The tourist from Syracuse
The tourist from Syracuse, written by Donald justice, is a poem about the different personas within the city of Syracuse. The poet is able to explore all the different kinds of personalities by narrating the poem in the form of a story through specific details. The poem is very direct in approaching the reader and could be perceived as a threat by the reader exploring the dangers of Syracuse. The poet explores the different themes of Dark, light, coldness, death and ambiguousness to metaphorically represent the threat of the Italian mafias in the city of Syracuse, but in the different forms of personas.
The theme of ambiguousness is portrayed through the representation of all the random people with everyday lives and with different stories that the reader may not be aware of. For example, in the last two lines of stanza six and the first line of stanza seven, the speaker claims himself to be of a different identity. The person next to you could be a “used car-salesman, a tourist from Syracuse or a fired assassin” as the poem states. The speaker is addressing the reader directly stating that the speaker is every stranger we have ever been around. We might have noticed them, or they might have noticed us, but the transformation from one identity to another keeps the speaker’s personality unclear. The ambiguousness of the speaker makes the tone of the poem mysterious. The tones is expressed in lines such as “My name is names and none” and “Familiar, anonymous.” The ambiguity of the tone of the poem correlates with the anonymous personality of the speaker. Both of these allow the poem to directly address the reader and making the reader aware of the different threats within the city of Syracuse.
The speaker explores the theme of darkness in the first and fourth stanzas. In the second line of the first stanza the speaker mentions that his