Sunday, October 24, 2010

Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green.
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings,
None of them are strange
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

This poem is crazy. I don't exactly understand much of it at all. The title kinda gives away that the poem is a dream or a confusing form of imagination during the night (Ten O'Clock). I think it just shows imagination at work within a writer's mind. Its a very strange poem though I will give it that...

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Unveiling

In the cemetery
a mile away
from where we used to live
my aunts and mother,
my father and uncles lie
in two long rows almost the way
they used to sit around
the long planked table
at family dinners.
And walking besides
the graves today, down
one straight path
and up the next,
I don't feel sad
for them, just left out a bit
as if they kept
from me the kind
of grown-up secret
they used to share
back then, something
I'm not quite yet ready
to learn.

-Linda Pastan

This poem struck me as though a child was thinking. When a child learns about death they don't think of it the same way as an adult, but also to recover for that a child is not given the same explanation as an adult would receive. A child usually thinks of death as a "trip" or a "journey" that the person who has passed is going on. That is what I see in this poem. The author speaks of their deaths as though they are in a secret place and the author feels "left out a bit" speaking of death as a mysterious secret. The secret is preventing the author from understanding the true concept of death. But, earlier in the poem the author talks of her previous life with these people as a child, so that is what I am confused about. If the adult is looking back on the childhood then why is the adult still viewing death as a child would? That's puzzling...

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Evening Concert, Saint-Chapelle

This poem reminds me of a church. The discription of the array of colors showed to me the different stain glass that surrounds an old chapel. The "Thick black lines, in shapes of sheild and cross" shows to me the perfect example of the different bible versus come to life around you while you are in church. I did not know what Saint-Chapelle is of the different composers until research, but I figured these were the names of several different churches...I was obviously mislead. It is cool to see how a poem can show several different points of veiw though, that is cool.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

The Hollow Men

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

                     For Thine is the Kingdom

-T.S. Eliot

In this part of the poem the author is making the point about how disfunctional the human mind is. The author is envisioning the world as a wasteland; the prickly pear is a cactus showing a desolate world man exists in. No people can live or thrive in a desert, making the point that no people can live and thrive in the world now with sightles minds and bad judgement. The hollow mind of man can not thrive in humanity fully or in peace with God, "For Thine is the Kingdom". Eliot repeats the lords prayer several times after the one written above; repetition of song and prayer showing the cultural differences in the mind of hollow men, and the division within social hiearchy. The ironic thing is that truly the social instances barely matter in my mind because Eliot is making the point that we are hollow men so our social being is not significant anyways.