Poet
   Writer
Dramatist
An image poem: The flag of mor(t)ality

Welcome dear audience, may you be a literature fan, a writer yourself or just an interested bypasser.
To start with, let me introduce myself, since this is my first video on Youtube. My name is Csaba Hegedűs, I am of Hungarian origin, age 22. Next to studying at the university I try to create literary artworks, what has become more than a hobby of mine. I tried out many genres, types of both poetry and prose, however their analysis was not demonstrated until now. But here’s the perfect opportunity to illustrate and comment on the first poem, which is a short and interesting piece of literature.
So I have chosen this image poem titled as The flag of morality or The flag of mortality.
I will read it now stanza by stanza in the correct order.
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As an image poem I propose talking about its peculiar form first. The title mentions a flag that can be clearly recognized. That flag is the upper form while on the bottom a more or less skull-like figure was placed. The pole on which the two stanzas, or more materially, the textile is set, that pole may lose any moment its balance.
This complex imagery is the first layer of the poem.
By moving further we have to look at the stanzas as small, separate enclosed units, with their simpliest meanings. The left side of the flag is about some sacred people or beings, who see as their main duty to protect the values of a society even in the wildest times. This service was given by a higher authority that is not clearly expressed. Here, an extract from The Revenger’s Tragedy emphasises how hard it is to be exemplary and at the same time evade being common.
In the right part of the flag, the guardians’ power, or the power of society’s moral is shown. Like a candle’s cleansing fire, while life is melting away, order establishes always its overpower in the originally tend to be chaotic world. Chaos may stand here for as a synonym for sins, and the guardians continuously on every day of the week try to push back the seven sins, thus pushing the flag of morality upside.
The third part of the flag is the pole itself which is made of positive values collected from the history of mankind, attributes of people which altogether make out the so-called ,,morality”, an ideal phenomenon in humans that would ensure the perfect working of a conscious society.
Still at the bottom lies the very last stanza, a skull which swallows every existence without caring about the earthly attributes of a man. It is in contrast with the unimportant great struggle of the living. Death is moreover a mystery, a grotesque apparition that laughs on the typical panicking emotions of overly self-reflexive human beings. In a way of traditional theatrical representation, the underworld lies under the stage’s trapdoor, but here hell-like circumstances (struggle of good and evil) can be found upside as the counterpart of morality, while unknown death is the only one down.
By mentioning hell, which is related to religious beliefs, demons are among the guardians in the poems third layer. The guardians keep them shackled, and from another perspective some writers do the same by encaging them into text, or literature, I dare to say into high culture.
The second stanza hides a sword, an emblem of justice, which helps and represents the guardians as well.
The devil word’s pentagram and the sword’s high moral core are again a contrast. Moreover, if we deprive the word devil from the letter D, we get an anagram evil, that can be transformed into the word live. So does the pole’s upper end tell us, life is equal with problems or evil, since here the two are very closely related synonyms.
Well, these were the three layers, form, contrasted meanings and hidden symbols.
I don’t want to go into rhetoric figures and other allusions, but feel free to ask about them if you’re interested. You can find the whole poem and the text of this video on my homepage. See you next time, and thank you for watching.


Text of the youtube video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL0NHYdduxM

Csaba Hegedűs