Poetry Blog 2

What intrigues me most about Mark Strand's poetic conversation is the fact that he is brave enough to say that "You, Andrew Marvell" awakened his poetic side and that he "wished [he] could write something like it.". The main reason Strand loves it so much is because of how simplistically MacLeish conveys the meaning of the poem, the theme being death. MacLeish refers to death as "the always rising of the night," and he uses very little punctuation to describe the cycle of life and death, beginning and ending the poem with the same idea of being "face down beneath the sun,". In his poem, MacLeish is basically saying that life is a constantly rising of the night, meaning that death is always lurking upon us, waiting to take over and then find a new life to take over.

Compared to "You, Andrew Marvell", "To His Coy Mistress" goes on a different path to discuss the experience of life. Where MacLeish conveys death practically, gloomy and "always rising", Andrew Marvell conveys death as a place the speaker can't avoid, but wants to put off as "at [his] back [he always hears] / Time's winged chariot hurrying near", saying that "The grave's a fine and private place, / but none, I think, do there embrace,". Marvell then goes on to say that "though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run,". So, Marvell is saying that while death is inevitable, we shouldn't live in fear of it; in fact, we should be living the to fullest.

I can probably relate more to Marvell's poem in that one shouldn't live in fear of death or have our whole outlook about is since we have lives to live, but I mainly feel like a stranger in a strange land in that I don't give as much thought or attribute as much beauty/cyclical tendencies to life and death as Strand, MacLeish, and Marvell do.