How Does Poetry Making Meaning

How Does Poetry Make Meaning

Yusef Komunyakaa uses antithesis between stone and flesh in his poem “Facing it” to emphasize How he struggled between his confusion and apathy when he visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  

The poem begin with “ My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite” where creates a image that the speaker was standing in front of the memorial and looking at his own reflection. “Black face” and “black granite” are two opposite objects and the difference between “face” and “granite” is that face can move and it represents alive but granite is a solid and lifeless which related to death. Those two contrary objects expressed the idea that the speaker was spliting himself into two separate part: The illusion and the reality. He could not distinguish between the truth and his imagination. However, “black face” and ‘black granite” are opposite to each other, the speaker uses the same color “black” to describe those two objects, which give us a sense that there are some relations between the “face” and the “granite”. They are still moving closer while they resist each other. As he mentioned his black face fades and hiding inside the black granite, the distinction between his face and the granite was disappearing, and the granite conceals the reflection of his face. It may expresses that the speaker is also disappearing just as those veterans who sacrificed in the Vietnam War, and there is no antithesis since the speaker is join into them. However, the truth is that he is still alive and has to suffer the pain of losing his comrades. Those are two relative emotions that the speaker wanted to express. Then, in line 16 “ my own in letters like smoke”. The “smoke” here also represents that the speaker imagine himself fading in to smoke, which also express the idea that the speaker imagine himself disappear and join in to those veterans.

Although Yusef is immersed in sadness, he wants to conceal his feeling by saying “I’m stone, I’m flesh”, which responses to the idea that Yusef is separating himself into two fragments. “I’m stone” refers his reflection that inside the granite, and “I’m flesh” refers his body outside the granite. Yusef wants to internalize his emotion and feeling by convincing himself that he would be insensible just like “stone”. However, in the previous line “I said I wouldn’t, Dammit: No tears”, Yusef appears really emotional, There exists two extreme affection contrary to each other,so between line 4 and 5 is a transaction between his true feeling and the expression. After he persuade himself that “I’m stone”, Yusef immediately mention that “I’m flesh”, “flesh” is a wired word since normally people would use body to describe themselves, but “flesh” gives us a sense of a soulless body. This might expresses that although his body still exists, his soul is gone.