“Advice to a Prophet” by Richard Wilbur [p. 130-131]

In this poem, the speaker is a person addressing the prophet. This poem most likely occurs before the prophet enters the city. It is the speaker’s response to the prophet’s action. The speaker carries a tone of indifference and knowledge at the same time. The speaker has an attitude that he already knows what the prophet would say. The poem carries a regular rhyme pattern of abba and every stanza is four lines long. This consistency gives the poem a strict persona. It would relate to the message of the poem since mass destruction is a serious subject. One of the biggest images used is one of destruction. The use of heavy words, such as “death”, “soul”, and “cold”, gives the speaker a yelling or argumentative tone. It further shows the speaker as somewhat disrespectful of the prophet. The prophet is a faceless character in this poem. His existence is only through the speaker’s reference to the prophet. It leads to question who the prophet is. From reading the poem, two references to God are made. The first one, the speaker sets the prophet as a missionary of God. He is shown as one of those people who would yell the do-this -or-you’ll-burn-in-hell speech in the populated area of the streets. The second reference is the “dove’s return” from the Noah’s Ark story. It alludes to previous messages of God. In this poem, the use of “we” and “us” hints that the speaker is mixed into the ordinary populace. Either the speaker is acting as the spokesperson or the speaker is all people in a way. My favorite part is when the “worldless rose” is mentioned in the beginning of the last verse. The contrast of the image is chilling.

The Hospital Window by James Dickey

I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.
I drop through six white floors
And then step out onto pavement.

Still feeling my father ascend,
I start to cross the firm street,
My shoulder blades shining with all
The glass the huge building can raise.
Now I must turn round and face it,
And know his one pane from the others.

Each window possesses the sun
As though it burned there on a wick.
I wave, like a man catching fire.
All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash,
and, behind them, all the white rooms
They turn to the color of Heaven.

Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly,
Dozens of pale hands are waving
Back, from inside their flames.
Yet one pure pane among these
Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing.
I know that my father is there,

In the shape of his death still living.
The traffic increases around me
Like a madness called down on my head.
The horns blast at me like shotguns,
And drivers lean out, driven crazy—
But now my propped-up father

Lifts his arm out of stillness at last.
The light from the window strikes me
And I turn as blue as a soul,
As the moment when I was born.
I am not afraid for my father—
Look! He is grinning; he is not

Afraid for my life, either,
As the wild engines stand at my knees
Shredding their gears and roaring,
And I hold each car in its place
For miles, inciting its horn
To blow down the walls of the world

That the dying may float without fear
In the bold blue gaze of my father.
Slowly I move to the sidewalk
With my pin-tingling hand half dead
At the end of my bloodless arm.
I carry it off in amazement,

High, still higher, still waving
My recognized face fully mortal,
Yet not; not at all, in the pale,
drained, otherworldly, stricken,
Created hue of stained glass.
I have just come down from my father.

The first thing I notice about this poem is that it begins and ends with the line, "I have just come down from my father". That line can have different meanings for the author ranging from: he (the man in the poem) has literally just come down from visiting his father, he has just been released from his father's hold, or something along the lines of visiting his father in heaven. I notice that each stanza is exactly 6 lines each. Dickey uses imagery containing color and other words such as "tainted", "pale", "hue", etc. He also manages to create each image by describing sounds heard or by what he physically feels at the time. I enjoy the way Dickey portrays the present reality of life compared to the passing of the father in the poem. Dickey also makes another parallel aside from the first and last lines by giving the idea that people are born and die with the same blue color. There are also many references to windows, glass, and other items that the man in the poem can apparently see clearly through--this maybe is his internal realization of needing to be away from his father.

Dying

by Robert Pinsky p. 455-6

This seems to be mainly a meditation on death. Initially it is dealt with in reference to things, concrete and abstract that die--dogs, metaphors--and then the poem moves to "someone I know is dying" which I think is the triggering subject of the poem. Then he moves to things that are growing but also dying, as we all are. The speaker also mentions pace of dying. The dying acquaintance is dying faster than the rest of us, which makes it more significant. There are also comparisons of human death to the other living things: the moth is nerveless like the nails and hair on our bodies but it is also like a soul. I don't know what to make of the last line: "Bored and impatient in the monster's mouth." Maybe the monster's mouth is a metaphor for the universe. The feeling I get from this poem is the interconnectedness of all life and death. There are nine 3-line stanzas, about half end-stopped and the lines are relatively long but there is plenty of punctuation within the lines in the first four stanzas. I think the stanzas flow more, having less punctuation in the remaining stanzas, the pace actually quickens, which makes us feel the increased pace of some deaths compared to others.

Country Stars by William Meredith (p. 115)

This is a short poem, containing two stanzas with five lines in each stanza. The poem has the rhyme scheme of abbab and cdcdd. I like how the poem opens up with a cute scene of a child coming downstairs to get a goodnight kiss. From the title, I could picture a little house in the country, where there are beautiful sceneries and bright stars at night. However, the poem then talks about cities, a chemical plant, and clotted cars. The second stanza makes it clear that the poem is about pollution and how it’s destroying our environment. I think when the child in the first stanza “blows on a black windowpane until it’s white,” she is trying to create the brightness of the stars. Through the black windowpane, the child could see a great bear passing over the apple trees. I take this to mean the pollution smokes that resemble the shape of a big bear. Thus, the child covers that by blowing on the windowpane. The last line of the first stanza also says that “she puts her own construction on the night,” meaning that the child creates her own surroundings where there are no smokes but the brightness of stars, like the “bright watchers” in the last sentence of the poem.

Prodigy

Prodigy
by Charles Simic

I grew up bent over
a chessboard.

I loved the word endgame.

All my cousins looked worried.

It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.

A retired professor of astronomy
taught me how to play.

That must have been in 1944.

In the set we were using,
the paint had almost chipped off
the black pieces.

The white King was missing
and had to be substituted for.

I'm told but do not believe
that that summer I had witnessed
men hung from telephone poles.

I remember my mother
blindfolding me a lot.
She had a way to tucking my head
suddenly under her overcoat.

In chess, too, the professor told me,
the masters play blindfolded,
the great ones on several boards
at the same time.

The first line of this poem is what immediately caught my attention. The image it created for me after reading it was so powerful that I knew I would be forced to read the entire poem. "I grew up bent over/ a chessboard" creates this image of the speaker being used for someone's benefit or in this case due the the title being prodigy, someone's replacement. Further along into the poem, Simic is able to create all this chaos in the background and yet a peaceful and beautiful situation in the speaker learning the game. For example, "planes and tanks" were shaking the "windowpanes" and the speaker had "witnessed me hung from telephone poles" but yet is engulfed in a game. There is also a very distinct and clear image presented when the speaker delves into the game. It is as though nothing else matters, but the exact details of every facet of the game. For the speaker talks about how the "paint had almost chipped off the black pieces," and the "white King was missing and had to be substituted for," clearly showing the degree of detail in this aspect and lack of it elsewhere.
I also really enjoyed the comparison between the speaker's mother and masters of the game of chess, in that both were excellent at their profession or their duties, such that the mother protected the speaker and the masters could play blindfolded. Furthermore, there is this idea that the mother blindfolded her from many things and that master play blindfolded, giving off the sense that her mother was in a way preparing her. Personally, I feel that because the mother had kept the speaker "blindfolded" throughout most of their life, the speaker should be able to understand and comprehend the art of playing as though she were a master, blindfolded and on several boards at once.

Description of a Pear on a Pewter Dish by Young Smith

Description of a Pear on a Pewter Dish

See the blue there shadowed
beneath the yellow’s gloss.

That blue is the sky
within the cutis of the pear.

At night this sky grows dark
and unfolds a crust of distant stars.

It is these pale fires within its skin
that give the pear its taste of heaven.

Young Smith

What I enjoy most about this poem is the imagery used. Smith used the same colors to represent the three different subjects he was referring to: blue of the sky, yellow of the sun and stars, and pear seems to signify earth. Not only did he use colors but he also gave the distinction of light versus dark with the words "gloss", "dark", "pale", and "fires". "Cutis" refers to the atmosphere surrounding the earth and sky. I also like that he refers to the earth as a "pear" but it can also be considered a person. This person can only look up to see the sky and sun illuminating. Then, as the sun goes down and dark arises, the stars are the "taste of heaven". I like the idea that stars are what can be considered heaven. The fact that Smith says "these pale fires within its skin" can be thought of as people being unholy and the idea of heaven is what can revive them once again to see outside of the "cutis of the pear".

Theodore Roethke Lull

The mind is quick to turn
Away from simple faith
To the cant and fury of
Fools who will never learn;
Reason embraces death,
While out of frightened eyes
Still stares the wish of love.

Theodore Roethke Lull

What I enjoy most about this poem is the simplicity of it. Roethke puts what would be two sentences into poetic form. The first thing I noticed is that each line has 6 syllables. The words flow off your tongue when it is read. Roethke did an excellent job of relaying the message that all people can sometimes be distracted by what others say when love is right in front of them. With the way it is line breaked I think that more thought goes into what the poem is actually trying to say.