Poetical Analysis of "the Kite" by Wyatt Prunty (1982)

The Kite

by Wyatt Prunty, 1982

The poem The Kite by Wyatt Prunty is a poem about a boy playing with a kite, although he is not the speaker in the poem. The actual speaker in the poem is a third person character that does not identify themselves, but seems to be an observer of this boy and his kite. The speaker seems to have a positive attitude about the boy, but mostly describes the kite with little emphasis on his own personal attitude while mostly describing what he observes. Although the speaker never directly addresses the boy or the kite, it seems as if the speaker is watching the boy and that they are at the same park or field. This poem demonstrates the beauty of the kite and gives new insight to flying a kite, a seemingly simple toy for children.

The purpose of this poem is expressive as well as aesthetic. The poem expresses beautifully the image of the boy flying his kite.

The sound patterns used in the poem are not very obvious as it does not rhyme nor does it have a lot of obvious alliteration. By using four lines in each stanza the poem follows some kind of format that serves an aesthetic purpose. There is an example of synaesthesia in line 9: “From liquid wrist the string dissolves into its length” because it takes the visual image of the string extending into the sky and applies the sensory feeling of liquid.

Each stanza in this poem makes an entire sentence, so each sentence is fairly complex; however each stanza seems to have its own theme and makes a complete thought. This poem is not too different from everyday speech because it is in sentences, but it definitely goes into more detail than I would expect from the average person.

There are some interesting synecdoches used in the poem, for example line 14 refers to the sky as “haze and blue”, and applies the image of only one aspect of the sky and uses it to describe the whole sky. The images in the poem are very vivid, the reader can imagine the kite and how it floats through the sky under the power of both the wind and the boy at the end of the string. It seems to portray the metamessage of how fragile many things are that we think we have control of. Like the kite, we may think we have control of our lives, but you never know when a “gust of wind” will come along and control the kite or even take the kite out of our hands and we might never see it again. The entire poem works as a metaphor for life as the kite is the life in our hands, and the sky, which we trust to take care of our kite as well as to give the kite a purpose, might have a different idea of where that kite can go. As some wind is needed to give the kite flight, we must be careful not to let it go into too heavy of a storm lest we risk having the kite ripped to shreds.

Because the style of the poem is fairly casual, I think the poet is trying to open the eyes of the reader through his metamessage/metaphor. Although on the surface the poem is whimsical because it talks of kites and playgrounds, as mentioned before I believe it has a much more serious undertone. It is not meant to talk down to any reader, but it is geared towards a reader that is mature enough to understand a serious metaphor dealing with life and maybe the subject of god.

I think it is important to recognize the social values that correlate with this poem, one of them being the idea of a Christian god that has some power of the lives of man along with the idea of free will. While the boy holding the kite has free will over the kite, when he flies it, where he flies it and how often he flies it, the wind and skies and “god’s will” have control over it as well, also if the kite falls apart that would also be the end of the kite. The boy in the poem seems to have some kind of fascination