"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.

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.

"me / a princess"

"so i goes ta flushm down / but sohelpmegod he starts talkin / bout a golden ball / an how i can be a princess / me a princess" ("Hazel Tells LaVerne," 9-13).

What did I notice? There's no capitalization and no punctuation, but the poem still flows nicely because Machan started new lines with new phrases and clauses. When we read Shakespeare freshmen year, we said that when somebody spoke in prose, he was usually drunk or uneducated. That might be the case with the speaker in this poem; I'll call her "Hazel." (I'm not sure why -- I just have a good feeling about it.) She does not capitalize or punctuate or use proper grammar because she is less educated and probably of a lower social class.

I also noticed that the phrase "me a princess" was repeated, which probably means that it's important. That repetition underscores how the author feels about being a princess -- it would be completely ridiculous. Why? I would say because of her lower social status. It makes her feel less of a "worthy" person than the cliche princesses in fairy tales.

I just worked up to figuring out the theme, I think. People who rank lower socially don't feel worthy of higher statuses.

Maybe the person who came up with the new movie "The Princess and the Frog" thought of the idea after reading this poem. I really liked that movie -- it was jazzy, and we ate spaghetti tacos when we watched it.