Poetry Blog Post #2

I really enjoyed reading Mark Strand’s “On Becoming a Poet” mainly because I liked his description of Lyric Poetry. It was interesting to be how he mentioned that these poems are not to be read or spoken; rather, they are to be sung. Going into Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” and Archibald MacLeish’s “You, Andrew Marvell”, with this thought proved to be rather helpful in shaping how I viewed them. “To His Coy Mistress” was almost Shakespearean to me; the way the way the lady in the poem was described. Though this connection may be off, lines like “An hundred years should go to praise thine eyes” reminded me of some Shakespearean sonnets we had read a few years back describing the features of a loved one. One similarity between the two poems was the topic of time and death. “To His Coy Mistress” has lines like, “while the youthful hue sits on thy skin like morning dew” that indicate haste. The speaker is talking about love coming sooner than later while they are still young and fresh. The reference to one’s grave in this poem also shows the idea of speediness and not to wait for death. “You, Andrew Marvell” also focuses largely on the idea of living while alive for one does not realize how quickly and discreetly the end can come. This is best illustrated in the last lines of the poem, “To feel how swift how secretly the shadow of the night comes on ...” Another reason I really liked Strand’s essay was because he really demonstrated how to carefully analyze the choices a poet makes. In one of Strand’s paragraphs he talks about a subtly repeated rhyme at the beginning and end of “You, Andrew Marvell” and how minimal punctuation influences the poem. This type of attention to detail is a very large part of not only analyzing, but truly appreciating a piece of poetry; seeing Strand do this as a well-known profession serves as a very good example for me- a novice poetry reader. Overall, having read Strand’s essay before looking into the two poems was very useful and also nudged me into paying more attention to the smaller details of the works.