Vergissmeinnicht

Vergissminnicht
-Keith Douglas


Three weeks gone and the combatants gone,
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.


The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.


Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonored picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht
in a copybook gothic script.


We see him almost with content
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.


But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.


For here the lover and killer mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.




This poem intrigues me for many reasons. I first noticed the rhyming in the poem that switches between AABB, ABAB, and ABBA. I personally like using ABBA so that I can start singing Dancing Queen in my head. Anyways, what grips me about this poem is the imagery of the soldier lying there. It had been weeks since he was killed and yet his body still remains. I wonder if his fellow soldiers are also around him or if it is only the one soldier. 


Vergissmeinnicht loosely translates to forget me not. Of course we can see the connection between the soldier and the lover. The woman at home will not forget her dead lover. But what makes me curious is how vergissmeinnicht could be used to describe the narrator and the soldier. The narrator has returned again to the place the soldier rests and he says he sees the picture again. The narrator is not able to forget this scene and he describes how moving it is here in this poem. 


Since the picture has German words on it, I am assuming that the soldier was German and that this was during either the first or second World War. And if that is the case, the narrator is most likely American or English which would make the narrator see the soldier as his enemy. Especially because the narrator says, "as we came on that day, he hit my tank with one like the entry of a demon," and refers to the soldier as the "killer." So if this is the case, why does the soldiers body effect the narrator in such a way to reflect on the sight instead of just passing by? Is it that love conquers even the toughest tests? Or that the power of love is stronger than the love of power?

Even If You Weren't My Father

Even If You Weren't My Father
-Camillo Sbarbaro

Father, even if you weren't my father,
were you an utter stranger,
for your own self I'd love you.
Remembering ho you saw, one winter morning,
the first violet on the wall across the way,
and with what joy you shared the revelation;
then, hoising the ladder to your shoulder,
out you went and propped it to the wall.
We, your children, stood watching at the window.

And I remember how, another time,
you chased my little sister through the house
(pigheadedly, she'd done I know not what).
But when she, run to earth, shrieked out in fear,
your heart misgave you,
for you saw yourself hunt down your helpless child.
Relenting then, you took her in your arms
all in terror: caressing her, enclosed in your
embrace as in some shelter from the brute
who'd been, one moment since, yourself.

Father, even were you not my father,
were you some utter stranger,
for your innocence, your artless tender heart,
I would love above all other men
so love you.


Here I am on sitting at my computer on Sunday faced with an assignment. An assignment that seems so meaningless after a day like yesterday. This assignment made me remember what I have to look forward to. This assignment made me forget my heartache from yesterday and believe in now, believe in my father.

Is that what the author was trying to do here? Make the audience feel the love and warmth that our homes and families have to offer?

I read this poem and convinced myself that this is something my older brother would write ten years from now. Sbarbaro's words reminded me of my own childhood. A father walking around the house looking for the culprit of the broken vase, and then seeing his little girl and his heart melting. A surge of anger due to broken pieces but then a rush of love and compassion at the sight of little pigtails with a scared expression.

The narrator almost praises his father because of the way the father treated his daughter. Not all fathers can control their temper, and the narrator acknowledge's this fact in the poem. This simple task that the father does in the poem shows what kind of man he is, which makes the narrator love his father unconditionally. Everything that he describes about his father is just another simple truth that contributes to his feelings towards his father.

Sbarbaro takes a simple fact, such as loving your father for the man he is and not the blood shared, and makes readers relate and reminisce. He allows us to forget the hurt and loss and think of love and safety.

A Study of Reading Habits

A Study of Reading Habits
-Philip Larkin

When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark
The woman I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
the hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store,
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.


This poem strikes me for several reasons. Philip Larkin's time period, 1919-1985, doesn't come to mind as the time when phrases like "crap" and "dude" were used. So I don't know if the meanings are somehow perceived differently back then compared to present day.

My favorite part of the poem is when he says "the dude who lets the girl down before the hero arrives." Larkin is generalizing so many works of literature here in this phrase and it makes me wonder if he is generalizing the rest of his examples as well. The transition between when the narrator used to read with awesome adventures and now when the stories are all starting to sound the same really took me as a surprise. However, I can relate to the narrator by saying that books used to be filled with stories and adventures, but then we grew up and so did our books.

"A Study of Reading Habits" kind of pulls the first part and second part together. As we age our reading habits change because the literature changes and so does our lives. The last line stumps me though. The narrator used to believe in books, but now he doesn't seem to care about them. Is he upset that literature is not the same for him anymore or does he think that all books are filled with pointless stories. Its hard for me to believe the latter because he used to have such adventures with books.

Acquainted with the Night

Acquainted with the Night

-Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain - and back in the rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchmen on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-by;

And further still at an unearthly height

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been acquainted with the night.

I love this poem for several reasons. The imagery used makes me feel like I'm out walking the streets at night with Robert Frost. Night is also my favorite time of the day, so that makes this poem enjoyable to read.

The style Frost uses to describe the night kept me guessing as to what he actually means. "I have walked out in rain - and back in rain." Is he saying that even when it is raining, he still enjoys the night or is he saying that it is always raining so he constantly walks in it? But after thinking about the poem as a whole, I was able to figure most of the poem. When he walks past a watchmen hiding his eyes, he means that he walked by a police officer of some sorts and did not care to explain why he was out at that time.

Frost was an American poet, but this poem makes me think of old London. The "luminary clock against the sky" makes me imagine Big Ben. It rests against the skyline as the source of time in the streets of London. Also, the reference to the watchmen reminds me of british soldiers. Maybe I am just confusing my revolutionary soldiers though. 

Night holds a beauty that only be discovered by going out and seeing it for yourself. It's more than just the lack of light; its the stars and moon, the night-crawlers and hidden details, and the mystery. Night is mysterious to us because we live during the day and sleep at night. However, I think Frost is saying that he lives at night, therefore he is acquainted with it.

A Chinese Bowl

A Chinese Bowl

-Katha Pollitt

Plucked from a junk shop

chipped celadon

shadow of a swallow's wing

or cast by venetian blinds

on tinted legal pads

one summer Saturday

in 1957.

Absorbed at his big desk

my father works on briefs.

The little Royal makes

its satisfying clocks

stamping an inky nimbus

around each thick black letter

with cutout moons for "O"s

curled up on the floor,

I'm writing, too: "Bean Soup

and Rice," a play about

a poor girl in Kyoto

and the treasure-finding rabbit

who saves her home. Fluorescent 

light spills cleanly down

on the Danish-modern couch

and metal cabinet

which hides no folder labelled

"blacklist" or "Party business"

or "drink" or "mother's death."

I think, This is happiness,

right here, right now, these

walls striped green and gray,

shadow and sun, dust motes

stirring the still air

and a feeling gathers, heavy

as rain about to fall,

part love, part connection,

part inner solitude

where is that room, those gray-

green thin-lined

scribbled papers

littering the floor?

How did

I move so far away,

just living day by day,

that now all rooms seem stange,

the years all error?

Bowl,

what could

I drink from you,

clear green tea

or iron-bitter water

that would renew

my fallen life?


This poem strikes me as something that I could imagine myself writing five years from now. Of course mine would not be exactly the same story line, but I can definitely relate to this poem. The narrator had grown comfortable in the home she grew up in with her father. She explains what her home was like before she left and then she says she wishes she could go back to then.
A part of the poem that sticks out to me is when the narrator explains what is not stored in the file cabinets. The expressions of "blacklist," "Party business," and "drink" could be anyone's educated guess as to what they mean. I would like to say that they refer to the father's occupation and personal life, but I cannot find any support from the rest of the text that agrees. However, the expression "mother's death" surly refers to the narrator's mother dying. What I find interesting about this is that it is referred to something that is not in the filing cabinet. Could that be saying that it is something that is out-of-sight-out-of-mind or is meant to be out in the open and not locked away in a filing cabinet. To me, these expressions seem like things that are kept in a box for a reason and act as they are forgotten.
A Chinese Bowl can obviously act as a bowl that the narrator picked up and has consistently used at home and away from home. I saw the Chinese bowl as something more than just an empty bowl, I saw it as an item that the narrator uses to connect back to home. She can take her bowl and use it as an escape from her new life and be transported to her life at home. She became so used to her life at home with her Chinese bowl, when she left, she had to rely on items that would remind her of home. 
Another thing I noticed throughout this poem was the repetition of the colors of green and gray. The author uses it to describe the walls of her home, the color of paper on the floor, and the type of liquid being held in the Chinese bowl. Are the colors being used as symbols for something else, or are they just being used repetitively? Either way, they definitely have some significance to the poem. Maybe they are the colors or the bowl.

Inoculation

Inoculation
-Susan Donnelly 

Cotton Mather studied small pox for a while,
instead of sin. Boston was rife with it.
Not being ill himself, thank Providence,
but one day asking his slave, Onesimus,
if he'd ever had the pox. To which Onesimus replied,
"Yes and No." Not insubordinate
or anything of the kind, but playful, or perhaps
musing, as one saying to another:


"Consider how a man
can take inside all manner of disease
and still survive."


Then, graciously, when Mather asked again:


My mother bore me in the southern wild.
She scratched my skin and I got sick, but lived
to come here, free of smallpox, as your slave.




I chose to reflect on this poem because I will be presenting it on Wednesday, and poems always make more sense to me when I blog about them. It took me multiple readings before I even began to understand this poem. The structure confused me along with the syntax. This was the only way I was able to make sense of Donnelly's poem-

Knowing that Cotton Mather was a puritanical minister in the mid 1600s and 1700s, the first sentence involving sin makes sense. "Thank Providence" was another line that got me. I figured it was somewhat like the expression, "Thank God." Boston was full of the pox, but Providence was not, hence Mather not getting the illness. I love the way the poet describes how Onesimus' answer was meant to be heard. But I am not sure who says the second stanza. It would make sense if it was Onesimus, but the poet does not say.

Mather's question does not have a clear answer; however, when we think about what Onesimus actually says, it begins to make sense. He was born in the "southern wild" and he grew up with different illnesses all around him compared to the upbringing of Mather. Mather most likely grew up in luxury with doctors with herbal remedies and sicknesses being scarce. Onesimus "[took] inside all manner of disease and still survive[d]." He was in contact with illnesses as a young child and grew immune to most of them. So Onesimus possibly could not get smallpox once with Mather because he had already been exposed to it.

Something that stands out to me in this poem is the attitudes of the men towards each other. Onesimus does not come right out and answer Mather's question. Wouldn't most slaves at the time be afraid of their masters and just say, "I cannot get smallpox?" Also, when Onesimus does not give Mather a clear answer at first, Mather does not get upset. He "graciously" just asks again. What does that say about the two men's characters? Does it say anything about the time period? Or am I just turning a drop of water into an ocean?

Evening Concert, Saint-Chapelle

Evening Concert, Saint-Chapelle
John Updike

The celebrated windows flamed with light
directly pouring north across the Seine;
we rustled into place. Then Violins
vaunting Vivaldi's strident strength, then Brahms,
seemed to suck with their passionate sweetness,
bit by bit, the vigor from the red,
the blazing blue, so that the listening eye
saw suddenly the thick black lines, in shapes
of shield and cross and strut and brace, that help
the holy glowing fantasy together.
The music surged; the glow became a milk,
a whisper to the eye, a glimmer ebbed
until our beating hearts, our violins
were cased in thin but solid sheets of lead.

This poem shows that music can be seen and felt, not just heard. "The vigor from the red, the blazing blue, so that the listening eye saw suddenly thick black lines." This line explains to the reader that the music was meant more than just to be heard. This reminds me of a part in the movie Ratatouille when the rat is explaining to his brother that food taste differently when paired with different foods. He has his brother imagine what the tastes look, move, and sound like. This poem has the same concept that something taken in with one sense can be taken in with other senses. When we hear a rhythm, we can feel the base moving up and down, our eyes want to flow to the beat, and our body wants to move to the melody. To me, that's what the author is describing in this poem. He is describing what he sees and feels when he hears the music at Saint-Chapelle. 

I had to do a little bit of Research to understand what Vivaldi and Brahms was. I already knew that the Seine River flows through Paris so I assumed that the church overlooks the river. Antonio Vivaldi was an Italian composer and priest born in 1678 who was very influential over Europe.  Johannes Brahms was another inspirational composer that was born in Germany in 1833. I’m pretty sure the narrator was playing the music because of the  line, “until our beating hearts, our violins were cased....” So if the narrator was playing the beautiful music, was he thinking of these two men while he was playing the songs? And were the songs actually Vivaldi’s and Brahms’ composed pieces?

The last line strikes me. I cannot tell if the solid sheets of lead are referring to something permanent, as if the music played was making history, or if it refers to the music being over and the violins being stored in a sturdy case. If it is the former, then that would seem more purposeful; however, if it is the latter, then it would make more sense. Maybe its neither and I’m just making the wrong assumptions. 

Mr Fear

Mr Fear

-Lawrence Raab

He follows us, he keeps track.

Each day his lists are longer.

Here, death, and here,

something like it.

Mr Fear, we say in our dreams

what do you have for me tonight?

And he looks through his sack,

his black sack of troubles.

Maybe he smiles when he finds

the right one. Maybe he’s sorry.

Tell me, Mr. Fear,

what must I carry

away from your dream.

Make it small, please.

Let it fit in my pocket,

let it fall through

the hole in my pocket.

Fear, let me have

a small brown bat

and a purse of crickets

like the ones I heard

singing last night

out there in the stubbly field

before I slept, and met you.

The personification of Mr. Fear is what I love so much about this poem. It makes the reader relate so much easier to the poem as compared to just talking about why no one enjoys fear. The image in my head of Mr. Fear plotting against the narrator with his sack of troubles reminds me of something evil. The fear in this poem is not just being afraid of something, its about nightmares. The narrator knows that Mr. Fear will give him or her nightmares, and the narrator embraces that and wishes for a small scary dream. 

I have a hard time with the idea of “a small brown bat and a purse of crickets.” The narrator wants these things from Fear, but are they meant to be deathly scary, a small nightmare, or a safe haven? The poet knows Fear is present, so is he or she asking for mercy or trying to settle with Fear? The sound of crickets in the yard while falling asleep can be comforting for some, but a small brown bat is troublesome for my reasoning. I think it is meant to be safety for the narrator to protect him of her self from Fear. Can Mr. Fear be afraid of anything, like a bat? What about the power of not being scary to others? The narrator is embracing the fear he or she is given, which can make Mr. Fear seem less scary. Maybe a small brown bat is just another small fear that the narrator has.

“Here, death, and here something like it” What is the poet trying to say here? That all things that we are scared of are related to death? People may be afraid of death, but that’s not the only thing to be scared of, is it? I’m afraid of spiders that crawl around my backyard, but I know that death will not come because of those spiders. So why did the poet phrase those words just so? Do spiders scare me just as much as death scares me?

1943

No excuses this time as for why it's late. Life happens.

1943
-Donald Hall

They toughened us for war. In the high-school auditorium
Ed Monahan knocked out Dominick Esposito in the first round

of the heavyweight finals, and ten months later Dom died
in the third wave of Tarawa. Every morning of the war

our Brock-Hall Diary delivered milk from horse-drawn wagons
to wooden back porches in southern Connecticut. In winter

frozen cream lifted the cardboard lids of glass bottles,
Grade A or Grade B, while marines bled to death in the surf,

or the right engine faltered into Channel silt, or troops marched
-what could we do?-with frostbitten feet as white as milk.



Since this poem was already discussed in class, I'm not going to just say what I thought about this poem. I've been feeling patriotic this past week due to the 9/11 tenth anniversary, so I chose to blog about this poem.

I was reminded of a book I read called The All Americans by Lars Anderson, and its about young men who go through the naval academy and the military academy. No matter how prepared they thought they were heading into the war, nothing compared to what it was really like. Granted, there is a big difference between academies and heavyweight finals when it comes to preparing for war, but no one really knew what they were in for.

I love how the poet is able to create vivid pictures in the readers mind without using a lot of description. I think this is because the subject and setting are things that most readers have learned about and seen before. For example, the line "while marines bled to death in the surf," can remind the reader of a movie such as Saving Private Ryan, or of their Modern America class when their teacher showed pictures of Normandy Beach.

The question at the end, "what could we do?" makes me think about the significance of the poem. Milk is obviously important to the theme of the poem, but the question makes me think in a different way about the poem. To me, it almost makes the line say that people at home were helpless to the soldiers and  almost naïve towards helping them. Was the poet trying to say that people at home just continued on with their daily lives with fresh milk because they thought they couldn't do anything to help?

The Halo That Would Not Light

Mrs. White, I am fully aware that this post is late. However, on my defense, today felt like Sunday. I naturally thought to do my blog the day before we go back to school, and once again, my logic failed me. So please, go easy on me. :)

The Halo That Would Not Light

Lucie Brock-Broido

When, after many years, the raptor beak

Let loose of you,

He dropped your tiny body 

In the scarab-colored hollow

Of a carriage, left you like a finch

Wrapped in its nest of linens wound

With linden leaves in a child’s cardboard box.

Tonight the wind is hover-

Hunting as the leather seats of swings go back 

And forth with no one in them

As certain and invisible as 

Red scarves silking endlessly

From a magician’s hollow hat

And the spectacular catastrophe

Of your endless childhood

Is done.

What strikes me about this poem is the haunting detail that the poet describes the metaphors with. The lines “hunting as the leather seats of swings go back and forth with no one in them,” reminds me of a scary movie - the creaking swings with wind throwing them back and forth with a dark, abandoned park as the background. Is the first line talking about a stork, maybe?

The format of the poem is difficult to understand, so I had to break it up differently and read it as sentences, not stanzas. It’s hard for me to decipher the actual story of the poem. I don’t know if it is that a baby was abandoned in a carriage and will not have a childhood, or if it is a child growing up and no longer being a child. I think it is the latter, because the former is to depressing to think about. However, the details make me believe it is the former. I really need to discuss this poem with someone to maybe come up with an answer, even though there is not just one answer. 

I’m not sure what the point is of all the description if the child is simply growing up. Why would the poet describe such haunting images of a childhood. Maybe the child in the poem came from a dark past and had many catastrophes in his or her life, and there is now relief that he or she is finally done with childhood. I think the title also contributes to this theory because children are supposed to be little angels, but the child had so much darkness, that the child's halo would not light.

Wallflowers

Wallflowers

Donna Vorreyer

I heard a word today I’d never heard before-

I wondered where it had been all my life.

I welcomed  it, wooed it with my pen, 

let it know it was loved.

They say if you use a word three times, it’s yours.

What happens to ones that no one speaks?

Do they wait bitterly, 

hollow-eyed orphans in Dickersian bedrooms,

longing for someone to say,

“yes, you... you’re the one”?

Or do they wait patiently, shy shadows

at the high school dance, 

knowing that, given the slightest chance,

someday they’ll bloom?

I want to make a room for all of them,

to be the Ellis Island of diction-

give me your tired, your poor, 

your gegenshein, your zoanthropy-

all those words without a home, 

come out and play - live in my poem. 

For my first poetry response, I chose one that went along with the theme of writing and poems, but I also chose this one because it was easier to understand which means it was easier to write my first response.

I usually start trying to understand poems as a whole by understanding each stanza. Once I have the format of the poem, it makes it a ton easier for me to put pieces together. The poem starts with a stanza that is a little different than the rest of it, but it still serves a purpose. It develops the idea that the narrator loves adding new words to her vocabulary. The meaning of the rest of the poem is that the narrator wants to put to use the words that are uncommon or even forgotten. 

I have never done a good job finding the tone of poems, and this one seems rather difficult for me. I cannot tell if the author feels sad that words are forgotten, or if the author is trying to console the words. However, the first stanza seems as though the author is happy. I can definitely tell that there is a tone shift in the second stanza, its just hard for me to put a finger on what the tones actually are.

The author uses some allusions as  examples of how unspoken words would feel and how they might one day be rediscovered. I’m not quite sure where the climax is in this poem, but I would say it is the last stanza without the examples. Words are being abused and forgotten, and all the narrator wants to do is give the words their time to shine, their time to bloom.

Heart of Darkness

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was by far the most challenging book I have read in a while. I’m not sure if it was because of the time period in which it was written, or if it is just the tone of the book, or if it was the fact that I read it during the summer. With that in mind, I tried to annotate the text to leave trails so that there might be a better chance of understanding it. However, once I read the summary and analysis of the parts that I had previously read, it made it easier to understand. The book’s format was also a little hard for me to see, along with the narrations. 

The theme of humane vs inhumane we have for our summer reading books was very easy to see in this book. Once Marlow had reached the Inner Station and found Kurtz, I began to see the direction of the book. Kurtz had been looked at as a remarkable man, but he lost all of his morals when he was at the Inner Station. It’s strange to think that even the greatest of men can fall so far downward that they would no longer be recognized as the same man. 

The Kite Runner

Throughout the summer I have read the Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and I lay awake at night thinking about the relationships between the characters. 

I had previously seen the movie, so I knew the plot line. However, I realized that the book was much different than the movie. The first paragraph had me hooked. The first part of the book goes into full detail on Amir and Hassan's childhood. The complexity of the relationship is so real, that I felt as these two children had really lived. I notice too often in books that authors tend to skip out on details of characters' relationships, but Hosseini really accomplished something. Every scene within the book just makes each relationship more and more complex. 

Being Amir and his father's servants, Hassan and Ali would have done anything for them. Hassan proves this the day of the kite tournament, and several other times throughout the book. When Hassan runs the last kite for Amir, he says, "For you, a thousand times over." Amir meant more to Hassan than anyone ever knew, but the same was not true for how Amir felt about Hassan. Deep down in Amir's heart, he loved Hassan as a brother, but it took until Amir's trip back to Afghanistan for him to realize it. Amir wanted a way to be good again.

The Great Gatsby

All that I could think about while reading this book was that I wanted to live in the 20s and be a flapper girl. The way F. Scott Fitzgerald described Gatsby’s parties could make anyone feel that way. 

We are going to look at the humanity of man and woman in class, so while I was reading the book, I was waiting for something inhumane to happen. It took until the part where Myrtle was hit by Gatsby’s car until I realized the plot was finally starting to thicken. Usually, main characters don’t die, at least not in the books that I have read. So I was surprised when Gatsby was shot and killed by Myrtle’s husband, especially because it was not Gatsby who hit Myrtle, it was Daisy. I saw the inhumanity come out in Tom Buchanan once he told George Wilson that the owner of the car was Gatsby. Tom wanted Gatsby out of his and Daisy’s life, so he made sure it happened.