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.