Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Reasons for Attendance
I liked the poem Reasons for Attendance because it is interesting to see the stages of this man’s thought process and how he came to a final decision. The poem starts out with a man drawn to the window of a dance club, where he ponders whether to join the couples inside or remain outside. He sees these couples who are supposed to have “the lion’s share of happiness” and knows that this is pure “inaccuracy.” By the end of the poem, the question is no longer whether he should go in or stay outside, but rather, where he can find happiness. The couples inside the club believe that they have found it together through dancing, but he knows that the music will not help them find the happiness they are looking for.
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The person's view of the dance seems to morph throughout the poem, beginning with innocent shifting, to sex, and finally ending with mauling. I took this to be symbolic of a maturation of the cynicism of the narrator. In the first stanza he says the dancers are young - "all under twenty-five" and that they shift with flushed faces to the beat of happiness. The second stanza shows signs of cynicism about the innocent dance of the young people saying that they just want sex, and that it is untrue that couples get all the happiness. In the third stanza the once loud and authoritative trumpet turns into a rough-tongued bell, he denies that it is art, and finally refers to the dancing as mauling in the last stanza. However, at the end, he seems to question his final line of thought. Maybe his cynicism is a defense mechanism for not going into the dance. I'm not sure. This is a very interesting poem.
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