Poetry Response 6

I hadn't read "Little Apocalypse" until we read it in class, but our discussion made me curious about it. I went home and re-read it a few times, and realized what I think it means. To me this poem sort of illustrates the "stop to smell the roses" idea, in the sense that it wants to get across that there are whole worlds of organisms that we pay no attention to, simply because they are small; and how things we would find non-threatening can be like an apolcalypse to them. This makes sense to me because of the way Charles Wright describes seemingly peaceful things, such as a robin or a butterfly as vicious and unsettling, and a thunderstorm as "a drop of fire and a drop of fire," as maybe they would appear to insects. I don't think Wright is describing the apocalypse of the whole world, but is using classic apocalyptic imagery to describe harmless organisms and an average thunderstorm. He does this in order to point out how these daily happenings can be apocalyptic for the "basements of the world" that we often do not think about, because we never see that world from that perspective.