Third World Country- Allegory

     Nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to encounter.  Not any books, maps, or lectures, just the experience I was about to gain.  I packed my bags, said my goodbyes, and left for my four year voyage to a third world country.
     When I arrived, I knew the myths about these savages were true.  They had these strange rituals, piercings, tattoos, and experimented with some dangerous things.  The leaders treated us like like slaves, working us day and night.  I just went through the motions, becoming numb inside and out.  The living conditions were harsh.  It was always too hot or too cold, from one extreme to the other.  The entire system was corrupt.  It was all a game to somebody, and we were all just the puppets.  We were turned into lifeless forms, without any will or say in anything.  After some time in this horrid country, I was becoming more and more brainwashed.  I began conforming into their society, and before I knew it, I was one of them.  To make matters even worse, death was always lurking around us.  We eventually became numb from any pain and dealt with our losses.  We also became numb from any happiness.
     As I arrived near the end of my journey, everybody has changed in someway or another.  We won't leave with as many as we first started with, but we will all leave as corrupt as the country we lived in. 

1943

1943

Donald Hall

They toughened us for war. In the high-school auditorium

Ed Monahan knocked out Dominick Esposito in the first round

of the heavyweight finals, and ten months later Dom died

in the third wave at Tarawa.  Every morning of the war

our Brock-Hall Dairy delivered milk from horse-drawn wagons

to wooden back porches in southern Connecticut. In winter,

frozen cream lifted the cardboard lids of glass bottles,

Grade A or Grade B, while marines bled to death in the surf,

or the right engine faltered into Channel silt, or troops marched

--what could we do?--with frostbitten feet as white as milk.

     Donald Hall was born in 1928, and lived throughout World War II.  His poem, 1943, was written at the end of WWII.  Although he wrote a poem about the war, Hall was did not fight in it.

     In the first stanza, Hall is describing how life was on the home front.  When he transitions to the second stanza, he shows how quickly life can change.  One day you can be having a care free time, and the next you can be fighting for your life.  In lines four through eight, Hall is back to describing life on the home front.  He is describing how every morning milk is delivered to the homes.  He then goes on to tell how soldiers are dying.  I believe Hall is trying to say that the people at home aren't sacrificing anything and still have the everyday luxuries, such as milk.  Meanwhile, soldiers are dying on the battlefield and are half frozen to death.  In the last line, he asks, what could we do? By this, Hall is acknowledging that they know there is a problem, but they don't know what they can do about it.   

My Fear

My Fear

Lawrence Raab

He follows us, he keeps track,

Each day his lists are longer,

Here, death, and here,

something like it.

Mr. Fear, we say in our dreams,

what do you have for me tonight?

And he looks through his sack,

his black sack of troubles.

Maybe he smiles when he finds

the right one. Maybe he's sorry.

Tell me, Mr. Fear,

what must I carry

away from your dream.

Make it small, please.

Let it fit in my pocket,

let it fall through

the hole in my pocket.

Fear, let me have

a small brown bat

and a purse of crickets

like the ones I heard

singing last night

out there in the stubbly field

before I slept, and met you.

     I think that everybody can relate to this poem.  My reasoning behind this is the fact that everybody has some sort of fear.  In the first stanza, Raab describes fear, but doesn't mention what it is yet.  In lines three and four, he is comparing fear to death.  In the next stanza, Raab introduces fear, but he personifies it.  Lines seven and eight are my favorite in the poem.  I took it as you don't get to choose what your afraid of, but what ever it is it's going to cause trouble.  In stanza three, he is talking about how fear feels, if he's truly dark and evil or if he feels guilty.  Stanza four is like somebody talking to fear, asking him not to give them a really big fear.  They want a fear that is small and can be hidden.  The last two stanzas I took it as a way to overcome fear.  In some Asian cultures, crickets are considered to be good luck.  If he had a bat and some good luck, he'll be able to overcome his fear and live life the way he had before fear had consumed him.

Blackberries for Amelia

Blackberries for Amelia

Richard Wilbur

Fringing the woods, the stone walls, and the lanes,

Old thickets everywhere have come alive,
Their new leaves reaching out in fans of five
From tangles overarched by this year's canes.

They have their flowers, too, it being June,
And here or there in brambled dark-and-light
Are small, five-petalled blooms of chalky white,
As random-clustered and as loosely strewn

As the far stars, of which we are now told
That ever faster do they bolt away,
And that a night may come in which, some say,
We shall have only blackness to behold.

I have no time for any change so great,
But I shall see the August weather spur
Berries to ripen where the flowers were --
Dark berries, savage-sweet and worth the wait --

And there will come the moment to be quick
And save some from the birds,and I shall need
Two pails, old clothes in which to stain and bleed,
And a grandchild to talk with while we pick.
 
     This poem has a very specific rhyme scheme of ABBA.  Every stanza follows this pattern and there are five stanzas with four lines each.
     In the first two stanzas, Wilbur is describing the blackberry bushes.  The first line is referring to them looking in different places for the blackberries.  The second through fourth lines are saying how the bushes are becoming alive and new again.  The second stanza, Wilbur is describing the flowers of the blackberry bushes. I wasn't sure what a blackberry bush looked like, so I found a picture of one and it makes the second stanza make a lot more sense.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The third stanza is where it gets a deeper meaning.  He is now talking about the stars and how someday, they might disappear.  I did a little background research on the poem, and Wilbur wrote it about his granddaughter because they picked blackberries together.  Wilbur compares the flowers to the stars in lines 8 and 9.  When he is talking about the stars disappearing, part of that is also the flowers disappearing.  I took this as someday he won't pick blackberries with his granddaughter anymore.  In the fourth stanza, Wilbur is talking about change.  Line 13 says, "I have no time for any change so great". I think he is saying he doesn't want to waste his time worrying about what could happen.  In lines 14 through 16, he's talking about how over time, the bushes change.  The flowers disappeared, but blackberries came in their place.  He is talking about how even though things changed, they changed for the better.  The last stanza is saying to live life in the moment and enjoy it to the fullest with the people you care most about. 
     I like this poem because I believe in what Wilbur was saying.  Life is better fulfilled when you aren't always worrying about the future, but instead, enjoying it in the moment. 

Wallflowers

Wallflowers

Donna Vorrey

I heard a word today I'd never heard before-

I wondered where it had been all my life.

I welcomed it, wooed it with my pen,

let it know it was loved.

They say if you use a word three times, it's yours.

What happens to ones that no one speaks?

Do they wait bitterly,

hollow-eyed orphans in Dickensian bedrooms,

longing for someone to say,

"yes, you...you're the one"?

Or do they wait patiently, shy shadows

at the high school dance,

knowing that, given the slightest chance,

someday they'll bloom?

I want to make room for all of them,

to be the Ellis Island of diction-

give me your tired, your poor,

your gegenshein, your zooanthropy-

all those words without a home,

come out and play--live in my poem.

   I really liked this poem because of it's diversity and it has a spin on the way you look at words.  It makes you think about how there is vast amount of words in existence.  In the first stanza, Vorrey is saying she learned a new word that she had never known before.  She was willing to learn it and use it.  The second stanza is about how you can make a word yours.  Even though this stanza was two lines, it was my favorite.  I especially liked the fifth line.  I took it as if you use any word at least three times, then you will make it your own.  Since the word becomes yours, you will never forget it, making you that much more smarter.  In the third and fourth stanzas, she is talking about how the words have feelings.  In the third stanza, the words have feelings of fury and vengeance but in the fourth stanza, the words have feelings of dejection and dismay.  In line 8, the "Dickensian bedrooms" Morrey was referring to the work of Charles Dickens.  He wrote books about poverty and social injustice.  By "Dickensian bedrooms", I believe Morrey was talking about orphanages and how the words don't belong to anybody.  The fourth stanza is another possibilty of how the words feel when they are waiting.  The words are more gentle and bashful.  Both the third and fourth stanzas end with a glimpse of hope for the words, but they also both end in a question mark.  The fifth, and final stanza is about how she would take all the words in.  She makes a reference to Ellis Island, but instead of taking in all the immigrants, she would make a home for all the words.  In line 18, she uses the words gegenshein and zoanthropy.  These are both words that most people never heard of or don't ever use. A gegenshein is a faint brightening of the night sky in the region of the antisolar point.  Zoanthropy is a mental disorder in which a person imagines that he or she is a beast.  I never have heard of these words until I read this poem, and after I researched what they mean, I wonder why she choose these words, beside the fact they are rarely used.  In the last line, she invites all the homeless words to live in her poem, and to have a home.  The poem is broken down into five stanzas, but there isn't a pattern in how many lines each one has.  There wasn't a rhyme scheme either in the poem.  Most of the poem has monosyllabic words.  I think Morrey did this to show how people generally use the same basic words, over and over again.  She personifies the words in the poem.  She gave them feelings, and acted if they were really orphans waiting for a place to belong.