"Nothing Gold Can Stay" Robert Frost

Robert Frosts poems are mostly about nature, and this one is not different.  This one specifically is about spring and the new, green things that nature creates.  It also describes the eventually of the destruction of the good that nature creates.  In the sixth line, Frost alludes to Eden, the paradise made for our enjoyment until we brought evil into it.  Frost must think that nature is good by its own design and would stay that way if not for the destructive potential of mankind.  We tarnish the gold that nature creates.  Because of us, "nothing gold can stay."  Frost also implies that good things dwindle over time and that flowers only have a short time to live.

"Terrence, this is stupid stuff" by A.E. Housman

The first stanza tells the story of a man who has killed his friends and anything else that listens to his poetry.  The second stanza begins with the description of several different types of alcohol and finishes with the description of a drunk night complete with waking up in an unknown location and not knowing what happened.  The third stanza is about a salesman trying to sell liquor to some people. The poem concludes with the story of a King where people try to poison him but end up poisoning themselves for some reason that I am not sure of.  The King was Mithridate who had built up an immunity to poisons throughout his lifetime by taking less lethal doses of several poisons.  Alcohol is definitely a common theme throughout these seemingly unrelated tales.  The speaker seems to think that alcohol is something positive because he never speaks of the evil that is associated with alcohol.  In the second stanza, he says that "malt does more than Milton can" which implies that alcohol can make men do great things.

"The Golf Links" by Sarah N. Cleghorn

Cleghorn was born in Virginia in 1876.  She graduated from a northeastern college which I'm sure was a great accomplishment for a lady of the time.  She was also friends with Robert Frost and Dorothy Fisher, a famous novelist of the time.  Her poems were mostly comments on society.  They ranged from women's suffrage to prison reform to the death penalty to child labor.  This poem in particular is about kids that are working while the adults are playing.  Shouldn't that be the other way around?  Cleghorn is probably making a commentary on the child labor of the early 1900s.  There were no child labor laws at that time, and children were used to work in dangerous factories like steel mills.  The children worked hard every day while the adults played golf and then drank their troubles away.  In this time period, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

"What the mirror said" by Lucille Clifton

Honestly, the first thing I thought of when I read this poem was, "that mirror is black."  I mean, the mirror doesn't conjugate the verbs correctly at all which gives it an inner city feeling.  After doing a quick google search, I learned that she was in fact black.  Getting back to the poem, the speaker is a mirror which I'm assuming is on a wall.  It is talking to a girl who is feeling self-conscience about her appearance.  The mirror then proceeds to give the girl a pep talk about how pretty she is and how any man would "have his hands on/ some/ damn/ body."  The mirror realizes how complicated the girl is and how she has "a geography" that somebody needs a map and directions to understand.  The syntax throughout the poem is not grammatically correct as I have already mentioned.  The structure is composed of short lines no longer than 3-4 words which adds emphasis to certain words.  It makes the reader pause while he or she reads making it sound, as I have already stated, like an inner city black person is talking.  More of a Will Smith in the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air than a Morgan Freeman or Samuel L. Jackson.

"you fit into me" by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer who was born in 1939.  She is a witty author who takes sarcastic jabs at society.  She writes books, short stories, and poems.  She graduated from RadCliffe College (not affiliated with Daniel Radcliffe I'm sure).  In this poem, the first stanza seems optimistic and uplifting.  It seems to good to be true that "you fit into me" as if they were made to be together.  Atwood makes a comparison to a hook into an eye.  Something that is very hard to do.  Therefore,  nobody else can do what the other does.  Nobody else could fit into the "eye."    Then, there is a huge shift in tone in the second stanza.  The poem becomes very depressing and hate-filled.  The comparison gets skewed from a sweet sentiment to a harsh attack.  Instead of the second person completing the first, he or she is a major nuisance and hindrance. Now, the second person is crippling the other person.  The poem is short.  However, the poem is still impactful and leaves a message about how something that was enjoyable at first can turn out to be quite annoying.

"A Gray Haze Over the Rice Fields" by Jayanta Mahapatra

Mahapatra was born in India which is where this poem takes place.  The speaker remembers his childhood and how different things are now.  His grandma is no longer alive and he no longer gets to watch over the rice fields and the cattle.  Now all the speaker has to hold onto are the memories that are a "dangling thread" that "stops halfway down, where [his] hands cannot touch it."  The gray haze mentioned in the title is the lost memories.  They are no longer apart of the past or apart of the future.  That is why the speaker can no longer reach his memories.  They have been taken away by some sort of disaster in his country that has made it change so much that nothing is the same as it was.  All that is left is an unreachable haze that floats over the rice fields.  The worst part is that the speaker wants to reach them and go back to the way they were, but it is never going to happen.

"For a Duro" by Philip Levine

After searching through all of the blogs from last year looking for some research about this poem, I found a few helpful things.  A duro is a coin used in Spain until it was replaced by the euro in 2002.  The picture on them as mention by Levine is Franco who was recognized as the ruler of Spain in 1945.  The speaker of the poem seems to be a wealthy man who can afford fancy things such as "coffee and a plain roll" or "the cars, the woman, the seven course meal and a sea view."  Around the rest of Spain though, there seems to be a lot of poverty.  A soldier sits on the side of the road, and the hotel goes out of business that was once a luxury to stay in.  The hotel is now being used as animal hospital.  The parrot in the hospital represents peace in the poem as told in the last few lines.  Levine is saying that while the world was once great and had some trouble is now working its way back to its once grandeur.  Because just like the toucan which was "leveled by an unknown virus but now alert and preening" the world is getting back into the thick of it.