Self-Portrait
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Self-Portrait
He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
as dull, as brutal
as the emptiness around him,
He doesn't want compromise,
nor to be ever nice
to anyone. Just mean,
and final in his brutal,
his total, rejection of it all.
He tried the sweet,
the gentle, the “oh,
let’s hold hands together”
and it was awful,
dull, brutally inconsequential.
Now he’ll stand on
his own dwindling legs.
His arms, his skin,
shrink daily. And
he loves, but hates equally.
Self-Portrait is about a man growing old and not being able to accept his loneliness. The speaker wants to act "brutal" (line 2) and "aggressive" (line 3) to deal with the "emptiness around him" (line 5) that he is feeling. He does not want to compromise on these characteristics, as he states in stanza two; the man feels as if his aggressiveness is a response appropriate to how he was treated by life. When the speaker describes "his own dwindling legs" (line 17), he is describing how he feels as if the loneliness that he is feeling is continuing to damage him. A key sentence is found in the last two lines: "And he loves, but hates equally" (line 19-20). Despite the man's angry response to how the world treated him, he cannot help feeling love sometimes, no matter how much he tries to avoid it.
(http://4thapenglish2012.wikispaces.com/Robert+Creeley-+Liliana+Rios)
(http://genius.com/2747347/Robert-creeley-self-portrait/As-the-emptiness-around-him)