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."

"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.

"Creamy" is an unacceptable adjective for paper, I think.

"The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand." -- 1984

Part of the way in which George Orwell has set the tone for this novel was probably utterly accidental. I told someone over the weekend that I was just starting reading 1984, and he told me how eerily close to accurate it was in some respects. It's meant as a frightening possibility-- almost a satire of sorts, except it's not really funny. The tone is supposed to be sort of foreboding, and it is, more than Orwell probably expected it ever could be, because here we are in 2011, and it's easy to see how these things could happen if somebody decided it was best for us. We type at least as many words as we pen. "Big Brother" can legitimately find all of our Internet conversations and tap our phone calls as it sees fit. There are security cameras on every corner. The paranoia is setting in. Sci-Fi was a bad choice.

Remember that time I was convinced that Dumbledore wasn't dead because he was a phoenix? It's kind of like that.

I'm gonna be honest here. When it said "I have the last unshredded pictures/ of our matching eyes and hair," I wrote "incest?" in my reading journal. I'm still not sure I get it. Why do their eyes and hair match, if they're married?

Wait.... The pieces are falling together, but I don't really want them to fall together like this. My group and another group were both discussing the possibility that perhaps the couple in the poem had to split because they couldn't have children. I don't think this strays from the illustrious Cone Zone, especially if two groups considered the possibility. If they were in an incestuous relationship... children would be something of an unlikelihood, would they not? Perhaps it wasn't a physical impossibility but rather a moral dilemma....

It all seems to fit, but it's a bit odd that Mathis would choose to write a poem about it.

For more information about states' marriage laws... click here.

Timmy Turner is the next Shakespeare. And also John Donne. Both of them.

"The Apparition" is pretty risqué. The speaker addresses a former lover (Q3), and his words are nothing short of threatmantic.

^right episode, wrong excerpt and... voices?

So that's definitely the tone, here. Essentially, the speaker isn't literally dead. Also, he isn't figuratively dead yet. He's trying to threaten this lady into not shunning him because he thinks he will feel dead. Clearly, the logical way to get people to keep you around is to tell them you intend to stand by their bedside and haunt them every night. It also helps if the person to whom you are speaking is convinced that, indeed, their bedmate will be too fatigued to notice your pleas for help and safety.

The ocean is on fire. The sky turned dark again as the boats came in.

The denotative situation of "Crossing the Bar" (Q1) is as follows:

In stanza one, the speaker mentions the sunset and an evening star, which both emerge at the end of a day. I believe this is symbolic of the end of his life. He also hopes to avoid a "moaning of the bar" when he "put[s] out to sea." I think that means he hopes to die a peaceful and brisk death, when the time comes. The "one clear call" for the speaker is perhaps a call to death, or the arrival of "his time."

The second stanza has a similar tone of imminent demise. "But such a tide as moving seems asleep,/ Too full for sound and foam," sounds to me like the notion that the speaker's life is too full. He has used up his life's potential, and he is headed toward the Great Sleep. (heythat'saeuphemism!)

"Twilight and evening bell" in the third stanza have a similar meaning to the "Sunset and evening star" in the first. It means that the onset of death is upon the speaker, and "After that the dark!" which is, again, death. "And may there be no sadness of farewell/ When I embark;" reminded me a lot of the poem "Valediction." They both forbid the audience to feel sad when they "leave," although for entirely different reasons. Personally, that would make me even more panicky-sad, but whatever.

Stanza four is "For though from out our bourne of Time and Place/ The flood may bear me far,/ I hope to see my Pilot face to face/ When I have crossed the bar." I believe this means that the flood, which symbolizes the rushing changes and differences that occur in death, take him far from his earthly "Time and Place," he hopes to see his Pilot, symbolic of God, "face to face." Also, the "bar" he crosses appears to be death, but in the context of the poem, our group decided it was a sandbar, which follows along with the imagery of the sea and foam and sunset mentioned earlier in the poem.

This song is creepy the first twelve or so times you hear it, but it grows on you. On the plus side, there are no dead people in this particular video.

You're in my spot.

Today in class, we-- or roughly fifty percent of "we"-- were asked whether we would feel offended or complimented if somebody recited "My mistress' eyes" for us personally, and I didn't respond because, due to the gelatinous mush of anti-think that was apparently encompassing my brain, I was too slow to decide. But there's definitely something to be said for sincere, trustworthy appreciation, I suppose. Most likely, though, if somebody told me that, I would just wonder, "Why... are you telling me this?"

The question of "tone" has always seemed a little vague to me.... I mean, is satirical a tone? Shakespeare's speaker is satirizing men who write such exaggerated sonnets for their lady-friends, but is that his tone, or is that just the overall subject?

That aside, I think his tone is sort of pompous, in the beginning at least. Then it moves to being a little defensive, maybe, when he says the last three lines. "My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground./ And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/ As any she belied with false compare."

Crayola washable kids' paint.

The tone of "Much Madness is Divinest Sense" is satirical, methinks. (*points at question eight*) Dickinson isn't really the dry humor sort, though, so it's not a particularly amusing satire, and I think there's some expectation of that in most satire, so I'm conflicted. Her speaker definitely seems to be calling for change, though. She wants to ensure that people don't just blindly accept things. Sense is madness, and the majority is sensible, but she wants to show that the crazy minorityis in the right.

She does recognize the risks involved, though. "Demur--you're straightway dangerous,/ And handled with a chain." Straying from the norm hasn't worked to the advantage of most of our famous examples. They're usually the ones who bring about the big changes that keep our world from plummeting into irrevocable doom, though, so we need those guys.

Friends: They Couldn't Sew It Back On

I like two-page chapters... except for it's hard to blog about them. Also, when I paged through it to see how long it was, I thought it was thirty pages because I never even thought to look on the first page-turn.

It was a chapter full of dark humor, though. I don't know if that falls under tone or mood.... The tone, I guess, is darkly humorous, and the mood is... uh, darkly humorous. I thought I had a good thought going there, for a second =\. I kind of loved the part where Strunk says, "Jesus, man, don't kill me," (p. 63) after they have that very official contract, and how Jensen seems relieved that he didn't make it, in the end.

Also, I forgot to mention that the narrator's name is indeed Tim. More specifically, he's Tim O'Brien, and that is the author of the book, which makes me think it's autobiographical, but the title page says it's fiction. My dad reads these books by Clive Cussler, and I think he said something about them possibly having a character named after the author.....