"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.

"Wallflowers" by Donna Vorreyer

Donna Vorreyer creates a reality for words that are rarely used.  They are forced to live in "Dickensian bedrooms" where they wait for people to use them.  I like how Vorreyer makes the comparison between the orphanage and Emily Dickenson because Dickenson used a lot of obscure words in her poems.  Therefore, it is very fitting for weird words to live in Dickenson themed bedrooms.  The next comparison she makes is to a high school where the shy kids sit in the corner.  They wait for their chance to shine.  They wait for the opportunity to be used and become popular.  The last metaphor compares making a safe place for unused words like Ellis Island.  Vorreyer then gives "gegenshein" and "zoanthropy" for examples.  Gegenshein is a shining that is seen directly opposite the sun.  Zoanthropy is a mental disorder where a person thinks they are an animal.  I think I will start to use words like this to make them feel less lonely.

"The Halo That Would Not Light" by Lucie Brock-Broido

This poem is telling a story of somebody's childhood which was filled with emptiness.  This person has undergone great tragedy throughout his life.  The poem has a bunch of fancy imagery in it.  Most of it is related to birds.  A "raptor" drops the subject in the first stanza "like a finch" into a "nest."  Then the wind is "hover-hunting", which after some research I learned is a tactic used by some raptors to catch prey.  The linden leaves mentioned in the fourth stanza of course come from linden trees which many small birds nest in.  The third stanza speaks of "red scarves silking endlessly from a magician's hollow hat" which is used in a simile for how the swings are going back and forth by themselves.  The last two lines talk about somebody's endless childhood ending.  The poet is trying to say that childhood is just as hollow as the magicians hat.  We pretend to pull things out of it like the red scarves but they really mean nothing because the hat is still empty.  As for the birds in the first half of the poem, the poet talks about finches which are known to not take care and abandon their young.  The child talked about in this poem was abandoned and, therefore, condemned to have a hollow childhood.

Donald Hall's "1943"

This poem is about being in the United States during WWII.  Donald Hall talks about how "they hardened us for war."  He also mentions how quickly things changed.  Ten months after being knocked out in the heavy-weight championship, Dominick Esposito was knocked out at the of Tarawa.  Another feeling Hall conveys to the reader is how inconsequential life was in the States.  People were getting milk while marines were dying in water and suffering from frostbite, but nobody in the States could do anything about it.  To portray this emotion, Hall releases an exasperated interjection of "what could we do" in the last line.  Hall structures the poem into five stanzas each with 2 lines each.  This structure makes the poem a little unnerving because the reader never finds a rhythm since sentences are always broken up across two stanzas.  This is very similar to the life people were living in the States.  Every morning getting the milk as if nothing was wrong but knowing that people are dying everyday to give you that right.

"Inoculation" By Susan Donnelly

After I first read the poem, I did some research about Cotton Mather to find out the antecedent to the poem.  Cotton Mather was a reverend who was partly responsible along with Dr. Zabdiel Boylston for the first small pox inoculation in Boston, Massachusetts.  The slave that is mentioned, Onesimus, really was a slave to Mather.  Only because of Onesimus was Mather able to find out how to inoculate people.  At the time, experimentation on human kind was frowned upon by the Church and so was inoculation.  A word I did not know was providence.  It simply means divine guidance.  Going back to the poem, we now know that the antecedent is that Mather is talking to Onesimus about inoculation.  Because Onesimus already has had the disease, he cannot get it again.  The second stanza in the poem is talking about the antibodies that Onesimus has inside of his body.  They are part of the disease yet he still survives.  In the last stanza, I think Donnelly is making a commentary on slavery and how Onesimus is free of small pox but not of slavery, but I am not sure exactly how she is saying it.

Trip to the Supermarket

My brother and I drove in our car up to the local supermarket and parked towards the end of the lot because we like to think the extra hundred yards we have to travel counts as exercise.  My brother and I go our separate ways as he walks to the hardware store next to the supermarket.  It is a bright day with the sun shining in my face as I enter the store.  As I move past all of the carts because I am only there to get some milk, I notice the service desk lady look at me as I go by.  After I have examined all of the prices of the milk within reach, I grab the cheapest carton and make my way toward the self-check-out area.  There is a line, so I get behind a mother with her child who continually looks at me until her mother tells her to stop.  Nonetheless, the child continues to sneak glances at me until they eventually walk away.  Finally, there is an open station.  I scan my milk, and the attendant walks over and asks I if I need any help.  I say I don't and he continues on his rounds.  I leave the store and meet my brother back at the car.  He asks me how my shopping was and I say looking at myself, "It's like people have never seen somebody in a wheel chair."

Analysis of "Evening Concert, Saint-Chapelle" by John Updike

At first, the poem seems like a person is attending a concert in the chapel.  The "violins vaunting Vivaldi's strident strength, then Brahms" are actually our "beating hearts."  The music from the concert is really the colorful light coming through the stain glass windows, yet the light is confined by lead walls which keep the light inside the chapel.  At the same time, the iron gives the light shape and form of "shield and cross."  Without the iron, the light would be nothing.  Updike uses alliteration to create images in the reader's mind about "blazing blues," violins vaunting Vivaldi's" with "strident strength".  Updike makes a comparison using light and music saying that eyes listen and hear whispers.  The light dances around the chapel as if it is dancing to music.  The windows are a form of art like music is, and just like music, they provide entertainment.  Our eyes see the light, and then our hearts bring out the images and the beauty of the windows.

Kite Runner

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini was a thought-provoking book.  The protagonist, Amir, is faced with emence guilt after not stopping his friend, Hassan, from being raped.  Amir tries several different methods of overcoming his guilt.  At first, he runs from the guilt by getting Hassan and his father, Ali, to stop being their servants, so Amir can try and forget what happened.  When Amir and his father flee to America, Amir sees it as another way to run from his troubles.  In the end Amir is presented an opportunity to redeem himself by resucing Hassan's son from Afghanistan which has turned into a war zone.  In Afghanistan, Amir must confront the person who is responsible for what happened to Hassan.  Only with the help of Hassan's son is Amir able to overcome his fear.  At the end of the book, Amir saves the boy and is finally at peace with himself.  As much as Amir tried to run from his past, it found a way back into his life, and he was forced to confront it. 

Blog Title

For those of you who can't infer what my title is, it is The Been Sitting Here for Hours Can't Think of a Clever Title Blog.  I spent several days thinking of titles and that was the best I could do.  I shortened it so that it would fit on hte computer screen in one line.