Crab, a Beautiful Poem by Ken Babstock, Implements a Variety of Contrasting Images, Often

“Crab,” a beautiful poem by Ken Babstock, implements a variety of contrasting images, often using personification, to illustrate how the speaker’s attitude toward the sea-side scene evolves from discomfort, to trepidation, to sympathy.This speaker, a young boy, describes the ocean that day as “ash- grim,” immediately creating a melancholic, lifeless atmosphere for the piece. The houses of the bay are “huddled,” suggesting a need for comfort and warmth and reflecting the speaker’s own unease. As the poem progresses, the boy discovers a plethora of crabs, which appear alien and even frightening: “black eye beads / like cloves looking back as they spidered / away from our toes.” Though the creatures fascinate the speaker because of their “plasticky joints” and “wispy ferns at the mouth” – traits that further suggest that the speaker views them as unnatural – they also elicit mild pity from the boy: “they were / brittle old men, grotesques thrown ashore by the sea.” By portraying these crabs as frail and elderly and as creatures rejected by their own domain, the speaker illustrates his kind-hearted sympathy. Though these creatures are foreign to him, he pities them and their hapless state. And as his fascination furthers, he moves from sympathy to empathy, becoming “brine-spattered, waterlogged, [and] less,” like these Dungeness crabs.

This speaker, a young boy, describes the ocean that day as “ash-grim,” immediately creating a melancholic, lifeless atmosphere for the piece. The houses of the bay are “huddled,” suggesting a need for comfort and warmth and reflecting the speaker’s own unease.

As the poem progresses, the boy discovers a plethora of crabs, which appear alien and even frightening: “black eye beads / like cloves looking back as they spidered / away from our toes.” Though the creatures fascinate the speaker because of their “plasticky joints” and “wispy ferns at the mouth” – traits that further suggest that the speaker views them as unnatural

– they also elicit mild pity from the boy: “they were / brittle old men, grotesques thrown ashore by the sea.” By portraying these crabs as frail and elderlyand as creatures rejected by their own domain, the speaker illustrates his kind-hearted sympathy. Though these creatures are foreign to him, he pities them and their hapless state.

And as his fascination furthers, he moves from sympathy to empathy, becoming “brine-spattered, waterlogged, [and] less,” like these Dungeness crabs. In Ken Babstock’s poem “Crab” readers are given a reflective glance through the eyes of a child. This unique viewpoint allows the author to depict vivid images in a chilling yet personal way that the reader would not otherwise see. One good example of this technique is the use of personification. By describing houses as “huddled, slanting,” Babstock conjures an image of people gathering around a fire, their backs to the chilling wind. This idea that the houses may be helping each other out reflects the attitude of an innocent child, believing that all people are good and will help you rather than hurt you. The idea of a vulnerable youth is demonstrated again when the speaker compares the crabs to “brittle old men.” In this case, however, his attitude is more insightful than naïve. By reflecting on the differences between himself and the crabs, he has noticed that his soft blemish free skin is unlike that of the crabs. Instead, their “spotted, knobbed claws” remind me more of a grandfather, arthritic hands contorted in pain and covered in age spots. Clumsy movements and “tangled leg locks” imitate the locked joints and lack of mobility of elderly, not the bounding, graceful step of a young boy. The use of a young boy as a speaker has allowed the reader to adopt his creativity as their own, and provides multiple attitudes and viewpoints from which a simple crab can be examined. Through inventive personification, the poem becomes alive and allows the reader to share its subtleties.