Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet born on May 9, 1938 in Belgrade which was then a part of Yugoslavia. Simic’s early days passed under the effects of the Second World War and he witnessed the effects of Nazism on people. At a very young age, Simic’s father had been captured by the Nazi officials but he managed to escape in the year 1944. Many of his poems such Death List are strongly influenced by the time he spent under the Nazi regime and on the horrors of the holocaust survivors. One of the first poem that Simic published was “What the Grass Says”, this was when he was in high school in USA. Later in 1990 he received the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of prose poetry.

If you read any one of the Simic’s poems you won’t be able to understand the clear meaning that he is trying to convey but as you read three or four of them, you will start to realize there is a strange sense of juxtapositions of objects in his works. The poems written by Charles Simic always have the sense of conflict within the poem itself. Simic is not afraid of exploring violence in his poems and this can be justified by his early days. His imagination has the scenes of what he witnessed during the Nazi regime and he seems to be scared of it. However Simic himself justifies his use of violence in the poems, he once said in the interviews, ““Violence is a kind of pathetic, perverted attempt to feel. The poems try to understand its origins, to see its consequences, to exorcise its demons”. (The Michigan Press, 1985) He adds to this, “My subject is really poetry in times of madness. There are people out there who have the means to murder me and everyone I love without giving us advance notice. We are all on death row”

The above dialogue of his, clearly explains the influence of the capturing of his dad by the Nazis on him. If we try to see the depth of his words, then we would realize, that Simic lost his sense of being safe in his very early childhood and he stills lives in fear.

Despite leading a good life, he tries to put himself in a situation where the people are trying to kill him and everyone has gone mad. His works also seem to have the same essence. He has always told that people are not grateful for being alive. This gratefulness of his towards life can be easily explained by the fact that he has seen people die right in front of his eyes while he was in Yugoslavia, and that was at a very young age. It has often been seen that whatever you do in your childhood or whatever you see then remains with you throughout your life and this what has happened with Simic. In his poems he sees everything that is wonderful with a sense of doubt but at the same time, he is also very grateful and thankful towards the almighty for all the good things in his life.

If we take the example of ‘The Storm’, one of his best works, we would come to know the sense of fear exists so deep in his heart that it is reflected on the paper as well. He talks about the silence of the afternoon in the last line of his first stanza which again displays the fact that the surroundings are unaware of the coming storm, and everything is so nice and quiet but little does the garden know about the coming storm. In these lines he is also trying to show his feelings about his dad as how without any notice he was captured and sent to exile. In the similar way the storm is also very cruel, it does not let anybody or anything feel its presence or notice it until it turns into its most devastating form.

But despite the fact that an oncoming doesn’t let us know anything about it, the birds and the animal can sense its presence, these image has been portrayed by him in the lines
“The sky keeps being blue,
Though we hear no birds,
See no butterflies among the flowers
Or ants running over our feet.” (The Virginia quarterly review, Spring 2008)
In the first line the image being formed is of a person who is looking at the sky but cannot feel thing that might be considered different from normal days. If we relate it to his childhood, then we can see that when the Nazi regime was coming the Jews couldn’t sense what was coming towards them and they saw it as yet another change of government. In the second line of the above stanza, he tries to portray the silence before the storm. The birds don’t chirp or the butterflies are not to be seen anywhere near the flowers. This explains that some change in the atmosphere is there which we the social creatures can’t feel but can be felt by the animals or the birds through their sixth sense.

In these lines we can also how his stanzas of the poem are progressive and tell about the coming lines, the clear blue skies and the silence of the birds is enough to tell that despite there is nothing abnormal happening right now, nothing is normal. As if it were the case then the ants would have been moving around in search of the food. So, this reflects that in the next stanza or so, there is something abnormal that is going to happen.
“About to make its entrance
Of which we know nothing,
Spellbound as we are by the deepening quiet,
The light just beginning to dim.”

The first three lines of the above stanza again displays the silence that prevails, but in the last line Simic is able to connect whole of the silence in the poem to the title. The whole image a normal noon with only the difference being the birds and the ants has now changes to the gathering of clouds overhead. There is much more to this line than the literal meaning says.

Now if we come to the tone of the poem set by Simic in his poems we will be able to see how he inserts the vowels at times to jut create a musical note that makes the words easier to visualize and we can now easily imagine what is going on. Let me explain this using the last two lines of the poem “The Storm” that has been mentioned on the previous page. The phrases ‘deepening quiet’ and ‘light beginning to dim’ both have a deep tone associated with them in the beginning of their respective starting words, the ee in deepening and the I in the light have a deep sound surrounding them but then suddenly the sound changes narrow vowels in the words beginning and dim. This is the same way the light on the sky behaves just before the storm. At first it is quiet bright but slowly and steadily it begins to constricts before making the whole sky dark and then the storm arrives.

Simic hasn’t use rime in the poem ‘The Storm’, yet he has been clearly able to make the poem good to read even for the laymen. Actually, Simic being a Serbian by origin might have the influence of it on his works as it is possible that he sees English as his second language and not his mother tongue. This explains the absence of rhyme in his poems.

One thing that has been criticized about Simic is that he doesn’t sum up his poem, rather we can say that his poem ends abruptly, to this he said, ““Some readers find my poems obscure because, well, I don’t sum it up for them. That is to say, I have too much respect for them to play the preacher, but that’s what they want from their poets” (The Michigan Press, 1985)
My opinion is that he doesn’t need to sum up his poems the progressive style used by him is enough to tell what is coming next and what might happen after the end. So, it is similar to the movies which have ambiguous endings. It gives the readers a chance to analyze the poem and then based on their mood decide what might happen after the poem is over.

So, it can be easily said that Simic’s way of writing is much different than his contemporaries yet he has created his own persona by which his works are identified. Also, it is not to be forgotten that most of the works by Simic are highly influenced by the time he spent under the Nazi regime and the capturing of his father

References 1. The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry (The Michigan Press, 1985) 2. The Virginia Quarterly Review, spring 2008. http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2008/spring/simic-storm/ 3. http://www.csub.edu/~mwoodman/english101/Charles%20Simic.htm