What is Faith?

     As we were discussing in class the questions raised regarding Cormac McCarthy's "The Sunset Limited," Jared brought up the question, "What is faith, really?" I think this is an underlying point in the film. The "black" character has his faith in God, and in humanity as whole, while the "white" character has no faith in God, no faith in humanity or really anything. It is a sharp contrast, but what does it mean to have faith? Is it simply to believe in something that you can't see, or does it go deeper to the point where you can feel what you believe in; that it resonates inside you? Do you need evidence to support your faith, or is it blind? I think faith can go outside the realm of religion. You can have "faith" that you will have a good day today. However, if you plan to go to a funeral chances are you want, but if you're going to a concert the evidence is there that you will. The evidence is on the white character's side, but maybe you don't need evidence at all. Faith is a strong theme throughout this story.

Two Lines

     Throughout our study of poetry over these past several weeks we have encountered many different poems. There are two that we've encountered which are so short that they are made up of only two lines. David Ferry's "At the Hospital" and Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" are both great poems, and they show that a lot can be said by only saying few words.

     In David Ferry's "At the Hospital," the speaker says, "She was the sentence the cancer spoke at last, / Its blurred grammar finally clarified." That is the extent of the poem, and despite it being so short it still holds a lot of meaning and resonates with the reader. The word cancer alone can hook the reader in a way that other words can't, and tone of the poem can almost send chill down your spine. The comparison of cancer and this person's life to a sentence is an odd metaphor, but it works. You can see that once the sentence ends, the person loses her life to the cancer. The "grammar" is clarified, as before it was uncertain if this person would beat the cancer or not.

     In Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," the speaker states, "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough." The speaker is sitting in a metro station, seeing hundreds of people passing by and living out their daily lives. It makes you think of all the people in the world and the lives they lead, which to them are the most important thing in the world. But by comparing them to petals it is implied how fragile they all are, and how insignificant their existence is in the overall scheme of humanity. The only thing that kept me from writing my paper on either of these poems is simply the length, but they are still powerful poems.

Those Winter Sundays

     I will be writing my essay on Robert Hayden's 1966 poem, "Those Winter Sundays." I think it is a great poem that holds a lot of meaning in just 3 short stanzas. It paints the picture of a loving father, and how some kind gestures go unnoticed, but yet it is those little things that mean so much. I plan to prove this point through the setting, time, language, tone, and even the meter of the poem.

Essay on Baby Villon

     What you gather initially from reading Philip Levine's poem, "Baby Villon," is that the speaker has an encounter with his cousin who has lost his father and brother. There was a war in North Africa and then some commotion happens in a bakery, and that's really all you get at face value. The poem only gives you a vague idea of what is going on, but by taking a closer look at the setting and context you can conjure up a meaning to what the speaker is trying to say.

     When you analyze the first stanza, that this person is robbed in different cities because he's white, black, jewish, or arab. He is probably middle eastern and his skin tone is judged differently based on where he is at. You get the sense that he is highly discriminated against. In the third stanza it is revealed that this person is the cousin of the speaker and they talk about family and the war in North Africa. The cousin eludes to the death of his father and brother right after the mention of war, and I believe that all three of the family member had fought in it. 

     At the beginning of the fourth stanza, a setting is introduced, and this is important within the context of the poem. Lines 13-15 read, " The windows of the bakery smashed and the fresh bread / Dusted with glass, the warm smell of rye / So strong he ate till his mouth filled with blood." The two are in a bakery, having a conversation about war, family, and discrimination, and at that very moment the bakery is suddenly attacked. An act of terrorism has occurred, and the cousin is shot while eating his rye sandwich. The smell of the bakery gets mixed with the smell of blood from those shot and killed. The setting shows that even in a place as normal and care-free as a bakery, this family is not safe in their surroundings. 

     In the last stanzas you get the sense that the cousin has indeed been shot and is in his final few moments of life. The speaker says in lines 24-28, " Stiff, 116 pounds, five feet two, / No bigger than a girl, he holds my shoulders, / Kisses my lips, his eyes still open, / My imaginary brother, my cousin, / Myself made otherwise by all his pain." When the speaker describes his cousins height and weight, you get the sense that he has not even fully grown, perhaps still a minor, making his death even more tragic. The speaker refers to him as his "imaginary brother" to emphasize their closeness. 

      I think this poem is significant because it shows how prevalent war and discrimination is in the middle east, and the hardships faced by those who live there. The cousin was probably not even an adult yet, and he was already fighting wars and killed because if the conflict. It shows that racism still plays a factor in society, and that in the middle east nowhere is safe, not even a bakery.

Works Cited

Levine, Philip. "Baby Villon."

One flew over Hard Rock

     

      I read Etheridge Knight's poem "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane" the other day and as I was reading it I couldn't help but compare to a movie I saw last year, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In both the movie and the poem there is a character who does things his own way and fights strongly for his rights. Other inmates look up to them, but ultimately they receive a lobotomy and are no longer the person they once were. Jack Nicholson portrayed the main character in the film, and I just picture him as Hard Rock in a way when I read the poem. In the last stanza, You can feel the heartbreak as Knight's speaker and other inmates realize that something terrible was done to Hard Rock and he was no longer the same person. The speaker says, "And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his name, We told ourselves that he had just wised up, Was being cool, but we could not fool ourselves for long, And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed (480)." Even in the single word, "crushed," you can feel the heartbreak. I'm glad I had seen the film to make the correlation; both characters have this anti-hero quality, to where you may not approve of their attitude, but you feel sympathy for the people who believed in them.

Let me count the ways...

     I enjoyed reading the poem How do I love thee by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. To me it really encompassed the number of ways love can make you feel, and all the feelings you get about the person you love. When I read the first line of the poem, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," I felt like I had heard that phrase before. I can't remember if it was lyrics to a song, or perhaps it was just this poem I might have heard about before, but some reason Love Me Tender by Elvis Presley popped into my mind, and I heard the song as background music in my head as I read the poem. There's no lyrics in the song that match the poem, but the subject matter is very similar and the connection just stands out.

     Browning goes on throughout the poem describing how much her love for this person means to her, comparing it to other loves of hers. She writes, "I love thee to the level of every day's" as if to says she loves this person as much as life itself. She continues, "I love thee with the passion put to use," saying she is in love with this person as much as she is with her passions in life. We've all been there at one extent or another and can relate to how love can make us feel all these things. In the last lines she says, "and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death." It puts in perspective that love can even be greater than life itself.

The Yellow Wallpaper in an insane asylum?

   

     Yesterday in class we discussed Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." We shot out topics for the basis of a good paper on the story, encompassing perception VS reality. Everything we discussed were valid arguments, but what Jared, whom we picked to elaborate on his chosen thesis, actually wanted to write on was how he felt everything the narrator experienced was in her head and suffered from sever schizophrenia. Having never taken any psychology courses before and knowing little about the field, I had to look the word up at thefreedictionary.com, which defined it as "a psychotic disorder (or group of disorders) marked by severely impaired thinking, emotions, and behaviors."
     With this knowledge I look back to when I read the story, and I get the same vibe from it. I don't go as far as Jared did in claiming that the whole story is simply an hallucination, but it's as if what the narrator is experiencing is a reality that has happened in the past and she is re-playing it back in her mind. I think she is now in a mental institution, possibly in a room with yellow wallpaper, and it triggers the memory of of the wallpaper from the house that caused her to lose it. On page 325 in our text, she describes a woman she thinks she sees through the wallpaper and out in the daylight, saying, "I think that woman gets out in the daytime! And I'll tell you why-privately-I've seen her!" I believe the "woman" is actually her, and she gets out in the daytime because she is not allowed to be out at night, due to being confined in a mental institution. I'm not sure if this was Gilman's intent, but she was very against the rest theory medical practice of the day. The narrator was subscribed to this treatment, and what better way to show its flaws than to have her ultimately imprisoned in an insane asylum?