Ferlinghetti Response

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poems on San Francisco tell the unique stories of a city of multiplicity. A town who's differing and separate creeds, classes, races, opinions, and outlooks add up to a bittersweet portrayal of San Francisco as an ambivalent city on the edge of the western world.

Ferlinghetti utilizes juxtaposition and imagery to convey the vast contrast and complexity of San Francisco. the most powerful use of these devices is in "Yachts In Sun", a poem about the vast difference in classes, as seen in a view of the San Francisco bay. The power of this poem is in the way the "white yachts" with their "white sails" filled with pushing wind are shown to "freely pass" over the bones of "an Alcatraz con", "imprisoned" "fifty fathoms below" "the glass of the sea". The beautiful and cold imagery of the water as a burial place is contrasted to the pristine white boats in the warm sun. These white boats represent the well-off people in the city, who's expensive toys allow them glide almost insultingly over the tomb of someone of a lower class. In this sense, to the rich the ocean is a relaxing travel destination, but to a lower class criminal it is a treacherous, tormenting, and icy resting spot. The duality of the situation and the town, and the contrast of the two class figure's situations brings home the image of a town so mixed and jumbled with differences that there is no easy way to portray it other than to show those differences in action.

This bitter-sweet (mostly bitter) treatment of the conflicting classes of San Francisco and the eerily picturesque image symbolic of that dynamic works very well to portray the great multiplicities of San Francisco.