Niagara+River+(Hanan)

 There are two things you would notice when glancing at Kay Ryan's //The Niagara River, // the first is its brevity and the second is its uses of similes. Scanning over the poem, one would notice the many uses of "as" and the comparisons Ryan makes to nature. The poem is indeed short being composed of 3 sentences being divided up into 18 lines. This poem may have been created short to incite thought provoking interpretations into the reader's head.

Kay Ryan wrote //The Niagara River // like she would write any other one of her poems. She writes with easily understandable vocabulary. Intendedly, she writes the poem to be straightforward, yet complex and thought provoking at the same time. Ryan loves using literal devices, mostly similes, repetition, and alliterations, although she did not use alliteration in //The Niagara River. // The poems that Ryan writes tend to have the same purpose, they tend to compare the complex meaning of the poem to everyday objects that we have taken for granted, that we almost forgot they exited.

The tone of the poem is that of a being (man or woman) recollecting what he remembers. The tone is that of an observer looking far upon the river and observing the surroundings of the river. There is no specific area of concentration on the poem, the wording is that of speaking casually to someone. Maybe this way of talking is what Ryan intended to write, so that the poem would be portraying her as this knowledgeable woman teaching her learning youth a lesson, or more of an advice for taking care of nature, or of the ignorance and arrogance of human beings in general.

//The Niagara River // is broken down into three sentences, which will be analyzed in the order which they are given:

As though the river were a floor, we position our table and chairs upon it, eat, and have conversation. //​ // In the first sentence of "The Niagara River" Kay Ryan uses the simile "As though the river were a floor". Ryan uses the comparison to show us how much we don't appreciate nature; "...We position our table and chairs upon it, eat, and have conversation". We eat at a table and chairs and never think of how the floor is the thing holding us and the table and chairs up; we know that the floor is there, we just don't pay attention to it. The same concept of knowing the floor is there but not acknowledging it is the concept Ryan implies about nature, we know that nature is our surrounding, we just don't take care of nature. Ryan implies that we should care and not treat nature as the "floor", although she doesn't say how, she leaves that to the reader to figure out.

As it moves along, we notice - as calmly as though dining room paintings were being replaced-- the changing scenes along the shore.

In the next sentence of the poem, Ryan is portraying us and what we do seeing the destruction of nature. "As it moves along, /we notice", is referring to as the ignorance of nature is moving on, and nature is being destroyed we notice something. "as/calmly as though/dining room paintings/were being replaced", we notice nature's ruin very calm and there is no problem with the destruction because, we don't see any major changes happening to us, humans don’t take into fact what will come to the next generations. "The changing scenes/along the shores", is referring to the destruction and suffering of nature increasing more and more. The shores are representing nature or problems that humans may have, and the changing scenes are the phases of destruction or madness respectively, increasing.

We do know, we do know this is the Niagara River, but it is hard to remember what that means.

The last sentence gives the conclusion for Ryan's idea of human’s perspective towards nature. "We do know/we do know/that this is the/ Niagara river ", Ryan uses the literary device of repetition in this sentence to emphasize that we realize that nature is being destroyed and that we are mostly the cause for it, "but/ it is hard to remember/what that means. Humans are in a denial stage, we know what is happening to our surroundings, but we won’t understand the major reason for fixing the mistakes until a major event "shakes us" into reality.

Here Ryan ended abruptly letting the reader think about what she means by "it is hard to remember/what that means". The "that" may also be referring to the problems of humans in general in addition to referring to nature and the surroundings on earth. This is the usual way Ryan would end her poems, which is why she is one of the most thought provoking poets of this time.

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