After this week my outlook on poetry has most definitely broadened in a positive way. I’ve always had much of an appreciation for poets and how they portray their vision and ideas, emotions and thoughts, in a way that often is beneath the surface. That being so, I often can become frustrated when I cannot grasp the main idea of a poem, and lose appreciation in that emotion. After this week, I have a much better understanding of how to analyze and read poems in a way that will help me to avoid this frustration. For example, in activity 2 they give examples of questions you can ask while reading to keep your understanding in check, such as, “who is the speaker in this poem?”, and “what does the title suggest about the poem?”, and others along with those. Asking simple questions can help break down information and better your understanding of harder concepts. “The second is assuming that the poem is a kind of code, that each detail corresponds to one, and only one, thing, and unless they can crack this code, they’ve missed the point,” (Hirsch). I love this quote as well from activity 2 as it enhances the idea that poetry can be deemed as boring and frustrating because of a lack of “skills” used to understand the main idea of each line, every word and every punctuation has an intentional placement in poetry, and these activities helped to guide me on ways to grasp the bigger picture.
Molly McKay
In “The Wife” by Emily Dickinson, the author explains how her childhood experience was detrimentally impacted because of how young she had to throw her youth away and center her life on being a wife. She explains that being a wife includes making heavy sacrifices and leaving behind dreams and aspirations you have for yourself. “If aught she missed in her day of amplitude, or awe, or first prospective, or the gold in using wore away”. These lines from the poem demonstrate the wife pondering about what life could have been, had she not become a wife so early. This enhances how the decision was not something she was ready for and included sacrificing one way of life for another, and in turn this left her with questioning thoughts. “The Story of an Hour” relates to “The Wife”, as both the women aren’t that happy with their marriage and it keeps them in a way of life they do not appreciate. The wife in “The Story of an Hour” has a realization after a brief period of grief when hearing her husband had passed away, where she was filled with a new found sense of independence, and a sense of freedom that she will now be living for herself here on out. She is almost paralyzed with emotion. Both the poem and story exemplify how women should make a life of their own, one they would be excited to live with or without someone else, before committing a lifetime to marriage. A lot of times, marriage can come with sacrifices that draw you away from your souls true desires if you are not careful about the commitment.
In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’Connor, to my interpretation, the meaning of the story on an interior level, is to enhance the beauty and the madness within the world we live in, in a way deemed cruel and unfortunate to the perception of the average reader. Beneath the surface, this literature represents the depth behind how perspective is relative. Obviously, an entire family being murdered does not represent the beauty of life to many; however, to The Misfit, the madness that he participates in throughout his life is part of the “beauty” of being a human who has never chosen to embrace the light of life. On the contrary, to the family, things such as the beautiful white house with “hidden silver” the grandmother and children wanted to see, and the land on the drive there, the nice traveling weather, are representations of beauty in life. Perspective is relative as you can see, relative to your past, upbringing, your environment, your surroundings, morals, etc. Similarly, the perspective of the grandmother initially, shifts by the end of the story. Originally, she seems selfish and hypocritical, naive to the broadness of what makes the world what is was at that point. Toward the end, you begin to feel empathy for her, as she is trying to reassure The Misfit he is a good person. Why? Her life is in danger and her family’s been killed. The beauty in the madness of that situation is you see how life, during good and bad, evokes various parts of your being, as this did for her, showing how perspective is relative to sources only available through the lens of the interpreter at the very moment. Good and evil are purely human concepts developed as a way for us to compare one another, “A Good […]
