Lobsters

     One idea from the classroom discussion of "Lobsters," by Howard Nemerov that interested me was the comparison of the lobsters to philosophers in their ivory towers. The comparison is not so far-fetched. Like philosophers, lobsters appear from the outside to be entirely shut off from the outside world in a dreamlike state, crawling through time with no apparent regard for the rest of the world. Similarly, philosophers might also appear to an observer to be nothing more than extremely lazy humans. However, both are more than daydreamers, the lobsters with their "imperial claws" and "beauty of strangeness," the philosophers with their thoughts and ideas.

      It would be an understatement to say that this influenced my view of the poem. I started to realize that the lobsters themselves were more than victims, and that the author was saying a bit more than an animal-rights statement. Rather, I began grasping at the deeper ideas of the poem, like death, ignorance, and the cyclic nature of the world. The comparison of lobsters to philosophers opened up my eyes to the greater depths of the poem.