Analysis of Archibald Lampmans The City of the End of...

Analysis of Archibald Lampmans The City of the End of Things Iron Towers. Terrible flames. Inhuman music, rising and falling. Grim depths and abysses, where only night holds sway and gruesome creatures crawl before their awesome Master. Through these disturbing images, and a masterful adaptation of the sonnet structure, Archibald Lampman summons forth The City of the End of Things. The nameless City he creates is a place of mechanical slavery and despair, where Nature cannot exist, and human life is forfeit. The place is a veritable Hell; no, worse than a hell - it is Tartarus. By evoking the name of this, the most feared of realms in classical Mythology, Lampman roots his poem, and thus his City and†¦show more content†¦Tartarus rose out of the primeval forces that existed before creation and, as such beings were wont to do, slept with his mother/sister. From this union arose Typhon and Echidna. These figures add to the poem as well, for elements of these offspring return frequently in the verse - Typhon was a gigantic, terrible being, the defeater of Zeus, fire breathing and powerful, spewing gouts of flame from his wounds; Echidna was a merciless snake-woman, an enemy of man and mother of, among others, Cerberus - the guardian of the gates of Hell. Interestingly, in some variants of the story, another creature was spawned from Tartarus union with Gaia: Thanatos. Not only does Tartarus (the realm), and by association, the City at the End of Things, contain death - it created it. These mythological elements are thoroughly enmeshed within the structure of the poem; the image of fire springs up several times, the figure of death roams the City, and the general notion of the City as a terrible prison or place of horror is consistently conveyed. Therefore, we can use the poems mythological basis as a springboard into several different readings of it. For instance: the poem is often approached from a Christian point of view. There is much to favour