YOU'RE an oxymoron!

The number of poems I analyze and my level of maturity are inversely proportional, so I apologize.

"A sweet disorder in the dress / Kindles in clothes a wantonness" ("Delight in Disorder," 1-2).

I have a huge problem with Google Chrome's thinking that "villanelle" is a spelling error while "wantonness" is just fine. It's not even in my AHD! Oh, yes it is. Apparently, it's the noun form of "wanton," which means "immoral or unchaste." I'm going to leave it up in the air as to what the speaker is saying in those two lines. Anyway, my purpose in quoting that line was to point out the oxymoron "sweet disorder."

The speaker draws a lot of parallels between disorder/wildness and sweetness/civility, so he's very interested in waffles. I mean, he's very interested in disorder. This is reflected very nicely in the poem's structure! Allow me to explain.

The lines of the poem are not as pretty as they could be because the lengths of the lines are kind of jagged. Also, the rhyming is a little bit off, but it's there -- "thrown" and "distraction" (3-4), for instance. It has a continuous structure, so it's not cut up into nice even little stanzas. The poem has a certain degree of disorder to it, just like what the speaker likes!

"Not only did she do them wrong, she did every one of them in."

"'The curse of hell from me shall ye bear, / Mother, Mother, / The curse of hell from me shall ye bear, / Such counsels you gave to me, O'" ("Edward," 53-56).

Apparently, this poem is brought to you by horrible parenting. If I wrote this poem, I would remain anonymous, too.

The repetitious repetition in this poem added a lot of emotion and suspense. And for me, black humor. I totally read the words to this poem with a song in my head -- how could I not? I was dancing around a bonfire in my head singing a song about some upper class guy who killed his dad, abandoned his family, and left his mother the curse of hell. Does it get any more jolly than that?

I'm more than willing to write a tune to this poem if nobody else has already. It would stand alongside such classic Tom Lehrer hits as "The Irish Ballad" about a maid who killed her entire family.

Speaking of Tom Lehrer, I am very confident that I can draw a parallel between the song "To His Coy Mistress" and the song "When You Are Old and Gray." I mean, that song was running through my head during the entire class discussion. Sorry about the Tom Lehrer overload.

English or Italian?

"One short sleep passed, we wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die" ("Death, be not proud," 13-14).

We've gooot another sonnet! This one is apparently both English and Italian, but I feel like it follows the English form more closely with respect to rhyme. Let me try this: abba abba cddc ee -- is that anything close to the rhyming scheme? If so, it ends in a rhyming couplet like the English sonnet. However, there's a shift in the nice abba pattern after eight lines which is deceptively Italian.

What about the thought process of the poem? Blistex addresses death in an apostrophe, personifying death as wrongly "proud" (1). It argues that death has no reason to be proud -- it's not "mighty and dreadful" (2) as some say, and even when people "die," they don't actually die. Headphones points out that death is associated with "rest and sleep" (5), both very peaceful things, and good men are always ready to embrace death. Then, we get to Lanyard, who says that death depends on "fate" and "chance" and is associated with things like "prison" and "war" (9-10).

I feel like there's no real shift in thought between lines eight and nine. The real shift comes between lines twelve and thirteen. The first twelve lines discuss why death should not be proud; then, the last two lines is a concluding defeat of death, as you will.

Therefore, I dub this poem an English sonnet which is also a tiny bit Italian. It's a little confused about its nationality.

I should probably not take everything in this poem literally.

"Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light" ("Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," 18-19 and half of the other lines).

I'd first like to point out that we wrote villanelles last year in English, and I wrote mine about an old man telling kids to get off his lawn. The benefit of the villanelle is presumably the repetition of two refrains over and over again, connecting all of the ideas throughout the poem.

Going "gentle into that good night" is probably a euphemism-y metaphor for a quiet death like our friend Tennyson described in "Crossing the Bar." However, as the speaker addresses his father, he is making a case against a quiet death. Question two is staring me down, so I'm going to try to tackle the speaker's view of the various types of men toward death.

The speaker argues that they all have relatively calamitous deaths for separate reasons:

• Wise men: because their words "forked no lightning" (5), which presents a bunch of confusing images to me, most of which end in electrocution. I think it means that the words of the wise aren't received as well as they would like them to be.
• Good men: because their "frail deeds" did not "dance" as they would have liked them to (8)? Maybe the deeds of good men seem unsubstantial and ineffective in retrospect.
• Wild men: because they "grieved" the sun as the "caught and sang" it (10-11). This is a little bit too metaphorical for my taste. It's a metaphor for . . . being ashamed of their lives, perhaps.
• Grave men: because they see with "blinding sight" (13). They have a very good understanding of life and death.

That was a lot of speculation on my part. My point is that the speaker doesn't want his father to go "gently" because none of those other guys in the four groups go gently for whatever reasons.

Ooh.

Blistex, Headphones, and Lanyard

"This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long" ("That time of year," 13-14).

Let's talk a little bit about the organization of this poem. This is a Shakespearean sonnet, which the introduction says "consists of three quatrains and a concluding couplet." In this case, the first three quatrains present three different images, and the concluding couplet presents a . . . conclusion. I don't want to keep calling the quatrains "quatrain one," "quatrain two," and "quatrain three," so I'll call them "Blistex," "Headphones," and "Lanyard," respectively.

Blistex introduces an image of autumn turning to winter -- "when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang" (2). Headphones discusses the end of the day -- "after sunset fadeth in the west" (6) -- and refers to "death's second self" (8) which confuses me. Is "death's second self" the end of the day? Finally, Lanyard talks about a fire that burns life -- "the glowing of such fire, / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie" (9-10).

The images of Blistex, Headphones, and Lanyard all discuss the end to something usually regarded as beautiful (autumn, daytime, and life). They also all say something about how whomever the speaker is addressing sees those images in the speaker. Just looking at those three stanzas alone, the speaker seems to me like a person who destroys all life that crosses its path like a bulldozer, so I'm assuming I should try to understand the concluding couplet. I quoted it at the beginning of the post.

I'm not very good at paraphrasing Shakespeare. I'll try. "You see these images in me, so your love for me is growing stronger." And then there's a weird infinitive phrase, and I'm not sure how it fits with the other line. "To love aptly what you must leave before long." I suppose autumn, daytime, and life are all things we love but have to leave before long. I think the speaker is comparing his audience's (his love's?) views of him to how we view those three images; his love knows that he's not going to be around forever, so she loves him even more.