Lobsters

Th poem "Lobsters" by Howard Nemerov is a much deeper poem than than it first appears.  The beginning of the poem starts out with the huge glass tank in a bright supermarket. The lobsters sit in the cold water waiting for someone to take them home and boil them alive. The dark and somber tone make this poem pretty depressing to read. It describes the slow moving lobsters sleepwalking around the tank and the dark hues blended into their shells. The last stanza puzzled me, it said that something under the world was the flame under the lobster pot. What? What could be under the world? It was not until the discussion that I began to understand. One of my classmates brought up the fact that the "flame" under the world is our inevitable fate: death.

This brought a whole new meaning to the poem. I realized that the whole picture of the lobsters was just a symbol of humans. We are the unknowing lobsters that are kept in the tank of the world, waiting for death to pluck us from existence. We pretend to be immortal and float through life avoiding reality at every turn, until we are hit. I now understand that the poet was not talking about lobsters at all, he was talking about humans the entire time. To me, this poem solidified man's greatest fear, death.