Poetry Response #4: Beginning Again by Franz Wright

Beginning Again

By: Franz Wright

"If I could stop talking, completely

cease talking for a year, I might begin

to get well," he muttered.

Off alone again performing

brain surgery on himself

in a small badly lit

room with no mirror. A room

whose floor ceiling ans walls

are all mirrors, what a mess

oh my God-

And still

 it stands,

the question

not how begin

again, but rather

Why?

So we sit there

together

the mountain

and me, Li Po

said, until only the mountain

remains.

     Beginning Again by Franz Wright, is very well done in portraying a struggle within themselves to become a new, almost better, person. He explains his difficulty in changing with the metaphor of "performing brain surgery on himself in a small badly lit room with no mirror.He also explains it as, "A room whose floor ceiling and walls are all mirrors, what a mess oh my God." Both of these show the difficulties in trying to change in two different ways. The first give almost impossibles as if he is trying to change his brain on his own and fix what is wrong but with the complications of doing brain surgery with no way to see what he is doing. The second is in a room of all mirrors as we try to get away from the reflection he is now and can't. The second stanza he is getting the the hard question of how does he change and begin again. Moving onto the third stanza he asks why, what's the point on trying to begin again in the first place. Then he comes to a conclusion in trying to begin again. He listens to Li Po to sit on a mountain until only the mountain remains. Once you can become one with the mountain and it only remains then you can begin yet again. 

Li Po was a poet from the 700 CE in Sezchawn, China. He also really liked the mountains.