Poetry

 Takesha Woods

Professor Fontana

Modern English 1102-XTID

September 29, 2016

Poetry is an expression of a person’s feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm. A poem or any literary work can even tell you a lot about the author. You can see their sense of humor, sensitivity toward different topics, and even their views of life itself. The three poems I chose to summarize from Backpack Literature were “The Watch” by Frances Cornford; “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins and “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost.

        The poem, “The Watch,” is a simple poem but is very serious and sullen, and it has a lot of meaning. It is spoken in metaphor form. The speaker even compares his illness to the ticking of his watch. You can’t distinguish whether the speaker is male or female, so it is left up to the reader to decide. Since the poem is short, I am going to go line by line to give my thoughts on the meaning. “I wakened on my hot, hard bed;” The speaker is in bed, but the bed is hot, which means that the reader is sick with a fever. The bed is hard because when you are sick, your body aches, so you can feel everything that touches it. “Beneath the pillow, I could hear my little watch ticking clear;” It seems as you can actually see the speaker laying there in the bed miserable as time just ticks by. “I thought the throbbing of it went like my continual discontent;” As the watch is ticking nonstop, the speaker feels as if his or her illness is never-ending just like the ticking. “I thought it said in every tick I am so sick, so sick, so sick;” The speaker is so out it with the fever that his or her is delusional, thinking the watch is actually speaking. The last phrase “O death, come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick,” is said like a mantra and even with the beat of the watch. The speaker can no longer take the pain or the ticking of his watch and is actually talking to death like it is a person, begging and pleading for death to just take the pain; he no longer wants to live. You can look into the meanings of the poem as I have, or you can decipher it the way you think it means. To me, it was a very sad poem full of despair that left me feeling sad after I read it.

        The poem, “God’s Grandeur” is a poem that starts explaining how the world is graced with the sheer greatness of God, his strength and power. The Earth is only a provisional haven that will one day lose its fire and breakdown from the treatment of mankind. The speaker talks about how the world is an extension of God even inseparable from Him but is only temporary. Just like with my first poem, I will go line for line to try to interpret what the poem means: (Line 1) “The world is charged with the Grandeur of God;” It is said almost like a claim, like the world is surrounded with God’s beauty and vitality. (Line 2) “It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;” The speaker is stating that the world is only temporary for us all. Like a flash of light, it will diminish like how it appears in “foil” when it is shaken. (Lines 3-4) “It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed;” Just like oil reaches its peak when it is boiled, the world will rise to greatness then peak. (Lines 4-5) “Why do men then now not reck his rod?” “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;” The speaker is asking a question, why don’t people heed to the power of God, why don’t we fear God’s anger. People should take better care of the world, but instead they walked heavily on it. (Lines 6-7) “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,” “And wear’s man’s smudge and shares man’s smell;” The speaker seems disgusted, judgmental, like he doesn’t even like people, trade, industry or commerce. Trade is polluting the world. We have stained it on the surface; put our stench off on the world. The speaker is even talking like he is not a part of all the corruption; he is not a part of the human race or ashamed of being human. (Lines 7-8) “The soil is bare now, nor can foot fall, being shod;” The planet is bare now, it is so polluted that nothing will even grow in the ground.  People don’t have a connection with Mother Nature anymore. Everything is screwed up with the world. Earth is a wasteland. (Lines 9-10) “And for all this, nature is never spent;” I interpret these lines to mean that even though people have did everything possible to ruin the world, nature always have a way of bouncing back. It is never spent because God is forever renewing it. (Lines 11-12) “And though the last lights off the black west went,” “Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—“ Although the sun sets in the west and night fall, the morning always come bringing a new day with the sun rising in the east. (Lines 13-14) “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent,” “World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings;” The final lines of this poem to me is simply saying that the Holy Ghost is watching over the world through it all. I personally like this poem because I agree with what the speaker is saying.