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WHAT IS IN A POEM?

Juan Ramon Jimemez, a Spaniard born in Moguer, was known throughout the world "for his lyrical poetry" (Wasson, 513). He was a man with many different styles and variations of poems. In one of Jimemez's poems, "Hand Against the Light," he uses many hidden meanings and a distracted style of writing in order to portray the deeper meaning of these poems.
Poets have a certain way of expressing their thoughts into beautiful, yet deeper lines of poetry. Jimemez succeeds in doing this in his poem "Hand Against the Light." In this poem he talks about the soul of a human being and how that person, with their soul can accomplish anything they want. He goes deeper with his thoughts when he writes the words "of light only and of shadow only and only ours," (line 8). Here he is saying that just as the soul is the thing that makes a person who they are, their traits help to create the soul too. It consists of the "light," the good in a person, and the "shadow," the bad in a person, and the person's self. There is never one without the other just as a soul would not be a soul without these things. One could say that Jimenez tried to let people know that their soul would always be with them, just as the shadow will always be with the light, and the light will always accompany the shadow.
Poets utilize many different tools to disguise their style of poetry. In "Hand Against the Light," Jimemez distracts the reader into thinking that by writing in free verse no set pattern is defined. Jimemez wrote "Hand Against the Light" as a sonnet containing fourteen lines. There could be two different types of sonnets used in this poem. The first one is a Petrarchan Sonnet. The Petrarchan Sonnet is divided into separate lines to reveal a story or describe a problem. The first eight lines of the poem, or the octave, tells a story or reveals the problem. Jimemez does this in telling the first eight lines by telling a story about how human souls are created. The last six lines of the poem, or the sestet, reply to the story by saying that human souls allow people to reach beyond their goals. This pattern of dividing the fourteen lines into lines of six and eight sets the foundation of the Petrarchan Sonnet in the poem. Free verse in the poem "Hand Against the Light" allows for the loss of the other form of writing called a lyric poem. Lyric poems "express. . . feelings of a single speaker. . . .They may be free verse. . . . Concentrates on describing a particular moment" (Prentice, 1012). Lyric poems are written in highly musical verse. Music allows people to feel every type of emotion in the world. These musical moments in the poem speak to the reader as if they were listening to a wonderful piece of music. They provide for the understanding of other moments in the poem itself. The particular moment described in Jimenez's "Hand Against the Light" is when the soul emerges and is born. This is the evidence found proving that the poem is a lyric poem.
The purpose of many poems is to encourage the reader to see the hidden meanings inside poetry. Such is the purpose of "Hand Against the Light". In this selection, the use of free verse is used as a distraction and in reality is a sonnet. The two underlying styles found in the poem are the Petrarchan Sonnet and the Lyrical Verse. As found in the evidence of the poem, the use of the lyrical verse is the most evident for the development of a deeper style of writing. Jimemez wrote the poem with a melodic verse and a structure of lines giving it the requirements of lyric verse.