Oranges by Gary Soto

The poem “Oranges” by Gary Soto was very cute. I read it in the literal sense as a story of a young boy that enjoyed his company with a girl that he liked by taking her to the corner store to buy a candy bar. The poem is written in very short lines that make it easy to read for the reader. There is not really any rhyme pattern and the poem is written in only two stanzas. The young boy is trying to impress this girl by bringing her an orange but she would rather have a chocolate bar that costs more than he can afford. Luckily, the saleswoman understood what the boy was doing and accepted his payment of a nickel and an orange. The boy then felt very accomplished by this and felt confident enough to take his “girl’s hand” the rest of the walk with her until they both enjoyed their snacks (47).

We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

The poem “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks was a very short and easy poem to read. I took the literal explanation of the poem because to me, it is a very literal poem. This poem is basically describing how “cool” people act. Each line in this poem is a fragmented sentence that begins with the word “we” (1-7). The reader can then draw the conclusion that the people that think they are cool, they are also not very educated (We / Left school” (1-2)). An interesting aspect of the poem is that it is only written with single syllable words. I think this was done in order to keep a certain flow or pulse throughout the poem. Brooks also used alliteration throughout her poem such as “lurk late” (3), “strike straight” (4), “sing sin” (5), and “Jazz June” (7). The poem ends with the line “We / Die soon” which I think that the lifestyle of these “cool” people isn’t all the glory that people think it is.

Daddy by Sylvia Plath

The poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath is a very dark poem. I believe that this poem is about her dad and how he pretty much screwed her over in life. The poem ends with a very strong line of “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” (80). I believe that this line shows that she is done with any connection she had with her dad and never wants to know anything about him ever. The whole last stanza is actually quite disturbing because she talks about how “There’s a stake in [his] fat black heart / And the villagers never liked [him]” (76-77). This shows that her dad was a man that was not very liked by the people around him. The line “They are dancing and stamping on you” shows that her dad was not a very respectable man and that people for sure did not like him (78). In all, I thought this poem was very disturbing because I would never write anything about my father.

Sad Steps by Philip Larkin

“Sad Steps” by Philip Larkin was written when Larkin was in his mid-forties. The reader can sense a bit of bitterness and vulgarity from the opening line, “Groping back to bed after a piss” (1). This line also lets the reader that this is an average citizen rather than a rich man because such vulgarity would not dare be used to describe the upper class. The conclusion that I have gotten from this poem is that the moon is a symbol of youth. Larkin describes it as, “a reminder of the strength and pain / of being young; that it can’t come again” (16-17). This seems like a mid-life crisis moment for Larkin as he realizes that he is not young anymore and he becomes sadden by this thought. As he is staring at the moon, he feels as though the moon is yelling, “Lozenge of love! Medallion of art! / O wolves of memory! Immensements!” and this just seems what a young person would yell (11-12).

The Moth-Man by Elizabeth Bishop

The “Man-Moth” by Elizabeth Bishop seemed very interesting in the beginning but then very confusing in the end. I tried to read the poem with the word “mammoth” in replace of “man-moth” but I was still very confused. At the beginning of the poem, I pictured a man that is fascinated by the moon by Bishop saying, “He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,” (7). In the second stanza, I feel that the man was in a hiding place and slowly “emerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks” to investigate the sky and the moon (12-13). He has found out that the moon is not an opening in the sky and becomes greatly disappointed. I am guessing that the man is a crazy, homeless guy because later in the poem, it is described that he goes in the subway every night and “He has to keep his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.” (Which mufflers are usually worn by people who have money) (39-40).

Sphincter by Allen Ginsberg

The poem “Sphincter” by Allen Ginsberg caught my eye big time. It threw me off guard because of all the vulgarity and nasty images it brought to mind. I didn’t think that poetry could be written like this and I’m pretty sure there is plenty more poetry out there that is like this or worse in vulgarity than this. With the line, “Now AIDS makes it shy, but still / eager to serve—“ I thought this was very risky for Ginsberg to put in his poetry because people at that time weren’t very open-minded about homosexuality (10-11). The lines, “active, eager, receptive to phallus / coke bottle, candle, carrot / banana & fingers—“ were very graphic (7-9). These lines were basically describing what Ginsberg would, well, as gross as it may seem, shove up his butt for sexual pleasure. Ginsberg is clearly well open about his sexuality and is a figure in striving for gay rights.

Dog by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“Dog” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti caught my attention out of all the assigned poems because to me, it seemed like it was very easy to comprehend. The line, “The dog trots freely in the street” is repeated several times throughout this poem. This gives the reader the feeling that a dog has its own free will to do anything that it may want to do. At the beginning of the poem, the dog is describing what it sees around him: “And the things he sees / Are his reality” (5-6). By describing what all he sees around himself, it makes the reader get a feeling that the dog is curious and likes sightseeing while he is around town. Since he is able to trot freely in the streets, he is a wild dog that “will not be muzzled” and is free (43). I’m sure that this poem has some other deeper meaning but I really enjoyed from a literal view point.

The Young Housewife By William Carlos Williams

This poem by William Carlos Williams caught my eye because I understood the meaning of the poem right away. Williams describes a young housewife that has lost her soul or sense of freedom. William expresses the loss of freedom with the lines:

                        At ten AM the young housewife

                        Moves about in negligee behind

                        The wooden walls of her husband’s house. (1-3)

By stating a specific time of when the housewife moves about the house, it gives the sense that the housewife lacks spontaneity and is confined to a schedule everyday. The housewife also seems like she is not part of her home but rather just another person living along with her husband in his house. The fact that she also walks around her “husband’s house” in a negligee gives the impression that she is some kind of object rather than a human being. These three opening lines give great evidence to the theme of loss of freedom.  

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

My second post for T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, is going to be a brief summary of the style and form of the poem. In the first section, “The Burial of the Dead”, it can be seen as a dramatic monologue but with four speakers instead of one. In the second section, “A Game of Chess”, the beginning is very unrhymed and lack meter. As the section goes on, the more irregular and unmetered it becomes. In the third section, “The Fire Sermon”, Eliot includes a rhyme or two here and there. He also includes bits and pieces of music. In the fourth section, “Death by Water”, seems like the most organized portion of the poem it has four pairs of rhyming couplets. In the last section, “What the Thunder Said”, also explores forms of music just like the third section did.

                        London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down 

                        Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina 

                        Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow 

                        Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie 

                        These fragments I have shored against my ruins (426-430)

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

When I read this poem, I really did not understand what was going on. I was highly distracted by all the footnotes and found myself going back and forth trying to decipher this poem. The final product of reading the poem ended with a very confused version of me. I decided to read a summary of the poem off of SparkNotes and finally understood what was going on in this poem. In the first section, “The Burial of the Dead”, the audience of the poem feels crowded with many speakers. The speakers want to talk but they are burdened with dead people. In the second section, “A Game of Chess”, contains two scenes, one of a wealthy woman being caught up in frantic and meaningless thoughts and the other scene consisting of two women in a bar talking about one of their friends that is on the brink of losing her husband. In the third section, “The Fire Sermon”, opens with a scene of a man fishing on a desolate riverside and meets a tarot card reader. I’m not sure if that is exactly what happens or if I misinterpreted the poem and summary. In the fourth section, “Death by Water”, talks about a man that has drowned and creatures of the sea have picked his dead body apart. This is also the shortest section of the poem. In the last section, “What The Thunder Said”, begins with a scene of mass destruction but then the poem shifts to another part of the world and ends in a very confusing way. I am really hoping that class on Tuesday will help me better understand this poem!

The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

            In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, I feel that T.S. Eliot makes the reader feel distant from the speaker by not stating Prufrock’s first name in the title. By opening the poem up with lines from Dante’s Inferno, the reader gets the sense that this poem is not going to be a “lovey-dovey” poem, but more of a pessimistic attitude for a poem that has the words “Love Song” in the title.

            T.S. Eliot used plenty of personification and similes in this poem.

·      Personification- the attribution of a personal nature or character to inanimate objects or abstract notions, especially as a rhetorical figure.

·      Simile- a figure in speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared using “like” or “as”.

In the first stanza, T.S. Eliot describes the setting by saying, “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table;” (2-3). This is comparing the speaker’s night to a passed out body, which gives the reader the feeling of a very dead night. To show an example of personification, T.S. Eliot says, “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,” (15-16). This is giving the fog human-like, or rather cat-like, qualities. From lines fifteen through twenty-two, Eliot uses great personification by giving the fog human or cat-like qualities.

Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot

            I feel like the speaker in the “Journey of the Magi” is one of the three wise men that travelled to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. In the first stanza, I imagined the wise men were having an awful time traveling.

                        And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

                        And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

                        And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

                        A hard time we had of it. (13-16)

            It seemed as though Eliot was describing their journey as backbreaking and full of hardships. They were obviously not treated as royalty and did not travel with great luxury.

            In the second stanza, T.S. Eliot describes their arrival in Bethlehem by saying, “Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.” (31). I believe that this expresses a kind of relief the gentlemen felt once they reached their destination after a long, excruciating journey.

            The third and final stanza made me believe that the first two stanzas were a memory of the past of one of the three wise men. The first line of this stanza, “All this was a long time ago, I remember,” gave the hint that the speaker was recalling the past (32).

Anne Donne By Sylvia Townsend Warner

Anne Donne was the name of John Donne’s beloved wife. The marriage was greatly looked down upon by Anne’s uncle and father. Since Anne’s father was the Lieutenant of the Tower, he had John thrown in Fleet Prison for marrying his daughter. It took about eight years for Donne to reconcile with Anne’s father.

            I believe that the speaker of the poem is Anne Donne herself. “I lay in in London;/ And round my bed my live children were crying,” (Lines 1-2). These lines reinsure the fact that it might be Anne Donne speaking because she did have many children in her life. I also feel like the poem could be taken as a letter from one woman to a friend, the woman being the main speaker. The poem gives the sense of a woman having a miscarriage and how her world feels as though it is falling apart. “Carrying my dead child, so lost, so light a burden,” (Line 18).

            “As my blood left me it set the clapper swinging:/ Tolling, jarring, jowling, all the bells of London” (Lines 4-5). This line really gives the reader the loud and slow ringing of a big bell in London by using the words such as, “tolling”, ”jowling”, and “jarring”.

            “Ill-done, well-done, all-done.” (Line 8). In this line, Sylvia Townsend Warner used an anaphora by repeating the word “done” throughout the line. I interpreted this line as the speaker, Anne Donne or another woman, going through stages of sadness, denial, and acceptance after a miscarriage.   

            The end of the poem ends with the lines, “And showed him my ill news. That done,/ Went back, lived on in London” (Lines 20-21). This truly shows how the speaker has fully accepted a lost child and has moved on with her life.

Piano by D.H. Lawrence

Piano by D.H. Lawrence immediately made me think of a memory that he might have had when he was a child. The long lines make the reader feel like they are drifting in to nostalgia or some type of sweet dream that someone may have.

            Softly in the dusk, a woman singing to me;

            Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see

            A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings

            And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

The first line of the poem, it gives the feeling that D.H. is going back into time and recalls some kind of memory of his mother singing. He gives the image of his mother being a happy woman that “smiles as she sings” and how he would be under the piano, listening and enjoying her company. D.H. ends the poem with the line: “Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past” (Line 12). I think this poem is done in memory of his mother and the time that he would spend with her; He longs for the feeling of the unconditional love of his mother and wishes that she were back in his life. (His mother died 8 years before this poem was written)

Oread by H.D.

Today I am presenting the imagist poet H.D. in class. She is a very interesting woman that influenced the imagism in poetry. Her poems are very different than the Victorian period poems. She feels that few words are needed to actually make poems; this is shown in her very early work such as Oread and The Pool.

In the poem Oread, I read it as the sea being a powerful force that is controlled by a nymph in the mountains. The shortness of the lines in the poem gives the reader the sense of that power. H.D. uses the word “whirl” at the beginning of the first two lines, which is an anaphora (the repetition of a word/phrase at the beginning of two or more lines). The word “pines” is repeated at the end of the second and third lines; this repetition is an epizeuscis (the repetition of a word/phrase at the end of two or more lines). The words “whirl”, “splash”, and “hurl” also give the impression of great force coming from the sea.

In a Station of the Metro by Erza Pound

When I first read this poem, I was so confused by its length! I could have sworn that the page that contained the rest of the poem had fallen out of my book, but this is only a two-line poem. After reading the back-story of the poem, it made so much sense to me. Pound is talking about a time he was at a train station and all the beautiful people mesmerized him. He uses the word “apparition” I think, to describe how he gets a quick image of all the people busily passing by him and how it’s not a very clear image. I can see why he used the word “apparition” because it really makes the reader feel that kind of hustle-and-bustle of a busy train station. He then describes the people as “Petals on a wet, black bough” because of how the people bring colorfulness to the train station.

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

I am not one to be interested in war poems but this poem really caught my attention. It described the looks of the worn-down soldiers with such clear imagery. “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags…” (Lines 1-2). The first stanza really gives the reader a feeling of fatigue the soldiers were feeling from the war by using very long sentences and great imagery. “Men marched asleep” and “Drunk with fatigue” (Lines 4 and 7). Owen really provides a great insight of the hardships that soldiers would face in war.

“Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – an ecstasy of fumbling” (Line 9). This first line of the second stanza really shifts the mood of the poem from fatigue to quick and alert. Owen then describes the horrifying death of a fellow soldier that is “drowning” in the poisonous gas. The last for lines shows that Owen is repulsed at the thought of young men, who haven’t lived a full life, die wars.

Elsa Wertman By Edgar Lee Masters

This poem by Edgar Lee Masters was the first poem that we were assigned to read that I actually understood what it was talking about after the first time I read it! I was very excited because it is a very interesting poem about a young woman getting pregnant and giving away her child. It was clear to me that the girl was very ashamed for getting pregnant and Mrs. Greene agreed to adopt it. Mrs. Greene was very clever about the pregnancy by spreading rumors by saying that she was the one that was pregnant and locked herself at her house in order to make it seem believable. In the end, the boy that was born turns out to grow up to be a powerful political leader and the young women who gave him away seems to feel guilty about it. “That’s my son! That’s my son!” is what the woman wants to yell when she sees what could have been her son has grown up to be (line 24). The ending is very sad because you can sense the regret the woman feels for giving up her child.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W.B. Yeats

 I really enjoyed this poem by W.B Yeats. At first I did not really understand its meaning but after reading other people's interpretations of it, it really turned out to be a beautiful poem. What drew my interest to the poem is the fact that it reminds me so much of my boyfriend and me. This poem is basically about Yeats and his lover and how he would do anything for her even though he is very poor. "I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams" I think this line is so romantic and describes exactly how I feel about my boyfriend that I've been dating ever since the 8th grade! I would give anything to my boyfriend and I know he would do the same. It’s not like we have much anyway because of the fact we’re both two poor college students.

Hap by Thomas Hardy

Out of the three poets we were assigned to read, I thought that Thomas Hardy was very interesting. His poem, “Hap”, is a short, three-stanza poem that describes how Hardy feels about a more powerful being running his life. “Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I/Had willed and meted me the tears I shed” He shows hints of being agnostic to religious views by describing how God does not technically control your life. The thought of having something and/or someone to blame all of your sorrows and hardships on is comforting to him. Hardy does not capitalize the word “God” but capitalizes the words “Casualty” and “Time”. I believe that this is because in his poem, he is trying to explain that casualty and time is what determines the sorrows and joy you will have in your life. It is interesting to me that one would find comfort in blaming a higher being for the faults and joyous moments in their life.