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.