The Strange People - Jenna Pelosi

Louise Erdrich
The Strange People

The prologue to this poem conveyed a connection to the antelope, and the concept of love between human beings. “The antelope are strange people…they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky….they are like shadows on the plains, because of their beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever” (Linderman, 1932). As antelopes are described as well, we often can find our self describing our significant other by “beautiful, but tricky” . The speaker also offers new language to the poem. Instead of being poignant and stating, “fills my eyes with tears”, the speaker states, “fills my eyes with blue fire” his lyric language not only describes emotion, it also offers more insight to the intensity of the emotions being felt by the speaker. The speaker’s language helps to connect the reader to the life of the speaker. His new language shows the insight of human heartache through a connection the that of a hunted animal (the antelope). I thought that such a connection was very interesting and profound to display through words. To give an example of this connection, you can find in the last three lines of the poem, “…Crawling back into my shadowy body, All day asleep in clean grasses, I dream of the one who could really wound me” (Edrich, pg. 472). I translate that into “dreaming of the one who could really wound me”, or “dreaming of the one who could really break my heart”.