random poem : Ambulences, Philip Larkin

Ambulances


Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,

And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;

For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there

At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable insided a room
The trafic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.

exposing rhetoric...when the going gets tough

Since they definitely work to some extent, it's probably a good thing to be aware of, and alert for, rhetorical devices.

Such perfect sounding phrases are very persuasive...but perhaps a useful counter action, to lay their actual logic bare, would be to swap the terms used, and to see if it is the content or the form which is swayin gus.

So, for example with the well known 'when the going gets tough, the tough get going' (using antimetabole - the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed grammatical order), one could change it to produce a similar sound bite, but with the opposite moral  "when going on is stupid, the stupid go on".

It is perhaps understandable why Aristotle once suggested story tellers should be expelled from Athens, since manipulation via the telling, is the most insidious danger of all.