Answers to “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See” – Lawrence Ferlinghetti (p. 55)
1. Ferlinghetti show the terror of ordinary people at a moment when they are victims of arbitrary and irrational power. In relation to both the landscape and the giant, the people are puny and helpless. Their only hope lies in trying to escape. That the giant has taken one of them implies that those who have escaped could just as easily have been caught. Power takes whatever it chooses.
Ferlinghetti adds close-up details that the painting suggests: babies, bats wings, cadavers. He also adds details of attack from soldiers, details that would be in keeping with the historical nature of the painting’s message of protest: bayonets, blasted trees, bent statues, slippery gibbets (scaffolds). Perhaps the soldiers are the “final hollering monsters.”
The images of suffering work through alliteration; the sounds are sharp and angry, hissing and spitting. The poet may have taken some liberty with the imagery in the painting to achieve this intensity of emotion.
He does use hyperbole in comparing the state of “suffering humanity” in stanza one to the state of modern America in stanza two.
2. Ferlinghetti compares the suffering people in Goya’s painting to people today who are still plagues by “legionaires/false windmills and demented roosters.” He contrasts the circumstances of people in the present with those in the past: “They are the same people/only further from home/ on freeways fifty lanes wide. He is making a link between past human suffering that was wrought by war and suffering that results from materialism and cultural decline. (“bland billboards”) and environmental damage (“engines/that devour America”). He is also suggesting a comparison between past and present in the injustice of being victimized by the inhumane exercise of power—we are now victims of the tyranny of the modern world itself
3. personal response
4. The staggered lines and their various lengths recreate the way the people in the painting are running in various directions. This creates a sense of chaos.