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.