Places you don't want to be

In ‘Camouflaging the Chimera’, Komunyakaa uses the diction we’d associate with nature and camouflage such as ‘twigs’, ‘helmets’ and ‘mud’. We are thwarted into something of a wild war-zone where the speakers find themselves alone with ‘ghosts’ that walk among them. Someone or something has died here. The use of enjambment signifies no break in their collective thoughts; this is a ‘world’ where they are all nervous, where they move fluidly as one. We find a moment of poetic beauty in the middle of the poem when the speaker alliterates ‘station of shadows’. This works like  some kind of milestone in this poem where we feel lost in its magnitude an uncertainty. The idea of the apes ‘throwing stones at the sunset’ sounds crazy but it reminds us that there is a romantic backdrop to this warzone. We can also imagine it is about to get dark for the characters, signifying danger, which is probably more reason for them to move fast. Additionally, we find many ‘s’ sounds in this text, symbolic of the quiet hissing and sliding through the forest atmosphere.

This is very different to the ‘Filling Station’ by Bishop. She strategically uses repetition to create a paranoid tone in the poem at this ‘gray’, ‘dirty’ environment. This repetition gives the poem a song-like voice, even without any end-rhymes, unbefitting of the busy, dull environment. The speaker is adamant about the idea of this place being ‘oily’, which is heavy, uncomfortable and pungent. This fits the idea that the filling station is a place we don’t expect love to spring up but alas it belongs to a happy family who water their plants and embroider their doilies. The use of end-stopping at the last line creates a powerful volta as the speaker comes to the conclusion about the magic of this place.