Free Verse: Sometimes with One I Love

As my free verse poem, I chose Sometimes with One I Love by Walt Whitman, which you can find here. (It's really short, but I didn't copy it here because I didn't want to mess up the formatting.)

Free verse is a style of poetry characterized by lack of strict meter or rhyme but that is still recognizable as poetry by some mannerism or effect. Basically, it is sort of vague to define it, but it is any poetry without meter or rhyme. Free verse is related to imagism in that imagist poetry was mostly written in free verse, but free verse does not necessarily have to be so image-oriented. Walt Whitman, who often took his stylistic inspiration from the King James Bible, is said to be one of the forefathers of free verse.

In Sometimes with One I Love, Whitman expresses the vulnerability involved in relationships. He takes the reader through the progression of emotions after being hurt by one he loved in an almost conversational way, free of poetic frills and allowing the reader to take everything at face value. The poem is very short but contains much substance. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker cannot allow himself to get close to a lover for fear of loving without reciprocal feelings, but then reveals that he has come to the belief that there is no such thing as "unreturn'd love." Instead, it is not really up to someone whether they love or not, "the pay is certain," meaning people love or they do not, and one cannot change the mind of another. Lastly, he explains that he has come to feel this way because of his own experience with unrequited love, but that he has grown from the pain and that "out of that I have written these songs." The poem does not use complicated rhyme scheme or poetic devices (besides, perhaps, the repetition of "unreturn'd"/"return'd") to get across the message of the pain and subsequent healing that comes with love.


Through poets.org I found a poetry project in which people have taken pictures of their favorite lines of poetry sort of "in the world." There are a lot of pictures, but click on the link and check it out! A lot of them are beautiful and very cool. :) This is one with a line from Sometimes with One I Love. You can scroll to the left or right to look at other pictures. I could figure out how to include the actual photo or the page or a link or whatever on my main page, but here's the link to the project's main page as well.

Imagist Poem: The Letter

For my imagist poem, I chose The Letter by Amy Lowell.

LITTLE cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly's legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncurtained window and the bare floor
Spattered with moonlight?
Your silly quirks and twists have nothing in them
Of blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth, virgin of loveliness
Beneath my hand.
I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the greater moon.

Imagism was a poetry movement in the early part of the 20th century that focused on the presentation of a precise image, free of unnecessary flourish and description to create a single accurate, evocative scene or picture. Comprised of mostly American and British poets, they created different anthologies of their work. In 1915, they published Some Imagist Poets, which is where I found this poem written by Amy Lowell, who was considered the unofficial leader of the movement at that time.

I thought this poem was interesting because while a lot of imagist poems are very concise (such as In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound), The Letter is longer and seems to stray a little from the imagist idea of a single image, yet still embodies the vivid imagery of the movement. The literal description of the poem is that of the letter which the speaker is writing to her "Beloved," whose "cramped words" are "like draggled fly's legs" and demonstrate the desperation and love with which she is writing. The reader can see the spindly letters which hastily cover the page, making use of all the blank space in an attempt to express all of the speaker's feelings.

The speaker asks the words she has written if they can capture the scene around her, the "flaring moon" and "blossoming hawthorns" and the "bare floor / spattered with moonlight" that she paces in the middle of the night, trying to come up with the right thing to say. In this way, Lowell successfully presents two images, that of the actual letter and that of the speaker writing the letter. There is a shift with the speaker's apostrophe (when the speaker breaks off to address a person who is not there or an abstract quality or idea) to her "Beloved" and the image returns to the letter and how she tries to squeeze "the want of you...into little inkdrops." I liked this because the poem simultaneously examines how words can express all that someone feels and experiences while being part of a poetry movement that relies on words to create an entire image.

Shape Poem: You Too? Me Too--Why Not? Soda Pop

For my shape poem I chose You Too? Me Too--Why Not? Soda Pop by Robert Hollander, which is on page 1137 of the Norton.

Obviously, this poem is shaped like a Coke bottle, which speaks to its main purpose. Right in the middle, the only thing that stands out is "COCA-COLA" in capital letters, solidifying this as a homage to Coke. The speaker describes the color in great detail, repeating the colors green and brown over and over. At the end, the brown of the coke in his glass seems to engulf his surroundings, casting "a brown shade." Though in some contexts, a brown shade would be less than appealing, in this poem it is comforting and evokes the image of hard-working, dedicated Americans who make the "deep-aged / rich brown wine of America," a title which shows how deeply ingrained Coca-Cola is in the American identity.

The poem also makes an allusion (a reference to something in literature, history, etc.) to the "beading of Hippocrene." Hippocrene is a fountain in Greek mythology whose water was said to bring "poetic inspiration" to whomever drank it. By using this allusion, the speaker goes as far to say that Coke inspires and revitalizes him. This also links back to the three "columns" at the beginning of the poem that make up the widening underneath the neck of the bottle. The fact that Coke is so important to the speaker shows how much of an American staple and pop-culture icon it is.