A Study Guide for Robert Bly's "Come with Me"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Robert Bly's "Come with Me," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535820974

Book preview

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Come with Me

Robert Bly

1967

Introduction

Come with Me appeared in Robert Bly’s collection of poems titled The Light around the Body, which was published in 1967 and received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1968. Many of the poems are expressions of protest—against the U.S. government’s involvement in the Vietnam War, for example—and underscore the often destructive ways in which public events influence private lives and the ways that human beings seek, but do not always achieve, connection with one another and the natural world. The first poem in the book’s section titled The Various Arts of Poverty and Cruelty, Come with Me compares the emotional world of disillusioned and disappointed men to abandoned car parts. Bly’s focus on the relationship between the external nonhuman world and the internal emotional human world would continue to inform all of his writing, and his description of the emotional complexion of men, in particular, foreshadows his later interest in men’s