O World! O Life! O Time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more -Oh, never more!
 
Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight:
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more -Oh, never more!
 
Poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley

A Lament at first made me think of oh poor me poor me!  He may have been thinking that while he was writing it but he sure gave it a poetic flair.  There are two stanzas both containing five lines.  I like this congruity because when looking at the poem its like you looking at one side of the mirror and the other.   The lines even almost perfectly match in legth with the corresponding other side of the poem.  All the lines match in iambic pentamiter except the third lines.  In the first stanza it is ten and in the second stanza on line three it is nine.  The first lines in both stanzas have six syllables, the second six, the third off, the fourth have ten, and the last have six.  I wonder why only the third lines are not matching?  Maybe Percy believes what the Native Americans believed when they were making a piece of art work.  The Native Americans would make one mistake because they thought the soul of the piece could not escape if it was pefect.  Maybe Percy believes they same thing happens to his poems, that the soul, the essence of his poem will be trapped if he does not make one little mistake.  Another interesting thing about this work is the rhyme scheme.  It follows a, a, b, a, b in both stanzas, I have never before seen a poem follow quite that pattern where the one a line gets repeated three times instead of the usual two. 

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
 
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
 
High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river;
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.
 
He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.
 
"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sat by the river)
"The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed."
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
 
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
 
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain -
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.

I was curious who the great God Pan was so I looked it up on the internet.  Pan was from the Greek religion and he was the god of sheperds and flocks.  He inhabited the wild mountains and he hunted and listened to rustic music.  His name comes from the word paein, probably latin.  It means meaning to pasture.  He is not a man but has hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat.  You could say that he looks like a faun.  He is widely recognized as god of the fields, groves and wooded glens.  Because of this Pan has a lot to do with fertility, and the season spring.  Pan is also in Roman mythology, his counterpart was Faunus.  This was a nature spirtit who was the father of Fauna.  In the 18^th and 19^th centuries Pan was really ingrained and was a signigicant figure in the romantic movement in western europe. 

The great god pan is also a novella by Arthur Machen.  He is obviously a character to be involved in so many books and poems.

One Day I wrote her Name

~

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

Vain man, said she, that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize!
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eek my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so (quoth I), let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name;
Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.

This poem is made up of two stanzas.  The first stanza is only four lines long, but the second is ten.  That makes a grand total of fourteen lines.  Every line in the poem is capatilized.  The author uses commas, colins, periods, exclamation markes and parenthesis.  I can tell this poem is old by the words used.  Like quoth, whenas, dust.  I can tell the first two are really old because Word does not even recognize the words and thinks they are misspelled.  Other words I like are assay, decay, eternize, subdue and prey.  They really give the  poem an extra push that makes it really good in my opionion.  The poem does follow a rhyme scheme, it is, abab in the first stanza and ababababab.  The last two lines do not have two more lines to make them partner up like the first eight lines do.  This poem is a love poem, but I did not really realize that totally until the last line where it actually uses that word love, Close reading it a second time showed that there were many other clues to it being a love poem.

Love is Enough

Love is enough: though the world be a-waning,
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Though the skies be too dark for dim eyes to discover
The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder,
Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder,
And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over,
Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter:
The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter
These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.

Poems about love are usually corny.  It’s really cool to come upon a love poem that can include ryhme scheme and be about love, and still not be corny.  The ryhme scheme here is, abcb except for the first two lines and the last line.  I have to wonder if maybe William felt this way about someone else?  If he did he was one lucky guy.  William uses a wide variety of punctuation in his poem like the semi colon, coma, period, hyphen.  Every line is headed with a capitalized letter and they are all almost all the same length.  William does not talk about the lover’s themselves until the last couple of lines.  Everything else in this poem is negative besides the lovers love.  It’s like it’s the only pure thing left in a dark dank world.  This gives rise to the old cliché of good verses evil, love verses evil.  Even in the face of these odds the lovers still stand together not a tremble to be seen, steady in their love and courage.

I think that I read this poem in 9th grade or something like that. It’s a really cool poem, about love and what you do for love. The father of the boy gets his splinter out, and when the boy is grown up and marries he gets the splinter out of his wife’s palm as well.
There is an undercurrent to this poem that gets to me. It’s like I can feel how much the boy is tied to his father and wife through the simple act of extracting a splinter. But that is the case with love I guess, you can tell through the simple actions how much someone cares for you. Like remembering your favorite chocolate bar, or bringing you a sucker after lunch.
Li-Young-Lee made a poem about love without making it cliché. He did not use gooey words to show his feelings He simply described a little thing that was did for him and he did for someone else.
This poem has four stanzas of free verse. There does not seem to be any pattern to it. The first one has five lines. The second line has eight. The third has seven. The last stanza has fifteen lines. The last stanza has the most words and lines. Why? Maybe they are saving the best for last? Also in this stanza it’s the only place where the author uses italics. Maybe it’s what the speaker of the poem is saying in his head and not his wife, what he is thinking.

This poem was not what I was expecting.  It did talk about toads, but not as much as I thought it would.  It used toads as a metaphor of something gross and hunkered down in your soul.  When I think of toads I think cute.  I think toads are the cutest things cuz they are short and fat, and to me very loveable.  They are also good for the garden.  They eat bad bugs like grasshoppers, and burrow in your soil so that means that air will be able to get in there.  This last summer my mom had the biggest grasshopper problem, I kept finding toads at the pool i worked at so I brought them home to her and we put them in her garden.  The more we had the less grasshoppers we had until at the end of the summer there were toads hopping everywhere and not a grass hopper to be seen.  This made my mom very happy, and i was thinking about buying her toads at the begginning of next years summer. 

I watched Pan’s labrinth a while back.  And one of the tasks she had to do was retreive a key from a really big toad.  I can’t remember if the toad exploded or not but she did get the key back.  That toad was very big and ugly and fit the discription in the poem to the T.  I also thought of wind in the willows when I read this book, because it had alot of animal characters.

            In the poem James fenton introduces something that should be good, then in the last two lines of the four line stanza changes it so it is not good anymore.  It makes sense cuz his poem is called the possibility, so I guess there are possibilities in life for every little thing to turn out not like you thought it would.  To think on the bright side though, that could mean a potentially bad thing could turn out good.  Like being too full at breakfast, but not having enough time to eat lunch so you have to skip it.  That’s not fun lol.  Or being really tired from working hard, then getting the best sleep you have had in a long time.  Or having a really annoying cat that always follows you around, but then when you have a bad day, he is there for you. 

            I also like how Fenton used animals and plants and flowers in his work. I like nature as a lot of people do, and I like to read about it also. 

            This poem is not a sonnet because it has five four stanza lines instead of three quatrains and a couplet.  I also enjoyed writing our couplet for school.  It was cool cuz we had a specific structure.  That’s kind of sad to say when writing a poem cuz you’re supposed to have a lot of creativity when writing a poem. Oh well I guess. All in all I like this poem and I like this choice of the other poems.  

William Butler Yeats wrote The Coming of Wisdom with Time.  It is a very short poem, only four lines.  But this made me think that these four lines must have been extra special to him, they must have been extra powerful. The first line … “though leaves are many the roots are one…” this made me think of a huge maple tree with many, many leaves.  That even thought it covers a huge expanse it still came from the same place.  That could be translated to many different areas in life.  For example mushrooms… there can be thousands of mushrooms in one field but all of them could quite possibly have one major root in common.  Or the grass we have in our front yard, it’s called Bermuda grass and it is almost impossible to get rid of, because it shares a common root system.  Or even people today… there are so many different kinds all spread out about the world, but could have quite possibly came from the same ancestor and just changed in their different places and times.

“Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; now I may wither into the truth.”  These last three lines make me picture in my head a young strong sapling tree swaying in the wind without a care in the world.  Just like humans do in their teen years… just getting from one day to the next not really thinking of much else then their selves.  Then the time comes when we all have to grow up and acknowledge and wither or cringe in the truth.  That life may not always be fun and games, but that does not mean that life can no longer be enjoyable, just means is could get a little difficult, but that could be the time in your life when you can show everyone and shine.

            This poem, I think was written about Chinese women.  The bonsai tree was used as a metaphor to how Chinese women are pruned right from birth to become something that their people want them to be, they can never truly be themselves unless they do so in private.  Clues that this poem was about Chinese women was the line where they talk about binding feet.  The Chinese culture is the only culture that I know of that does that to their women.  From wat I know they don’t do that any more.  The ancient tradition was that small petite feet are beautiful.  So the Chinese would start from child hood and bind their children’s feet.  This is a very painful process and it is very disfiguring.  It reminds me of western and European women wearing corsets.  It also could deform and break ribs if worn tight enough.  Today people don’t usually use restraining clothing, but that image to be thin is still very popular.

            I can also connect this to the book we just read in AP … the Awakening.  In that book Edna was also bound by society’s view on what a perfect woman should be.  Also in this book she breaks away and becomes an independent woman.  She becomes the opposite of what society wants her to be and loves it.  Her true inner person shines.  There are downfalls to this, she totally disrupts her home like.  She abandons her husband children and household, and becomes very selfish.  It’s sad in a way that she became so into herself.  It’s too bad that there cannot be a fine balance between society and women’s rights.