Please post a brief response to 1 poem from this week’s readings. If possible, focus on one aspect of bodily expression as it is represented in the theme and/or form of the poem.
12 thoughts on “Week 3 Poetry Response”
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Robert Frost’s “To Earthward” is concerned most with the lips, the hands, and, through the senses of smell and of taste, the nose and tongue. The lips experience cloying, adoring sweetness that the speaker can no longer stand. The hands sense both “dew on the knuckle” from honeysuckle the speaker aches to know and “hurt” the speaker wishes carried across the whole body, after pressed hard into sand and grass (Frost). The tongue tastes sugar then predominantly salt. The nose only remembers “the sweet of bitter bark” (Frost). Through these body parts and their associated senses of taste, touch, smell, Frost explores a deep longing for extremities in human emotion, for attachment to intensely overwhelming senses and emotions past. The speaker wants to feel extremities of pain or infatuation or joy, expressed through aforementioned extreme bodily experiences, such as a bitter taste or a sweet kiss. However, these are extremities the speaker avoided and now cannot find, reclaim. The speaker seems, then, to long for a younger, more passionately hot-blooded, responsive self who tuned into the earth and their earthly sensations.
William Blake’s poem “London” tells the story of a wandering through the bleary streets of London. It is a poem that depicts weak, corrupted people, and ultimately a corrupted society. In every face the speaker encounters, he finds, “Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” The sufferings of people, their pain, are manifested in their bodies. Interestingly, Blake’s speaker seems to blame the people for their troubles. He hears in the peoples cries “mind forg’d manacles.” It is as if the pain he sees is the fault of the sufferers. The language of the poem is already fearsome and ugly, with descriptions of crying chimney sweeps and blood running down walls. The element of blame adds a hostility to the poem.
The poem concludes with what the speaker sees as the greatest ugliness of all, “the youthful Harlots curse”. It is not just a corrupted individual he hears as he walks through midnights streets hearing the harlots. The last line laments at how they corrupt the societal institution of marriage, the harlots, “blights with plagues the Marriage hearse”.
In Claude McKay’s “Tropics in New York,” the speaker is referring to a longing for a return to nature, and feels trapped and out of place by the overwhelmingness of New York City. The speaker begins the poem by describing in vidid detail an image of colorful, tropical fruits sitting in a window, probably waiting to be sold to paying customers. The speaker is immediately overcome by feelings of sadness regarding past memories, and is familiar with the origins of these fruits that once dwelled in such beautiful places with, “dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies in benediction over nun-like hills.” It is clear that the speaker wishes to convey a sense of better understanding in regard to human ignorance, and they do this by presenting this clear juxtaposition of tropical fruits existing in a place like New York, a place which they were never meant to exist, bringing the speaker to tears.
Claude McKay develops a stark racial contrast in his poem “Harlem Shadows.” Following the thematic body throughout the poem shows a clear distinction of black bodies. Through heavy imagery and repetition, McKay juxtaposes and sets apart black and white bodies and beings. From the inception of the poem, McKay poses nighttime as the time for black girls to emerge; in night’s “veil,” obscured from sight, black girls are described as “prowling.” In the first stanza alone, McKay has already posited that black girls aren’t acting as normal children do. He continues such imagery in describing the girls as “dusky” from wandering “through the lone night,” all the way up “until the silver break” when dawn comes. Here, McKay provides his first contrasting imagery; when light arrives, it vanquishes the darkness – and, in turn, the black girls. McKay further develops the contrast in colors by describing the Earth at daybreak having a “white breast.” The Earth is pure and unadulterated, whereas the young black women scourging it are immature and less than deserving of trotting on pure ground. Importantly, McKay repeatedly ends his stanzas with the phrase “from street to street.” McKay is likely reminding his readers that the black girls traipse around for nights on end, their bodies even used “to bend and barter.” A notable bout of alliteration is the “wretched way” the world treats black girls. McKay’s traceable depiction of the young black girls’ routine, somber movements against the white world’s lush and reproductive nature show he believes black girls to be wholly disadvantaged in a world structured against them.
I meant to describe McKay’s white world as “fertile,” but I forgot the word.
Oftentimes, we find ourselves too focused on a particular goal to take in the messages and the events of the world around us, and many of us have trained ourselves to go towards not only physical places but also objectives in our lives, with a sort of tunnel vision. W. H. Auden with his poem “As I Walked Out One Evening” has authored an uncommon story in our modern day, the speaker presenting a reality so distant from us in a world where we are captivated by technology, where smartphones hold all of the world’s knowledge, and where our surroundings have become irrelevant. Free of our self-enabled distractions, the able-body is equipped to hear and see all the life that is around us and to learn from what is happening. In the poem, the speaker recounts walking down Bristol Street one evening and hearing two different songs, which function as life lessons to internalize. The first song is a lover singing about how they will love forever and the second song is a clock giving the fatal reminder that time is unavoidable, unconquerable, and always moving. The key lesson, at least for me, is the realization that we must work at whatever we are doing with the knowledge that time will not stop for us, we should be caring and present for those we love before it is too late, and we should appreciate all that we have while we can.
In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Love’s Philosophy”, I find “philosophy” is an interesting word. Besides the meaning of “love of wisdom”, it also means “rational inquiry or argument.” This provides a refreshing understanding of the poem since the speaker’s question should be viewed as a rational inquiry instead of some type of random asking. “The fountains mingle with the river/And the rivers with the ocean” is prominent imagery. As the fountains and rivers both consist of water as the essential element, which metaphorically demonstrates the internal connection between the speaker and the object of the poem. It is resonant to the poem as it sets up the relation between the speaker and “thine”, which is followed by more similar metaphors. At the same time, it justifies the two questions asked at the end of two sections. The form of the poem is a parallel structure between two stanzas. Both start with the metaphors and end with a rhetorical question. The metaphors set up a convincing argument for the central idea, which is to invite the object of the poem to be together with the speaker. Yet after reading the poem I wonder how the rhyme scheme helps the speaker shape the central idea of the poem.
I found that the poem “The Tropics in New York”, by Claude Mckay was rich with emotion which invoked nostalgia and sorrow. Upon doing some basic background research, I found that McKay was an influential figure during the Harlem Renaissance. The poetry foundation states that Mckay used poetry as a way to celebrate both Jamaican lifestyle and African American’s living in the United States during the early twentieth century. In the piece “The Tropics in New York” this message shines clear. The speaker opens by talking with an enthusiastic voice, describing lush fruits which should be celebrated for their beauty. The tone of the speaker shifts to one of remembrance and longing in the second stanza. Here it is revealed that these beautiful organic creations are being put on display in a window, not organically in their natural environments’. The speaker wishes to see these fruits in their organic settings’ which remind him of a place which is obviously very rich with nature and far away. By the time the speaker reaches the third stanza, the reader can sense obvious sorrow in his tone. He can no longer even look at the glass display, he is too “hungry” and needs to go back to this place of nature. Waves of nostalgia pulse through his body show physical characteristics of discomfort and sadness. These waves finally manifest themselves in the speaker’s actions when he breaks down and weeps, releasing all of his emotion, love, longing, and regret for something which he no longer is experiencing. I find it very interesting that before the speaker starts to weep, they turn their head away from the display as if to shield the beautiful organic fruit from this negative bodily expression. The fruit does not make the speaker act with such sorrow, the mistreatment of this nature does.
In William Blake’s “London” the theme of human suffering is evident throughout the poem but the cries and scowls of the humans really speak out to the speaker. The speaker witnesses “How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry” (12) when he passes them by. In the bigger context of the poem, the speaker is walking by London when he notices how everyone and everything is constricted included the river Thames. The chimney sweepers are much like the constricted and chartered river Thames because they are owned by their employers and the British crown to do menial work with zero hope for a better life. They cry for their fate and their suffering is hyperbolized in their crying. The chimney sweepers suffer under the reign of the British Kings and Queens; similar to the men mentioned earlier on in the poem, which shows that according to the speaker, the crown is failing the people.
In the poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” the speaker uses a scene of daffodils to lift the feeling of loneliness and bring upon happiness to him. The speaker throughout the poem describes the daffodils as dancing. When I think of dancing, I think of a fun time in which you are surrounded by ether family and/or friends. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, dance means “a rhythmical skipping and stepping, with regular turnings and movements of the limbs and body, usually to the accompaniment of music; either as an expression of joy, exultation, and the like or as an amusement or entertainment.” After looking up the definition of dance it makes more sense why the speaker chooses to describe the daffodils movement as dancing. The speaker is in a state of loneliness but upon seeing the daffodils he is brought to a better state of mind. Dancing is meant to bring people joy and amusement so by associating the movement of the daffodils with dancing it brought the speaker joy. In addition, the definition of dance states that it is the movement of the limbs and body. The speaker talks about how he often times flashbacks to this scene. Envisioning the daffodils dancing which is considered a movement done by humans could make the speaker not feel as lonely and bring him closer to others. The idea of watching something dance brings him to a happy place.
In ‘I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud’, Wordsworth heavily uses personification to imbue the landscapes, the daffodils in particular, with human qualities. Almost every part of the landscape dances, tossed about in the breeze as if they are joyously moving autonomously. The flower of a daffodil becomes its head, the whole patch a celebration; the flowers “out-did the sparking waves in glee” as they celebrated, unaware of the speaker viewing them (14). Wordsworth also compares the daffodils to celestial bodies, most specifically the milky way, giving the array of daffodils a grand scale that is almost sublime.
Wordsworth compares himself to the natural world before he imbues these flowers with human qualities: “I wandered lonely as a cloud / that floats on high o’er vales and hills” (1-2). This helps to create a connection between the human and the natural world as almost interchangeable in substance from the beginning of the poem. By seeing the daffodils, Wordsworth is brought back to the ground form his airy reverie, rooted by the brilliant yellow flowers that awed him in their energy and multitude. This image, as is noted in the last stanza, helps to ground him at any time, even when he is far from the actual landscape he saw. This allows him to return from a “vacant or… pensive mood” and become embodied again as he remembers the flowers and their dance. (20).
In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem titled, “Love’s Philosophy”, the speaker talks about the close relationships between elements in nature and how these relationships relate to those of human beings. Shelley begins the poem with a statement of how fountains, rivers and oceans all interact physically as if they were mingling like people: “The fountains mingle with the river and the rivers with the ocean”. Shelley continues on to pose similar statements about the wind and other inanimate components of the world. At the end of the first stanza, Shelley writes, “All things by a law divine in one spirit meet and mingle”. The speaker is making a point that mingling and interacting with desired companions is an essential part of human nature. Moreover, he’s explaining that physical interaction between human bodies is as natural as the wind or rivers.
In Shelley’s second stanza of the poem, he intentionally uses verbs that elicit feelings of romantic interaction between human bodies. For example, Shelley writes, “mountains kiss high heaven” and “waves clasp one another”. Clearly, these examples of physical touch are meant to make a statement about human contact and mingling being a natural part of life. Ultimately, Shelley’s poem exemplifies the theme of the human body and physical touch.