Avid poetry reader. Although of course I have my favorites, I love to read and enjoy poems from nearly all movements, time periods, and in all forms (for example, I know many people who will like or dislike something based on whether a poem rhymes or not--this sort of thing doesn't matter to me).
I do not currently write poetry myself nor am I in school taking a course. I say that because my comments and interpretations of poems I read come almost solely out of my own intellectual and emotional reaction to a piece--I am not commenting on poems because I am looking for critique of my own work in return, nor am I looking for input or insight because I am preparing a paper or doing homework. Not that I think there is anything wrong with either of those motivations--if you've got activity in your life that's inspiring you to think about poetry in specific and life in general, I think that's marvelous. If my insight can be helpful or interesting, I'm more than happy to provide it.
I do not currently write poetry myself nor am I in school taking a course. I say that because my comments and interpretations of poems I read come almost solely out of my own intellectual and emotional reaction to a piece--I am not commenting on poems because I am looking for critique of my own work in return, nor am I looking for input or insight because I am preparing a paper or doing homework. Not that I think there is anything wrong with either of those motivations--if you've got activity in your life that's inspiring you to think about poetry in specific and life in general, I think that's marvelous. If my insight can be helpful or interesting, I'm more than happy to provide it.
- Last seen on Apr 13 8:55 AM 2006. Member since April 12, 2006.
- I am a woman from Colorado (United States)
- When I'm not writing, I'm business analyst.
- Visit my homepage at www.dunnobaby.net
- I have 1 comment
Guest Book
Comments
1 - 1 of 1
one of my absolute favorites
I can't remember when or where I first came across this poem, but it has been at least five years and I still find it one of the loveliest and the most meaningful to me. I realize that the 'meaning' of poetry is extremely subjective (and hold fast to that an amateur personal emotional reaction is just as valid, even with poems that have "official" academic interpretations that are held in consensus by professional poets/scholars/professors. T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" are the two examples of very often analyzed poems that spring to mind).What I love about this poem and the idea that it clearly invokes in me does have to do with spirituality and the quest for finding that feeling of spirituality that comes from pondering the interconnectedness of humankind, nature and the universe. The "oceanic" feeling, I think it's called.
Jewett titles the poem, "At home from church," but the specifics of *why* she stayed home aren't expressed. She may be sick, she may not have wanted to go, she may not have been invited. She doesn't seem sad or upset about it, and is enjoying the beauty of a warm spring morning. However, she does use the terms "left alone", "count the hours", "somehow feel shutout", which do speak to a certain sense of isolation. Then, in the last stanza, after all the beautiful imagery about nature and also the beautiful imagery about worshipping at a church, she uses the lines "No thought of temple or of priest/But only of a voice that sings". In the context that this is a Victorian woman writing about something that could be construed as going against convention (enjoying staying home from church and saying so, and also finding personal spirituality in the observation of nature) she's eloquently expressing the idea that such spirituality may exsist to an individual *outside* of the structured religion, without the 'help' of The Church, a Judeo-Christian God or a Priest.
So, is that "reading too much into it"? I have no idea. That, too, is subjective. I do know that this poem grabbed me as soon as I read it, and has stayed in my memory for years, and speaks to me very clearly about finding spirituality in many experiences, not just the ones we think of as the most common or are currently accepted in mainstream America.
Even without all the interpretation, the meter, the rhyme and the description of the scene are written with such skill that the piece stands on that merit alone...i.e., even if you don't want to read the lyrics, the melody is just lovely.
Thoughts?