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.