In my classroom discussion about the poem, “Lobsters”, we were questioning the context of the poem. We had questions such as, “Why does the author, Howard Nemerov, use odd descriptions of the colors?”, so on and forth. My discussion group was talking about the literal meaning versus symbolic. The group I watched seemed far more interesting than the one I was in. They went beyond the thinking of the symbolic terms from the poem. I remember one classmate introduced the symbolic idea of the poem was similar to the slave trade coming to the New World. When our teacher read the theme of the poem, I was shocked. ‘Death is inevitable’, I would have never know that by just reading, annotating, and analyzing the poem. I have always been a bright thinker however, during the class discussions I could tell we were leading into a theme that might be darker than expected.
I thought the theme of the poem was easy. My theme was about what things humans should/shouldn’t take advantage of. The theme I chose was the starting point to the specific theme in mind. Our discussion also talked about the comparison between the lobsters and spiders. I couldn’t imagine the similarities my classmates found in the poem that were symbolical meanings about the two animals. The discussion make me think beyond the text and my own thinking, it’s like we dropped into a universe below us where we think further than the concrete idea.
