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.