“A Grace Before Dinner” by Robert Burns

This poem is one stanza that is an octrain.  There is an abab rhyme scheme but in the second line, it seems to be a slant rhyme because want doesn’t truly rhyme with lent.  It has mixed lines of masculine and feminine lines.  It is also end-stopped. 

This is a very sweet poem.  To me, it is saying  that the lord serves us, and all we can do is be faithful to him and hope he sends his love and kindness to us.  And even if sometimes our prayers aren’t answered, let him still bless us as we go on with our meal, or even day.  I like this poems because it is so simple, yet it is very complex of course because it is talking about the lord. 

This poem reminds me of all the big family dinners when Grandpa Bill stands up and says prayer before we eat.  I always like saying grace before dinner.  It seemed like the food even tasted better after prayer.  I love holding the hands of the people i love and sharing with them the love for the lord.  My grandpa Bill is starting to be active in the church and some days he preaches.  On those days, we go to his church instead of ours.  We are all so proud of him and he seems like such a happier person.  We also didn’t start attending church until this school year, but I’m glad we did.  I feel like I just had an hour long grace prayer before lunch.  You can only imagine how good the food tastes after that prayer.

The Dying Child by John Clare

The Dying Child by John Clare is an amazing poem.  There are six stanza, each with five lines.  The rhyme scheme is ABABA.  The rhyme scheme is also masculine rhyme.  These are not the parts that make it amazing though. 

What makes this amazing is the theme or the plot of the story.  It talks about a young boy who could not die in the spring because it was too beautiful of a time.  It shows the scenery or what the boy sees very graphically.  Besides the beautiful imagery, it  definitely pulls on anyones heartstrings.  It is sad, but at the same time, it is nature and things like this happen.  Young children should never have to die, but it does happen and it is tragic.  

It reminds me of my cousin Katie.  Even though she is still living, she went through traumatic times even though she is only 6.  Two years ago, the doctors found a volleyball sized tumor inside of her stomach.  The scans were horrifying.  She was also in her third stage of cancer.  Not once did that baby cry or complain.  She kept everyone else strong, even though that sounds impossible.  The removed the tumor and she was going through serious sessions of chemotherapy and radiation.  Her hair fell out and she lost most of her body weight.  She didn’t care, though.  She had a goal that she was going to play soccer with her brother one way or another.  And now two years later, she is in remission, her hair has grown back, she’s gained weight, and she has finally gotten to play soccer with Brayden, her older brother.

Sea Shell by Amy Lowell Post # 8

In the poem by Amy Lowell called Sea Shell, I noticed some writing techniques she used to write this poem.  The rhyme scheme throughout the poem is aabb after the first two lines.  In the first and third stanza the first lines are the same which is repetition.  It has three stanzas and the first two have four lines and the third has two.  This could be a sonnet.  The poem is also end-stopped and has a euphonious sound to it. 

This poem reminds me of my little cousin Kristin.  She loves sea shells.  She always was so amazed when she was little at the sound that came from inside the shells.  She was like “Haley! Haley! Listen! You can hear the ocean in here!” and she would put the shell up to my ear.  My Grandma Kati gave her this gigantic one and I have never seen such light in a child’s eyes before.  I like this poem because it is almost just like a thought.  It seems she is just looking into the ocean and thinking of the little rhyme in her head.  Her word choice is actually very typical.  There is not much about this poem that is eye catching or grand.  Even with this factor, it still intrigues me.  I can see her singing this little diddle in a soft, quiet voice towards the waves as she sits on the beach.  She almost sounds like she is trying to sound like a young girl, who has just learned about the Spanish Main.

“Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a free verse poem.  There are twenty-two lines in the first stanza, twenty-one lines in the next two stanzas and then ten lines in the last stanza.  In the second stanza there is a ceasura at the beginning where it says “But O!”   It is an end-stopped poem.  The poem is euphonious which is it has easy and nice sounds.  Very soft as to note the stillness and silence of the night.

This poem reminded me of my sister.  She is one year old and she fights sleep.  If I have her for the night, I have to work hard to get her to sleep.  She will fight and fight just not wanting to miss anything.  Finally when I do get her to sleep, it seems almost too quiet in the house to be good.  Once she goes to sleep its so nice because she is finally exhausted and will sleep good and so am I.  Its a nice time to admire her beautifulness and laugh about how she is getting a personality. 

I didn’t fully understand this poem, but that could be because I’m a bit tired.  The word choice he uses is spectacular, even if it doesn’t all make sense to me.  At the end of the second stanza, when he is talking, I think, about his dream, it almost sounds like Alice in Wonderland.  After awhile it goes back to the baby and how the baby is precious.  I have always wondered what it feels like to be a parent.  I mean, I’ve been a big sister for 11 of my 18 years and feeling the overwhelming of loving my siblings so much is amazing.  I can imagine what a parent feels knowing they made this special gift that they are holding.

“Prayer” by Henry David Thoreau

“Prayer” by Henry David Thoreau is an aa bb rhyme scheme.  He seems to have repetition with “That” in the beginning of many lines, and “I may” also.  There are three stanzas and the first two stanzas have four lines and the last has six.  There is proper punctuation in each line. 

This poem, or better yet a prayer, can mean many different things depending on the person and the situation at hand.  He is saying, “please let me be proud that I have made the right decision, especially when I know I will upset my friends.”  He is asking to be strong during this time in need.  I took it kind of like a teen trying to help a friend.  The friend may be using drugs and the one asking for this strength just found out about it.  This person knows that they would be helping their friend by telling someone to get them help.  But on the other hand, this friend will be angry and possible not want to be friends at all.  The person is caught between friendship and helping someone they care about.  I think that I would tell because I would rather that person be angry with me and never talk to me again than that person be dead or close to it.  They would be able to live their lives, with or without me in it. 

Maybe I percieved this poem incorrectly, but this thought was the first to pop into my head after reading it.  Its almost like those commercials about “Above the Influence”  where the dog says “I want my friend back.”  Even if the person wasn’t your friend for a long time, maybe sometime they will thank you for saving them before they were too far in.

“Tears, Idle Tears” by Alfred Tennyson blog #3

In this poem, there are four stanzas, each containing five lines.  The last line in every stanza ends the same saying “…the days that are no more.”  This is repeatition throughout the poem.  There is no rhyme scheme, but all lines are capitalized and there is punctuation in every line.  There is some alliteration.  One example of this is the second line where he says, “Tears from the death of some divine despair.”  He also has some similies, like when he says, “Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail.” 

I love this poem!  It is beautiful and I can relate so much.  I often get a deep-down feeling of sadness and rememberance when I think of my past and some things I wish were still going on or I still had.  I can look at something and get instant flashbacks to something and feel a longing for wanting to be in the moment again.  Other things make me feel sad because of what happened in certain situations or times in my life that I wasn’t so proud of. 

His words are so simple but at the same time, they are so deep.  He is trying to relate to many people with different levels of intelligence who have all had these days of feeling sad about the past and how it is only the past.  He must have wrote this while having one of these days, and if he wasn’t then he was after writing this.  This was a very deep, but simple poem and the thing that made it so great was the fact that it is true and sad.

“I Cried at Pity — Not at Pain” by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson does a great job at expressing her thoughts.  I think this poem is talking about a child passing and Emily putting herself in this child’s shoes because she feels dead inside.  She constructs this poem with some stanzas having every other line rhyme and some stanzas having no rhyme scheme whatsoever.  She has a good mix between strong descriptive words and short thoughts with simple words.

Emily, from what I know from Kristin Ozzello and various projects I’ve seen about her, she seems like such a sad person.  I would hate to feel dead when I was still alive.  That must be the worst feeling ever.  To feel like nothing in your life makes you feel alive.  Everyone has felt it, but hers seemed to go on for her whole life.  This reminds me of the book I am reading right now called The Color Purple.  In this book, the main character, Celie, has a life full of pain and suffering.  She could count the good days shes had on two hands, if even that, and has lived a full life of being treated like it didn’t matter if she was alive or not.  As the story goes on, it gets a little better, but not great.  The whole time I’ve been reading this book, all I have thought is how could someone live this kind of life and not go crazy?  It hurts my heart, as cheezy as that sounds.  I think of all the true stories just like Celie’s that happen every day.  It makes me sad that we live in a world where people could be so horrible to other people to make them feel dead inside.  Or even really dead.  It makes me really think if it is worth it to grow up and have a family and bring someone into this life that could be put in a situation where they could be a victim of the many horrible things that goes on in this day in age.

That last thought takes me into another thought.  Why does the news and media and everyone only advertise tragedies?  Nobody wants to turn on the news anymore because of all the bad things.  Why don’t we show the world how good the world is?  Its almost like saying that there is more evil in this world than good.  This has to stop somewhere. My boyfriend and I were talking and we figured out that he is a realist and I am an idealist.  This means he looks at facts and I still try to find the good in things.  I told him I didn’t think this was a bad quality, and he said he agrees and that we need more like me in this world to still have faith that good will be back in the lead someday.

“Joy in Death” by Emily Dickinson Blog #1

In “Joy in Death,” Emily Dickinson uses proper punctuation.  This is a short poem and is almost like a conversation between two people narrated by another person.  There is no rhyme scheme, and her sentence structure varies from line to line. 

She is straight forward in this poem.  There is little room for any misinterpreting or confusion.  She says what she needs to say and nothing more.  This was most likely a quick thought she had, and since, if I’m not mistaken, she wrote poems often, probably didn’t have to change it into poem form.  It was probably already structured perfectly when she wrote it down. 

The thought in this poem is a very good and firm thought.  She is saying that if someone dies, why should we be sad when heaven is happy.  She says “A soul has gone to heaven”  and then says something like that should be good news.  It really should.  If a person is suffering or is in pain enough where they should die, then shouldn’t they get the award of heaven.  Sometimes this senario doesn’t fit, but sometimes it does.  Like in cancer patients.  The death of someone who has suffered and suffered should be able to enter heaven with no more pain and have their loved ones be happy.  They should do it because it is a way of showing the person that was in so much pain that they loved them and are happy that they can rest well and no one has to suffer anymore. 

Even though the people still alive should be happy, that is easier said then done.  Even though they are happy the pain is gone, they have to live with the fact that they will never again, as long as they live, be able to feel the presence of the late person.  It is almost too much to handle when I think of someone I care so much about passing and never being able to feel their touch or hear their voice, until I am released to heaven.

Even If You Weren’t My Father by Camillo Sbarbaro

This poem reminds me of the song by Brad Paisley titled You didn’t have to be.  It is a good song about a step-father being a father when he didn’t have to be.  My step-dad did this for me when my mother met him.  My father wasn’t around since he had a traveling mechanic job.  I was four and my brother was eight.  Wes, my step-dad kept dating my mother after knowing she was a single parent of two little brats.  He would take us with them all kinds of places and it was fun.  He was a young fun guy who helped my mom when she needed it.  But then they got married.  It started to become an authority deal where he was mad I didn’t call him Dad and he became mean.  He didn’t work for ten years and we pretty much became his slaves.  He would manipulate my mom into taking his side and eventually Zach, and even later, I moved out.  I tried to respect him and to just stay out of the way but once I moved into my dad’s house he started being very childish.  I only respect him now because he is the father of my gorgeous, wonderful, little sister.

My dad has finally been a big part of my life and I see how he loves being a parent to my younger sisters and my younger brother.  He has bent over backwards to make my life wonderful and to make up for lost time.  Although I could be jealous that he has been there more for my other siblings, I am not.  I’m just happy they don’t have to grow up in a broken family.  He is a great dad and I am glad he is there for me now.

For the Sleepwalkers by Edward Hirsch

This poem is a really fun and thoughtful one.  We really do need to trust our hearts.  They are usually right.  Even though sometimes they can lead you into a wall, they usually lead you right back to your bed after an adventure.  I wonder what it is like to sleepwalk.  I wonder what sleepwalkers think or if they even do, but they must have some consciousness because like Hirsch says, they don’t run into things and they usually know their path. 

My older brother, Zach, used to sleepwalk.  I don’t think he does anymore but he used to talk and walk in his sleep constantly.  He would go to bed early and if you would make the slightest noise like hitting the table or anything he would start a conversation with himself.  It was so funny, we should have recorded it.  There was this one time when he walked out the back door, over the the neighbors, knocked on their door at like three in the morning, and looked in their window.  My step-dad was watching the whole thing because he heard the back door slam.  What made it really funny was he was in his boxers the whole time.  Wes, my step-dad, said he looked through the front door window because he locked himself out.  Wes let him in and started yelling asking what he thought he was doing and he must have lost his mind.  All Zach could say was that it was really cold outside and then walked to bed.  He had no recollection of it in the morning and laughed as hard as we did when Wes told us.