The Silence Of The Stars By David Wagoner Analysis

Stars are a universal part of our human culture. Celebrities are compared to them, people reach for them and we try to shine like them but we often forget to actually look at them for what they are. Instead of becoming vain and trying to emulate something much grander than ourselves or be selfish and try to claim them as our own, we should be looking to the stars to remind us that we aren’t everything in this world. This is the message that David Wagoner tries to get across in his poem, The Silence Of The Stars, using metaphors, allusion and abnormal sentence construction to try and get us to stop, think and maybe look up once in awhile. One of the most prominent literary devices that Wagoner uses is allusion. Wagoner saw value in referencing …show more content…
He opens his poem talking of “When Lauren van der Post one night in the Kalahari Desert” talked to bushmen. As the poem goes on, it narrates the fateful night of van der Post with the Bushmen of Africa and how he could not hear the stars. The other men around the fire, the Bushmen native to the land laugh at him. Wagoner tells that van der Post is brought away from the fire by the Bushmen but still cannot hear the stars as it is assumed the others can. Although the poem is not solely about van der Post, knowing his history of how he made money off of the plight of the San people is important. Wagoner highlights the stark contrast between the rich and materialistic not being in harmony with the rest of the world, being lost when it comes to anything but possessions. Another seemingly more minor but largely important allusion was that to the “music of the spheres.” The speaker in the poem talks of their own share in this music of the world around them when they can hear the stars but it is also in reference to being closer to a religious awakening as well. Music of the spheres can be seen as a reference to ancient Greek astronomy and science. The well-known mathematician and philosopher