Sunday, January 18, 2009

In what a beautiful silence the death is inflicted

My second external form poem this week is Evening News by David Ferry, which is on page 1048 of the Norton.

The interesting set-up of this poem leaves a lot of blank space on the page, which mirrors the "nothing" mentioned in the second and third lines. The way the lines are arranged makes the reader pause while speaking or reading and go through the poem slowly.

The pace created by the shape of the poem allows the reader to examine the juxtaposition of the language as well, which leads to the deeper meaning. "Death" and "wasted" are really the only two unpleasant words in the poem, so it is easy to glide over them amongst happy words such as "beautiful," "dazzling," and "radiantly." "The eye is instructed" by these words, which serve to gloss over the actual issue of death and destruction in the village. The shape and resulting pace of the poem helps the reader to have a discerning eye, which is necessary when watching the evening news as well, to discover the truth beneath the pleasantries.

At that awkward age now between birth and death

My first of this week's external poems is Here I Am by Roger McGough on page 1046 of the Norton.

In this poem, the speaker voices all of his regrets of things that he has not done in his life. They are not anything huge, like scaling Mt. Everest or learning to fly a plane, but rather silly, spontaneous things that he presumably held himself back from for fear or nervousness. He seems to mostly regret not living in the moment.

The poem's shape is not blaringly obvious, but it does resemble the silhouette of a woman. This provocative image represents the romanticism and adventurous sense of adventure of youth, which this man feels, to an extent, he missed out on.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

when my feeble sun of life burns out

My second External Form poem is Mother Night by James Weldon Johnson which you can find here.

This poem is also an example of an Italian sonnet. Unlike my first poem, though, there is a break between the octet and the sestet, and the sestet follows the traditional rhyme scheme. The stanza break signals a shift from a wider, universal subject to a more personal application of that subject to the speaker.

The first four lines are expository. They explain that even before the sun and stars, light in general, existed, night ruled over and pacified the "chaos" that was the universe. In lines four through eight, the speaker explains that after suns and stars have "run their fiery courses," they go out and give way to the darkness of the Night. In this way, Night represents death. It also represents birth and beginning, because the suns and stars evolved out of it. Because of this, their death is a peaceful death, through which they experience "Nirvanic peace" in a state of absolute bliss and wholeness.

In the second stanza, the speaker uses similar terms of light and dark to relate himself to the suns and stars. He (like Hamlet!) will accept death when it is his time to go and almost be relieved of it. The "feverish light" of his life sounds more of a nuisance than a blessing, and, "feeble," does not appear to be wanted all that much. The weight and brunt of living has tired him, so he will gladly crawl into the comforting "quiet bosom" of maternal "Night."

For unremembered lads

My first External Form poem is [What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why] by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It is on page 1030-1031 of the Norton.

This poem follows the structure of an Italian sonnet, divided into an octet and a sestet, although the rhyme scheme of the sestet varies from the standard (instead of cdecde, it is cdedce). The octet tells of the speaker's real life, and the sestet transitions into a metaphor for her ultimately solitary, lonely life.

At first the poem seems sort of romantic as it tells of all the affairs the speaker has had, but then the reader realizes that she does not remember the men behind the sex and that she has not had anything meaningful with these men. The first explicitly sad image comes in the third and fourth lines, when "the rain / is full of ghosts," the shadows of her forgotten lovers. After that point, the octet takes on a definitively more melancholic tone. The speaker has left these men behind, but they still "tap and sigh / upon the glass" looking for love. She admits that she does feel bad for them and the triviality of their fleeting relationships.

In the following sestet the reader sees a bare tree standing alone in the cold, barren winter. The tree does not remember all the birds that have left its branches, but once they are all gone, it realizes how quiet and lonely it is, which is how the speaker feels after all the men and one-night stands have faded away. The last two lines present the happy image of "the summer sang in me," but only for a little while, reminiscent of the momentary satisfaction of the speaker's affairs that leave her with nothing once they are over.