All I Was Doing Was Breathing | Style

All I Was Doing Was Breathing Style

Imagery

Some of the effect of the poem comes from its contrasting images. Line 2 emphasizes the minute aspects of the divine being that the speaker worships; she yearns for “every hair of that dark body.” In line 4, however, the image of the minute gives way to a vast, cosmic image, of the face of the divine being that is “like the moon.” By swinging the reader's awareness from the tiny to the immense, the poem conveys the entire range of the divine.

A somewhat similar swing between opposites can be seen in the direct references to the god. Krishna is represented clearly in human form. He possesses a human body, and he walks past the poet's house. But he is also represented in abstract, rather than concrete, terms as the “Dancing Energy,” which describes not a human form but something more immense and fundamental, the dynamic consciousness...
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