Chocolate Island 3

Publication Instance Details #3197

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
No	No	No	Yes	No	Yes

Details

Human Rights Issues	Other HR & Environment
Languages	English
Genre	Part Of Lyric Sequence
Medium	Print Collection
Notes	The poem forms part of a sequence of lyrics written about the death of the poet's mother. Sexton employs the world of video games and Super Mario interspersed with fragments of private memories between past and present. The collection is written in two parts. These lines focus on a short 1878 clip by Eadweard Muybridge that shows a jockey, Domm, riding a horse, Sallie Gardner. The clip is not filmed. Instead, it consists of 24 individual photographs shot in rapid succession, making a moving picture when using a zoopraxiscope. Known also as ‘The Horse in Motion’, the clip is a series of cabinet cards including six cards that each show a sequential series of six to twelve "automatic electro-photographs" depicting the movement of a horse. The series became the first example of chronophotography, an early method to photographically record the passing of time mainly used to document the different phases of locomotion for scientific study. The short lyric concludes with the image of the Wright brothers, the American aviation pioneers, beginning to imagine the possibility of flight, 'leaving the earth althogether.'