Tonight I Can Write...

Ok, so I'm 19 and I'll be the first to admit, I've known love and what it's like to love someone and be loved in return. Don't get me wrong, however, I hope that I can love more than I have already, because there's so much more to learn but that which I have known was stupendous while it lasted.

Now, I normally don't like poems, stories, and movies about love. Life isn't as easy as they make them seem. Not everyone ends up happy. Somebody gets hurt. Nothing is ever happy and neatly contained. Snow White is twelve, Cinderella wasn't anything more than a girl who talked to animals that couldn't really talk back. Now, if you leave with a man older than you for a 'happy life' 9 times of 10 you get sold into slavery. Not a fairy tale in my book.

Tonight I Can Write..., however, shows us pain and suffering. He loved, she supposedly did, but left, and now he has to pick up the pieces. He goes back and forth on what really happened and how he really feels. I can imagine the tears falling on the page. This poem, when I read it, I feel my heart being ripped open. The last two lines however, "Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her" (2443 Line 31), gives me hope for him. He's learning that it will be ok and that life will continue without her. To me, this is real life. He hurts really bad, but it will be ok.

In the end of the day if we look in a mirror, that mirror, in order to accurately represent ourselves, will not be a solid piece of glass. No one is perfect and without blemish or scars. No, that mirror will be whole, but will be cracked and pieced back together, be it by our own power or that of an outside source. Neruda, in this poem, took his broken mirror and is starting to put pieces of it together. He is healing. Not ignoring the fact that she took a huge chunk out of him. He is moving on. I am proud of him for that.

Leda

Now, this poem is weird for me. I like it, but I feel bad for liking it. Rape shouldn't, in my mind, be so pretty sounding.

I guess why this one struck me was that it addressed it from Zeus' outlook. I mean, rarely do you see what was going through the rapist's mind. "The bird from Olympus, wounded by love" makes me feel bad for Zeus (1720, line 9). He's been hurt, so he just wants something from someone. Much like a child that has had its favorite toy taken away, it lashes out. A child doesn't rape, but throws a tantrum. A kicking, screaming, horrible thing that lets the adult know that the child is not happy.

In this sense, I feel like Dario shows Zeus as a large child that doesn't know how to explain his frustration. He throws a tantrum and acts out upon the nearest person or thing that he knows. I'm not sure he targeted Leda for any reason other than she caught his eye before. I don't think he wanted to hurt her specifically. Zeus had all of his home issues with Hera. She hated his womanizer ways. It was Hera that was so harsh to him and probably wounded him. Now, that is an assumption. It could also be Leda that denied him his desires. When you sit and think about why he is acting out, you feel less bad for him, I guess.

Part of the reason this is so hard to be disgusted by is that it's romanticized, at least in my mind. She struggles, but doesn't seem to actually do anything that would cause damage. I mean, you can struggle, and you can really struggle. He seems to come across as someone who is trying to be her lover. He seeks her lips which is an odd thing in this sort of situation. Often, in situations where the couple is not emotionally bonded, kissing is out of bounds. It gives it a sort of extra desperation, like he just wants to be loved.

This poem is so different than some of the other ones. It seems less vibrant. Everything seems muted. The colors of the swan have changed, from bright white to grey, and the beak has become amber instead of rose-red. The poems after the TR one are much more dark, but dark doesn't describe it right.

I feel that this one is a guilty pleasure. It makes such a beautiful story out of something so utterly horrible.

Sonatina--Thoughts

So, poetry to me is alright. I rarely sit and actually think about it. I will sometimes, but to sit and honestly consider what they are talking about is odd to me. I tend to write, when I do, very straight forward. I have a logical way of thinking. It makes sense to just say what I mean. Poetry though, I feel is trying to fool with you. Nothing means what it seems to mean. It's like listening to a Beatle's song and knowing they were on acid. (Don't believe me listen to Strawberry Fields or I Am the Walrus).

Also, I feel that I will never understand what they are really trying to explain. I'm colour deficient, so I don't see colour like most people. I cannot see the colour teal for example. It's just green to me and I can't tell you what it looks like. I feel like understanding what the poet really means is like that. Only the poet can see all colours and those of us reading are all colour deficient and can't quite agree or fully understand what the poet meant. Gosh darnit, if only they would stick to simple colours (joking of course).

Anyway, Sonatina by Dario. Good poem and fairly straight forward unless you start looking for things. On the surface, the Princess is in her castle very sad and lonely. In the footnotes in our copy, it says he references Sleeping Beauty, but in my opinion, it is more like Rapunzel. She's a princess stuck in her castle and is lonely. Eventually, her fairy godmother shows up and says it's going to be ok.

Now in class, we discussed various meanings. Religion is one of the ones that stuck with me, but that is probably more to do with the fact religion has been pounded into my head for years. Re-reading it, however, I feel that everything but the fairy godmother could happen in real life. There are princesses that don't like life and aren't happy. They have all sorts of servants and things to make her happy. The only part that we don't have factual evidence of is the fairy godmother. To me, that is what is the oddest in the poem.

Now there are a few possible explanations of the fairy godmother. It could be literal, as in magic is occurring and the Princess talks to fairies. At this point, her message may quite honestly be an uplifting one: "Don't worry, Princess. It will be ok soon. You will fulfill your role as a good woman and marrying the nobelman that comes for you." Now, that has some implications of sexism and chauvinism, but I'm not really concerned with that.

The fairy godmother could be, if we are taking this whole thing literally, a hallucination. It was not uncommon for inbreeding to occur within the royal families, because of the want of good royal blood. So the fairy godmother could simply be a sign of her screwed up family history. This line of thought makes sense. If it is a commentary on how not having everything makes you happy, you could take that thought further and argue that not only does it not bring happiness, but it also brings consequences. She has been cursed with schizophrenia perhaps. This would also make sense why the knight has done such outrageous things, such as conquer Death and ride a winged horse.

Well, these aren't things we talked about in class, but they came to me after the discussion and I figured they would make an interesting blog.