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Windhover3

  • Last seen on Jul 26 12:31 PM 2007. Member since February 14, 2006.

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  • on Your Dog Dies by Raymond Clevie Carver, on January 4, 2005
    The point of the wife screaming is the point of the poem. This is not a poem about a dying dog, it is a poem about how a man gets caught up in himself and in his passion for writing. Just as his sympathy for his daughter is transformed by his desire and love for the poem, the relationship with the screaming wife has been transformed into hiding and writing, and the tragedy is that he friggin recognizes that it is killing them.

    This poem is not puppy dog dying sad; it is end of a marriage, world collapsed tragic.

  • on The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins, on July 22, 2004
    Even though agnostic, I am always uplifted by Hopkins' inter-weaving of sound, the sweep and swing of words. This is poetry which attempts to break from the plodding regularity of french-influenced metrical verse. Hopkins brought back beat to English poetry, structuring his verse around stresses in a breath rather than metrical feet.

    Thematically, Hopkins found proof of God's existence in the diversity of life around him, and the beauty of everyday things. This poem emphasizing the beauty within, and the joy of mastery.

    The final stanza may sound a little odd to us, but that's just vocabulary: the simple act of plowing wears a plow blade to a shine, black embers when they fall split open and glow bright red and gold.

    You cannot appreciate this poem unless you read it aloud, and let the natural stresses from the alliteration roll. Don't hold back, what Blake tried to accomplish with symbols, Hopkins accomplishes with sound.
    Edited on Jul 22, 12:18 because ''.

  • on Tanka 03 by Masaoka Shiki, on June 14, 2004
    Very glad to meet this poem. I'm always concerned about translations, but this comes across beautifully. After reading Shiki's bio, I can see how his sketch-from-life philosophy informs the poem and sparked a reawakening of the form.
    Concise, powerful, and eternally contemporary. Thanks Ma'atkara