Sign Inventory, Week 1

Poem: “My Shoes” by Charles Simic
pg. 432 in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

1. The poem shifts the agency of the speaker through each stanza by the use of the possessive “my” to “me” and to the “you” when conveying the purpose of the shoes.
2. The fourth stanza is the only moment that the speaker uses the first person “I” in the poem.
3. The poem bookends the image of the shoes with the first stanza describing them as “toothless mouths” and “partly decomposed animal skins/Smelling of mice nests,” while the last stanza provides more animate and personified images with the shoes being “ascetic and maternal” and more in kin “to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men,/ With your mute patience, forming/ The only true likeness of myself.”
4. The third stanza is the only one to open with a question.
5. The first two stanzas evoke images of decomposition, decay, and death while the last two stanzas evoke the ideas of building, endurance, and formation.
6. The words “Gospel” and “Saints” are the only two words capitalized outside of grammatical correctness.
7. The agency shifts from “continuing” and “guiding” of the shoes in the second stanza to the speaker who would “proclaim,” “devise,” and build around the shoes in the fourth stanza.
8. The poem mentions the term “life” three times, all in different contexts.
9. The poem mentions the shoes as “toothless mouths” in the first stanza and having “mute patience” in the last stanza.
10. The first stanza creates a catalogue of specific and concrete images while the last stanza creates a catalogue of more abstract images of the shoes.