Just to Let You Know

I have gone to
dinner
with that same
person

in which
you were probably
going
to marry

Forgive me
she is beautiful
so nice
and gullable




This is a parody of "This is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams, except instead of writing about how he had stole the plums from an icebox, my poem is about a guy who stole a girlfriend from his friend. I tried ot keep it on the same idea wen it comes ot stealing, but decided that the tone of the poem would be more noticeable with a more serious event. Both poems have the same amount of lines, number of punctuations, and number of capital letters. I had to change the number of syllables in a few lines to fit what I was really trying to say.
In the original poem, the form and content sent the tone as being nonchalant and making the apology sarcastic. Williams use of short words such as "sweet" and "cold" gives the apology less seriousness to it. In my poem, I tried to give the same pseudo-apology by using words such as "nice" and "gullable". My parody of William's poem is giving praise to his poem because it shows that his poem is worth noting and learning from.

I Swear I Didn't Write It

Between the first three words of "Ode to a Nightingale," "My heart aches," and its last, "sleep," John Keats describes a brief personal escape from an existence whose suffering he can no longer endure. The "I" who speaks eight times in this perfect eight-stanza lyric is Keats himself, not a surrogate persona. Ambiguity, irony, and even implication have no place here, but biography does. Keats' letters show that he certainly believed the poet possessed "negative capability," the self-nullifying power to enter other things and speak as and for them. "Ode to a Nightingale" depicts one such experience. True enough, Keats leaves his "sole self" (72) to join with the nightingale in verse that briefly realizes, in human language, the ageless beauty of its unintelligible song.

In "Ode to a Nightingale" A major concern is Keats's perception of the conflicted nature of human life, i.e., the interconnection or mixture of pain/joy, intensity of feeling/numbness of feeling, life/death, mortal/immortal, the actual/the ideal, and separation/connection. In this ode, Keats focuses on immediate, concrete sensations and emotions, from which the reader can draw a conclusion or abstraction.

John Keats is known for his vibrant use of imagery in his poetry. Keats's imagery ranges among all our physical sensations: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, temperature, weight, pressure, hunger, thirst, sexuality, and movement. Examples of Synaesthetic Images are, TASTING of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!O for a beaker of the warm South, (stanza II). Here the poet TASTES the visual ("Flora and the country green"), activity ("Dance"), sound ("Provencal song"), and mood or pleasure ("mirth"); also the visual ("sunburnt") is combined with a pleasurable emotional state ("mirth"). With the beaker there is finally something to taste, but what is being tasted is temperature ("warm") and a locationJohn Keats presented in his poetry many issues, such as nature, existence and the soul. All of these aspects relate directly to the human spirit. The spiritual nature of Keats poetry concerns itself with exploring human emotions and understanding nature. ("South").

In this ode, The poet falls into a reverie while listening to an actual nightingale sing. He feels joy and pain, an ambivalent response. the poet has beautifully fused pain with imaginary relief or the unconscious joyous things of nature and art. To escape from pain of reality, he begins to move into the world of imagination. When he hears the nightingale, he yearns for fine wine from south France, not to get drunk but to achieve a state of mind, which will give him the pleasure of the company of the beautiful nightingale, “that I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim:”(II, 19-20) However, the poet realizes that he does not require wine for being with the bird, so chooses the route of flying to her through his poetry. “ Away! Away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy…………..And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays”(IV, 36,37).

In Stanza VI, Keats yearns to die, a state which he imagines as only joyful, as pain-free, and to merge with the bird's song. The nightingale is characterized as wholly blissful--"full-throated ease" in stanza I and "pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!" (lines 7-8). The inner pain and grief engulfing the poet is revealed in a very subtle manner. He also realizes that death means he could no longer hear the bird song and will be non-existent. Suddenly the beautiful bird song seems to him more like “requiem”(VI, 60), a song of death.

John Keats presented in his poetry many issues, such as nature, existence and the soul. All of these aspects relate directly to the human spirit. The spiritual nature of Keats poetry concerns itself with exploring human emotions and understanding nature.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.

I chose these two images because after I got done reading this poem, the first image that stayed in my head was of a man hunching over on uneven soil working day in and day out to feed his family. To me, this first picture captures that perfectly. I also had to put this next picture in because it shows that writing is also a form of hard work. Writing and hard work are both being compared to each other in this poem, and it would not have been complete if I did not show both sides of the poem. I personally like the second picture a lot. The empty page, in a way, represents the hardship and skill required to write poetry.

The poem I chose was "Digging" by Seamus Heaney. This poem sticks out to the reader for many reasons. He uses a great deal of figurative language,such as the use of imagery, similes, and metaphors. Right from the second line of the poem, Heaney says "the squat pen rests; snug as a gun". To me, comparing a gun to a pen shows that he feels that he can do many impactfull things with his writing utensil. The gun can be a symbol of power and control over a situation, and comparing his pen to a gun shows that he feels that he has power when he has his pen "[in]between [his] finger and [his] thumb."

Seamus Heaney also creates many images with his use of language. One major image that he creates in the readers mind is men, which in his poem are his father and grandfather, that are hard at work doing difficult labor. One way he creates this image of hard labor is through sound imagery. He uses words such as "rasping", "gravelly ground", and "slap" to depict the noise the hard workers are making when their spades are digging into the wet, moist, ground. Heaney also uses the sense of smell to reach out to the reader. In line 25, he writes, "the cold smell of potato mould". Our generation of people that read this poem might not be able to compare to this smell, but I'm sure this addition of olfactory imagery was meant to be used to give the reader a better sense of the type of hard labor his father and grandfather were doing.

The use of the language to create this image of men doing hard labor enhances the idea of the speaker using his pen as his, utensil of choice. All throughout the poem, the speaker focuses mainly on how his father and grandfather not only did a great deal of hard labor, but also how good they were at it. At one point the speaker said that "[his] grandfather could cut more turf in a day/ Than any other man on Toner's blog". The speaker is shown to have a great deal of respect for his elders and looks up to them for doing what they are good at. At the end of the poem, he uses a metaphor comparing the potato pickers spades to his pen. His pen is what he chooses to work with because, like his elders, he is following what he is good at and what he loves to do.

Poetic Form

"My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning
lines 43-48

Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.Will't please you rise? We'll meet
the company below, then.


The duke is telling another person this story while they are both looking at his previous duchess' portrait. The duchess smiled a great deal every time I saw her, but how many other people did she openly smile at also? She kept smiling at other people and would not stop, then she stopped smiling altogether because she died. She looks alive in the picture. Let's go downstairs and meet the others downstairs.

The poetic form of the content helps to enhance the readers understanding of the story that is being told. In line 47, the Duke asks the person to rise and leave where they are to go meet the guests downstairs. If this was to be read in prose, all the reader would get from the Dukes' statement is that he wants to go downstairs to meet the rest of the guests. On the other hand, if it is read in its poetic form, the duke's huge transition from talking about her portrait to suddenly wanting to leave and go downstairs shows a sense of urgency. The sudden transition shows that the Duke might have told his guest a great deal to much about the situation of his previous duchess, and is now trying to urgently start a new topic to skew the other man from thinking about the situation of the previous duchess to much.

The poetic form used by Browning also alters the meaning between the prose version and the original, poetic, version. When read in prose the statement "I gave commands" could mean that the duke gave commands to her Duchess not to smile at so many people, because he was getting jealous. When read in its poetic form, it is obvious that he was getting extremely jealous and that the commands that he gave were not to her, but most likely orders to other men to have her murdered.

It is seen throughout the entire poem that the Duke was getting more and more jealous as time went on, and could not take it anymore. Such as in lines 30-34, he compares himself to others, basically saying that his presence should not be taken for granted. The duke also states the he chooses "never to stoop", saying that he would not even talk to her about his problem. This makes it more believable that he had the duchess murdered.
The duke had a problem with other people getting the same attention from the duchess that he was getting, so now he gets to control who gets to see the duchess' beautiful smile. He controls it by putting the portrait o her behind a curtain, which to me, shows a psychotic side of the duke.