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.