“The Loft” (Analysis and Discussion)
Here is my analysis and discussion on this week’s Poem of the Week: “The Loft” by Richard Jones. Stay tuned tomorrow for the posting of next week’s Poem of the Week.
My first reaction is that this moment takes place in a city like Detroit or St. Louis; developed industrial cities on a river. However, the author informs us that “afternoon light” is “falling beautifully into the room”. The problem with Detroit or St. Louis is that both cities sit to the west of their respective rivers. This means that you can’t open a window and have afternoon light pour in while also being able to see the river and the rest of the city. This leads me to believe that this poem takes place in an industrialized city that is on the EAST side of its river. Potential cities include: Washington D.C., Albuquerque, Memphis, or any industrialized city that sits on the east side of a river. (Personally, I would lean towards a suburb of Washington, D.C knowing that Richard Jones attended college in Virginia).
The Characters: With the information about the setting, the reader can begin to form conclusions about the characters of the poem.
1. The narrator. After reading through the poem several times, you may conclude that the man, who is our narrator in this poem, is a rather apathetic individual. This is a pretty sound conclusion since the woman is the one doing all the action. The woman opened the windows. The woman burned incense and candles. The woman was talking quietly and moving about the room. While the man “lay, calm as a lake reflecting the nothingness of late summer sky.”
2. The woman. The woman is not characterized very much in this poem. She does a lot of mundane things like open windows and talk quietly about stuff that the narrator doesn’t feel the need to mention specifically. This character may exist solely for the purpose of focusing the narrators thoughts and actions so that the author could explore the narrator’s mind as it reacted to the woman.
3. Economic Status. They live in a more fanciful house farther away from the poor housing around the factories. This would suggest that the characters are in a more luxurious house. Furthermore, poor people probably couldn’t afford to burn incense and candles just to set the mood for intimacy. With this information, one could even go so far as to infer that these characters are of the upper middle class.
What is the purpose of this work? What is this poem trying to tell us? I would argue that this poem is bringing up the idea of casual sex. I would claim that this poem’s purpose is to highlight the average casual sex meeting as something that is mundane, passive, and unattractive.
When you read this poem, it leaves you with a melancholy feeling. It leaves this effect because we can relate to the narrator’s feelings of emptiness and lack of self-confidence. Everybody feels that way once in a while. However, in the modern time, we have dating sites that allows us to curb these feelings by meeting people online and then in real life to hook up (as early as Match.com in 1995). The narrator does just this; he finds a woman and convinces himself that he wants to sleep with her. But, after convincing her as well, finds he does not want to after all, since this won’t provide the satisfaction he wants, but rather, a temporary feeling of pleasure which amounts to nothing in the grand scheme of things. He sees this same feeling reflected in the woman’s dreamy eyes and quiet muttering. Richard Jones conveys this sexual encounter as mundane and unpleasant by choosing not to use any passionate words to describe their actions or feelings. Jones even has the characters open up a window to see the factories, which echoes the poem’s overall purpose: pulling back the shades and promises of casual sex to reveal the assembly line nature of it all and its lack of passion and romance.
