Sign Inventory, Week 3

Poem: “The Assassination” by Donald Justice
pg. 202 of Contemporary American Poetry

1. The poem highlights recursive elements in the language evoking through the first word of each line, such as “It,” “We,” “Now” and “Here” then breaks the chain of recursivity at the end of the first and second stanza.
2. The poem seems to play with the agency of the language between the static and the active as it often uses such verbs as “begins,” courses,” “mounts,” etc., but shifts with “to be” verbs throughout.
3. The subject of the poem shifts from the “we” in the first stanza to the “I” in the last stanza.
4. The subject of “It” in the poem shifts from active to passive agency as the first stanza implies its individual activity as it “courses” and “mounts” until the “We” becomes “involved with the surge.” The second stanza uses passive voice as the “It” is being acted upon rather than evoking the active agent.
5. The only distinctive characters in the poem are the woman selling carnations and the man in a straw hat.
6. The only seeming sense of the speaker addressing the subject or subjects occurs in the last line of the poem when the speaker states, “Look, we are dancing.”
7. Nearly every line formulates as a full statement, yet the poem seems to subvert such a recursive element at the end of each stanza until the last stanza completely subverts it.
8. The verb usage for “It” seems to shift from the first to the second stanza in the first stanza, “It begins,” “It courses” and “It mounts” while in the second stanza the verbs “burst” and “running” seems to evoke a speedier agency.
9. The last four lines of the poem seem to blur the lines of what “It” connotes to as the speaker introduces the ballroom and the orchestra.
10. All throughout the poem, “It” seems to actively move through the transformation of the verbs, yet in the last stanza, “It” goes through the act of confinement when it shelters itself.