Yeah, about poetry...

We are now starting poetry and I will admit poetry is not my favorite thing in the world, most likely because I couldn't write good poetry if my life depended on it. I find it hard to find the right words to use to express what I'm feeling and make it sound beautiful. However, just because I don't like writing poetry doesn't mean I don't like reading it. Poetry is amazing and I love the way poets can choose the perfect words to paint a picture in the readers mind with such vividness. Poetry evokes such emotion so that the reader can feel the poets pain, sorrow, happiness or whatever emotion it may be at that time.
On top of not being able to write poetry, I also find it hard to depict poetry and find the underlying meaning or purpose of the poem. Some poems are easy to find that meaning but others I have to pick my brain and read the poem many times to find it. For instance in class we were talking about a poem and everyone was coming up with all these deep thoughts from the poem that I did not see when I read the same poem. This unit will be hard for me but hopefully it will help me to think more critically instead of so superficially, so I can unravel the thoughts and emotions in poetry.

"The Rocking-Horse Winner" By: D.H. Lawrence

"The Rocking-Horse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence is centered around money and the characters attempts at fortune. Through their greediness there is sorrow and tragedy, so therefore money is not the root of all evil but it is greed. The greed the mother in the story has for money is so powerful that it is echoed throughtout the house and even the children can hear the whispers, "There must be more money, there must be more money." This is a great burden to the children and especially Paul, the only son. He is greatly bothered by the lack of money in the house and his mothers disappointment with her life. He asks her one day why they were poor and she tells him, "Well I suppose it is because your father has no luck." Therefore, she is impressing on her children as well that all that is important in life is money and she sets the example for greediness.
Paul then becomes greedy, not for money, at first, but for his mothers love and approval, which he considers to be money. He says he is lucky but she does not believe him and he is greedy to prove to her that he is. He starts betting on horse races with Bassett, the gardener, and Oscar, his uncle. He earns more than five thousand pounds and then decides to give it to his mother in hopes of her approval and silence to the house. He is wrong the noise only increases to screams and his mother is still not satisfied. Paul becomes frantic and one night his mother finds him violently riding his rocking-horse right before he crashes to the ground screaming the name of the next winner. Now that Paul is sick, his mothers greed subsides and she finally realizes her greed has driven him mad and she sees what she has been missing because she was blinded by her greed.
Whatever the greed, for money, for approval, it is the greed its self that causes heartbreak and tragedy and in the end greed is the root of all evil.

"The Thing in the Forest" By: A.S. Byatt

"The Thing in the Forest" was a very descriptive, vivid story in which two little girls wonder into the forest and encounter a "thing" which is horrid and haunts them for many years. The plot and characters are simple enough but what I had a hard time figuring out about this story was the central theme or I thought, "was there one at all?" Surely there must be so I tried to pick through and look deeper into the story and it's meaning, and this was difficult for me not only in this story but often times the theme may not pop out to me right away.
What I came up with was maybe the "thing" the little girls saw represented their fear, their country was in wartime and they were evacuated to a safer place away from their families. I can imagine they must have been pretty scared and I'm not sure if the "thing" was real or if they made it up but it was their fear and then these fears haunted them the rest of their life. At the end, both girls go back to see the "thing" once more, which shows how sometimes we need to face our fears in order to move past them and continue with our lives.

"Araby" By: James Joyce

Throughout "Araby," Joyce uses vivid descriptions and strong emotion as he tells about a young boy who is "in love" with a neighbor girl who goes out of his way to try and please her. There is a sentence that stands out to me the most, it is the very last one of the story. Joyce explains the intense frustration the boy feels once he realizes how foolish he is acting, "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity, and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."
The boy represents the world and how we get caught up in material things of this world. The same way he was obsessed with this beautiful girl and ready to go to extreme lengths to satisfy her in order to get her to like him, we go out of our way to be accepted. Just as the boy, we often end up feeling foolish and are disappointed by our silly attempts to conform. He realizes that it's not worth it, this is a lesson that alot of us should learn and instead just be ourselves and be true to who we are.

"Cathedral" By: Raymond Carver

At the beginning of "Cathedral" the womans husband is not enthusiastic or inviting to the blind man, Robert, that is coming to stay with them. He is uncomfortable with the fact that this blind stranger that his wife used to work for will be in his house. However, at the end, when he is drawing the cathedral for Robert he becomes sympathetic for him and he all of a sudden wants to connect with him. While he was drawing Robert told him to close his eyes, then when he is done Robert tells him to open them but he hesistates and they remain shut because the man doesn't want to open his eyes, knowing that the blind man cannot and he wants to be relate with Robert. This shows how at first we might not accept others but if we are willing to put ourselves in thier shoes and look at things through their perspective we can relate to them and form that bond. We must be open to others, no matter how different or unfamiliar it is to us.