Poetry Blog Post #2

My first read through “You, Andrew Marvell” by Macleish, the only words that were left behind in my brain were “life is fleeting.” I saw that it was a sunset in different places of the world and I saw that as an end that you can not escape, even if you do travel and make the most of it. “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell wasn’t quite that simple and left me thinking for a while. Finally, I started to get the vague idea that the narrator is after an impossible love but that for one reason or another, he can’t attain, and so he sees it fleeing but at the end with the last two lines “Thus, we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run” make me thing that he is making the best of the situation. These two poems are similar in that they talk about the transient nature of life, although at first glance I thought that Marvell went to a more personal level with the poem, talking about love.

Those were my first impressions of the two poems. After reading Strand’s  “On Becoming a Poet” I began to get a better idea of what the first poem was about. The impressive manner in which Strand takes apart the syntax and the punctuation of the first poem to emphasize that life was not only fleeting but that there was a sense of “suspended circularity.” I thought that that was beautifully put, and helped put the poem into perspective. The more I looked back and forth between the essay and the poems, I began to like the poem more and more. I started to notice how Macleish had in very poetic terms put into words things that we have all felt as human beings. It went so as far as to touch base with our insecurities and aspirations through perfectly placed pauses in the fluent rhythm.

Yay for poetry!

I definitely read those poems out of order, that's okay. though. GIF not mine, someone on Tumblr made it bc why not? And Troye is great so. I'm out.