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.