TCC - Marcia Regina Barreto Moraes - Departamento de Língua e ...

utterance” and “speaking individual”. The poet has “hegemony over his own language”. 31
But other concepts like heteroglossia and foreign language are not completely out of the
poetic language. However, these “possibilities are limited” 32 , especially because the
concentrated efforts of a poet refer to his own language.
Therefore, the poet crafts words in order to create a poetic effect, which is their
own concept of language and world. Bakhtin 33 reiterates “the poet’s meaning” as “a single
intentional whole”. According to this theory, the poet’s use of “the word of others’
intentions” ceases connections with “concrete intentional levels of language” and with
“specific contexts”.
In Map of Dreams, there are these two excerpts of sirens 34 , part women and part
birds, that the language used demonstrates how the previous mentioned myths serve the
poet’s intentions. The persuasive creatures have a supporting role in the sea travel. It is
possible to verify their moves in “No sooner had we left” and “What was left us then”.
In the former, the sailors were lost and the captain, rum-drunk. They had no alternatives.
Once the captain destroyed the charts, sirens, in a certain way, put their gifts in practices
suggesting (chanting) that seafaring men forgot their nautical instruments:
something from the sirens,
Sail by power of dreams,
they crooned, by ignoring maps,
by letting the helm go.
31 Idem (297).
32 Idem (287).
33 Idem (297).
34 As persuasive beings, sirens are associated with death. The Cambridge dictionary at the website
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/ defines siren as “(in ancient Greek literature) one of the creatures who were half woman
and half bird, whose beautiful singing encouraged sailors to sail into dangerous waters where they died”.
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