Author: Seth Moore

Post-We Real Cool.

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I’m pretty confident Prof. Oerlemans made a remark about how we’re at a point where the poets we are now reading have recordings of them reading their poems, and interviews. Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem We Real Cool was published in 1960, but we have her commentary on the poem. (Found here -> https://poets.org/poem/we-real-cool <-) Admittedly, I can not find the exact date this recording was made, but It would probably have to be after 1987 (The invention of the mp3 file format).

Having this interview as a resource is insightful; Through it we learn about the poem’s exigence, a funny misinterpretation, and one of its line’s greater significance.

  • In the interview, Gwendolyn Brooks talks about what prompted her to write this poem: She was walking around her community during school hours when she noticed a group of school boys playing pool. She thought to herself how they must feel, and how they would feel if they had more awareness. This is reflected in We Real Cool, where the speaker of the poems refers to themself as “We.” Brooks inserts her own views on the childrens’ delinquency through the speaker of the poem: Their delinquent lifestyle where they “strike straight,” (Play pool instead of be in school) and they “thin gin,” (Create alcohol) will result in their early misfortune.
  • In the interview, Brooks talks about the reason behind her poems frequent ban: The line “We / Jazz June.” is often interpreted as a sexual innuendo. Brooks denies this behind the original intention of the lines, but admits that the interpretation is fitting.
  • In the interview, Brooks talks about the significance behind her choice of month in the poem: June. There really isn’t a meaning at all. June is just a nice and uncontentious month. There is absolutely nothing significant about the month of June. Why are you still reading this bullet point. Move on already. If anyone tries to insist that the month of June is significant please shut them down. 

Design and Some Small Comparisons That I Hope Someone Enjoys.

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Robert Frost’s poem “Design” opens with an octave describing the scene of a white spider, on a white mint plant, devouring a white moth. There are a multitude of things I found interesting in this poem.

  • Repeatedly describing the characters in the scene as being a pure white, especially the spider as being a “snow-drop” white, intentionally misleads the reader into the idea that the characters of this scene represent innocence. Line 4, “Assorted characters of death and blight” and Line 8 “What had that flower to do with being white,” point out that the characters of this scene are deceptively not innocent, the characters of the scene are all assorted in a way that brings about “death” and “blight“, and that the mint plant being white does nothing to affect the innocence of these characters.

 

  • The poem “Design” implies that the characters of the poem are intentionally and malevolently “designed” in such a way to bring about death and blight. Its interesting that it does so by repeatedly asking questions about the nature of this design in the second stance. Lines 11 to 14 best show this “What brought the kindred spider to that height, / Then steered the white moth thither in the night? / What but design of darkness to appall?- / If design govern in a thing so small.”

 

  • The final stance of the poem, which ask important questions about the nature of creation, reminds me a lot of William Blake’s “Tyger Tyger”. However, I think, that “Tyger Tyger” concedes by accepting that god creates both good and evil. “Design” just says that god, or whoever the creator is, is responsible for the “design of darkness.”

 

  • Take everything I say in this final bullet point with multiple grains of salt. The poem “Design” and the poem “The Second Coming” by Yeats were both published post-WW1, and both seem to share some sort of pessimism about the world. “The Second Coming” does so in describing a vision of a bleak possibly-apocalyptic future for humanity, “Design” does so in saying that the world was designed in a malevolent way. It isn’t completely unreasonable to say that the events of WW1 had some sort of influence on the ideas of these poems. “Design” and “Tyger Tyger” also remind me of Gnosticism, or one of the core ideas, that the world is inherently flawed and made by a flawed creator. This probably is less so with “Tyger Tyger” with William Blake being a super devoted Christian (Gnosticism is a heretical ideology).

These are my thoughts (which I hope are coherent) on Robert Frost’s poem “Design”. I would like to explore more post-WW1, post-WW2, and Gnostic art and poetry in the future.

Personification of the Hunting Rifle

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I cannot arrive to a conclusive interpretation of this poem, but I found it interesting nonetheless. I think the gun in this poem represents blind faith, because of how the gun is personified. The gun waits for its master, roams with its master, speaks for its master, and on being fired, smiles with “such cordial light.” The gun takes pride in serving its master, noting the fact that the foes of its master, will never “stir the second time,” implying that the gun never fails its duty. 

I can’t say for sure what Dickinson is trying to convey through the faithful personification of the gun. I’ll bullet some thoughts though.

  • The Master is definitely male, so maybe the message involves female obedience, assuming the gun’s dialogue is representative of Dickinson herself.
  • Or perhaps it is the opposite, the gun has the power to kill and will outlive its owner.

Sensational

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Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” is an interesting poem. The poem follows the dramatic monologue of a man who feels unsatisfied within the relationship. He complains that his lover, Porphyria, does not “give herself” wholly to him. He decides to fix this by strangling her to death.

I feel as if this poem could be interpreted as a response to “Victorian sensationalism” (Although the poem was published a year or 2 before the Victorian Era officially started so it’s probably not a valid description) This poem was written in a period where the people romanticized what was extreme, or sensational. This was a period where dying of tuberculosis, crushing your ribs with torturous corsets, living in rooms painted radioactive green, was in style.

So the poem sort of poses a question of what is too far. If strangling someone to death and then romanticizing the act of strangling someone to death isn’t too far, then something has gone wrong. If it is too far, then something has also gone wrong.

The Tyger

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To say William Blake was devoted to religion is an understatement. He was fanatical, and I think it really shows in his works. He was not just a fantastic poet, he was an artist too.

The Tyger elicits very strong feelings from the reader. Threatening, Imposing, but also accepting, as if Blake himself was openly showing his acceptance for god’s plan, even if it involved things as fearful as the Tyger. The poem is so concise with it’s point, being in stanzas of 4 with the rhyme scheme. This simplicity mirrors this idea of the divine, perfect.

 

(I tried inserting an image of “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun” but it delete everything I wrote so I encourage you to search it up. It’s my favorite work of Blake.)

A Valediction Of Weeping

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I really love this poem, the conceits John Donne uses are phenomenal. There’s already a blog going over the conceit between mintage and love, so I will cover the one between globes and the tears the lovers weep. This conceit begins in lines 10-13, and continues to linger around until the final stanza of the poem.

Donne first describes a workman (cartographer??? craftsman? I don’t know what we would call them in the present day) copying the continents of the earth onto a blank sphere, which in his words ,”quickly make that, which was nothing, all.” This is followed by the author proclaiming that the same principal applies to the tears his lover bears. What exactly Donne means by this is slightly unclear. Maybe he is saying that as a workman crafts the globe from nothing, the tears they bare make the relationship and its end much bigger than it actually is? (Scratch this, better interpretation incoming)

I think Donne, by using the conceit between crafting a globe and tears, is saying that the tears his lover bears are evidence that their relationship meant something special. Making that which was nothing, all.

Thomas Wyatt’s “The Long Love “

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Being completely honest here, I am having trouble finding the exact message of this poem, and the meaning I have derived may be faulty, so please feel free to comment about it! It would be greatly appreciated.

Thomas Wyatt’s “The Long Love” is a poem about love and control, and how the two conflict. This poem personifies love as a soldier that in our minds we quarter, which I think is a really unique take that I like because it can bring a lot of interpretations for it. It could be used to depict love as a confused, in the context that many soldiers may die not knowing the true cause that they out their lives down for. I think that would be a fun take on that, although in this poem it is not used in that way. In this poem, love is personified as a faithful soldier, who will lie down and die with his host/master. (This is the part I am confused about and still trying to understand)

After the first 4 lines personify love as a soldier which “thought doth harbor,” it introduces a new character assumed to be the lover of the poem. The lover is portrayed as having a certain amount of power or control over the narrator, and thus causes conflict as love’s “hardiness taketh displeasure.” Or, the way the lover reigns control over the narrators love is something the narrator’s love does not like. Love and control are conflicting.

This is solved in the final 6 lines, where the love flees into the forest like a deer (A deer is an animal we hunt for sport so is the poem trying to depict love as vulnerable or innocent??), and love faithfully dies in a field (Weird).

Again, my interpretation of the poem is probably flawed, but I see it as this. The narrators comparison to love as a faithful soldier and the lover as controlling (not entirely manipulative but definitely limiting) is telling us that if we are ever unhappy in a relationship then we have full control to flee??? (And die in a field…. This is definitely a stretch sorry)