On O`hara`s `having A Coke With You`

Well, let`s take perhaps the most obscure image in the poem, from the final lines of the first section: `in the warm New York 4 o clock light we are drifting back and forth / between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles`. We know that this is a love poem, and we know it engages the history of visual art forms - most obviously painting and sculpture (or `statuary` in the poem) - to examine the relation between art and life. Throughout the poem, there`s the suggestion that art falls short of the intensity of lived experience. Bearing this in mind, lets look a little more closely at the image above. As you know, this is a simile. It asks the reader to make a comparison between `drifting back and forth between each other` and `a tree breathing through its spectacles`. As a love poem, `in the warm New York 4 o clock light we are drifting back and forth / between each other` might suggest to us a kind of process of exchange, dialogue perhaps, an experience shared, as well as a strong sense of intimacy too. `Drifting back and forth` is both very relaxed (`going with the flow`) but also active: it`s back and forth, from one to the other. A `tree breathing through its spectacles` however, is more obscure. We could be forgiven for immediately conjuring a surreal image of a tree wearing a pair of glasses, and attempting to somehow breathe through them: there`s something about this that doesn`t make sense the image doesn`t feel clarifying.

What if, however, `spectacles` means something else? From our drama reading we know that a `spectacle` is a visually striking display. Imagine you are looking at the tree leaves moving above you - could that be a spectacle? If, in love, our experience is heightened, perhaps we can imagine each movement of the tree as a spectacle a series of mini spectacles akin to a series of frames in a film. The poet ties breathing, life, love to this succession of amazing spectacles, the leaves moving in the breeze. And the visual artworks, so static elsewhere in the poem, especially immediately prior to the lines above (`it`s hard to believe that anything could be as still / as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary`) are compared to the far more dynamic, cinematic account of this shared moment between lovers, the trees overhead, upturned like lungs. Perhaps the most important lesson here is that, if an image doesn`t feel like it clarifies or lends further lucidity to the poem`s `content`, so to speak, there may be something deeper going on. Make sure you look up each of the more difficult words in the poem, especially if they`re central to certain images, in order to find further options for your reading.