The Grey Line

“The Grey Line” is a wonderful example of non-traditional poetry. The entire piece is literally divided into two by a line down the middle composed of the word “grey”. Each line of the poem has the word “grey” in it as well. Some lines are simply the single word “grey”.

I think that the author of this piece hoped to really convey multiple things about the word grey in this piece. When one hears the word grey, the first thing that comes to mind is blah… boring. It is technically a color, but not a very bright one or a very bold one. It is rather plain. The reader must have these feelings about the color in order to receive the full effect of reading the poem. By writing this poem, the author goes beyond the feelings of blah, boring, plain old grey. The writer gives the reader a glimpse of all the wonderful things that grey is and can become… The poem travels from “grey and lifeless-looking” to “a grey light beginning to show” to “pretty gray”. It then moves back to more somber thoughts about the color. It seems as if the author is trying to create a roller-coaster of positive and dreary thoughts for the reader about grey. Up and down… up and down. Dull and lifeless… pretty… mossy….silver… sickly…crossing the line about grey.

I think that the author chose to use a nontraditional approach to putting the piece together because it really adds to the meaning of the poem. With the up and down of the feelings about the color grey, the reader goes back and forth between the positive and the dreary about grey. The reader is doing exactly what the title, and the poem as an entirety, suggests… the reader crosses the line about grey, then goes back, then crosses the line again, both about the emotional feelings evoked, but also in physically reading the piece. The reader’s eye has to travel across the grey line on the page to get from one side of the poem line to the other, and back again.

The thing I most enjoyed about this piece is that it flows on so many levels. The first thing that I noticed was the literal representation of the title in the body of the poem. “The Grey Line.” It was really interesting to look at. Then once I read the piece, I noticed the back-and-forth emotional feelings the author invoked about the color. That back-and-forth crossing-the-line motion and rhythm of the poem is something I would like to incorporate into my own work. The rhythm in a piece is so important, and when it works in conjunction with a strong visual representation on the page, it is even more powerful. “The Grey Line” does that. Coordination of the body of the poem, the layout of the poem, the words of the poem, the meaning of the poem, and the rhythm of the poem is the main thing that I would like to hold on to.