Poetry Blog #2

To His Coy Mistress- After the the first read of the poem, I was left confused. On the second read I began to grasp what Marvell was getting. Upon the third read, I decided that I loved the poem. It flows gorgeously and is marvelously crafted. I loved lines such as "Two hundred to adore each breast,/ But thirty thousand to the rest:" How sweet is that? I suppose maybe I feel a sense of connection with the desire to race time, despite knowing that I will lose.

You, Andrew Marvell- Who the hell is Andrew Marvell? To Google! Oh, now I feel stupid. *hides under rock* Anyway, I also had difficulty understand this poem, and it took me about five full reads to understand what Macleish is getting at. I am still not entirely sure what each stanza means, but I think the poem as a whole works to discuss how night is inevitable. It catches all creatures in the light all the same; nothing can be done to stop it. "And over Sicily the air/Still flashing with the landward gulls/And loom and slowly disappear/The sails above the shadowy hulls" Life is caught in the act by the dark and must sucumb to it and yet here we lay, face downward in the sun, thinking, feeling, how the darkness, essentially death, the end of our time, is due to arrive at an unscheduled time. 

On Becoming a Poet- Holy heavens. Mind blown. I began reading this out loud, hoping that it would make it easier to understand through the fog of my head cold, after the first few paragraphs of sheer brilliance my voice softened to a whisper and eventually my voice faded out, unworthy to speak word of such insight. While I was in awe, I also began to realize that I may have skipped a few crucial connections between the two poems. Lost on me was the fact that You, Andrew Marvell is essentially a counter argument to "To His Coy Mistress," or at least I hope so, because that is what I gathered from the essay. The end paragraph is almost a poem itself, which is not that far from the realm of possibility considering that its author is a poet. "A poem may be the residue of an inner urgency, one through which the self wishes to register itself, write itself into being, and, finally, to charm another self, the reader, into belief." To me, poetry is magical, but I never quite realized how magical I thought they were until reading this passage and a moment of epiphany where I understood exactly what he meant.