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.

Dying and Journeying are Very Different Things

"And though it in the center sit, / Yet when the other far doth roam, / It leans, and hearkens after it, / And grows erect, as that comes home" ("A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," 29-32).

Donne's poem presents images of both death and journeying. It seems to me like the speaker is using figurative images of death to compare them to his journey in which he will depart from his love -- in other words, I don't think he's going to die soon.

The initial stanza is a simile -- "as virtuous men pass mildly away" (1) -- to introduce a figurative image of death. The title also presents a picture of mourning, public grief over someone's death. However, details in the poem suggest to me that the speaker is not pondering his impending death.

The "priests," or the true lovers in the poem, engage in "refined" love that is "inter-assured of the mind" (17-20), and when they depart, their souls behave in a special way. Their souls endure an "expansion," hearkening after each other, and even if they are two different souls, they are like "compasses" because they spin in the same direction (25-28). Then, there are implications of those lovers reuniting -- "as that comes home" (32) and "makes me end where I begun" (36).

I suppose they could be reuniting in the afterlife, but the images of a journey -- the compass and the longing for company -- seem to be predominant.

Kinesthetic Imagery: Fun Stuff

"As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, / the movement of his powerful soft strides / is like a ritual dance around a center / in which a mighty will stands paralyzed" ("The Panther," 5-8).

According to the introduction of imagery by Perrine, the images in this second stanza are primarily kinesthetic images, meaning they have to do with muscle sense. The words "cramped" and "paralyzed" illustrate confinement through images of muscle discomfort. When the undefined image in the last stanza enters in, the panther's muscles are described as "tensed" and "arrested" (11), further suggesting confinement.

The imagery in this poem translated better to me than the imagery of any of the other assigned poems to read -- I mean, to study. While most of the poems dealt with the sights and sounds of nature or gloomy and woeful feelings, this poem dealt with restraint. I'm not really all that into that kind of stuff, but in this poem, immediately, I recalled how horrible sleep paralysis is for me. Waking up and not being able to move is a horrible feeling that never gets better no matter how often it occurs. I could vividly feel and understand the panther's desire to roam free.

Also, I'm not even really sure what a panther is. I assume that it's something that usually is unrestrained and wild and is kind of like a lion. I'll look at some pictures. The babies are kind of adorable, but I don't want to cross them:

"And took he forth a saw, and cleft her in twain."

"Till the Spinner of the Years / Said 'Now!' And each one hears, / And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres" ("The Convergence of the Twain," 31-33).

The only other time I remember hearing the word "twain" is in Rowan Atkinson's "Amazing Jesus." The part I quoted is between 2:35 and 2:55:

At first, when I read the title and the helpful epigraph, I thought that the "twain" might have been two halves of the ship, or something. Did the Titanic break in two? I don't know these things.

However, the "twain" are the vain and "opulent" Titanic (8) and its "sinister mate" (19), the iceberg. Of course, the poem's denotative situation is the meeting of those two separate spheres. What I liked about the structure was that in each stanza, there were two lines of approximate length x followed by a third line of approximate length 2x. The stanza construction in which two lines "converged" into a third line that was twice as long reflects the convergence of the Titanic and the iceberg.

The other question I want to answer is what I think of the "Immanent Will" and the "Spinner of the Years." I absolutely loved the final stanza where "the Spinner of the Years / Said 'Now!'" (31-32). At first, it made me think of God's commands in the creation story. However, I don't think God is the undefined Being in the poem. The text says that the Being created "a sinister mate" (19), which is not what an benevolent God would do; it also uses the word "consummation" (33), which suggests to me a fulfillment of what was inevitably going to occur. Therefore, I think the "Immanent Will" and the "Spinner of the Years" are fate.

My first-ever sad poems! Hooray!

"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" ("I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," 1).

Emily Dickinson "felt a Funeral in [her] Brain" (1), which I think reveals a lot about the imagery in the poem. She felt the numbness of her mind (8) and the "Boots of Lead" (11), and she heard the beating of Drums (6) and the lifting and creaking of a box "across [her] Soul" (9-10). She felt and heard, but she did not see, so her imagery was confined mostly to those two senses. The images still conveyed the somberness and pain of a funeral, but it was fresh to me because I (presumably like most people) associate events with what we see. Dickinson gave me the perspective of feeling and hearing the event.

Now, I'm going to defend my belief about what happens to the speaker in the final stanza -- she dies. She imagines the feeling of a funeral in her brain for the duration of the poem, and that picture in her mind becomes real when she herself dies at the conclusion. She "dropped down, and down" (18), and death is often associated with descent. She "hit a World" (19) because it was new to her -- she was unfamiliar with death, so it hit her when she died. She "Finished knowing" (20) because she lost consciousness, something that seems to happen when people die.

I'm skipping "The Widow's Lament" in my blog posts, but I have a theory I wish to express. The poem is extremely depressing, which is obvious, but I think that the reason the poem is extremely depressing is that the poet himself had an extremely depressing life because his name is "William Williams."

I need some more tissues if I want to keep analyzing this one.

"A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning / In Eden garden" ("Spring," 10-11).

Hopkins's central point is his first sentence: "Nothing is so beautiful as spring" (1). The poem's imagery effectively reflects that beauty of spring. "Echoing timber" (4), leaving and blooming peartrees (6), and a blue sky "all in a rush" (7) within the first stanza let the reader experience the most rich and beautiful facets of spring. As I read this poem, my eyes got watery and I sneezed a few times, so the imagery also messed with my allergies. This is true -- I have witnesses.

This poem contains two allusions in the final two stanzas. First, Hopkins relates Spring to the beauty of the Garden of Eden. The poem glorifies the beauty of spring, but then presents a contrasting warning -- "Have, get, before it cloy" (11). I think that Hopkins wants to express that spring is so beautiful that it cannot last, and anything that precedes or follows it cannot compare to its "sweet being." Next, "Spring" discusses the "innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy" (13). The purpose of the convergence of these two allusions is to realize both the beauty and the innocence of Spring that we must embrace while it lasts.

Hopkins could have reworded a few lines to express his point more clearly, but the poem would have lost its rhyming structure and alliteration. The second line's alliteration jumped out at me -- "when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush" -- because it gave the poem a rhythm I could follow. The soft, rhythmic consonants repeated in these lines reflect the subtle, sequenced season of Spring. That . . . was unintentional. But I like it.

For the record, I think that this poem's central theme is moot for people who have to deal with this:

I like polo shirts, too.

"Laura kept up her performance all through the team-picking, doing all the different expressions that went across Tommy's face: the bright eager one at the start; the puzzled concern when four picks had gone by and he still hadn't been chosen; the hurt and panic as it began to dawn on him what was really going on" (Never Let Me Go, 9).

Never Let Me Go in your pants, and I'll never let you go in mine.

I think what's going on in this quote is a bit of imagery -- I can fairly well picture the expressions on both Laura's face and Tommy's face. First, the images characterized Laura and Tommy for me. Laura is a girl who has the nerve to sit inside of a safe pavilion and make fun of somebody else. Tommy is a boy who has a fairly malleable temperament.

The imagery also showcased the pretty quick progression in Tommy's mood as he realized what was going on. At first, I was thinking, "Hey! He has a polo shirt. He must be cool." But then he started playing football and had a huge tantrum, so I couldn't relate to him much after that.

I haaave two comparisons to make. First, the sports pavilion reminded me of the humming pole at St. Mark (the place where people like me would go to, you know, observe recess rather than take part in it). Also, the part where Kathy said, "At first I thought this was just the drugs . . ." reminded me of soma. I worked hard to find a Brave New World connection, and that's all I got so far. I mean, the first part of chapter one left a lot of questions in my head, and that happened a lot in Brave New World, too.

Synaesthesia and Anagrams

"He wiped them on his chest, on his shoulders, on his bare arms. Delicious perfume!" (Brave New World, 143).

As John dug through Lenina's suitcase and later creepily watched her sleep, I found lots of imagery! In chapter nine, these images primarily illustrated the attraction John felt toward Lenina. On page 143, I found . . . "touch of smooth skin against his face," "scent in his nostrils of musky dust," and "curls, so touchingly childish." And you know what? I would be fine if they ended up together because, as I've pointed out many times, Bernard is obviously not her soul mate. Not that soul mates exist in the "civilized" world of this book.

The synaesthesia I quoted in the beginning of this post accentuated John's feeling of Lenina's presence as he stalked her and her belongings. I have a vague memory of reading The Tempest sophomore year, and there was something about smelling music, which is the same idea. I'm probably only thinking about that because John quoted Miranda for about half a page in the previous chapter.

On another note, at the beginning of chapter nine, John was standing among the "agaves." I had to look up what those are, and I learned that they're a group of American plants. Interestingly to me, "agaves" anagrams to "savage," and John was also standing among a lot of those in Malpais. I don't know if that was intentional, but I thought that was worth noting.

Speaking of anagrams . . . it starts at 1:25.