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Lion
Posted: 14 June 2003
Word Count: 41
Summary: This just happened, don't ask me how!!
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Lion
With your great golden head and tangled mane,
your eyes reflect my fear.
What thread binds me to you?
What cage keeps you from me?
Break loose into the wild savannah of my love
and make me your lioness forever.
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Comments by other Members
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 James Graham at 20:15 on 19 June 2003
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If you hadn't told us this poem 'just happened', the poem itself would have conveyed that anyway. It has real spontaneity - the expression of the feeling seems very close to the feeling itself. I was reminded a little, especially by your two questions, of Blake's 'Tyger' - this is a rather different response, but akin to Blake's. The questions are good because they're not rhetorical but answerable. (Not with a simple answer, but they lead the reader to explore answers.) The cage is not only the actual cage, otherwise the question doesn't need to be asked. So what cage keeps human and feline apart? Who is really the caged one? (Ted Hughes's jaguar is caged but seems to have clung on to its elemental wildness, its inner being.) 'Fear' forms part of the cage too, the nature of the human and the nature of the animal, but there's still a 'thread' in spite of all that. A little tour de force - immediacy of feeling, and potential for the reader to bring something to the poem.
James.
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 poemsgalore at 18:50 on 20 June 2003
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Well, thanks for the comments. Maybe I've made the meaning of the poem a little too obscure, it can be taken to mean a literal lion but actually is symbolic of two people and their possible relationship which both are trying to avoid.
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James Graham at 19:59 on 20 June 2003
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No, it's not obscure, I was too thick to see it! But now I think it's like the optical illusion of the Greek vases that turn out to be two faces in silhouette facing each other - you can look at it a different way and you see a different meaning. The literal lion is there all right, and won't go away. But the other meaning, concerning two people, is clearly (I see now) the one that is uppermost. It's not the poem's fault that I could only see the lion!
James.
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Agnieszka Ryk at 20:40 on 20 June 2003
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poemsg - might it be a suggestion to change the title to something less lion-related, even just 'You' or something more ambiguous like that. The lions would still be obviously there in the poem, but it might shift the balance in a way that suited your aims. I think there's a few ways you could play with the title that would subtley change the meaning of the poem.
a
x
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Ellenna at 22:37 on 21 June 2003
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This is wonderful .. it captures those unseen barriers between two people.... who are hovering on the edge of letting go.
Ellenna:)
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poemsgalore at 12:40 on 22 June 2003
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That's it exactly Ellenna, thank you. The reference to the lion was deliberate as it represents the powerful emotions that are difficult to control, sorry but the title stays :-)
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bluesky3d at 13:09 on 22 June 2003
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Kathleen
I enjoy reading all you poems, but this is the first, which I have seen, where you have broken loose into the wild savannah away from rhyming style, and I am intrigued.
Have you written others before?
I had the sense that you too, were breaking away.
Great stuff!
A :o)
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