Symbol Analysis
While taking us on a tour of her ruined statue, the speaker also gives us a bit of an anatomy lesson. In almost every stanza, she finds clever ways to weave in mentions of the various stone body parts that are scattered around. Though these parts are all part of a statue in the extended metaphor of the poem, something about the mention of them also gets across the feeling that the speaker is living in the remains of a giant human corpse. If we were her, we'd get a better real estate broker. Just sayin'.
- Lines 3-4: The first mention of a body part comes when the speaker says, "Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles / Proceed from your great lips." It's kind of an intense image, right? The lips are a pretty intimate part of the body, and the idea of someone's mouth being full of animals, or at least animalistic activities, is sort of horrifying. It's almost like the speaker is dehumanizing the statue with the mention of this human body part, since all that comes from its lips now is the sounds of animals.
- Lines 8-9: The speaker continues the body part thing with "Thirty years now I have labored / To dredge the silt from your throat." It's cool how this links back to the mention of lips. Both lines seem to be about how the speaker can't communicate with the statue anymore.
- Lines 12-13: Next we have, "I crawl like an ant in mourning / Over the weedy acres of your brow." This image relates the general state of decay of the statue. Apparently, the speaker doesn't have weed killer, because pesky plants are growing everywhere. You could also interpret this line to mean the weeds have actually grown from the statue, forming living eyebrows (eesh) where before there was only stone.
- Lines 14-15: The speaker is crawling over the face of the statue "To mend the immense skull-plates and clear / The bald, white tumuli of your eyes." We get the mention of two body parts here. First, we have skull-plates, which we wouldn't like to eat off of, but which totally conjure the image of a human corpse. Then there are these spooky eyes, which look like tumuli, or burial mounds.
- Lines 20-21: The corpse-like imagery continues with the mention of the statue's "fluted bones." This seems to carry through the image of skull-plates and tumuli eyes from earlier. More and more the speaker is weaving the idea that these ruins are the remains of a human who's died.
- Lines 24-27: Our tour of the body ends where it began: the statue's mouth. The speaker says, "The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue." This fleshy image makes us feel that this statue might not be made of stone, and it carries through both the lack of communication idea as well as the deathly imagery which are both woven into the motif of body parts.