Kingdomland

By Rachael Allen

This poem is a short piece that seems to focus on a dangerous path to a unsafe-seeming village in the distance and someone who charges ahead, paying not heed to these things. The speaker of the poem is a concerned woman who calls after her daughter, the direct audience, whom she's trying to keep from trouble. It seems to me that the poem has the deeper meaning to it that this "impassable path" represents a time in life where one must make a decision about where to go in life and the hardships that they're going to have to make - all of that leading very likely to a darker place if you don't pay enough attention, represented by the "dark village" on the "crooked hill". In this instance, the audience would be someone who is struggling to to see what's up ahead and needs a bit of a wake-up call should they be willing to realize that's what this poem is calling for. The strongest aspect of this poem would have to be imagery, because there is so very much of it. Figurative language and poetic line so still hold their own, though.
The use of poetic line in this poem seems nearly random, but upon reading it, I became aware that the lines, though long, are split up by basic ideas or details of those ideas, despite some being within the same sentence. For instance: "There is a plot of impassable paths towards it, / impassable paths overcome with bees, the stigma that bees brings." or "Come away from there - I am yelling, / while the black dog rolls in the twilit yard." The first line of the first example talks about the paths while the second line talks about bees on the path. The first line of the second example is of the mother yelling to her daughter, and the second line about a dog in a yard.
As far as figurative language, this poem has metaphor, simile and personification. Metaphor can be found in "the village is slanted, full of tragedies with slate" in that slanted means wrong or almost sinister, none of which an inanimate place can be, which is also an example of personification. Personification can also be found in "they scream all night" when referring to peacocks being plucked, because animals can't scream. Simile was found most in the examples "socks bob into the night like teeth" and "throwing drinks into the air, / like a superstitious wife throws salt;" since two unlike things are being compared in each one.
The reason I said that imagery was the most prominent is because every sentence evokes some kind of image, and pretty vivid ones at that. "The dark village sits on the crooked hill.", "There is a bottle neck at the base of the hive.", and "Small white socks bob into the night like teeth in the mouth of a laughing man / who walks backwards into darkness, throwing drinks into the air," to name a few. The poet does a great job of taking simple images and adding words to the phrases to make them more interesting and to give a more real sense of what one should be seeing when the read the words. Words like crooked, slanted, level, jogging, black, twilit the reader goes a step farther than a typical image and is given more, proper detail to see the poem in the light it was meant to be read/seen in.