The moon has nothing to be sad about.

In the line preceding the crackling and dragging blacks, the speaker notes that "She is used to this sort of thing." The antecedent of "she" is the moon, as it is personified in the prior stanza, and the line is an elaboration on the statement that, "The moon has nothing to be sad about." Which ends in a preposition. But I just wrote a fragment, so it'll be all right.

In any case, when I imagine the moon crackling and dragging, I imagine its orbit through space. Taking into consideration that the moon is [probably] lifeless, I can't imagine anything on the moon would be crackling and dragging. The "blacks" could perhaps be referencing the "edge" of the moon, which looks black in the night sky, but that seems like a disappointing and shallow interpretation to me. What else is black in the moon, though? Craters? "The man in the moon"? I used to think the moon looked like it had a picture of a wolf on a cliff howling at the moon in it. I don't see it anymore, which is disappointing.

The title would probably have to refer to more than merely the edges of the moon as perceived from Earth, however. It could tie into the line, "We have come so far, it is over." There, they (the feet?) reach a sort of metaphorical edge. It could be the edge of life, as many have already noted. Knowing as we do that Plath favored confessional poetry and also that this poem was one of the last she wrote prior to her suicide, this interpretation would make align well. Maybe the perfected dead body of the Greek woman is her twisted glamorization of death. Having read Ava's post, I do see now some oddly striking parallels between Plath's mindset and Nina's in Black Swan.

It reminded me of that song a little bit. That song almost became my eighth grade class's graduation song. It's a crazy world.

Oh, Sylvia

Words - Sylvia Plath

I feel as though this poem is another lamenting her lack of recognition as a poet. Otherwise, I don't know what the title could mean. I believe the image she depicts of the tree being chopped is a metaphor for her work's being "cut down."

The echoes of which she speaks sound, I believe, like horses as they run away. The echoes return in the penultimate stanza as dry words and riderless horses.

The water striving to re-establish its mirror could be interpreted as a symbolic representation of Plath's striving to establish herself as a poet. The rock the drops and turns may be one in the same with the white skull eaten by weedy greens. This imagery sets a desolate picture to reinforce the hopelessness of the tone.

"From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars/ Govern a life." That sounds like another metaphor. Her hopes are drowning under the weight of her predetermined destiny to remain unknown.

"I can't love anything I can't finish."

Brilliance - Mark Doty

"I can't love anything I can't finish."

That's just a good line. I think it encapsulates the the tone of the entire poem; this man is dying, and he knows it, and he doesn't want to leave behind any unfinished business. When he goes ahead with the goldfish, he reaches an important decision. He can't necessarily tie up all the loose ends, so he may as well get the bowl of goldfish. If he has to die, he wants to go "in brilliance." I'm not sure how goldfish make one's life transform immediately into something brilliant, but I certainly wouldn't deny the man his contentment.

"And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

What... is the deal... with the sudden disinterest in new stanzas?

The Feelings - Sharon Olds

The feelings in question deal with grieving for a deceased father without faith in an afterlife and also physical feelings, like the hair like a wolf's (which I found to be a strange comparison because I don't know how a wolf's hair feels in comparison to a dead human's) and the dry lips (and maybe it is not weird that she did that, but it took me by surprise) and the weight of the husband on her apparently fruit-like body, which was leaking tear-juice all over the place.

Also, I don't know what was going on with the Eskimo and the death canoe, and the daydream about the ashes was sort of disturbing.

"How did I get into this ... great big nutshell?"

The Roundhouse Voices - Dave Smith

In a nutshell:

There's a guy who practiced baseball with his uncle a lot, and the uncle died, and now he's having an identity crisis.

"I'm here/ though this is a day I did not want to see," provides the only bit of enjambement in the poem, which I can only imagine to be a short of shift in tone to one more directly melancholy. "Mick" is an allusion to Mickey Mantle, who I have learned from Google is a baseball legend, so that makes sense. I am as yet unsure of the significance of the roundhouse, which is like a shed. Maybe the speaker is in the roundhouse, and he's recalling those voices asking him who he is and maybe something his uncle said to him. The "box of silk" is a euphemism for a casket, and "the sun that made its glove soft on my hand" is personification. "I see myself like a burning speck/ of cinder come down the hill and through a tunnel/ of porches," is a simile.

LoL: Lots of Labels

Skunk Hour - Robert Lowell (the village creep)

post-discussion

Probably not intended as a personal outing. But you know. Maybe.

The skunks were rather underrepresented in my interpretation; the mother skunk's nurturing side makes them the characters with the most enviable familial ties in the poem.

"I myself am hell" is a line from Paradise Lost.

This is an example of confessional poetry because it is a glimpse into the life of the poet himself.

The tone is lonely, cynical, melancholy and hopeless.

Acting Like A Tree - Jonathan Aaron

"How to Make a Company Party Bearable and Be with the Wolves"

I wasn't actually far off on this one. I neglected to use the word "anthropomorphism" and note the alliteration in "red ribbon of a river," and I didn't know that there was a tradition of humans becoming trees that pertains to a name I don't think I caught that sounded like Avid.* But this guy. He didn't need to be with people because he was rich inside his head.

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry - Howard Nemerov

The title is interesting because it's a sentence fragment and creates a conversational tone, and the reader expects an answer to the question he never actually asked, and he probably expects it in the form of a definition.

The last stanza is a rhyming couplet, and prose falls while poetry flies.

Also, it was recommended that we read Emily Dickinson's poem that begins with the line, "A bird came down the walk."

*Ovid. Metamorphosis. That was silly.

Crayons

Acting Like A Tree - Jonathan Aaron

Uhhhm. So there's this guy at a party, and he's all, "Oops, I forgot to wear a costume," so then he pretends to be a tree, and this little girl looks at him like, "That is not how you act like a tree," so then he closes his eyes and tries harder, and then he drifts away into his imagination, and he hears a wolf. That's what I got from this. It's a strictly literal interpretation. I'm really not sure what else it could mean.

It could be pointing toward the fact that what one person observes to be a tree may not be exactly the same as what somebody else observes. Sometimes I think about colors, and I wonder if everybody sees red the same way that I see red. Maybe when I see red, other people see purple, and we just don't ever realize it. Sometimes I think that's why people have different opinions. They literally see things differently. But who knows.