Poetry and Poetics–Lit 204

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“Jabberwocky” is a poem famous for its utter nonsense. Like much of the setting in “Alice Through the Looking Glass” follows dream logic, this poem seems to follow nonsense logic. It feels like every other word is completely made-up, yet taken as a whole the poem makes perfect sense. Carroll wrote this poem in a childrens’ book, so he had to know that to keep a young mind engaged he would have to do something to make the poem stand out. His nonsense words feel like words that a young brain would create, and are typically alliterized onomatopoeias. There is little deeper meaning I could find in the poem – I think it is very much what it says on the tin. But nonetheless, this poem has infected our culture and uses language in a way that almost makes me think of a childish Shakespeare.

Loading Likes... “Mending Wall” is a poem that is framed in an almost playful tone, but asks something rather deep of the reader – to consider why they build walls. Every year the narrator and his neighbors fix the wall between them, and every year it breaks again when winter comes. The two of them have no livestock, the their plants are ones that will not harm each other, so why do they build this wall? Is it simply tradition? The neighbor seems to think so, at least to a point – all he does is repeat the saying he learned from his father: “Good fences make good neighbors.” It seems the narrators main reason for building the wall is to keep hunters off of his land. His question to the neighbor is not posed as a serious one, but as him trying to be cheeky.

I think this poem gets at the strange nature of humans. We are naturally social animals, yet we often fear showing emotion to others and letting ourselves be open. We wall ourselves in to protect ourselves from getting hurt, and because it is what is expected of us. People are expected to keep their problems and emotions to themselves in most situations. But the more we wall ourselves in, the more likely we are to become unstable until the wall bursts, and we are sent back to rebuild it.

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“Beat! Beat! Drums!” is a very classic Whitman poem – it has long lines with rhythm despite its lack of consistent meter, alliteration, no rhyme, use of questions and exclamations, and themes of war and average Americans. In this poem, Whitman also uses repetition to great affect. Each stanza starts and ends with the sounds of the drums and bugles of war, while the middle talks about the average Americans and how they are effected. Just like war surrounds daily life, war surrounds the stanzas.

One thing I found interesting is that it is hard to tell if the poem is pro- or anti-war. On the one hand, it is talking about how it has disrupted daily life, but it also it commands the effort to continue. The narrator says that there should be “no parley” and that the suffering people should be ignored – is this genuine? I could honestly see arguments in either direction. Historically, Whitman was a known supporter of President Lincoln and worked to help the Northern War effort, but he also loved America and feared that the war would forever fracture his country. The poem seems to reflect his own complicated feelings about the war, though of course it is hard to say what a poem says about its author. It is also interesting to me that the poem focuses on the sounds of drums and bugles, the patriotic and triumphant sounds of war, not the gunshots and screams. Whitman worked in hospitals in the DC area and was well aware of the damage war did to its soldiers, but still put an emphasis on the “noble” sounds of war. This could mean the poem is coming on the side of the war as a necessary evil.

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“The Tyger” by William Blake has been one of my favorite poems from the first time I read it at around 7-years-old. Though I didn’t know the words for it at the time, the trochaic meter and rhyming couplets made the 24 line poem feel very fast and snappy. What I love about the poem to this day is how it is very intuitive to understand, but still leaves many layers to be unraveled. As a young girl I was able to understand that it was about a person asking how the same God who made all the wonderful and gentle things in the world had it in him to create a creature as vicious as a tiger. But looking at it now, with greater age and knowledge of its companion poem, “The Lamb,” it is clear the poem holds more complexities. While “The Lamb” is written from the perspective of a young child who is too innocent to realize that a lamb will be slaughtered, “The Tyger” is written by a child old enough to question the will of God.

 

Another part of the poem I quite like is that at the end of the first and last stanzas, the narrator asks “What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry,” which brings symmetry to the poem as a whole, which is immortal. It brings up an idea that poets are immortal, and perhaps frames God himself as a poet of the world.

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In John Milton’s poem, “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” we see Milton use the Petrarchan Sonnet form to talk about something other than strictly love. In 1652, Milton completely lost vision in both eyes, a devastating ailment to have, especially as an author. In this sonnet the narrator is clearly meant to be Milton himself as he considers how he’s spent the time he’s had with vision, and wonders what he will do with it gone. This sonnet, like much of his work, has a highly religious undertone, with him asking God if he still must work while blind and receiving answers from a spirit of Patience, which tells him God requires no mans labor, blind or no. What I found particularly interesting about this poem is that Milton was famously in favor of religious freedom, and spent much of his time fighting for these principals. Though he himself was Catholic and had a deep interest in the Bible, he believed that State-Sanctioned religion was against the will of God. In this poem when he asks if he is still expected to do the Lord’s work once blind, he likely isn’t strictly referencing his work on poetry like “Paradise Lost,” but instead more broadly referencing the political work he did with Oliver Cromwell. It seems to me the answer he is given is that if he is patient, the work will happen on its own. In the last three lines Patience tells Milton that “Thousands at his bidding speed / And post o’er land and ocean without rest: / They also serve who only stand and wait.” (lines 12-14), meaning that God as many followers that tirelessly spread his word to all, not just those who are constantly in action. In this poem, Milton gives himself permission to rest.