Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Kraken

After reading this poem several times through I came to believe that the Kraken represents the changes that Tennyson is seeing around him. The world went through great changes and advancements in his time, and I think that the Kraken represents the old ways of life. “Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green. /There hath he lain for ages and will lie/Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep, /until the latter fire shall heat the deep; /Then once by man and angels to be seen,/in roaring he shall rise on the surface die”.(pg.586). I think the giant arms that has lain for ages is the old way of life, and then man comes along with the changes he is seeing and changes everything. Using the Kraken, a mythological beast, might show the fear that came with these changes. Many people do not like change, and rebel from it more from fear than anything. This giant beast could represent the fight that the people were putting up as changes were being made.

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One’s Own Chapter 3

What I liked about this particular passage is how she created an alter ego for William Shakespeare to prove her point that because of the times no woman could write plays like the famous playwright. She creates Judith , sister to William. While they both supposedly grow up in the same household, both were not afford the same benefits. Judith is just as talented as her brother, but with the prejudice of her sex, she was limited to how far he “genius: would go. Knowing she would not go far in the theater, a different fate awaits her: “ Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in the face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows-at last Nick Greene the actor-manger took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so-who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?-killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant Castle”.(pg1241) This outlook shows that the times were based not only on social status, as proven by the aristocracy, but also by gender status. This is the type of writing that made her famous, and this theme of inequality goes throughout her writings. I must admit that I recognized the famous name of this author but knew very little about her. She seemed to me to a very adamant advocate for women’s rights, and she chose to express these beliefs in her writings. I think the answer is clear she was right, no woman could write like Shakespeare that the time not because of lack of genius but because of what was allowed by society, What a shame that is; imagine how many people we will never know about from that time that did not write because they were woman.

T.S. Eliot

Journey of the Magi

The way I interpreted this poem was it was written from the view of one of the wise men headed to visit the new born Christ child. The way he describes the camels journey gives the impression they are in the desert: “ And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,/Lying down in the melting snow./There were times we regretted/The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,/And the silken girls bringing sherbet.”

Also in that passage I felt as if he was turning his back on the old ways of his beliefs and looking towards the new one that were emerging. It seems that at the end of the poem the person making this journey has accepted the change because he wrote: ‘we returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms, /But not longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods./I should be glad of another death”. After their journey he returns back to his Kingdom, and because of the change that came from within he is no longer happy with the old ways of life. I think that he sees that by dying ‘again” it will cause a “rebirth” in the form of his new found faith, by Dying he frees himself from his old beliefs and is reborn in the new ways.

William Butler Yeats

Who Goes with Fergus?

I chose this poem because it has some of the myth and magic that I find interesting. In the poem Yeats is calling up his fellow man to follow the beliefs of King Fergus: “Who will go drive with Fergus now, /And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,/And dance upon the level shore?/Young man, lift up your russet brow,/And lift your tender eyelids, maid/And brood on hopes and fear no more.”I know from books that I had read that King Fergus was a mythical and ancient King of Ireland. Many rulers that followed were named after him to honor his legacy.  I feel that since Yeats had a strong sense of countryman ship, he wanted his fellow Irishmen to go back to the days when nature and man were one. At the end on the second stanza he goes into great detail describing the countryside he sees: “For Fergus rules the brazen cars, /And rules the shadows of the wood,/And the white breast of the dim sea/And all disheveled wandering stars.”  Ireland was a country of great turmoil and I can’t help but to interpret this poem as a calling for people to go back to a simpler life: to leave the life of arguing and governing behind, and embrace the natural world around them.

Thomas Hardy

The Convergence of the Twain

This poem was written about one of the worse tragedies of our time, the sinking of the Titanic. Right from the beginning he talks about the ship herself and her fate: “
In solitude of the sea/Deep from human vanity,/And the pride if Life that planned her, stilly couches she.” I feel that the vanity in which he talks about was the way she was built and the men around her. She was the biggest ship of her time, and the builders boasted she was unsinkable, a very arrogant and costly claim considering the outcome. Now the ship is at the bottom of the sea away from all the boasting and glamour. In stanza 7 he talks about what befell her, the iceberg.” Prepared a sinister mate/ For her-so gaily great-/A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate”. As we all know from history the ship had received many warnings about icebergs, but they ignored them and it eventually led to their fate. I have always been fascinated with the Titanic, I was always struck by mans arrogance and sense of entitlement when it came to controlling things that were totally uncontrollable. There would not have been as many death on that ship had there been enough lifeboats, that is true, but the sense of greatness they had, to not even include them, shows that man has yet to conquer his greatest challenge, his own vanity.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

No Worst, There is None

This is an incredibly dark sonnet written by Hopkins. I felt the pain coming from every line that he wrote, almost as if he struggled to think clearly enough to write it. From the first stanza I felt his believed abandonment by his deep devotion and God: “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,/More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring./Comforter, where, where is your comforting?/Mary, mother of us where is your relief.”  Hopkins was so devoted to his religion and at the same time was so hurt by it. He confessed he was pained by what he saw and experienced “It made life even a burden to me” (pg. 773). He also wrote this as he as living in Ireland, a move that caused him to feel even more alone, and isolated. Reading this example of his “terrible sonnet” I feel great pity for this man. It takes a special person to enter into the priesthood, a calling. I would have thought in order for him to achieve this great task he would have been truly happy to be in the vocation, but he obviously had more demons in him than he could fight.

Oscar Wilde

Symphony in Yellow

I was familiar with Oscar Wilde due to his famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray; it was one of my favorites growing up. The reason I chose this poem was for two reasons. One was because I had never heard of it before and two the simplicity of it. Was it possible that someone as “intricate” as Oscar Wilde could write something so basic? I read this poem as couple of times trying to see what he was saying and every time I read it I could picture the colors he was describing, and I could see the river. Then I thought maybe this is a poem about art. Being an Aesthete, this is exactly what they would have wanted us to see and appreciate. In the first stanza:

An omnibus across the bridge

Crawls like a yellow butterfly,

And, here and there, a passer-by

Shows like a little restless midge”

The wording is so descriptive; to me it seems he wants you to see exactly what he has written. There is no doubt Oscar Wilde was brilliant and quite a character, but I think there was a quiet side that not many people got to see ,because it would have interfered with the persona he as creating.