As the words from Oral Messages accompanied by a background of carefully orchestrated jazz moves across the pages; Ferlinghetti brings the reader full circle, as he enters into the third final section of the book with, "Pictures Of The Gone World." From the seriousness of the first group of poetry in, "A Coney Island Of The Mind" to the more light hearted group of poems found in, "Oral Messages", with poems such as, "Dog", this section carries the reader into a world of more serious undertones. First contained in Ferlinghetti's first book in l955, the thirteen poems portray darker imagery wrapped around tightly designed phrases from the literary subconscousness boardering on the realms of naturalism. The world that Ferlinghetti describes is not a world of cheerful romanticism, but a world where meaning and love remain forever void, and love has been stripped down to the bare essence of life in the rawest form. Ferlinghetti seeks and accomplishes in his drive to observe the naked reality of existence. His ninth poem serves to exemplify this unique characteristic,
"funny fantasies are never so real as old style romances where the hero has a heroine who has long black braids and lets nobody kiss her ever and everybody's trying all the time to run away with her and the hero is always drawing his (sic) sword and tilting at grinmills and forever telling her he loves her and has only honorable interactions and honorable mentions....." (8)
Romanticism loses face in the lightness by such candles as Ferlinghetti writes by a noonday sun inside a burning desert.
The eleventh poem lends itself to becoming even more depressing as it captures the state of the world in a two page free verse poem. The first 32 lines, nearly a fourth of the poem, deals with the harsh realities of life. Lines such as,
"The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don't mind a touch of hell now and then......" (9)
Even when the poet brings a sense of optimism to these images;
"Yes the world is the best place of all for a lot of such things as making the fun scene and singing low songs and having inspirations and walking around looking at everything and smelling flowers" (10)
He ends the poem with a note of dark humor.
"Yes but then right in the middle of it comes the smiling mortician....." (11)
His prose sits between the limits of melancholy, with a small bit of humor to keep
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