The Apartment
The poem mostly takes place inside Popeye's apartment. Olive tells the story of how Popeye was exiled from the apartment to the country by his father. Sounds like an exciting family drama, but the...
Messages
The first stanza compares the poem to a coded message or a puzzle, but the puzzles do not figure prominently in the rest of the poem. Still, the dialogue spoken by the characters always sounds vagu...
Thunder
About halfway through the poem, when Olive tells her story, we realize that Popeye is responsible for the strange thunder that seems to fill both the apartment and the country. This spinach-powered...
The Country
The poem tells us very little about this mysterious "country," or even what sense in which the word "country" is being used. Does it mean a nation or a rural landscape? In each stanza, the word has...