Abstract
This essay compares Utjeha kose, translated as The Solace of Hair, by Antun Gustav Matoš and Death’s Valley by Walt Whitman. We analyze similarities in theme, metaphor and poetic style. We also offer a close analysis of verse, together with meter, together with syntax and phonology of the two poems. Matoš and Whitman approach similar themes from different perspectives. However, we find coincidental similarities in both techniques and stylistic devices and the underlying messages of the pieces. We also draw upon our personal vision of the pieces as well as, in the case of Death’s Valley in particular, outside sources, to form our opinions. It is necessary to say that we had no access to any materials on Matoš, and, therefore, all our statements on The Solace of Hair are our personal conclusions and have no intext or works cited documentation.
Highlights
The idea to compare the two poems was born during the work on the translation of Matošs poem and through a contextual approach confirming this poem’s landmark position in Croatian literature
Angus Fletcher states about that poem that, „the poet’s «nominal style» employs a coupling of nouns with adjectives or participles, without benefit of finite verbs or copulas” (Fletcher 2006: 216), as in the line: Of the broad blessed light and perfect air, with meadows, rippling tides, and trees And flowers and grass, And of the low hum of living breeze-and in the midst God’s beautiful eternal right hand Thee, holiest minister of Heaven-thee, envoy, usherer guide of last of all, Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot called life (Death’s Valley, Whitman 1892: 707)
They wrote on similar themes and applied some similar techniques in their poems The Solace of Hair and Death’s Valley
Summary
This essay compares two poems, Death’s Valley by Walt Whitman and The Solace of Hair by Antun Gustav Matoš. The thematic and formal similarities of these two poets, as well as differences, become obvious if two works that each author wrote later in his life are juxtaposed: Matoš’s poem Utjeha kose, translated as The Solace of Hair, written in 1906, eight years before the poet died, and Whitman’s poem Death’s Valley, published in 1892, a month after the poet passed away (Whitman 1892: 707).
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