Poetry response Sestina

Britton Woodall
Jernigan
English AP
29 March 2011
Sestina
The poem “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop shares a sad moment between grandmother and granddaughter. The reason for the sadness is unclear. However, water imagery expresses suppressed emotion ready to burst. Ironically, I also relate to this poem in some immediate family connection like I have with so many other poems we have responded to.
My grandmother, or “Mama” as my family calls her, lives with us. Like the poem she always seems to be suppressing tears for many understandable reasons. The first being the fact that her husband, my grandfather, died a few years ago. His memory always rests with her because they were together for such a long time. The second reason being the fact that she is slowly losing her mind and she knows it. She cannot tell difference between my dad and I partly because her poor vision and partly because of her memory. She cannot remember anything she does throughout the whole. She runs purely on emotion and hunger because her mind is so weak. Her stomach tells her what to eat and heart tells he how to feel.
The fact that I know all this makes me feel like the child drawing the houses., the child trying to draw a perfect world when it is not. Except I am not even trying to draw a better world. I just watch hers fall apart and stay far away as possible. I understand the emotion waiting to burst in the poem because I see it at home. I do not have to know what the causes it in the poem.

Poetry Response March 22 Villanelle

Britton Woodall

Jernigan

English AP

22 March 2011

Rage Against the Machine

            The poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” reminds me of my grandfather. I saw him for the last time over thanksgiving a few years back. He rested on a hospital bed exhausted and hardly able to keep his eyes open to see his family. Yet the minute I flew into Austin, Texas and he knew, he began scheming ways for me to sneak him out of the hospital “to get some McDonald’s and a sweet tea.” Over that week a saw an old man, my grandfather, “rage against the dying of the light.”

            Despite the fact that the Dylan Thomas, the poet, obviously speaks to his father as he slowly dies, I understand the emotion he feels even though my relation is not as close. I know the wish to will a loved one on to life, yet understand “men at their end know the dark is right.” It remained clear that his time had come whether or not anyone wanted it that way.

            He, in the tamest way, reminds me of a “wild man” mentioned in the poem. He lived his life as a mild mannered golfer and father, yet his wit and lifestyle choice remain unparalleled (except of course to Charlie Sheen). He had a keen appetite for sweets. I cannot recall a homemade milkshake that tasted quite like his. I also have never heard of a man after his second stroke hiding peanut Eminem’s from his family trying to take care of him. He drove his car with only the use of one arm and one leg due to the strokes and recited “The Cremation of Sam McGee” from memory. He died the same way he lived, he “[did] not go gently into that good night.”

Poery response ODE

Britton Woodall

English AP

Jernigan

8 March 2011

Wild Wild West Wind

            In the poem “Ode to the West Wind” Percy Shelley expresses a positive faith in the cycle of nature in order to expose the reason of man’s problems as a means through which he receives his blessings.

            Shelley begins his ode by exalting the wind because it blows the dead leaves during Autumn. He begins the poem with death for a specific reason. The dead leaves and the dying Autumn represent man’s universal pain and she specifically points out the seasons in which a man tends to suffer by calling upon autumn.

            The rest of the poem tells the story of wind as the force that paves the way for life and blessing, represented by the season of Spring. She says, “Winged seeds, where they lie cold and low/ Each like a corpse in its grave, until/ Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow.” In this stanza alone, Shelley walks through the natural process from autumn to spring, from life to death. The wind takes on the same role in nature as the God or a god does for man as Shelley calls it a “destroyer and preserver.” It blows the leafs and seeds from the trees in the autumn, spreads them, then they bloom and grow in the spring.

            Shelley reverses his role in the poem from an observer to a potential leaf or seed experiencing the powers of the wind. He clarifies his intentions of the poem by putting himself in place of everything he had described previously to this point by saying, “If I were a dead leaf… If I were a swift cloud.” And confidently returns to his original faith in the seasons of man with the last stanza “The trumpet of prophecy! Oh wind,/ If Winter comes can Spring be far behind?”

Poetry Response #6

Britton Woodall

Jernigan

English AP

1 March 2011

The Black Hell

            In “The White City,” Claude McKay describes his anger due to racial tension. From the poem the reader infers that Claude McKay must be a black man during an earlier time period or from another country because very few African American men can say they have the name Claude.

            Claude’s does not describe the kind of anger he has, it describes the emotion he feelings knowing the existence of his harsh emotion. He “will not toy with it or bend it an inch.” In other words he has no desire to tinker with or understand the hatred in his heart. He goes further to say he “[muses his] lifelong hate” and he “[bears] it nobly.” His hate gives him a sense if identity to an extent. He flaunts like a war veteran wears his medal. Claude twists the expression of hate in this poem.

            Claude continues to twist the usual form of such a poem by juxtaposing black and white and heaven and hell. He calls his “heaven” the “white world’s hell.” He comes to this conclusion because his race essentially built the white man’s heaven. Therefore his heaven would be away from all the labor that made the “white world.”

            The end of the poem returns to loving his hate. He recalls all of the structures in the “the white world’s hell” and refers to them as “sweet like wanton loves because I hate.” The idea of sweet hate recurs often with vengeance.  He loves to hate because that is all he has known like wanton love.