For many, an urban environment is a city. One of significant size and importance. A place where many different cultures come together to live. When I think of urban, I think of an atmosphere with loud noises and large structures. A town taken up by buildings, apartments, houses and streets. A place packed with transportation and activities. Now we have a concrete image of an urban area, but can it also be intangible? Can it replicate the state of mind of a human being? I think so.
             You can get a good idea of an urban city through not only the solid images, but through the emotions felt by one wandering through the city. Emotions such as pleasure, bewilderment, franticness and a sense of losing yourself in the city. These feelings depict an urban area just as much as a bridge hanging over the water. I think both extremities, the concrete images and the emotions felt there, are needed to get a better sense of an urban setting.
             In the poem, "The Streets Crazy, Wild Tell Me Why" by Ernest Slyman, we see the city from both the visual standpoint and from the emotional one as well, showing us readers how this is undoubtedly a distinctly urban text. The descriptive landscape, noises, people, chaos, and emotions of the main character in the poem illustrate an urban environment.
             The lines, "Along the dirty streets I movedThrough the tendrils of the city's heart" (Slyman) introduces us to the landscape of the city. The weather has done its job on the pavement, creating worn, grubby streets that twist and turn to support the city's core. Each street does its part in helping to maintain the city's equilibrium. Without the assistance of one street, the city could fall apart. The streets are also mentioned in the lines "I was the beaten down streets. My life was long and flat and hard." Here the streets are a metaphor for the man's life. They have been trampled on by a...