in a high-rise building.

Psychoanalytically speaking, there is a hint of selfish narcissism in the poet’s mind. The poet’s gaze is in Lacan’s language it is a phallic gaze. The poet does not make poetry music about the grasshopper, but looks at it from different male points of view. The grasshopper that looks at him fixes a male phallic gauze together. This look is a look that is also cinematically constructed. Rather than delight, the language of the poem revolves around the gaze. The relationship is impersonal, “you take care of your business and I take care of mine.”

From Jung’s point of view, the grasshopper becomes an archetype of a gnome or troll. The grasshopper is psychologically portrayed in a language where the archetype defies rather than deifies the presence of the subject. The grasshopper becomes a psychic entity, an invading mind monster that speaks to the poet in the language of a cosmic machine. In Jungian language, grasshopper is the presence of a dark archetype, a small incarnate devil who deliberately disturbs the privacy of the poet.

Existentially speaking, there is a hint of deliberate nihilism in the poem. The poet has denied the existence of the grasshopper in a cloud of language that shows that the grasshopper has deliberately invaded his privacy. The poet is intimidated by the presence of the grasshopper being. The being of the grasshopper is examined in the topology of language as the presence of the existence of consciousness that denies the being of the grasshopper in impersonal language. For example, “you take care of your business and I will take care of mine.” Consciousness becomes a literary instrument of “nothing”, expressed in the language of Sartre. The surprise of finding the grasshopper does not become an ornament of delight but a literary vehicle for the expression of anguish. There is an existential mysticism of language that is put into the hyperbole of machinery. Is the poet a punk to be a mechanized saint? Caution, suspicion and the spirit of hostility are other existential gestures that are transmitted through the poet’s language. The grasshopper is the poet’s other existential. The poet catches the grasshopper in the language of another who is traumatized in the world of words.