Journal 3: “it may not always be so; and i say” Literary Critic

In “it may not always be so; and i say,” E.E. Commings conveys the warning a man gives to his lover about betrayal. The poem begins with speaker giving his lover a warning that if she betrays him and leaves him he wants to know. Even though he refuses to see his lover with another man in the end he realized that to see her happy he will resign his love for her. The speaker says in the first stanza “that i may go unto him, and take his hands, saying, Accept all happiness from me.” This shows that love is more than about the trust and relationship of two people but ultimately about the sacrifices one is willing to do for others. It is more painful to retain a person that does not love you than to let them go. Throughout the poem the speaker conveys the jealousy he feels to see another man touching his lover. But in the middle of the poem he resigns when he realizes that if he loves his lover, he would rather see her happy with another man, thus, he says that he is willing to give her up. Through the use of end rhyme and punctuation, E.E. Cummings is able to emphasize his message of the hostility love can create.
The end rhyme in this poem serves to emphasize keywords that convey the main idea of the poet wants to get across. For example, in the first stanza the words (say, touch, clutch, away, lay, such, overmuch, and bay) at the end of the lines reveal that the man is afraid of betrayal. The words that have a rhyme of “ay” convey that the man is nothing without her while the words with the rhyme of “uch” what he needs of her. The punctuation also contribute to the main message of the poem by setting a contrast that makes the reader think about what love can do to us. The poem only has two periods to separate everything into two ideas which are a cause and effect. The first period appear is placed after he explains his fears of losing her to another man. Before the second period, the poet reveals to his lover that he will resign to let her be happy.

Journal 3: “I carry your heart with me(I carry it in” Personal Response

E.E. Cummings coveys in this love poem that when a man finds true love, he finds a soul mate that makes his being complete and gives him courage to affront any situation in life. The description of the influence of his soul mate gives the poem an ecstatic tone. Cummings reveals the magical spell that love can cast on humans when they have found their soul mate who they believe they can spend the rest of their lives with through the use of repetition and metaphors. The speaker constantly repeats “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)” to emphasize not only the love he feels towards his beloved but to also emphasize the possession he has over her since she is part of his being. When we feel someone is part of us, we feel more obligated to take care of them because without them our existence would be meaningless. The poet further describes that the man’s life is complete with his soul mate by his side when she compares himself to the moon that cannot exist without the sun.
Obviously when a man finds the woman he loves, he wants to marry her. However, signing a paper in front of a judge and walking down the aisle of a church to a partner, does not necessarily mean that a person will be able to stay together with their soul mate for the rest of their lives. This poem explores that love is about trusting each other and caring for the other without necessarily binding each other through marriage. Today, marriage has become a mock since some do not marry for love. Celebrities opt to not marry the person they believe is their soul mate since they have come to realize the true meaning of love. For example, Brad and Angelina had a child without being marry which support the idea that love is more about the trust and passion each feel towards their. This couple did not believe that a marriage would give them knowledge that each is part of their being, when they already know that in their hearts.

Journal 2: Literary Critic “My Wicked Ways” by Sandra Cisneros

In “My Wicked Ways” Sandra Cisneros illustrates through an abstract speaker that children are innately wicked because they are receptive to their surroundings from the moment they are in the womb of the mother. The speaker of the poem is reveal in the last stanza of the poem as being a baby in a womb. This poem explains the conflicts that led to the innate wickedness of the child. In the first stanza, the narrator presents her father who uses his appearance to attract women. The second stanza reveals the life of the mother who lives a peaceful life before she meets the narrator’s father. Her father makes her mother suffer because later he started cheating on her mother. Her mother continued living in a turmoil which affected her while the daughter was in the womb.
Each stanza conveys a cause that led to conflict between the couple and ultimately affected the baby in the womb. Cisneros’ poem is in freestyle meaning that it does not have any rhyme because she chose to tell it a narrative form in order to make it seem like the story that the reader going can relate to. Cisneros purposefully changes the time of the poem, the poem starts in the past then moves into the future and then returns to the present. Towards the end of the second stanza the narrator conveys that his father will have a lover that will lead into her parents fighting and her mother conforming to the fact that her father has a love. The narrator refers to the lover of her father as “The woman, / the one my bather knows, / is not here / she does not come till later.” Cisneros emphasizes the important role the “other woman” plays in the destruction of this family so Cisneros makes the line “The woman” stand by itself. Instead of revealing that the baby in the womb is the speaker of the poem at the beginning of the poem, Cisneros chose to tell the history of the family first and then reveal the speaker to evoke sympathy from the reader. After reading about the family’s conflicts the reader feels more compel to think about who is really responsible for how the baby in the womb turns out, the parents or society.

Poetry Journal 2: Personal Response “Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins

Collins in “Forgetfulness” depicts the melancholy realization that human beings turn to nothingness when memories began to slip away. The speaker is an old person that has forgotten memories from his childhood and laments the knowledge that he is not able to retain. He relates his loss of memory and knowledge. Through the sequencing structure, the poem emphasizes that knowledge and memories take too much space in the brain that we are unable to retain everything similar to the many experiences there are in life but we can only try few because we have so little time to live in this planet, after all we are fragile and die. The slow rhythm of the sequencing of metaphors reveals the poem’s tone of desolation, which is one of the feelings that we experience when we lose the essence of what makes our existence purposeful, knowledge and memories.
Collins refers to memories as floating “away down a dark mythological river” to show that memories not just vanished but they vanished because we start to replace them with new memories that might be more important to us. This metaphor further explains that we are the current that drive memories into nothingness. In the third stanza, the author explains that we see “the quadratic equation pack its bags,” because since we began to prioritize some memories over others we push them away which is sad because later in life when we try to recall things like this we appreciate its value.
Often times when we learn in school we are taught that we have to memorize certain formulas to solve a problem. But when we go on summer vacation we replace that memorization with something that has more value to us since we don’t think that will use what we learn later on in our lives. But the truth is that those skills that we should have learn we should still remember. I have learned that learning is cumulative one skill builds on another. For solving a physics problem, I have to remember the basic algebra that I took freshman year. If one cannot recall the memories, one start to feel desperate as described in the poem because you feel like navigating through a black hole not knowing what direction to take in order to get out. Thus, without memories we are nothing since they are the foundation of ourselves.

Journal 1: Personal Response “We wear the mask”

This poem attempts to convey that everyone wears a mask for survival. The mask, a symbol for lies, acts as a shield that protects people from harm but at the same time it is a sword that can attack their own identity. Everyone at one point in their life has face the struggle of being true to oneself and being what society expects one to be based on gender, ethnicity and race. According to the poem we wear a mask for fear of not being accepted into a group and for vanity too. To the poet life is nothing but pretension since humans are so fragile to what other people may think of them. Through the literary device of assonance and metaphors the author’s ultimately conveys that since we cannot be true to ourselves then we cannot expect more from the world but lives; what you give is a reflection of what you project.
In today’s world, this poem paints the pessimistic side of what it means to live in a mainstream culture like America. We often are told that we have to be unique at home but in American culture which is influence greatly by superficialities through Hollywood we received the message that we must be what the general society accepts. This struggle creates a divided identity especially among teenagers, whom may project a different personality with friends and to the outside world than the one they have at home. Celebrities and movies influence teenagers to appear and behave in a certain way in order to be “cool.” Because American culture already has a definition of what it means to be beautiful usually, thin and blond-haired, some teenagers will go to the extreme of changing their identity, and even harming themselves, to fill that definition. In America there is a pressure to be thin that some girls have become anorexic. Wearing a mask often times makes us feel more comfortable fitting in popular culture but that may restrict us from being honest to ourselves. The poet explain that we intentionally put the mask on and we do come to feel ashamed as he describes “We smile, but, o great Christ, our cries / To thee from tortured souls arise.” Only to God we can admit our lies because at some point we come to feel guilty for the actions we take. But the shame is not as great to make people think about being their own person because the fear of harm and rejection outweigh it.

Journal 1: Personal Response “We wear the mask”

This poem attempts to convey that everyone wears a mask for survival. The mask, a symbol for lies, acts as a shield that protects people from harm but at the same time it is a sword that can attack their own identity. Everyone at one point in their life has face the struggle of being true to oneself and being what society expects one to be based on gender, ethnicity and race. According to the poem we wear a mask for fear of not being accepted into a group and for vanity too. To the poet life is nothing but pretension since humans are so fragile to what other people may think of them. Through the literary device of assonance and metaphors the author’s ultimately conveys that since we cannot be true to ourselves then we cannot expect more from the world but lives; what you give is a reflection of what you project.
In today’s world, this poem paints the pessimistic side of what it means to live in a mainstream culture like America. We often are told that we have to be unique at home but in American culture which is influence greatly by superficialities through Hollywood we received the message that we must be what the general society accepts. This struggle creates a divided identity especially among teenagers, whom may project a different personality with friends and to the outside world than the one they have at home. Celebrities and movies influence teenagers to appear and behave in a certain way in order to be “cool.” Because American culture already has a definition of what it means to be beautiful usually, thin and blond-haired, some teenagers will go to the extreme of changing their identity, and even harming themselves, to fill that definition. In America there is a pressure to be thin that some girls have become anorexic. Wearing a mask often times makes us feel more comfortable fitting in popular culture but that may restrict us from being honest to ourselves. The poet explain that we intentionally put the mask on and we do come to feel ashamed as he describes “We smile, but, o great Christ, our cries / To thee from tortured souls arise.” Only to God we can admit our lies because at some point we come to feel guilty for the actions we take. But the shame is not as great to make people think about being their own person because the fear of harm and rejection outweigh it.

Journal 1: Literary Critic “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note"

In his free verse poem, Baraka illustrates the change that we must confront in our lives through the contrast of the world a man (the speaker in the poem can also be a woman) “sees” and the reality of his life. Although the poem does not have a rhyme scheme, it has a unique structure and diction that gives the reader a hint about its purpose. From the beginning of the poem the man is defined as a victim of change. The man expresses that “the ground opens up and envelops [him]” in order to evoke sympathy in the reader and express the immensity change brings to his life. The poet has an example in a stanza followed by one line as a stanza. Since the poem starts in the poem in the past, the one line stanzas bring the reader into the present and serves to make comparisons of emotions.
Through imagery and specific examples that establish a connection with the reader, the poet is effective at conveying his message of the confrontation and acceptance of change. One of the changes that the poet conveys is death though the metaphors of the stars in the third stanza. People are the like stars in the sky because their life in this planet is temporary. Similarly, the stars constantly change positions and leave a “hole” in the sky. The man counts the “holes [the stars] leave” in the sky which can be a representation of him holding on to the people he lost to death through reminisces. Through the representation of this image in a tone of calmness, this example illustrates the acceptance of death.
In line 11 “Nobody sings anymore” the poet describes that in the present nobody has faith. Singing can be an interpretation for faith based on the image of paying followed after this line the poet explains in detailed. The poet utilizes contrast again in the last stanza where the man apparently sees her daughter praying but she is actually praying since she was on her knees with “her own clasped hands.” This rich imagery of the daughter presents the idea that as time passes people lose their faiths, however there is still hope as some, like his daughter, are faithful. This idea relates to change because up until this point the man had accepted change but he cannot accept the reality that others are losing their faith.