Reflection of Linda Pastan's "Pass/Fail" #7

Poem:
you will never graduate
from this dream
of blue books.
no matter how
you succeed awake,
asleep there is a test
waiting to be failed.
the dream beckons with two dull pencils,
but you haven't even
taken the course;
when you reach for a book--
it closes its door
in your face; when
you conjugate a verb--
it is in the wrong
language.
now the pillow becomes
a blank page. turn it
to the cool side;
you will still mother
in all of the feathers
and have to be learned
by heart


Reflection: 
I believe this poem is about how everyone has their own struggles, obstacles, and tests that they have to face and overcome just to survive in life. Whether that be something externally, meaning a conflict a person faces that includes another person or thing, or something internally, meaning emotions, fears, and thoughts that said person needs to overcome. the line that says "you will never graduate from this dream" to me means that you will have to live through these many tests for the rest of your waking life, you may pass through one conflict but there will always be another one right there to take it's spot, life will find a successor to fill the spot that the old conflict had once taken.  The line that mentions how there was a course you never took and the book just closes its door in your face made me think of adulthood and how that is an obstacle we all have to face by ourselves, we all need to find a way to survive through it on out owns: "but you haven't even taken the course; when you reach for a book-- it closes its door in your face". No one teaches you what you have to do as an adult, school teaches you how to do things that are mandatory for adults like jury duty and paying taxes, but no one teaches you how to make that transition from goofy little kid to mature adult you just have to wing it and hope for the best, like you would on a test for a course you know nothing about. But you can always start over and change, it's never too late to learn from your past: "not the pillow becomes a blank page. turn it to the cool side; you will still mother in all of the feathers and have learned...", this quote means that you can always start over, but you can never erase anything, you will still be that goofy little kid underneath that mature adult. 

Reflection of Randall Jarrell's, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” #6

POEM:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, 

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. 

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Reflection:

     Upon my first read of this poem, I thought this was a poem about a pregnancy. The first two lines talked about the narrator hunched into the belly of their mother while she slept, "From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.", I just figured it was the a poem about an unborn child's thought. The part that says that this narrator has wet fur made me believe that the speaker was, in fact, not human: "And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze". The next line that says, "Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life", could symbolize how much longer this fetus, whether human or not, has until it joins us in this world; six miles could probably be construed as six months. The last two lines made me think that it was actually a poem about abortion: "I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose".  I thought the black flak was whatever poison they use to kill the fetus before extracting it, and the part that said the when the narrator was dead they'd wash them out with a hose was when they were getting rid of the dead fetus. Reading the title one more time, I wondered what a ball turret gunner was, so I looked it up and found out that it was the gunner in the underbelly of a war plane. The whole point of this poem to me completely changed. Instead of an abortion, I thought of a very hairy guy, due to the fact that he says his wet fur froze, who was shot or had exploded in this Ball Turret, and they have to wash out all his pieces.

Reflection of Cathy Song's "The Youngest Daughter". #5

The sky has been dark

for many years.

My skin has become as damp

and pale as rice paper

and feels the way

mother’s used to before the drying sun   

parched it out there in the fields.

      Lately, when I touch my eyelids,

my hands react as if

I had just touched something

hot enough to burn.

My skin, aspirin colored,   

tingles with migraine. Mother

has been massaging the left side of my face   

especially in the evenings   

when the pain flares up.

This morning

her breathing was graveled,

her voice gruff with affection   

when I wheeled her into the bath.   

She was in a good humor,

making jokes about her great breasts,   

floating in the milky water

like two walruses,

flaccid and whiskered around the nipples.   

I scrubbed them with a sour taste   

in my mouth, thinking:

six children and an old man

have sucked from these brown nipples.

I was almost tender

when I came to the blue bruises

that freckle her body,

places where she has been injecting insulin   

for thirty years. I soaped her slowly,

she sighed deeply, her eyes closed.

It seems it has always

been like this: the two of us

in this sunless room,

the splashing of the bathwater.

In the afternoons

when she has rested,

she prepares our ritual of tea and rice,   

garnished with a shred of gingered fish,

a slice of pickled turnip,

a token for my white body.   

We eat in the familiar silence.

She knows I am not to be trusted,   

even now planning my escape.   

As I toast to her health

with the tea she has poured,

a thousand cranes curtain the window,

fly up in a sudden breeze.

Reflection:

I really don't like this poem,  it kind of played with my emotions and my head. I feel like I know what is going on, it’s just a loving daughter taking care of her mother when no one else will, none of the older sibling would come back and care for the elderly withering, wrinkly old woman. But further reading I realized that this old woman most likely drove her family away from her senile actions. The narrator, also known as the youngest daughter of six children, is taking her old mother to the bath to wash her old mother, she seems to be the only one of the six who has actually come back and taken care of their mother, even if she doesn’t like the tasks. In lines 17-26, the narrator talks about how her mother is laughing at the fact that her breasts float in the water, actions like this is probably the reason why none of the other children wanted to come back and take care of their aging mother: “She was in a good humor, making jokes about her great breasts floating in the milky water like two walruses". At first I thought it was just a poem about a loving younger daughter who is admiring her mother having fun in her old age,  but at the end of the poem my view of this poem completely changes. She talks about how she is planning her escape from her situation, then she mentioned hey mothers good health and it makes me think that she is trying to sabotage her mother so she can escape taking care of her old mother: "She knows I am not to be trusted even now planning my escape. As I toast to her health with the tea she has poured, a thousand cranes curtain the window, fly up in a sudden breeze". The last part of those lines where it talks about the cranes in the breeze,  I was a little confused,  did this girl just kill her mother?  Is that what the cranes symbolize? 

Reflection of William Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much With Us". #4

        To me, this poem is basically saying that us humans take advantage of this world that we live in, Earth. It is pretty much just saying that we like to lay claim to everything we see and like. I didn't catch any of this at first, but by the second time I read it I started to understand a little. The third line gives me the idea that the narrator is saying when we, humans, see something and we like it, we grab hold of it with an iron tight grip, lock our fingers, don't let go, and yell "DIBS": "Little we see in Nature that is ours”. In the line that says “Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea”, I was a little confused about what the word Proteus meant, so I looked it up on Google. The first answer I found was that proteus was “a bacterium found in the intestines of animals and in the soil”, but that didn’t make sense at all to me, I spent a good long while wondering why the sight of animal intestine bacterium rising up from the sea would be a good thing. It had to have had another meaning, so typed Proteus into dictionary.com and came up with Proteus being a classically mythical sea god who could change forms. This made much more sense and I got the feeling that the narrator of this poem wants the humans to lose control of the land they thing belongs to them, this narrator what’s nature, its creatures, and its gods to take back what it theirs; this narrator wants the Earth to stand up for itself and stop letting humans ruin it.

Reflection of Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool". #3

This poem is a little strange, there is not much going on and it is really, really short; it's only 10 lines long, and the wording is very strange as well. I don't know what it is about this poem, even after all these weird things, I still kind of like it. Though it is only 10 lines, and it is very short, there is something about this poem that makes it so amusing to read and listen to.  I read it a few times to get a full grasp on the overall concept of the story that is behind the poem, and there was even an audio version of it attached to the link on the poetry foundation website. Listening to that person read it the way that the author had wanted it to be read added something completely different to my view of the story. At first I took it as some kid thinking that he was cool because he skipped school and was bragging about it,  from what I read in the beginning, but the ending didn't make sense to me. After listening to the audio version of it and having had it read to me, I now see it in a different way, possibly even the way the author had planned us to see it. I'm picturing and I person wasting their lives away in a bar, they're sitting there talking to another customer at said bar, and they are explaining what their life has been like, that's when they realize they haven't really done anything at all, they weren't really cool and their youth is over. Before listening to the audio version, I didn't understand why the "we" was at the end of the line instead of the beginning, but then I heard it and realized it was to make the narrator sound like they were racking their brain looking for something, anything they have done with their life, but they come up empty handed and realize that their life's almost over.

Reflection of Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time". #2

      If it weren't for the title of this poem, I would never have associated it with Virgins; no where in the entire poem does it say the word once. But if you go into the poem knowing that it has something to do with Virgins, it makes it a whole lot easier to understand. This line that says “Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying” could refer to ones virginity. It is a very delicate things that is gone too fast, once a rose-bud blooms it can never revert back to that bud, and once your virginity is lost, you can no longer be a virgin anymore; you are a completely different entity. The last few lines are could be advising someone not to rush into things, be a child as long as you can because you will miss those days when they are gone, you can never get them back: “Then be not coy, but use your time, And while ye may, go marry; For having lost but once your prime, You may forever tarry”. They are basically warning the young that they should not rush into things because youth and innocence are precious and should not be taken for granted. Have fun while you can, make the most of your life, because if you don’t, one day you will find yourself a changed person, haunted by the future and regretful for the past.

Reflection of John Donne's "Death, be not proud". #1

This poem caught my eye on the first line; as soon as I read "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee" I instantly came up with a meaning behind the words. They personified death and made it the main character of this poem, saying that he doesn't really like his line of work, and he doesn't necessarily agree with everything he does, but he has to do it; he doesn't take pride in it. It’s kind of like a vegetarian being a vet, at one point in their career they are going to have to put an animal to sleep, they might not want to, but it is in the job description. In the second line,  “Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so”, I feel that the author is trying to say that Death is basically the “big cheese” in this situation, everyone looks up to him because he is powerful, but no one wants to get to close so that they can’t get on Deaths bad side. They go on to talking about how we are all ruled by fate, with the way they say it they could be talking about the character of Death or they could be talking about everyone else that death has/will take: “Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men”, as if to say that Death can’t escape fate just like we cannot, Death has as much of a role to play as we do. After hearing the idea that Death is controlled by Fate, it made me think two things; one, Fate is the speaker of this poem, and two, who Death kills isn’t his choice, it is the choice of Fate. Fate decides when Death’s punishment is over, and Fate decides when the punishment starts for everyone else; “Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me”. The last few lines give us a bigger hint at who the speaker could be, “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; Death thou shalt die”. These two lines make me think that the speaker is someone who Death has taken recently, someone who has gone through that “short sleep” that happens when a person dies, and when they “wake eternally” it is some sort of life after death. In the beginning of this poem, it seems that the narrator feels sorry for Death, but at the end when they say “and death shall be no more; Death thou shalt die” it sounds more like this person has a vendetta toward Death. They don’t feel sorry for him, that tone was leaning more toward sarcasm.

Reflection of Emily Dickinson's "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers"

My first read through of this, I didn't really understand what was happening, but upon the second read I understood one possible meaning. I got up to the line that said "Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone" and had one idea, and when I went back to the line that says "safe in their Alabaster Chambers" I realized that this just confirmed my theory. If I'm not mistaken, Alabaster is a stone that they use to make Mausoleums, which hold dead people, coffins are commonly bedded with Satin and in a Mausoleum they top those final resting places with a slab of stone. Emily Dickinson is talking about the dead people inside the Mausoleums, she is talking about how normal coffins that are buried in the ground of a cemetery are prone to harm due to the continuously changing Earth, while the ones in the Mausoleums are very safe because of the fact that they are above ground. They have lasted many, many years while leaders have fallen and surrendered, and they still stand where no one notices them, no body pays them any mind: "diadems- drop- and Doges surrender- soundless as dots". Taking the time to go back and read this a second time really helped me understand, and catch things I didn't see the first time around, and I'm actually really glad I did.

Reflection of Michael Drayton's "Since there's no help".

When I was first reading this poem, I thought that it was two lovers who were breaking up because one wasn't willing to help the other: "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part". I thought that first line was basically saying that the narrator was still in love with this person, but they couldn't support two people by their self, they needed the help from the other lover but wasn't receiving it. Not until I read it for a second time did I realize that the narrator was mourning for their dying love. Someone who was too far gone for anyone to try to save. It seems like this poem is focused around a situation where there would be some controversy between medics on whether or not to waste supplies on someone who most definitely would not make it through the night. In the end, the narrator had given up on trying to convince people that their love could survive, they just accepted that no one would help and decided to make peace with it, but they still don't want to believe it: "Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over, From death to life thou mightst him yet recover".