The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

When at first reading this poem there were some definities and research that needed to be done in order to better understand its meaning. I looked up who William Butler Yeats is and what Innisfree is as well. William Yeats is an Irish poet and playwright. He was born in Country Siglo and studied poetry in Dublin. He is known for his intrest in the occult and inIrish legends. The occult is the idea the knowledge is only known by people who were meant to understand it, it is also know as knowledge of the paranormal. Innisfree, whose name means "heather island" in Gaelic, is an island off the coast of Ireland of intense natural beauty. It is located in County Sligo, which is where Yeats's mother's family came from, and which he identified as the part of Ireland and the world closest to his heart. In the idea of building a home there and living as a hermit, Yeats was influenced by American transcendentalists such as Thoreau. He wrote in a letter: "My father read to me some passage out of Walden, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree."

From this background information a reader can then better understand the poem. Yeats wrote this poem as a soothing connection with his hometown and with nature. He wants to return to the home of his heart and live there in tranquility and peace.

The structure of this poem is very particular and interesting. The rhyme scheme is very hard to pick up on but does exist. Yeats consistantly rhymes the first line and the third line. Also yeats rhymes the center word of the first line with the center word of the third line "there" "glimmer", "day" "roadway". Also the second line and the fourth line rhymes as well. From this rhyme scheme the reader can flow into the poem and see the tranquility of it. The words flowing like "water lapping with low sounds by the shore" can really influence the reader to take part in and appreciate nature and become one with it. The structure takes a major role in the peice as a whole.

Sign for my Father, Who Stressed the Bunt by David Bottoms

On the rough diamond,
the hand-cut field beneath the dog lot and the barn,
we rehearsed the strict technique
of bunting. I watched from the infield,
the mound, the backstop
as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs
and shoulders squared toward the pitcher.
You could drop it like a seed
down either base line. I admired your style,
but not enough to take my eyes off the bank
that served as our center-field fence.
Years passed, three leagues of organized ball,
no few lives. I could homer
into the garden beyond the bank,
into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors,
and still you stressed the same technique,
the crouch and spring, the lead arm absorbing
just enough impact. That whole tiresome pitch
about basics never changing,
and I never learned what you were laying down.
Like the hand brushed across the bill of a cap,
let this be the sign
I'm getting a grip on the sacrifice.



Any poem written about a sport is never really just describing the sport. The peom is used to give off a deeper meaning of life and the lessons learned from playing the sport. This baseball poem is obviously about the lessons a young boy learned from his father when his father was teaching him the "strict technique/of bunting". Since I am not a true baseball fan and don't know much about baseball I talked to my father about the reasons to use a bunt and how it contributes to the game. According to him, a bunt is used to help progress another player across the bases or even to help them score, but there is a sacrifice. The sacrifice is that the player who hit the bunt is almost always thrown or tagged out.
In this poem the young boy was obsessed with home run hitting. That was his passion, even though his father tried so hard to progress and advance his game by teaching him to bunt, the son never understood. The boy never understood what the adantages of taking a bunt during a game rather than a homerun would be. The son finally understands his father's "sign" near the end of the poem. The sign the son is "getting a grip on the sacrifice". This obviously is associated with the idea that sacrifice for the greater good or the better of the team is better for humanity and could be better in his life lessons too. The greed and glorification associated with a home run rather than that of the bunt is not always better when it comes to life and learning from things in life.
This poem was not simply about the game of baseball but about the journey the father tries to teach the son through a game of baseball. The sacrifice the son can make for the greater good is always better than fame and fortune.

The Golf Links by Sarah N. Cleghorn

The golf links lie near the mill
    That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
     And see the men at play.


This poem is about the times in America before child labor laws came into existance or even into effect. Children and families at this point in time had little to no money and companies would hire children to work very long hours with dangerous jobs. The children in this poem are working for hours and hours next to a golf course and every day the children can see the rich men playing golf and having a carefree time, probably not even noticing these children. I looked up information on Sarah N. Cleghorn and she lived between 1876 and 1959. She was a writer and a poet. She was against child labor which this poem explicitly represents and she was mentioned by Robert Frost many times for her great talents as a poet and writer.

The Guitarist Tunes Up Frances Cornford

With what attentive courtesy he bent
Over his instrument;
Not as lordly conqueror who could
Command both wire and wood,
But as a man with a loved woman might,
Inquiring with delight
What slight essential things she had to say
Before they started, he and she, to play.

This poem is passionate. The author compairs the quitarists passion for his instrument just the same as a passionate and loving relationship should be. The man is not bent over his instrument with power and greed but with love and compassion just as a man should do the same for a woman he loves. This love and compassion can be reflected into anyone's passions. A person who is passionate for reading, writing, singing, playing, composing, making, anything; these things a person is passionate about shoud be with love and care not with cruelty and power. The poem has a continued sentence with only a period at the very end. The rhyme scheme is a, a, b, b. This adds to the flow of the poem. It is almost as if the guitarist is playing this poem in his song. Also from the flow the reader can imagine the guitarist playing for his lover and his sweet music is compassionate and caring just as his feelings for his loved one is. This is a fun love poem.

A Poison Tree William Blake

In this poem, A Poison Tree by William Blake there is a lot to comment about structure and meaning of the poem. To start off with meaning I see this as the common Friend vs Foe cliche. The author is writing about how he pents up his anger agianst his foe and uses it to actually kill him. Figuratively speaking I see this poem as meaning that it could have been a friendship if the problems were compromized and talked about but instead a secret war was started between these two people and the relationship between them was completely ruined. The author also uses a biblical allusion in some aspects of the poem. The entire poem is about a tree growing in a garden, a poison, or forbidden tree that obviously should not  be eaten  from if it is poisonous. His foe stole the apple from the tree and was found dead lying in its shadows. The biblical allusion aligns with the story of Adam and Eve in the secret garden. God's foe is sin or the devil. Adam and Eve commit a sin by eating from the forbidden tree and people are destroyed of being pure and sinless and original sin was born.
The structure of this poem is using an A,A,B,B rhyme scheme. There are four lines in every stanza and four stanzas. The structure of the poem adds to the impact it sets on the reader. It makes it easier to understand the situation that the character and his foe are in and the relationship between them. The character is "glad to see [his] foe outstretched beneath the tree" lines 15,16. The rhyme and the consistant stanza and line matching helps make the poem and the words flow together. When reading the poem out loud it is almost as if its a song.

you fit into me Margaret Atwood

My mom is a big sewer. When I was little all my St. John's skirts she sewed by hand. It's weird to talk about that but that how I saw the first two lines of the poem. "you fit into me/ like a hook into an eye". There are pictures down below that would maybe help a reader understand what it looks like. The most common hook and eye would be at the very bottom, ladies would probably see this to button a bra.  Atwood uses symbols to describe the speaker's relationship. She uses a common hook and eye, like what you would find on a dress, to illustrate compatibility. Two human beings fit together like a hook and eye, peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese, a fat kid and cake- there are many others.  But then there is an enjambment, and then an explanation: this is not the hook and eye first imagined, it is painful. The lines "a fish hook/ An open eye"show how this would be a helpless relationship where the partners injured one another. The first line makes me think positively upon the situation, but then ends hopelessly. The couple has manajed to not fit together anymore but actually hurt one another.

Writing Jan Dean

and then i saw it
saw it all         all the mess
and blood and everythink
and mam agenst the kichin dor
the flor all stiky
and the wall all wet
and red an dad besid the kichen draw
i saw it saw it all
an wrot it down an ever word of it is tru

In this poem I see the state of a human mind during a traumatizing experience. All these mistakes on the page with things written wrong and with spelling errors, short incoherent sentences, I see this coming from the actual experience the author went through. From what I can gather this is a child of a couple- a disfunctional couple, and this child watched or was there when the male seriously injured or even killed his spouse. The author uses the mispelled words to put a message into the reader's mind and make an impact. His small but discrpitive words allow the reader to capture glimpses of what happened and there is no mistaking what actually happened. For example "all the mess/and blood and everythink" this shows to the reader that this experience was violent and obviously someone was hurt, it was a blood bath. Only five words and the reader is already impacted in this poem, the author does a great job of leaving impact with a small amount of words with very little discrpition.