Question

How does Dobyns’s use of unusual structure affect the meaning of “Icarus’s Flight?”

Answer 1

Answer:

The unusual structure affects the meaning of the poem because:

D. The way sentences extend from one stanza into the next pull the reader along.

Explanation:

It is as if the reader has no time to rest between stanzas. As a matter of fact, the unusual structure, the sentences that extend themselves from one stanza into the next, seem to pull the reader along.

Perhaps author Stephen Dobyns wanted readers to feel like Icarus felt as he fell. The lines pulling us down, to the next stanza, then the next, then to the ending, feel like gravity pulling Icarus down. Down and down he went, until he fell into the ocean, unseen and unnoticed, but enlightened. Below, there is an excerpt that shows how the author applies this structure:

What else could the boy have done?  Wasn’t

flight both an escape and a great uplifting?

And so he flew.  But how could he appreciate

his freedom without knowing the exact point

where freedom stopped?  So he flew upward

and the sun dissolved the wax and he fell.

But at last in his anticipated plummeting

he grasped the confines of what had been

his liberty.  You say he flew too far?