Coal

Audre Lorde writes about being black, black as coal. He starts the poem "Coal" with the word "I", letting you know he is using the coal as a reference to himself. He then moves on to talk about words as kinds of "open". These different things, words, are judged and heard a certain was depending on what color the person is that says it. His whole first paragraph describes this idea, saying that words are "colored by who pays what for speaking." "Some words are open like diamond on glass windows." This he means, is a word that rings our and cuts. Diamonds are the only jewel strong enough to cut glass. Then he says there are "words like stapled wagers in a perforated book." You use your words like writing checks. You choose your word, use it and then it is torn out of your book. What is left is just the stub. It's been ripped out and all that remains is a jagged edge like "an ill-pulled tooth." An ill-pulled tooth is very painful. Some words "live in my throat." He means he does not say them. Words he wants to say, but he never lets them come out to "know the sun". Some words "explode through my lips" without him really wanting them to come out. Then he speaks of the word love, "another kind of open." Take this word and make it a jewel in the sun. Make his word have as much pain on someone else as it does on him deep down inside.

Ars Poetica

I choose "Ars Poetica" by Archibald MacLeish to discuss two poetic elements about today. I really enjoy this poem. I would like to discuss the language used and the rhythm he captured in his lines.

The language, first and foremost, is excellent. he uses descriptive words and lots of verbs to paint the picture of his imagination for you. He uses several adjectives that make you stop and think with each line, such as "Dumb", "silent", "night-entangled". I think his diction is brilliant as well. The poem has a very casual diction to me. I read it as if I'm sitting in a lecture given by Robin William's character in Dead Poet's Society. He chooses words that really examine the beingness of the poem, and repeats a few lines to reinforce his point.

The rhythm he uses for this poem is very effective. It contains short, to the point lines, and a great set up. Some lines begin with only two or so words, and make the reader feel the need to take a pause before going on to the next line. This created a great ambiance in the descriptions he provided. I really enjoyed it.

Holy Thursday vs. The Divine Image

William Blake wrote “Holy Thursday” and “The Divine Image” in the late eighteenth century when war and political change were at extremes in the Americas. Being from England, William Blake knew about governmental treachery and religious ultimatums. A large focus for Blake’s poems was his religion. Many people turned to Christianity during difficult times, because it gave them hope. When the world seems to throw every problem available at someone’s door, that person needs a reason to go on living and breathing. People turned to religion because Christians believe there is some thing, some place, out there that is bigger and better than any of them, and that if they endure the pain and suffering of life with a strong head, they one day will reap the rewards of this place called heaven. Blake used imagery in these two poems to talk about the same ideas, yet to portray them in a totally distinct way. The way he describes Jesus Christ and heaven are similar, but his images of children change throughout. The style in which a poem is written can have a great effect on the way the audience reads it. Blake does not stick with a single, simple rhythm. He gives us variety and depth to express himself through his words.

One aspect these two poems have in common is the idea behind worship and religion. God and heaven play important roles in these two poems by Blake. In “Holy Thursday”, Blake speaks of attending church on Ascension Day, watching the innocent children file in to attend service and learn about their religion. “Harmonious heaven among.” In this line fragment, he talks about sitting in church as if it is comparable to actually sitting in heaven. He described the children’s songs to heaven as being “raised” up, as in an offering. Usually hymns and songs at church are sung as a way of communicating with God and Jesus Christ. The children are seen as angels singing to God, as seen in his passage, “lest you drive an angel from your door.” In all these ways, William Blake makes it very clear that he values the church and worships God and Jesus.

Comparatively, Jesus is “The Divine Image” in Blake’s eyes. He explains that everyone that prays, does so for mercy, pity, peace and love. “Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love, Is Man, his child and care.” This line comes right after he calls God, “our father dear.” He believes that any man that prays, no matter where from, what religion or background, must love Jesus. If they pray for these four symbols, they are praying to God and his human form, his son, “The Divine Image” of Jesus Christ.

The style he writes with varies in these two poems. Blake changes up his wording, lines and rhyming rhythm to cater to his poems. In both of these poems, he uses exact rhymes like “snow” and “flow” as well as approximate rhymes like “clime” and “divine.” In “Holy Thursday”, every other line, separated by commas, rhymes either exactly or approximately. This can make the poem seem to flow better and make it easier to give a rhythm to when reading it out loud. When each line rhymes, the poem feels more like it reads itself. These systematic set ups are more orderly and work well with a traditional poetic audience.

In contrast, “The Divine Image” has a much different set up. Since the theme of the poem seems to be the ideas behind praying to and communicating with Jesus or God, this poem has a song-like look and feel. The rhythm is quite different from “Holy Thursday”, as it consists of five small paragraphs with short lines, and only four lines per paragraph. The other, is three paragraphs with two short sentences put together on each line which conform to the rhyme. Not all the lines rhyme in “The Divine Image.” It looks like lyrics from a song, perhaps a work that Blake looked at as an offering to God and Jesus showing his devotion.

Blake’s use of imagery and descriptive words are what make his poems so intriguing. These two poems differ in the way he describes things though. In “Holy Thursday”, the children and church seem to be portrayed more graceful and colorful. He describes the children as “red & blue & green,” these “flowers of London town.” They all “flow” into the church on this fortieth day after Easter, this Holy Thursday. Then he changes his metaphor and uses images of lambs being herded, as the “multitudes” of children all taking their seats in the church. Another few words he uses for describing the children are pity and angels. So, with all of these descriptions, the images that are seen just representing children are flowers, a river, pity, innocence, angels, and herds of lambs.

In The Divine Image however, Blake does an exquisite job of attaching a solid human feature to a moral value or idea for his image focus.
“Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.”
In all these ideas, he speaks of something human, yet pins it to this idea he has already expressed that “The Divine Image” is just the human behind God. Perhaps this divine image he has laid out for us is the image we have come to know as the body of Jesus Christ.

Blake uses religion, imagery and rhythmic style to create his own distinct and creative poems. It is obvious, through reading these two works, that he was a religious man. He viewed children as angels from heaven as well as innocent little lambs. He used great descriptive words to illustrate his poetic ideas and wrote with a flavorful style. Some poems always rhyme and some do not. That does not mean it is any less poetic. A good audience for a poet like Blake, is one of open mind, rhythmic ear and caring heart. To read Blake, one cannot help but become a good member of his audience.

Line Breakage

Poets writing in Free Verse, pretty much have the freedom to stop a line at any time and begin the next whenever. Some of the time, the lines are totally different in word count and length. Sometimes it makes the poems very difficult to understand and read in a "flowy", "poetic" way.

When I think of poems, I think of rhyming words at the end of each line. Little is that the case now in the free verse writing. I feel like poets tend to end lines with the end of each thought. For example, with Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," even though it is only two lines long, the poem is a whole idea or single image.

The first line is sort of the start of the thought. The second line is then the completed description of the thought. There is nothing more to it than just that. The line ends with a comma, where I would assume there is a pause, a breath, a break in the reading. This, to me is more poetic and flows better than one like Gertrude Stein's stanzas. I feel like hers were almost made to look a certain way, instead of sound a certain way.

Yeats Changing of the Times

Over the fifteen or twenty years between Yeats' poems Adam's Curse and An Irish Airman Foresees His Death the subject of his writing changes dramatically. In the beginning, with Adam, Yeats writes about poets and how their work is not viewed like most other professions of the time. Although it may "take us hours", "stitching and unstitching", it is still better to go scrub floors or be a banker or schoolmaster. The women see their chore in live as "labour(ing) to be beautiful." A man, a poet, truly wants to love a woman with the ways of old, through romance and poems. Eventually though, love dies out. Eventually we all end up as lonely and hollow. This is the tale of a normal course of life and love, for a common man and woman.

In An Irish Airman Foresees His Death though, Yeats tells it how it is for the time period. His friend's son chose to serve his country and fight for freedom, and in doing so, gave up his life. He talks of being able to really please no one, not the enemy or the people for whom he fights, and feels like he wasted his previous time as well as the years he would have had if he had not chosen to fly. Basically in this time period, people were struggling to industrialize, and in doing so, many people had to leave their families and happy homes to work and serve in ways they may not have wanted to. In this instance, it seems as though this was an honorable thing for this young Irishman though.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was a truly underrated poet for many years. Like many artists, her work was not fully appreciated until far after her death. Like many in the Romantic period, Dickinson stretched out and used her poems in a much different light than tradition called for. She used her poems to truly express herself and talk about her life. She used them to write about feelings and people she held very dear to her.

Her unusual use of dashes and capitalization added zest to her works. It seems she was fascinated with mysticism and mannerism, and her failure to conform became accepted by later generations of readers. A lot of her published works can be almost sung to the tunes of songs. Her language flows and smoothly leaves the tongue.

I am not sure what else I can say to reach my 250 word minimum except that I enjoyed her poems.

Keats Hand

John Keats wrote a poem called The Living Hand. Keats lived from 1795 to 1821, dying at the young age of twenty six. I do not know much about his values except that in his poems he speaks of power, love, money, health, and full life. In his poem The Living Hand, I think his audience may be to a specific person, but it does not specify. The situation is one of threat and immortal subconscious control by him on the person reading.

John Keats wrote The Living Hand in basically one long run on sentence with very little punctuation. He throws in a few commas and that is about it. I guess the commas are merely for taking a breath because they do not seem to imply to me any other sort of break in the action of the poem. I think this whole poem being one long sentence makes it very bold in the sense that it is direct and concise. It is not meant to be rhyming and "flowy". It is a blunt statement.

I thoroughly enjoyed this poem after reading it over a few times and finally getting what he was talking about. He is threatening the reader that if he were dead, he would haunt you until you prayed he were alive again so he would stay out of your dreams. It is very serious on one hand and sort of amusing on the other since I am an outside observer from two centuries later in the world.