Joy Harjo “The Path to the Milky Way Leads through Los Angeles”

                Some older traditions held that when our souls departed this world, they travel to a star. Just as one takes a train from point a to point b, our souls take death from earth to a star. I believe that is what this poem is saying, however it is odd that the path to one of those stars, or to the milky way leads through Los Angeles. Harjo mentions that it is a city named after the angels, but is probably more well known as a city of sin. I think that Harjo is not being specific to Los Angeles however. She is being analogous to all cities where we are crowded in with other people. I think that she is trying to communicate some kind of truth behind the reality of looking for good in a place where there is so much bad. I have to ask myself why she uses the Crow to say “wait, wait and see” (line 25) Is it because it is a joke, or a trick rather to try to find something good. I believe this poem could also communicate some sort of secular version of one having must passed a life of sin in order to reach the afterlife. Maybe if I wait and see, then I will find out.

Gwendolyn Brooks “A Song in the Front Yard”

                Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry is dark, sad, and realistic sounding. You immediately get pictures of non-ideal lives, and the hidden face of America in these poems. It’s no wonder her biography talks of Blues tradition, because that’s what her poems are. “A song in the Front Yard” at first sounds like a middle class American poem of a young girl, but the last stanza reveals to us that it is probably a very poor neighborhood, where prostitutes walk, and a mother is trying to keep her child from being like them. I feel like this poem is slightly activist-like in the way that it illustrates how a young girl cant have the ideal childhood with friends. She is jailed to her front yard, in order to protect her from being subjected to the bad influences of the area, however it seems that the mother is unsuccessful as she has already seen and strives to be like the girls, “And I’d like to be a bad woman, too” (line 18). but only because she hasn’t seen the consequences.

Ted Hughes “An Otter”

                I chose to really try and analyze this poem for the shallow reason of my favorite animal being an otter. In reading, I would believe that the otter is purely symbolic of some other idea like a person, or an exile, “Like a king in hiding.” (line 17). As with most poems, I have learned to look at the last stanza for a meaning to the poem. In the big picture, we have this wandering creature that once belonged to the land of everyone else. Now he is seeking some sort of home he cannot find, but in the end, he is hunted by the land creatures and his pelt is tanned and strewn over a chair. I could say this poem is about being a wanderer as an identity of a person, that once that person finds the land he has been looking for, he loses himself and becomes “this long pelt over the back of a chair.” (line 40), or that there is some sort of injustice in an otter’s life, or that once exiled, this “king” can rule a new world, which is that of fish. Another notable feature about this poem is its structure. Frequently the first few words of a sentence is begun on a previous stanza, while the rest of the thought continues not only to the next line, but the next stanza. I am curious as to why Hughes chose this odd structural format.

Philip Larkin “Church Going”

                Larkin must be somewhat of a comic writer, because the title of this poem is a pun in itself. We think it will be about going to church (or at least I did), however it is really about the church “going” away. Distracted by my reverence for this poem as a sci-fi poem set in the future, because I don’t believe the church will ever go away. That being said, the poem gives light into how many atheist people must feel about the church, as merely a place for marriage, baptism, and funerals. “Only in separation—marriage, and birth, / And death and thoughts of these—for which was built” (lines 50-52). It seems surprising that this poem was written in 1954 when I thought that religious conservatism was at a stable point. If that is the case, then this is a very revolutionary or avante garde kind of work.

Robert Lowell “Memories of West Street and Lepke”

                The poetic nature of this poem lies in the way in which its stanzas are presented in a possible chronological order. The stanzas have seemingly little connection with each other, however they could be a timeline of memories throughout a person’s life just as the title suggests. Clearly the poem could be recounted as a summary of one’s life, but what is most exceptional about this poem is that it seems to recount a list of bad or darker things in life. the poem is also written in a romantic meter, however the topics are very dark; involving jail drugs and death by electric chair. This poem tries to communicate to me a sort of antiromantic picture of life. Clearly the third stanza seems to be the changing point of this story. It seems to describe the moment in the narrators life when everything went bad, and how it did. Given that no major story was made, its doubtful that he went to jail for something terrible, rather he may have gone against some sort of government regulation which landed him in jail.

Dylan Thomas “Fern Hill”

                After first reading this, it was a relief to find that some poets upheld the values of something thought out purposeful and metered. Even if there was no justified rhyme scheme at the end that pre-modernists sought to maintain, the poem is still not so  haphazard and careless sounding as those of the Beat poets. This poem has themes of the innocence of youth and the injustices of growing older. I Feel like the whole poem is a set up painting an impressionistic like picture of what a joyous life a young child can have on a farm, so that the last stanza can seemingly reverse our lighthearted mood that Thomas has created.  The last two lines of the last stanza are specifically paradoxical to what we hear at the beginning of the poem. “Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” (lines 53-54). Thomas also seems to use describing words in very unconventional ways. In this way he is not like the old poets. He likes to use adjectives that normally describe other things for unexpected nouns and verbs.

Shell Silverstein “The Perfect High”

It seems that another consequence of modern culture that affected some of the beat poets was the experimentation of drugs. While I cannot relate to the literal reading of this poem, I would say that there could be a wide interpretation. Just using the themes of drugs in the background of the poem is what illustrates the culture that this poem arose from. One could have certainly replaced the drugs with almost anything else, foods, experiences or perhaps even women, however the message can come across the same

"Well, dog my cats!" says Baba Fats. "here’s one more burnt–out soul,
Who’s looking for some alchemist to turn his trip to gold.
But you won’t find it in no dealer’s stash, or on no druggist’s shelf.
Son, if you would seek the perfect high –– find it in yourself."

These lines are met with some resistance from Gimmesome Roy who finds it unacceptable that he has worked so hard to find something that seems simple when in reality it is not. This theme is especially motivating for those willing to listen to Baba Fats. as it is a predominant cultural belief that things can be achieved by material means without the use of intrinsic thought. This poems message is to find that happiness is not something obtained but achieved. 

Allen Ginsberg “Howl”

Was really glad we got some good explanation about this work in class today. At first reading, the poem appears to be a non-rhythmical, poorly written rant about some terrible life who did nothing good, and all things miserable. In part two I feel like it’s an un enlightening parody, or satire on Maloch, who symbolizes the United States taking away the people’s humanity, to which I as when has any vast number of people ever had this humanity? that’s beside the point. It is good to know that this poem was done in the Dadaist fashion. Most helpful was the analogy between this poem and a collage that our professor gave us today. Just as impressionist paintings described the poetry as well. We find all sorts of macabre or grotesque things in this poem. Things that are not well thought of. Ginsberg does a great job of adding humor to lighten the almost whiney tone of this poem. These whines significant and wanting to be heard as what the author probably thought was a howl. There’s no telling how loud the howl was, and how much of an impact it actually made. I do appreciate how the lack of style in Dadaist poetry allows writers to freely express emotion in a kind of in your face approach. I would like to employ this type of writing, similar to Ginsberg as kind of a lazy impressionism.

Allen Ginsberg. “Last night in Calcutta”

In this poem I could go on to summarize what would be seemingly sleeping in a dankish hot room in India, but that would be boring. Instead I will focus on the lines of the poem that seem the most out of place to me, or the hardest to understand. The last 3 lines of the poem begin with a hyphen and it  says “—Leave immortality for another to suffer like a fool, / not get stuck in the corner of the universe / sticking morphine in the arm and eating meat.” (lines 38-40). The previous lines seem to elude to the narrator having pain in the kidney.  “Skin is sufficient to be skin, that’s all / it ever could be, tho screams of pain in the kidney / dying to finish its all too famous misery”(lines 34-37). It would seem that the narrator is in pain and doesn’t want to die in Calcutta. I would say the significance of the morphine would at least be symbolic of an unwillingness to let go. I would also make so bold of an assumption as to say that “eating meat.” is a reaction against the Indian culture in which many are vegetarian. It seems the narrator wants to go back to New York or Bangkok (line 33) but I couldn’t say why. Let me say that there is at least some more structure to this poem compared to many of ginsberg’s others which makes it easy to read, but it is still filled with vagueness, the likes of which I have experienced far too much since beginning this course.

William Carlos Williams

“The Great Figure”

William’s apparent experience with the Imagists becomes quite apparent in his poetry from the early 1900’s following his partnership with Ezra pound. Imagistic poetry can sound overly simplistic, and lacking of depth, but I suppose that is what is attempted to be portrayed. It is a sort of visual snapshot through words. This poem captures the entire essence of a fire truck rushing in the rain (ironically) to some destination at night while its siren goes. In 33 words (later 29 after line 7 was omitted) Williams paints a movie clip in the minds of readers. In reality this scene would have lasted about 15 seconds, but that is all that he wished to portray evidently. What other meanings this poem could mean, and why he wrote it is beyond me. I may as well just write a poem about this cup of water sitting on my desk and call it an imagist poem, just as well as a painter might paint a still life. It is poetry, and it is art.

Mina Loy “Songs to Joannes”

I get the feeling that Loy is poet equivalent in nature to the impressionist painters of the beginning of the 20^th century. I feel that she uses more emotional words, adjectives and adverbs than there should be in relation to nouns and verbs making the whole poem a fragmented montage of expression rather than meaning. I frequently hear that art is a medium of self expression, and this piece illustrates that quite nicely. This poem has a narrator and is speaking to only one person. It is full of a mixture of innuendos and descriptive imagery. There seems to be an air of secrecy about the poem “…Something only for you / Something that I must not see” (part XIII, lines 9-10). I can’t put a finger on it exactly, but this poem also seems to be glorifying the darker themes associated with love.

Let us be very jealous

Very suspicious

Very Conservative

Very Cruel

                (lines 14-18)

The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot.

When one thinks of poetry, it is usually a few stanzas, but in the case of the wasteland, Eliot puts a new outlook on poetry. With countless allusions, and varying changes in rhyme scheme throughout the stanzas and a great many characters, it is no wonder it became one of his most notable works. In a preface, I read that Eliot, never intended to derive a certain meaning to his poem, and that he was really just writing what he thought was best. This is comforting, because the poem itself is very difficult to understand, and a greater than renaissance or literature education would be required to grasp it all without the footnotes. I like how Eliot frequently adds a rhyming couplet near, but not on, the end of the stanzas. He frequently makes use of enjambed lines, often times marking the first word of a sentence at the end of a line. there are many literary techniques involved, and this poem is clearly far from anything prosy sounding.

T.S. Eliot “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

                After reading this lengthy poem, I would like to make a conclusion or moral of the story; that woman should be sought out before a man’s head begins to bald, and that it doesn’t hurt to work out, if only for aesthetic purposes. However, this I feel is not the meaning of the poem itself. What is Important to take note of is that this “Love Song” is an Ironic, a satire even, version of what love poetry has always been before. I think when one first begins their journey of poetry, they stereotype it with love poems; roses are red… etc. In terms of literary elements, the concept of poetry that I think is most important in this poem is the use of metaphor. When J. alludes to his being as a yellow fog is one time (line 15) is one example, or “I should have been a pair of ragged claws” (line 74). In the end he uses the metaphor of a peach to be a woman, or love, and sets up a whole scene in which he describes the women as mermaids. Let’s not forget line 111 when J. says, “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;” Hamlet is alone in his play by Shakespeare, and although this is more of an allusion, than a metaphor, the comparison qualities are still strong.

T.S. Eliot “Whispers of Immortality”

                This is probably one of the more difficult poems I have attempted to interpret thus far in the course. Starting with the title, I ask how the narrator is receiving these whispers. The first stanza seems to be an allusion to one who is familiar with death, but why is he brought up? “Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin” I interpret this to mean that there is someone who, when he looks at a person, easily imagines them as being dead, which is not too normal. But why is this important to the poem? “He knew that thought clings round dead limbs / Tightening its lusts and luxuries.” I feel like this is symbolic of dead limbs, or the body only and not the soul, is the part which wants and desires things. This answers my first question of why this man is familiar with death. It is because only in death do the material lusts and luxuries stay with the body, so it is by death that we separate ourselves from these thoughts. I suppose a moral of the first two stanzas could be that Immortality is not so good in that in it we never separate from these things. through immortality we are stuck to the thoughts that  cling round our limbs!

Louis MacNeice: Carrickfergus

                The setting of this poem is introduced with the title, that is if you know where or what Carrickfergus even is. A lot of poetry in the English language is from England or the United States, so to get a poem from Ireland really makes Carrickfergus exceptional. MacNeice includes historically important facts throughout the poem, mentioning the soldiers as well as the conflict between the catholic and protestant church. This poem is about a wealthy individual in Ireland who still sees the lives of many others in his city. There is plenty of autobiographical information in this poem, and what is strange about this poem is the way that he doesn’t downplay the role of the working class at all. in fact he describes his educated status as a puppet world of sons. For such an autobiographical poem its interesting that he uses a quatrain meter, and even more interesting is the rhyme scheme in which he rhymes the last word of lines B and D but not the others.

The Harlem Renaissance

                Sterling Brown was a highly educated African American poet that wrote many of his poems about the life of those who shared his ethnicity. His 65 line “Odyssey of Big Boy” is just that; a very short odyssey. First by summarizing the poem, we come to understand that we have a man who has worked many jobs since he was only a boy. He works for a little while, and moves onto another job, all involving physical labor. Along his life, he has relationships with quite a few women, and in the end gets caught with a white man’s wife. Sterling Brown was obviously educated enough to write standard poetry, but in the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, he writes the whole poem in a strong dialect. He utilizes a pattern of repetition  of the last two lines of almost every quintain, giving his poetry a strong metrical sense. The structure of the stanzas are strong enough to be a poem, and the consistency of rhythm and voice could have easily made this poem into a song. It’s doubtful that a less literal meaning can be taken from this poem, but it still is an important step of developing new conventions toward poetry and strongly represents the Harlem Renaissance.

Valentine Ackland

                I find most of Ackland’s poetry to be written in a much more traditional way than most of the other modernist poets. here use of rhyming and common ABBA, ABAB, AABB structure make her poetry seem less developed than the poets of more free verse. Her poem, “The Lonely Woman” is somewhat of a traditional poem with its two stanzas of four couplets each. The content probably reflects her emotions in a depressed state as it sounds like she was in much of her life, judging by her autobiography. The poem illustrates a woman living alone on a farm, which can probably be related to by many people who live alone. The Newspaper is important as a way of coping with the fact of being alone, in a way that she seeks some kind of social interaction even if it is only by reading about others.  The fact that she is lonely but has no trouble going to bed shows that she has been like this for a while, and while many may not feel bad, it is written so that by the end of the poem, you feel sorry for the old woman, and begin to think about the lonely people that you happen to know and how they might be feeling.

D.H. Lawrence.
Of all the poets we have been reading about, I beleive Lawrence to be the strangest of them all in his style of poetry. most of his poems are prosy, non-rhyming, and metered in an artistic form. In "Snake" it is a very story-like poem if it were not for the technicality in metered verse. It is hard to derive meaning from such an elaborate story about a man's reluctance towards killing a snake. There are societal connotations of conformity in it. In "Whales Weep Not" Lawrence tries to establish love as a mystical sort of experience relating back to the gods of old and using other allusions. "The English Are So Nice!" has a matter-of-fact tone and is somewhat whimsicle. Lawrence's use of ploce keep it a bit more conservative than many of his other poems written in the same time during the 1930's. "The Ship of Death" is a long poem written with Roman Numeral breaks to give the poem an epic, or ancient Greek feel. It is a dark poem, with a positive light on the mystery surrounding death. Lawrence's poetry has a two dimensional feel, probably derived from his need to capture his real emotion at the time. He cover's a broad range of subjects in his poetry contrasting from many poets who publish poems of only a similar feel.

H.D. Sea Rose and The Pool
In "Sea Rose" we get to see elements of imigism as it applies to other poets. However, much of H.D.'s poetry is more emotional and even rhetorical with more inspiring or romantic words, in the end he asks a question to the readers which sounds a little bit unheard of so this poem is not purely imigistic. In the Pool, it is almost as impressionist as anything else, as it seems H.D. is trying to capture the moment in time when he catches a fish, and you are that fish. It makes the reader feel uneasy changing perspective to an animal or a fish even.

Amy Lowell, The Pike

This poem reminds me to much of a poem by Elizabeth Bishop called “The Fish”. In both poems the elements of Imigism come through as a style that although beautifully versed, seems to lack an emotional aspect that is prevalent in a lot of other poetry. The poem is literally about a pike being illustrated as it swims away in a flash of shining color. What else is there to say about the poem? Is it supposed to help symbolize a fleeting moment, or perhaps a missed opportunity? looking for hints of meaning in “in the brown water” (line 1), and “Through sun-thickened water.” (line 13) I try to imagine that the setting has anything to do with the meaning. Does one find beauty in a unexpected place? I believe that the goals of imagism, which this poem is an epitome of is that it merely describes an image in poetical verse. It is like the equivalent of an artist painting a still life picture. It is art in itself. 

Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”

                Usually I believe that the poem an author creates always has a parallel meaning between the lines, or the non-literal translation, but “Dulce et Decorum Est”, illustrating a painful death in World War I is a powerful enough image in itself, that it need not parallel something else. It only needs to vividly and poetically express its message with poetical verse a tragedy of sorts. The title translating roughly to “It is sweet and proper” leads us not to expect this horribly described death and sets up a bit of irony in the story. At last the poem makes it point rather clearly “The old Lie: (It is sweet and proper/ to die for one’s country)”(line 27-28). The author of this poem illustrates to the reader by using words with a hopeless and macabre connotation. “incurable sores”, “white eyes writhing in his face”, and “from froth-corrupted lungs”. All these words set up a specific tone that the author wishes to portray.

Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg

                These are two poets that I frequently hear about in the world of poetry. Robert Frost’s “Birches” is a poem that illustrates a young boy climbing a tree to the top to be lowered to the ground by the bending of its branches. In my own interpretation, I thought of this as a young person who climbs to the top of the world by way of power or ambition, but when he reaches too high, that the world can no longer bear him, the tree puts him back on the ground. Doing this repeated times makes the tree grow weary, and in the poem are themes of rebirth and continuation with a sense that there will be an end when rebirth can occur no more. This is my dark interpretation of an otherwise whimsical poem.

                I liked the Simplicity, or understandability  of Carl Sandburg’s “Grass”.  The repetition between stanzas is significant somehow in providing significance of how the grass deletes old memories. That even though a significant act may happen, when the surface of the problem is covered up, no one else knows what happened unless you experienced it yourself. This poem is likely a message that things aren’t only what they seem on the outside.

William Butler Yeats

It is no surprise that someone with an unrequited love such as Yeats would write a poem titled, "The Sorrow of Love“. The Structure is fairly straightforward and recognizable. In summary, the poem starts with a description of some worldly things described by words with a positive connotation. After the first stanza, when the love interest is introduced, we see a kind of realization that all the bad things in the world have come along with this person. The third stanza is a mirror image of the first stanza that reflects things in a negative or pessimistic version of the first. This is a depressing poem with maybe a hint of real world value in that a love interest can bring realization of many things not previously noticed even if they are pessimistic things. What is to be focused on this poem mostly is probably the last line of stanza one and three. Something about the person in stanza two causes “the earth’s old weary cry” to become uncovered from the natural things described. It is as if a woman destroyed the simplicity or tranquility of nature itself.

Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush

Between Thomas Hardy’s poems and Edward Thomas’s, I remembered just how difficult it is to decipher a poet’s work. If I were only to strive to understand the concrete meaning, then poetry would just be shallow and short writing.  My first impressions of Thomas Hardy are that he is a dark poet writing from sadness, maybe even depression. While Hardy is the focus of my current list of poems, I decided to focus on just one of his poems going for a quality analysis rather than quantity.

I chose to focus on The Darkling Thrush, simply because I liked the title. On the Concrete level, Hardy describes a sort of winter setting where everyone is inside because it is cold in the first stanza. Next, the Century’s is personified as having a corpse which is the land, and the wind being a lamenting. A sort of gloominess is intended toward the reader with the line, “And every spirit upon the earth Seemed fervourless as I.”  Suddenly in Stanza three amidst a gloomy scene, and old skinny bird, a thrush, begins to sing. Explained in the final stanza is that there is nothing around that the bird could be singing for as it is cold, dead, and dreary. So it is that the narrator supposes the bird sings of good capitalized Hope, that he is unaware of.

Surely, there must be more to this poem than a man in a dreary winter scene who hears suddenly hears a cheerful bird. As determining this is very difficult, I reviewed some symbols of literature. As winter time is a common symbol for death, one could interpret this poem as someone passing away. That person may have lived as long as a century, and while everyone else is warm by their fires, (alive) the narrator is dying. What hope is there in death, especially for an atheist, but Hope is introduced by the thrush?  Could it be that the thrush  sings of an afterlife while on the concrete level it is probably looking forward to spring, which is a common symbol of rebirth. While this poem was written on December 31, 1900 it seems likely that Hardy could have been talking about the Century. maybe the 1800s weren’t so great, so the thrush is a symbol of hope for a better world in the next century.

Welcome to my first blog. It is a blog dedicated to my thoughts and analysis of the assigned readings for my introduction to poetry class.