The Coming of Wisdom with Time

I liked this poem a lot because I think the first line sums up the real truth of life. We may come from different backgrounds, races, sexes, upbringings, and cultures, but all humans are the same. We live for the same necessities and we all share the same emotions. The author speaks of all the "lying days of my youth"  which I think means he didn't realize how much people were alike. He lied to himself saying that he knew the truth of the world and he showed everyone his leaf. His little piece of the pie and his little ray of sunlight, but he never knew that it didn't matter how much he showed off himself to the world because in the end we are all together as one united species. His leaves are withering into a truth because I think that now he was grown up and he is realizing that there is truth in the fact of the first line of the poem. It was strange how it was only one stanza, just four simple lines and yet they are four very impactful lines. They speak the truth about people and how we act when we are young and the way we may act as we get older. Which I think also ties into the first line that we are all naive as people when we are young and then as we get older we all realize the truth.I liked the poem less the more I read it. I don't really know why, but it just didn't catch my interest as much the more I read it.

A Work of Artiface

When I first read this poem the only thing going through my mind was the fifties. Women in the fifties were for show. They had no thoughts, no ideas, no place among men. They were to be seen and not heard. They lived to serve their husbands. Had they not lived in this manner perhaps they could have been doctors or lawyers or maybe one of them could have found the cure for cancer. "Could have grown eight feet tall on the side of a mountain" means that if they had been set free and let do as they wish they could have amounted to anything they wanted to. The men believed they were helping them and keeping them safe and happy just like the gardener thought he or she was doing for the plant. The gardener makes the plant seem lucky to get a pot to grow in just like men believed women to be lucky for them to have a home. They were lucky they had been chosen for marriage. The beginning young thing I didn't understand at first, but I think it means that this was driven into young men, young women and even children of the fifties. They were taught at a young age that men rule the house hold and women have babies and clean the house. The bound feet made me think of Chinese cultures because they use to break and bind the feet of little girls so that they would be small and delicate. After this last part of the poem it seems almost a mixture of Chinese culture and their treatment of women and the American culture in the fifties and the way society of that time viewed women. I really enjoyed this poem a lot because as a society most of us believe the fifties to be a time of prosperity and the rich social classes where everyone lived like a millionaire, but this poem shows how much destruction of self worth came through for women in this time. I really liked how right away I knew it wasn't about a tree. I knew it was about women and their roles in society. That was nice because I didn't have to beat the meaning out of it. I understood right away. Overall, I think this is one of my favorite poems.

In Blackwater Woods

 Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

 

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

 

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

 

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

 

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

 

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

 

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

 

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

 

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go. 

I think this poem is about the authors adoptive family and her home in Ohio. When she talks about the fires and the black river of loss I think she may be talking about the tragedy that may have lead to her adoption. She keeps remembering it all the time and at the end she has to remind herself that in life when things are gone you have to let them go. Maybe she feels remorse because she didn't cherish her family when she had it. It just seems like in the beginning she is talking about heaven because it's the pillars of light like shining down from heaven and then she talks about the fragrance of cinnamon. I would assume heaven would smell good and I think cinnamon smells good. I think the fulfillment comes from the fact that maybe her parents are in heaven and they are safe and happy. I think the nameless ponds means that people lose their loved ones everyday and they are nameless to us but to the people who lost them it's a huge deal. I liked the way it went from just being pillars to pillars of light with the sweet fragrance. I typically don't like when the authors split up the sentences between stanzas but I don't mind it in this poem at all. I think it adds to the effect of the poem. Overall I really liked the poem a lot because it is partially about nature and it has a much deeper meaning than just how beautiful nature is. 

1943

This poem just shocked me a little at first. The first line " They toughened us for war. In the high-school auditorium Ed Monahan knocked out Dominick Esposito in the first round of the heavy weight finals, and ten months later Dom dies in the third wave at Tarawa " was really crazy to me because it's like if we had lived in a time like this, all these boys we know around school would be gone in a flash. They wouldn't be the quarterback or the track star anymore, they would just be soldiers and instead of weight lifting in the gym they would be doing push ups and getting ready to carry a gun through harsh conditions. It was crazy how people at home often watched their normal lives continue and they forgot all the things that were happening to the young men across the world. I just got an email the other day about how people are beginning to realize that we have forgotten all these men and women go through and now people want to show they still appreciate these people and their selfless actions. I didn't understand the whole milk thing at first, but when everyone in class was talking about how it was a kind of child-like, nurturing sort of thing then I understood. These were young men who really had to grow up fast and they were still kids in reality. They had to lose their childhood too soon and the families at home grew up safe and sound and people there got to keep living their childhood and drinking their milk. I really liked the poem overall. Sometimes I just don't understand the way they split stanzas sometimes. For me it is just confusing and not that effective. It just makes me mad sometimes.