Analyzing Poetry Form Structure Line Imagery Essay

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Despair in "Hope" by Ariel Dorfman

There is not much to hope for in Ariel Dorfman's "Hope." A citizen of Chile when the Pinochet regime led a coup over President Allende, Dorfman experienced what it was like to have friends captured and tortured by the new government. In this poem, Dorfman explores what it must have been like for the family -- in this case the father and mother -- of a captured son, their only "hope" of his still being alive coming from others who heard his voice while in prison and could report that he was being tortured. It is an ironic hope -- the fact that he is tortured gives comfort to the parents (at least he is still alive then). The ultimate hope within the poem, of course, stems from the fragmented question, "What kind of world / what country? / What I'm asking is / how can it be ... " The question is a cry for sanity in a world that has gone politically and militaristically mad. In "Hope," is the theme of a society broken down by political madness. This paper will examine this them and show how it is effected sound and closed form, Orwellian imagery, and the speaker's tone.

At the heart of the poem is a family, torn apart by war and political intrigue. Understanding the poet's background provides some context for the poem: clearly it is a reference to the Chilean coup by General Pinochet in 1973 and to the subsequent torture of political dissidents, like the "son" described in the poem "Hope." The family is the building block in any society, but in the poem it is broken -- "They took him / just for a few hours / they said / just for some routine / questioning. / After the car left, / the care with no license plate, / we couldn't / find out / anything else / about him." The halting measure of the verse gives the impression that details are emerging between breathes of the speaker, as though he has just traveled a long distance to deliver this message, or as though he cannot fully catch his breath to deliver this painful news. There is a hesitation and a lurching manner to the heartbreaking narrative of a son who has been "disappeared" by a government agency. It is a sign of the coming times, in which Orwellian regimes practice totalitarian nightmare policies in order to exercise complete control over all. But in doing so, they crush the foundations of society -- the family, breaking it into fragments and shards, just like the lines of the poem are broken into fragments and shards.

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Thus, the verse, line and meter reflect the subject of the poem -- which is the fracturing of a family and the society as a whole. The sound and closed form of the poem's structure is like that of prison memoir scrawled in snatches on scraps of paper, stuffed into a bottle for the world to see.

The Orwellian imagery is displayed in the ghostly images -- "the car with no license plate" -- a Black Mariah type of image (the government squad cars of the secret police who would round up individuals who were deemed a "threat" to the government's power and make them vanish -- sent off to the Gulag in Soviet Russia, or to Guantanamo Bay in the case of the modern war on terror -- or to "Villa Grimaldi ... in the red house / that belonged to the Grimaldis" as in the case of this poem). The sense that "Big Brother" Pinochet (never named but contextually alluded to) has not only broken families but physically confiscated their homes for his own tortuous purposes is manifested in this haunting line: "in the red house / that belonged to the Grimaldis ... " What happened to the Grimaldis is unknown. In fact, the unknown hangs over the poem like a specter: it is not know what has happened to son -- other than the snatches of information that come after months of silence -- and it is not said what has happened to the Grimaldis, whether they have fled, been arrested, tortured, killed perhaps, are still remaining in the country, living somewhere else. It is an Orwellian nightmare, shrouded in ignorance and secrecy, where the threat of violence looms in every line, filling the reader with dread and sorrow. The imagery allows the theme to be explored more forcefully, underscoring the insanity of this nightmare "world / country" where lies are told -- "they took him / just for a few hours / they said / just for some routine / questioning" -- and where no answers are ever given -- only inscrutable silence in which the only hope that lives is an ironic one.

The tone of the poem is filled with this awful irony -- and a sense of exasperation as a parent grieves for the lost months and years -- not knowing whether the son is alive or dead, taking comfort only in the news that the last anyone heard of him was his screams as he was being tortured: good news -- he lives. But the tone is also pleading -- pleading.....

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