When I was a child my mom
sometimes sang me to sleep with a song called “Me and My Shadow,” or my dad often
entertained me into the “land of Nod” with stories about hand shadows that he
made on my bedroom wall. Remembering those nights filled with music, stories,
and the wonder of shadows led me to this week’s prompt.
Shadows have an intriguing,
mystical aspect, and we often encounter then in poetry, even when the poems’
subjects are not specifically shadows or even shadow-driven. “Shadows of the
world appear” in part II of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott;” in Eliot’s “The
Hollow Men,” we read “Between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow;” and
in Yeats’s “When You Are Old,” we find the deep shadows of a loved one’s eyes – and this is just a tiny sampling!
Superstitious thought proposes
that your shadow is part of your soul and that to step on or throw stones at a
person’s shadow may cause that person harm. In dreams, shadows are said to
represent a person’s latent potential, fear, illusion, and unknown parts of the
self. Seeing your own shadow in a dream may also signify an aspect of yourself
that you haven’t yet acknowledged or recognized; it may also suggest a quality or
part of yourself that you reject. In Jungian psychology, the shadow or “shadow
aspect” refers to the unconscious – everything of which a person is not
fully conscious, as well as a facet of personality that the conscious ego
doesn’t recognize within itself.
Shadows typically suggest things
that are dark or threatening, but have you ever seen the beauty in a weeping
willow’s shadow on a lake, or the way cloud shadows float over a field or
mountainside? This week, let’s think about shadows and write about them. Keep
in mind that you needn’t go to the dark side in a shadow poem – though you can,
of course, if you wish to.
Examples:
Suggestions:
Be sure to stretch your inner
vision and your imagination. Remember that a poem needs room to move, sometimes
away from your original idea. Give your poem room to veer off course and to
change direction.
More important than your
compositional method or conceptual framework is how you make a poem about a
single experience (idea, time, place, bird, stone, stream, etc.) bigger than its
singularity. In poetry, it’s important approach the universal through the
personal.
Now …
1. Write a poem about
your shadow.
2. Write a poem to
your shadow.
3. Write a poem in which shadow
becomes an extended metaphor.
4. Write a poem about hand shadows on a wall.
5. Write a poem about any shadow – a weeping willow’s
shadow, a tenement’s shadow, an animal’s shadow, skyscraper’s shadow, a
flower’s shadow, cloud shadows on a field.
6. Write a poem using the following (borrowed from T. S.
Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) as your title or epigraph: “Your Shadow at Evening
Rising to Meet You.”
7. Write a poem based on the following shadow poem, written
by Emily Dickinson (c. 1863):
Presentiment – is that long Shadow – on the Lawn
Indicative that Suns go down –
The notice to the startled Grass –
That Darkness – is about to pass –
Presentiment – is that long Shadow – on the Lawn
Indicative that Suns go down –
The notice to the startled Grass –
That Darkness – is about to pass –
8. Do you remember the old song “The Shadow of Your Smile,”
famously sung by Barbara Streisand? Try writing a poem based on the title of
that song. Here’s the song for you to enjoy:
