Where It All Goes Down
This poem is all about setting. The speaker crawls around the ruins of the Colossus, a huge toppled statue. (It's kind of a weird thing to do, but to each her own, right?) The speaker gives us a real sense of all the huge, cracked body parts that she tends. She says, "Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles / Proceed from your great lips" (3-4), and we can see the giant face, now inhabited by animals (or at least animalistic activities). Another one of our fave descriptions is "I crawl like an ant in mourning / Over the weedy acres of your brow" (12-13). Not only does this help us see how time takes its toll on the fallen statue as the weeds creep in, it also gives us a sense of how massive this thing is. The speaker is like an ant compared to it, and its brow goes on for acres. (That's one big brow, gang.)
Throughout the poem we wonder what terrible catastrophe brought the big guy down. The speaker doesn't tell us exactly, instead saying,
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin (20-23).
So, she says it would take more than lightning, but she doesn't bother to specify any further. We think it's cool that she does this, though, because it increases the sense of foreboding around these post-apocalyptic ruins. We're left to imagine what horrible disaster could've spread the remains of the stone giant all the way to the horizon. (Wow, thanks speaker—like we didn't have enough to worry about already.)