The Sun woke me this morning loud
and clear, saying “Hey! I’ve been
trying to wake you up for fifteen
minutes. Don’t be so rude, you are
only the second poet I’ve ever chosen
to speak to personally
so why
aren’t you more attentive? If I could
burn you through the window I would
to wake you up. I can’t hang around
here all day.”
“Sorry, Sun, I stayed
up late last night talking to Hal.”

“When I woke up Mayakovsky he was
a lot more prompt” the Sun said
petulantly. “Most people are up
already waiting to see if I’m going
to put in an appearance.”
I tried
to apologize “I missed you yesterday.”
“That’s better” he said. “I didn’t
know you’d come out.” “You may be wondering why I’ve
come so close?”
“Yes” I said beginning to feel hot
and wondering if maybe he wasn’t burning me
anyway.
“Frankly I wanted to tell you
I like your poetry. I see a lot
on my rounds and you’re okay. You may
not be the greatest thing on earth, but
you’re different. Now, I’ve heard some
say you’re crazy, they being excessively
calm themselves to my mind, and other
crazy poets think that you’re a boring
reactionary. Not me.
Just keep on
like I do and pay no attention. You’ll
find that some people always will
complain about the atmosphere,
either too hot
or too cold too bright or too dark, days
too short or too long.
If you don’t appear
at all one day they think you’re lazy
or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.

And don’t worry about your lineage
poetic or natural. The Sun shines on
the jungle, you know, on the tundra
the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were
I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting
for you to get to work.

And now that you
are making your own days, so to speak,
even if no one reads you but me
you won’t be depressed. Not
everyone can look up, even at me. It
hurts their eyes.”
“Oh Sun, I’m so grateful to you!”

“Thanks and remember I’m watching. It’s
easier for me to speak to you out
here. I don’t have to slide down
between buildings to get your ear.
I know you love Manhattan, but
you ought to look up more often.
And
always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space. That
is your inclination, known in the heavens
and you should follow it to hell, if
necessary, which I doubt.
Maybe we’ll
speak again in Africa, of which I too
am specially fond. Go back to sleep now
Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem
in that brain of yours as my farewell.”

“Sun, don’t go!” I was awake
at last. “No, go I must, they’re calling
me.”
“Who are they?”
Rising he said “Some
day you’ll know. They’re calling to you
too.” Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

Wow, this poem is crazy. I’ll tell you that the first thing the sun reminded me of was God, since he/she/it appears omnipotent, all-seeing, and friendly. However, I thought maybe the meaning was a little more complex than the sun just representing God. The sun is certainly very human-like. He talks to O’Hara the way a famous professor would to a student, with a little bit of an air of superiority but also a friendly demeanor. The strangest part was that line at the end, where he says “No I must go, they’re calling me,” and Frank says “Who,” and the sun just goes “You’ll know, they’re calling you too” and then departs.

Who could “they” be? Who calls the sun? Who calls Frank O’Hara? People perhaps? Society? After all, the sun is a pretty big “guy,” and is responsible for lighting and heating the whole earth. Everyone calls to the sun to herald in a new day, and to bring light and warmth and life (that opening scene from The Lion King comes to mind.) Perhaps the sun is telling O’Hara that society is calling to him as well, calling him as a poet and a thinker and an artist.

Maybe O’Hara is comparing himself to the sun then, as if he’s bringing in new light and life and warmth to poetry after another dark, cold night. However, it is somewhat strange that O’Hara would say he had been called forth in this way. For one thing, the poem would almost seem prophetic, since the sun tells him “Someday you’ll know.” The implication in this statement and in the entire poem is that O’Hara is just beginning to find success, that the Sun is one of the first to really enjoy his poetry. Did O’Hara guess in advance that he would be so successful as a poet? Was it just a good guess? The poem raises more questions than it answers.

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that’s who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that’s my old man across the yard
he’s talking to the meter reader
he’s telling him the world’s sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips

I think this poem is meant to be sarcastic, not only because of the context of the other poems but because of one of the lines. “How did this happen? Well that’s who I wanted to be.” It’s something I can’t quite put my finger on, but it just seems like the implication is that perhaps in reality she didn’t want to simply grow old to be a “traditional” woman, maybe “that” wasn’t who she wanted to be. The part that confuses me is the last little section, where the man is talking about oil and uranium and she’s reflecting on kissing him. This part is difficult to reconcile with the poem whether it suggests a feminist or more traditional attitude. Perhaps it is sarcasm that reveals disatisfaction? The implication of the grandfather’s “sweet explaining lips” could be that women could have “sweet explaining lips” as well.

Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

This poem struck me because it reminded me of some of the stuff we talked about throughout the year. For instance, at the end of the poem, the line “The tigers in the panal that she made will go on prancing, proud and unafraid” reminds me of the themes in The Iliad, where we talked about how by acumulating time and kleos you could become immortal. Now Aunt Jennifer isn’t going out killing Greeks to get her honor and glory, but nonetheless her embroidery will certainly end up immortalizing her in some sense, as the poet suggests. Another important theme in this poem seems to be the wedding ring, alluded to in the line “the massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand” and also “her terriffied hands will lie, still ringed by the ordeals she was mastered by.” The implication here seems to be that marriage is oppressive or a burden to women, but the root of the concern seems to be revealed in the last line, “the tigers in the panel that she made, will go on prancing unafraid.” Rather than marriage being oppressive, perhaps the criticism is that society is oppressive. Her criticism could be that while the tigers (men) will be immortalized and remembered, the women are often forgotten.

We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
and all the sea were moving marble.
We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship;
we’d rather own this breathing plain of snow
though the ship’s sails were laid upon the sea
as the snow lies undissolved upon the water.
O solemn, floating field,
are you aware an iceberg takes repose
with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?

This is a scene a sailor’d give his eyes for.
The ship’s ignored. The iceberg rises
and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles
correct elliptics in the sky.
This is a scene where he who treads the boards
is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain
is light enough to rise on finest ropes
that airy twists of snow provide.
The wits of these white peaks
spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares
upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.

The iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself, perhaps the snows
which so surprise us lying on the sea.
Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off
where waves give in to one another’s waves
and clouds run in a warmer sky.
Icebergs behoove the soul
(both being self-made from elements least visible)
to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.

As soon as I read the first part of this poem, I tried to decide what the “Iceberg” represents, and I first thought that it represented our judgments and thoughts. What Bishop seems to tell us in the first part of her poem is that we would rather have these judgments and “standardized” ideas than continued growth and learning. We would prefer to stay on the Iceberg of knowledge than sail off into the Ocean of learning.
Then I thought maybe Bishop was referring to words too, because we often find definitions for words and simply accept them. Since Bishop is a Structuralist writer, she might be referring the nature of words, which we often take for granted as having certain definitions, and never reflect upon how these definitions affect us. Words often display the effects of Bishop’s iceberg, they “dare upon a shifting sands and stares.” They can also “behoove the soul,’ and she calls the Iceberg “the Imaginary Iceberg.” This makes sense, because what are words except things that we have dreamed up to make communication possible?
It seems that the iceberg could represent any number of things, but that fact itself is the point of the poem. It is a great observation of our process of “naming” objects; we assign names and properties and descriptions to objects to allow understanding of them without actually seeing or comprehending them. The poem also reveals the way in which we take in meaning. What is meaning? Does it exist, or is it just something attached to objects in our heads? Bishop seems to say that meaning, like the iceberg, is purely “imaginary.”

BEAT! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation;
Into the school where the scholar is studying;
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride;
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, plowing his field or gathering his grain;
So fierce you whirr and pound, you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.

2

Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow!
Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets:
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? No sleepers must sleep in those beds;
No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—Would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.

3

Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley—stop for no expostulation;
Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer;
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man;
Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties;
Make even the trestles to shake the dead, where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump, O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.

The bugles and drums in this poem at a glance look like they’d be as simple as “war.” However, the message is certainly more complicated than that. The end of the poem puts a more sinister spin on whatever it is that the drums and bugles represent (“so strong you thump, o terrible drums, so loud you bugles blow.”) One possible idea I considered at first was “new ideas.” It seems like that for every generation some new idea comes along that sweeps through and creates a big ruckus (like the “sexual revolution” of the sixties.) Big new ideas can certainly have the potential to uproot society. Still though, new ideas generally aren’t as sinister as the tone of the poem suggests (or if they are we don’t find out until later) so I don’t think it can be new ideas.

I think the interesting thing about Whitman’s poem is that what he’s doing is talking about something we can’t exactly put our finger on, which makes the poem that much more powerful. The closest thing I could think of would be “revolutionary, radical ideas without thoughtful consideration or memory of historical mistakes.” There isn’t exactly a word that describes that phrase though, which makes it all the more powerful. I also think historically that if you take a big group of people, do something to make them mad, give one of them a radical “new” idea, inject a little male testosterone into there, and you have a revolution going. The real message here seems to be to encourage us to remain thoughtful. Whitman is saying that new movements or generations based on emotion and thoughtless action rarely last and rarely do more good than harm.

You know I took a test in Citizenship the other day where the essay question was “Why do you think that Americans are often ignorant of the issues affecting their own government?” I think this poem makes a statement on that reason; because governmental issues, philisophical issues, scientific issues, religious issues, and all that “deep” stuff is, frankly, boring. Who really wants to sit around having a thoughtful debate or discussion? Who really wants to think about difficult issues? It’s so much easier just to let the “smarter people” figure that stuff out and preoccupy ourselves with more immediate pleasures. However, when we all do this, inevitably the whole system just goes down the tubes. I think that’s kind of what this poem is saying.

Similar to this, a few weeks ago I was at my girlfriend’s house watching “Gladiator.” Her mother made a comment about how unbelievable it was that people ever could have been so fascinated with, and so entertained by such bloody, gory, senseless violence. I quietly thought about how unbelievable it is that people still are entertained by such things. We love to watch gory horror movies and extremely violent action movies. Oh sure, it isn’t “real” like it was in the days of Rome, but haven’t we gotten good at making it real? We’re sorrounded by it on television and in video games. I play counter strike and I know that there are a lot of times where it looks like a terrorist really did just shoot four hostages in the back of the head and blow their brains all over a wall. Who am I to judge? I play counter strike. I watch violent, gory movies. What’s the big deal right?

But that’s not real, what I’m seeing. That’s not real brains and blood sprayed accross the wall, that’s animated brains and blood made up of millions of color pixels organized by ones and zeroes in a computer program. Compare that to what we see on the news, or in certain student’s Darfur presentations. When we’re sorrounded by fake violence, the real violence doesn’t seem like such a big deal does it? Except those aren’t just animated figures in a computer program. That was a real person over there, a real person with a mother and father and children, who had hopes and fears and thoughts and wonders just like me. A real person who lived, who loved, who laughed, who cried, and who was chained to the ground and burned alive for one nation’s greed for natural resources. Isn’t that significant? When I phrase it that way of course it is, but when you’re sitting in front of yet another big flashing-picture-box watching yet more violence, it’s no big deal is it really? Nothing we haven’t seen before.

So I think that’s what Whitman wants to talk about here. Learning and growing is hard, and it takes work. It’s so much easier just not to learn. Nevermind the cries of the mothers, the prayers of the fathers, and the suffering it causes.

out and out meanness, too, lets love breathe
you don’t have to fight off getting in too deep
you can always get out if you’re not too scared

an ounce of prevention’s
enough to poison the heart
don’t think of others
until you have thought of yourself, are true

all of these things, if you feel them
will be graced by a certain reluctance
and turn into gold

if felt by me, will be smilingly deflected
by your mysterious concern

Interesting that O’Hara would say all this. We often take hate to be negative, but O’hara seems to say “come on guys, everybody hates. There’s nothing wrong with a little hate once in awhile.” I don’t understand his reference to filth as “awesome” however. Does he mean awesome in the sense of “The power of a hurricane is certainly awesome,” or does he mean the context of “Dude, this videogame is awesome.” Pretty much every other single time I would assume he meant the former, however, O’hara shows a pretty informal style sometimes and he did go through the sixties…

I do agree with O’hara that a certain amount of honesty (mixed with some bluntness) can be necessary to get a point accross. Still, I cannot help but think of hatred as something purely bad, simply because hate seems to me to be the opposite of love, which is purely good.

But is love purely good? I guess that’s what the question comes down to, and maybe where opinions differ. I guess someone could list times when love would be a force for bad. For example, what if love for a person drives you to commit horrible crimes? Does this make love bad? No I would say not, because true love and actions carried out in the name of love are different problems to me. Assuming pure goodness is part of the “definition” of love (though love is, at its core, intangible) then an action carried out in the name of love does not make love “bad” the way Nuclear warfare does not make E=MC squared untrue. Actions can be independent of abstract definitions.

So if love is purely good and hate is the opposite of love, hate must be purely bad. However, we’ve seen that since actions are disconnected from abstract definitions, theoretically the same way love could result in a “bad” action being comitted, hate could result in a “good” action taking place. Such a situation is difficult to imagine; perhaps the effect of seeing a group of innocent people being executed by a cruel death squad would cause you to feel hatred, therefore eliminating the death squad and saving innocent lives? Of course, that then deals with the moral question of whether killing a person is ever truly justified, and the whole concept of “justice” is another intangible concept, just like love. We’d better leave justice and killing a moral question for another poem.

For now though, I guess I must grudingly agree with O’hara’s statement “why be afraid of hate, it is only there.” I guess hatred, though it is purely “bad,” could in some way end up being a force for “good.”

But I still don’t think hate is a good thing!

This poem is great at drawing the reader down the same path that the character it describes follows. It starts off with an innocent young boy and paints a likeable picture of him, describing him as a “good boy.” Then the boy kills for the first time, a rabbit, but clearly still significant since he cries for a week afterwards. Then we find out that his family is horribly dysfunctional, but that the boy still has that dream of escaping his family, escaping his problems, and getting away. Then he finally does escape, by going to war, and seeing the horror of death and chaos that comes with the reality of war, and the years go by and he finds himself unable to escape. Finally it’s the end of his life, when all of his dreams, his “escapes” from the nightmare of knowing his own, animal nature, have all fallen apart. He watches his wife dying, but he still has that forlorn dream of escaping, of getting away. That dream is the one thing he’s been able to hold on to over the years, but he never realized that the escape he dreamed of was not as simple as hopping on a train and leaving.
The boy tries to escape the knowledge of his true nature though. This poem gives us a poignant message about our true nature, that we are, at heart, animals who are desperate to survive. We often forget this about ourselves; I think we’ve gotten good at covering it up with our planes and our clothes and our televisions and all the distractions we have to forget that we’re animals at heart (although it’s amazing how quick you see a group of people become animals again when there’s no more food or they’re desperate to survive.) Maybe we, as a culture, do what the boy does then. We’re always running after “change,” always trying to escape, and we equate that “change” or “escape” with more science and more inventions and more products. But do our new products and inventions really make us different from what we really are? Can we simply invent a new truth for ourselves by making some discoveries? This poem says no, the same way a boy cannot just leave his past life behind by jumping on a train and going somewhere new and exciting is the way we can’t just invent a new identity for what we are.

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way–the stone lets me go.
I turn that way–I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

This is hard to comment on, because it says so much so much better than words can express. I’ve talked to my dad about Vietnam sometimes, and I always come away thinking it must have been so surreal, so unbelievable. He’ll talk about being “out in the field” just walking along, and something will happen; for example, a swarm of rice beatles will suddenly fly through (they’re each about five inches long) and there’d be so many they could knock you down, and he’ll smile and remember it the way you might remember taking a walk with some friends, and you can almost see him and his buddies laughing and talking like a bunch of kids, except that they’re carrying grenades and M-16s and rocket launchers. Then suddenly the smile dissappears and he stops talking about it; it’s suddenly not funny anymore, and he never talks about what it was like when it wasn’t funny, when it was bullets, not rice beatles, that knocked men down. My father never talks about the other men there though, other than saying that he was no hero and he doesn’t want a parade when so many other men gave so much more. I wonder about his friends though, and I hope for his sake that in the four years he was there he decided not to make too many friends, because the alternative would be too horriffic to imagine.

This poem speaks to me the way my father does though, and after visiting the Vietnam Memorial and seeing the 60,000 names on it, it’s hard for me to see the glory of war, and it’s hard for me to see the romance of fighting, because I think any family with a member on that wall would rather have a relative than a pretty etching in a big black rock. I guess that’s what this poem really makes me think about with that last line, the way sixty thousand men could pass into history and into death, and a woman could stand before all of that and still worry about a child’s unkempt hair, as if those men never even existed in the first place.

Mary= The Blessed Virgin Mary

Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season-

Mary is often seen as an “equal and opposite” to Eve. In the Creation story, Eve ended up refusing God’s gift (of a pretty good life I think, I mean, come on, chilling out in a beautiful garden forever?) by eating the forbidden fruit. In the Gospel of Luke, when Mary accepts God’s request to be the mother of Jesus (interestingly she was actually asked, it was not a purely “you-will-do-this-because-I-said-you-will” situation) she reverses that role and accepts God by being the mother of Christ. This is an interesting parallel to seasons (Eve falls=winter, Mary prepares to give birth for Jesus=spring) which is pointed out here.

Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?

Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?

Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?-
Growth in every thing-

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.

In Catholicism, because Mary was the mother of Jesus, she is also seen as the mother of all Catholics, but Protestantism does not share this view. Here Mary is compared to “mother nature,” which is an interesting comparison. Mary is often seen as beautiful, virtuous, and kind the same way we often imagine nature. Of course, in reality, we know that nature can be at times peaceful and beautiful, and other times violent and horriffic (earthquakes/volcanoes/floods etc.) Perhaps Hopkins is saying the way we can romantiscize nature too much we can romantiscize Mary too much?

Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this:
Spring’s universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.

“Mary is so awesome that she gets May, the last month of spring when everything is just finishing growing in and nature is alive and vibrant with life.” I think that’s what Hopkins intends us to think when he says this, but it could be read into a different way…

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfed cherry

This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.

Again, it’s rather unclear. I did research and found out Hopkins was actually a Roman Catholic convert and Priest. I would say that fact makes it likely he seeks to simply venerate Mary in this poem, but parts of it do seem strange to me. I am uncomfortable reading into it too much, because I do not want to offend any potential readers. To present the issue at a glance, I’d say that this poem highlights what some conservative Protestants would accuse Catholics of- of venerating Mary too much and basically “making too big a deal” out of all the Mary stuff. However, I could also say that the poem could be interpreted as simply talking about how cool Mary was, and comparing her to the beautiful month of may and the spring season. It really depends on how you read into it, and I find this poem particularly confusing.

In all of her poetry, Sylvia Plath always seems to bring up Nazism or Fascism or something about the second World War and the Holocaust. This particular poem is an extremely powerful reference that is very effective. The power begins just with the title alone, “Daddy.” “Daddy” and “Mommy” are emotional words that represent a child’s love for its parent and the desire for love and affection back. Just the name “Daddy” is very emotional. However, Sylvia Plath clearly is not idealistic about her father anymore. She is long past the stage of childhood where we associate mommy and daddy with perfection and omnipotence, and in this poem Sylvia laments about losing her father in more ways than one.
I’ve researched and read a lot about World War Two and the Nazi party, and that combined with this poem really speaks to me. Sylvia seems to indicate that her beloved father, after becoming swept up in the nationalistic fervor that took hold of her homeland, became more and more detached from his own family and his daughter. To a little girl this would seem so confusing, so frightening, but clearly Otto Plath no longer picked up on his daughters emotion, becoming lost in his devotion to the state and to Nazism. In the end, his devotion costs him his life, and Sylvia Plath is left wondering how her father who loved her was able to eventually leave her so easily.
Sylvia’s poem says more than that of course; it’s interesting the way she brings up her own ancestry, questioning whether or not she herself would have been in one of the focus groups targeted by the “master race” as inferior. What would her father have done then? Would the love of his own daughter ever have stopped him from comitting atrocities, or was it all erased by that nationalistic fervor he felt so strongly? We can only wonder. The most interesting part is the end where Sylvia lashes out at her father, calling him a vampire with a “stake in his heart.” This comparison of her father to a vampire is powerful because vampires and monsters are the things little children fear, the things that their parents are supposed to protect them from. In Sylvia’s lament, it becomes clear that her father was the vampire, and that she has long sinced realized that her father was the monster.