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.