Tone Piece--Sarcastic/Pessimistic/Dreadful

     It is late at night and finals are coming up this week...ugh. To top it all off, I am sick and it's approximately 11:15 p.m. I am SO excited to wake up at 6 o'clock in the morning to start off this dreaded week. This week better go fast.. I just wish it was over!!!

Acquainted with the Night

I really, really like this poem. I get a feeling of a sort of depressing, lonely atmosphere, but in a bazaar way that gives one pleasure. I just kept imagining Robert Frost walking through the city at night, after everything has stopped--bars closed, buses stopped, everything in standstill and abandoned in its place until morning. Playing in my head, I can just hear a somber Sinatra tune while Frost describes his journey through the still night. I was curious, though, about the second stanza of this poem, "I have looked down the saddest city lane./ I have passed by the watchman on his beat/ And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain./" My question here is, what is he keeping from the watchman? What is Frost implying with the last line of this stanza? The last line feels to me like it is gorging with a sense of guilt and shamefulness, specifically because he states how his eyes "drop." Also, is time a symbolic feature in this poem, as he looks at a clock-tower and goes into further depth of the time being right or wrong in the next stanza? Who is calling for him? Or is this all sequentially happening to define the fact that he is extremely alone and isolated? Maybe he wishes that someone would call for him and care what he had to say even though he looked, shamefully, at the ground, and whatever time that it might be, how much does it even matter? That's why it's never right or wrong when you're lost, alone, apathetic, sad, gloomy, depressed, etc. Unlike the last poem I responded to, though, I love the tone and feeling of this poem the way Robert Frost writes it.

Deciduous

Annexing two
As one departs,
and turns one less few.
The amputation
of an umbilical
to mother nation.

But here-off
is started new truths,
new beginnings,
new futures--
clear-off--
in the distance.

The new union of two,
Peace-filled and diplomatic
Through and through.

Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock

Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock is exactly that. It seems like the poet is describing his own chaotic visions at ten o'clock. I don't like this poem at all. I'll just be blunt with it. From my point of view, it seems like the poet just made an organized jumble of ideas that are completely random just to match the idea of "disillusionment." Stevens does use parallel structure in lines 4,5,and 6, and it seems to me like that is the only useful things he does. After staring at this poem from a while, am I missing something? Or is it really that surface-y? Reading it even again makes me feel like this poem is a waste of ink and space. I want it to amaze in some way by showing me some sort of cool meaning or use, but there is nothing that lets me justify that. So I guess what I can milk from this piece is that he wrote this piece to display what his disillusioned vision at ten o'clock was.

A Study of Reading Habits

I feel like the author of this poem is talking about the phases in his life in which he reads, and does not. The first stanza is the first phase, when he is captured by earlier choices of reading. Clifford maybe? The second stanza proceeds to tell of the next phase, deep into science fiction and teen reading. Harry Potter comes to mind immediately. As well as the line included in the first stanza: "It was worth ruining my eyes," the second stanza responds with the line: "Later, with inch-thick specs...." That is one of the elements that tells me that with each stanza, time passes. With the last stanza he talks about how he doesn't read much anymore. He talks about how all of the old stories are just that--old. And at this point, in the last line, he seems to take a nihilistic stance. He seems to give up on books in an almost self-destructive manner. I sort of like how Larkin starts out with hope and shine and glimmer, and then he just burns it all to pieces by the end of the poem. It seems like the true path of literature: dwindling path of destruction. It's depressing, but in the way that makes one feel good.

Those Winter Sundays

     Oftentimes, I wish the title of this poem felt like it should right now on this night in November. When I read this poem, I think of a snowy morning that just makes you feel cozy inside. This, however, is not what this poem is about. Robert Hayden seems to be talking about his father from the perspective of a child in times that a furnace did not replace the hard work of a man to provide shelter and heat to his family. I assume that this setting existed in the past before such electricity was available. The poem is almost written as a recollection of his father when he was a child and he wished he had not taken him for granted. Just in the way he said, "No one ever thanked him," in the last line of the first stanza just depicts the fact that the father was the guy who was behind the scenes and kept doing what he would do for his family, even if he was never given appreciation. I noticed that the stanzas went from 5 lines to 4 to 3 to 2 in sequential order. I am currently baffled at the author's technique or strategy with using this structure, but I feel like it helped the poet to climax his last two lines: "What did I know, what did I know/ Of love's austere and lonely offices?" With out this countdown setup, I feel like the lines wouldn't have meant as much as they did or even have any impact to the audience, but it seems that Hayden "frames" these last words with his stanza structure.
     I found this poem interesting and heartwarming through the setting, although reminiscing and somber in tone. It just simply makes me think of Christmas morning.

Unveiling

     I picked this poem to read and blog on, not because we studied it this past week in class, but because I am currently in Wisconsin for the funeral of my grandmother as I write this. I found this poem ironically haunting to be studying in class the day following my grandmother's passing, so I thought it suited my blogging this poem this week.
     As I was walking through the cemetery yesterday afternoon at the burial proceeding, I saw the head stone where my preceding grandfather's head lay, and I walked the line of the headstones--my my great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, all following in line of the same sort of deceased meeting ground among the branches of the tree that continues to stretch further as my family continues growing (quite wordy, I know). As I walked this line, I was eerily reminded of this haunting poem that I had previously read in AP Literature. As my grandma was the last sort of grandparent to die on my father's side, it seemed that the great-greats, great, and normal grandparents were commencing, once again, in their rituals as the poem dictates, as sitting around the dinner table, enjoying the newfound company of my grandmother which they had missed. But the rest of us were stuck here, that is, until we are received in the same earthen graves, looked down on by our lively children and grandchildren. But they are mortal. They, too, will become part of the family dinner table. But for now they must sit at the kids' table and wait patiently as their way comes 'round.
     It was not my full intention to write my own story about my own recollections, but I feel like that was what was necessary to greet the full meaning of this poem--to feel it, and then to retell it as your own legend, as I did see it.

The Coming of Wisdom with Time

This poem was only four lines long, but it had a message that is a lifetime long--that is, that I believe it is talking about the span of a person's life. The poem starts out with the first line being: "though leaves are many, the root is one." By this I believe the poet is trying to say that we has several perspectives in our life that change through the seasons and phases, but we always remain rooted to the ground as the same person with the same soul and conscience. In the last three lines, Yeats is pretty much reinforcing the first line: that in the days of his youth, he was the same tree, but had different leaves, but as he as a person matures, the leaves are changing to a new perspective more clear. I love this poem because it is short and sweet, but it tells a story all the same. I think it is a very different structure that creates a lot of draw and interest.

On Reading Poems to a Senior Class At South High

Well writing this a second time kind of ticks me off. Apparently I  was never connected to the internet, so I didn't have backup. So anyway, I'm not so happy about blogging this again. I loved this poem when I read it. I think it is talking about a high school teacher who is trying to fill his ideas and thoughts from his poems into the heads of stagnant high school kids. He uses frozen fish to capture the initial mood and  temperament of the adolescent mind. And then he starts reading his poem and he intoxicates the room with interesting thoughts and conjectures, jumping from head to head, and the fills with water, coming to life. But as soon as the teacher has his grasp on the students' imaginations and minds, the bell rings and the door lets out all of the water and life from the classroom. I think the poem is making an analogy to the water being the thoughts and creativity and conjectures that are brewing in minds and it is all starting to flow from the poem being recited to the students, bringing them to life. But by the end of the day, the teacher has gone home in his own world as a fish, and ironically, is woken up by his pet cat Queen Elizabeth by a lick to the hand. The reason I love this poem is, it reminds me of Mr. Moore from last year, when he was almost some form of mad or crazy, as he always had some sly "plan" to keep us thinking and keep his students around his finger, thinking about the thoughts he projected to us. To me, I feel Mr. Moore's personality through this poem and I really enjoyed it.

Lost Brother

     This poem seems to be written almost as an obituary would be in my mind. Throughout the poem it is very documentary of  the life of the deceased tree. What made me think of this was when the narrator (another tree) started describing his temperaments and what he sheltered, being his accomplishments, and everything that surrounded him when he was living so stationary (no pun intended).
     I thought that this poem could've very well been a personification of trees into a sensitive human situation, such as the death of a loved one, in order to create an argument for the importance of every living thing, even trees. This poem to me is an environmental argument that essentially tries to personify human emotion to create attention to the fact that trees are being cut down every day and animals are being killed every day and even the smallest organisms are tossed aside to be made out to be unimportant, but this poem is confronting that idea and saying that it is a sad thing when a tree is cut down or that an animal is slaughtered. I just love how Moss slips under the reader and personifies this tree and gives it human emotion before the reader can detect it and make a biased notion or judgement about their beliefs on the subject. The more and more I read into this poem, I start to love it more and more. This could all possibly be absolutely none of the poet's intentions, but I don't care. I find that my perception of what the poet wrote makes me happier and happier the more I think about it because of my interest in the environment. If I beat it with a hose, then so be it.

In Blackwater Woods

     At first, I had a pretty tough time with this poem and understanding it, mainly because of the ambiguity of some of Mary Oliver's lines in the poem. Some of the lines that were confusing were lines such as:

"...and every pond,
    no matter what its
    name is, is

    nameless now."

     Mainly the line break throws me off. Why didn't the poet just move the other "is" down to the next stanza? What is she trying to communicate by using this technique, and secondly, what is she even saying? Why is the pond nameless now? Is she talking about the mortality of life, and once it dies, it loses its name? That is what I extracted from those stanzas.
     I think Mary Oliver is trying to write about death and mortality in this poe and how you have to enjoy what  life is today and hold on to it, because it won't always stick around. Like she specifically says to do: to love what is mortal, and then hold on to it as if your life depends on it, and then be able to let it go when the time comes. So like in anything in life, nothing lasts forever, but you have to take it for everything it's worth while it;s still around and before you have to let it go.

Beginning Again

This poem comes out to me as being seemingly dark. Maybe it is just my image of "...Alone again performing brain surgery on himself in a badly lit room with no mirror." It almost seems like a dream. Or like a Tim Burton film (or just Alice in Wonderland). And within this darkness, at the end I ironically find myself feeling refreshed from all of the burdens of the first stanza. I think the structure of this poem is the bread and butter of it. The first stanza goes on about being lost and confused in a giant mess--just as the stanza diction itself seems. And then it continues down and gets more and more simple and easier to understand, and then you finally hit that "Why?" and you cross into this new phase of the poem of optimism and light. And with the last stanza, I can just imagine myself in complete tranquility, and with only two things--myself and Li Po. Franz Wright is very sneaky about how he does this, even if the reader has no clue what the poem is about, by the time they get through the end, there is just a sigh of relief and he or she has completely forgotten about the mess in the first stanza. After reading this poem and analyzing it 3 or 4 times, this is one of my favorite poems in the mix, simply because it makes the reader feel the writing instead of interpreting it.

Inoculation

     Cotton Mather, the character in this poem, was a real-life character who was a Puritan minister in Boston around Circa. 1700. He has been made famous by his heritage and also his involvement in the Salem Witch Trials. As dictated in the poem, Mather was a slave owner who had been studying Smallpox in Boston. The poem says, "...instead of sin," because of the fact that he was a renowned minister. So in his studies, he asks his slave, Onesimus, had he ever had the pox? Onesimus replied with yes and no because he never actually had the disease, but I believe he was referring to the disease of slavery, as he seems to emphasize it the second time he is questioned by Mather:

"'My mother bore me in the southern wild. 
She scratched my skin and I got sick, but lived
 to come here, free of  smallpox, as your slave.'"

     I think Onesimus is definitely suggesting that he overcame Smallpox, the initial disease, but he still has not overcome the subjugation of slavery, the latter "disease."

To Myself

This poem starts out seeming like a call to the author's own self, trying to find who he really is as he is writing it. It begs the question that maybe we never know who we really are, or contrarily, we may know exactly who we are, but in some sort of doubt we question and prod who we actually are in order to find ourselves to be some sort of impostor, when the case is quite untrue. The poem ends by saying that, maybe within all this searching, we knew all along who we are but we just refuse to believe it. I think W.S. Merwin  is keying in on the common issue that we are insecure with our own intuitions and we cannot decipher between our realities and our psychological doubts. The poem talks about how a person feels closer, then further from know themselves, and this is just the roller coaster of doubts that people have about their own conception of reality and their true self and that people lose and gain faith in their knowing about themselves.

Wallflowers

This poem speaks about words--words we don't use, words we may not recognize, and words that may never find a "home." I feel like this poem generally talks about the depth of literacy. Shakespeare made his own words. How will we ever know if a word is a word until it is spoken? Where do these words exist? That is a question that the poem begs. Words are a person's own conceived ideas and notions that may not exist until they are merely thought. So this poem could be about a variety of subjects--words, thoughts, realities. But I think Donna Vorrey is talking about words here, as she pulls some from the shadowed corner and brings them to light--gegenshein, zoanthropy. Some words that are a rarity in our mind and in our own literature. Mrs. Vorrey was simply giving the stray words a home, right here in her poem.

1943

In the poem 1943 by Donald Hall, the wording and diction of the poem waiver from a very safe, domestic feeling to a vulnerable, independent feeling. The general gist of the poem is talking about the war. About how, when so many souls are lost in the curses of war that people can live on with normal and safe lives back at home.      I love how the poet starts with the title being 1943, giving the insinuation that the events that he is describing is about WWII, and then he immediately starts with talk of the war at home, but in the next stanza, Hall continues describing the war, but more-so from a soldiers perspective. The author waivers between perspectives in each stanza; hence, the stanza structure.
     The part of the poem that was chilling was the point of connection between these different perspectives of safe suburban life and dangerous battle life. Specifically, the last line of the poem is this point: "...with frostbitten feet as white as milk." The author describes the milk in his domestic perspective and the storming troops as his war perspective and the last line is where the connection is made.
     I mostly like this poem for the fact that it waits until the last line to break the connection of the subjects he is talking about in the preceding four stanzas, so when you realize he is connecting the two life perspectives all along, it magnifies the poems meaning ten fold.

The Kite Runner

     This book, as The Great Gatsby, wasn't an extremely challenging read, but the story complexity and development was brilliant (bravo). I this was the second book that I read, after The Great Gatsby. I made many connections from The Kite Runner to The Great Gatsby. The author wrote about similar societal restrictions as the American 20's. An example would be the right to be associated with certain people like the poor, or in The Kite Runner, Hazaras. Also in Rahim Khan's story about he was also married, it immediately made me think of the quote Daisy made that "Rich girls don't marry poor boys." This is a similar discrimination because the story was that Rahim Khan told showed that he was not allowed to marry a Hazara women, whether he loved her or not. The same goes for the "friendship" between Hassan and Amir. The pressure of the Afghan society pries them apart and essentially tells the that "a Pashtun may not be friends with an Hazara." 

     Other than the relations between the two books, The Kite Runner was a very interesting read. I loved how, as children, Hassan was the recluse in society and Amir was the acceptable one, but later in life the tables turned and all of the feelings that Amir suppressed for so long finally simmered to the surface and Hassan (although deceased) was married with a son and lived on as himself. By the end when Amir rescues Hassan's son, I sort of feel like the circumstances were very unrealistic, which ruined the reality of the book for me. The overall story was really good if that one part didn't seem like such a stretch. But romanticizing with the idea was fun. But really. This book was a fun one to read, especially after seeing the similarities between The Great Gatsby and The Kite Runner. Bravo. 

The Great Gatsby

    The Great Gatsby caught me in a fantastic way. Although F. Scott Fitzgerald doesn't write with such a complex style, his development of themes is very interesting. The way the "Lost Generation" writer unfolds his themes is almost that of a soap opera, where you feel you should be gripping for detail around ever corner and page. He precariously sets up this story of affairs with precarious placement, which at times is slightly confusing until 2+2 becomes apparent. I was especially fond of the climax of the book when everyone comes to terms with the very obvious "elephant in the room"; more specifically, the section where Tom shows up to Wilson's Garage in Jay Gatsby's car and it turns out that Mrs. Wilson is murdered with the same car. But it all happened that the murder was suggested to be Daisy, but Jay was shot. It is this kind of  precarious placement that grasps the reader in the drama of the writer.
    Moreover, Fitzgerald's intention was not a drama or intense soap opera. He depicts the images of the bourgeoisie and rich 20's as a very scandalous time and also shows the reality of what the American 20's had become. This book is almost a mockery of old-time thinking, and Fitzgerald is showing the new frontier of the 20's where parties were okay, flappers were a trend, and marrying for wealth and status wouldn't exist any longer--marriage and scandal for love became the right thing to do. Old conservative views on marriage were expiring and Fitzgerald showed this when Daisy blatantly stated that "Rich women don't marry poor boys." This was Fitzgerald's mockery of the idea of marriage and almost this whole book did. No one was happy with the idea of their marriage because it was numb; love was transparent and no longer existent.
     F. Scott Fitzgerald does a very swell job of tickling the idea of satire of old ideals in the 20's while sufficiently entangling the reader into a mess of several lives and affairs making the book into an eventful maze of interest. A soap opera.