tone

as i lay on the field field with the pain coarsing throught my leg i couldnt help but feel despair instead of the pain. the pain in my knee was gone and now it was replaced with a throbbing in my soul...will i ever play again? will i be able to play the game i love? the depression that followed my surgery was enveloping me and i couldnt get out, but whatever kills u makes u stronger right? yes. i did become stronger, in my mind and soul.

those winter sundays

those winter sundayse by robert hayden was an interesting piece. it was between that and reading habits, and reading habits was way too weird for my taste. in this poem by robert hayden there are no real symbols, no mysticism, no hidden truths. this poem is simply about an event, or better yet, a simingly reoccuring event that happened in haydens life a lot it seems.

in the poem hayden talks about his father and how he has been weathered down by the hard work and labor that he has had to endure in his life and how no one seems to thank him. it is quite funny how a provider of life and comfort through swet and blood gets absolutely no thanks. it unfortunately reminds me of my father and how no one would really give him any thanks eventhough he worked a really hard job, and how the job seemed to ice him over like the characters father.

the character talks about speaking indifferntly to his father, which i have been guilty of...i try not to, but in my case its difference so i feel no pity for the father in this poem and how his child is indifferent, he probably the deserves the indifference.

Delicious Earth

The earth that we drill with our steel,
The crust that bends at our will.
Mining for the rich rewards at the center,
recieving every precious gem we get.
The hot coals in our mouth,
the delicious clouds that compliment them.

vergissmeinnight....

this poem by keith douglas was extremely intriguing. i started to read it and i was immediately hooked into it. it is about a dead soldier of course but instead of it being about death or about the battle that he was in or even about how he died, this poem is more about what happens after his death and what kind of happened before his death, and all of this coming from the point of view of another soldier, im assuming of course.

i like how he describes the man, and how his gun is frowning and overshadowing, so it exhibits sadness because of what it has done, and it is overshadowing because it probably is more important than the carrier of that gun. he then describes the gun and says that it hit his take with one like an entry of a demon. violent and hard, like a bullet. then he says the picture of the girl is dishonored, possibly because he is dead? he states they see him with content and she will cry because he has died, because the "lover and killer are mingled who had one body and one heart." this states that the dead soldier is a kind of monster because he is a lover and a killer....very lovely poem.

curiosity!

my gosh this poem was amazing!!! i loved this poem so much! i read this poem and immediately saw the correlation between the dogs and the cats. the writing was brilliant.

Alastair Reid writes about cats and these cats are people, but these people are the kinds of people that are worry free, they are carefree, and they hold little to no responsibility for anything. he states that the cats love too much theyre irresponsible are changeable and unloyal unlike a dog who is tame and loyal. the author then goes on to say that cats are doing whats right, to be curious and untame is worth the pain and the "hell" that they come back from, because these cats then have stories worth telling.

my favorite part of the poem is when he states that cats are willing to pay the price of dying and dying again so that they can live full and curious lives. Chilling.

freebee

this is the one im talking off mrs. white....due to ap. bio.haha

my nights

i have been acquainted with the night many times. i love the night, the sme?? how it tastes everything is so much different when the sun goes down...it is ridiculous. it is when i come alive and when i see clearly, but dont act as such.

robert frost is an author we have all been reading since we were all young and we all have forgotten about his great poetry. he describes the night in such a way that it personifies it. the watchman is a part of the person that is the night, the rain, the clock, all of these things gaing so much more significance in the night time because they belong more to the night than the day. the clock for instance, might not be noticed so much in the day, but at night it illuminates the sky and cant help but be noticed.

he describes the utter silence that i so love. he says he stops the sound sound of feet making it utterly quiet and this quiet comforts me. i know this quiet. and we notice things that we might not have during the day, like the interrupted scream that rang through the night.

i love this poem

withering, and wisdom

its an odd thing that someone would honestly refer to themselves as a dying tree. i know why he did it. in the poem "the coming of wisdom with time," the author, William Yeats refers to himself as a tree with many leaves and he was waving them but he had no roots. these leavesn were lies, because in the second line he refers to his youth and all of htis lying and how he swayed his leaves, which could be a metaphor for him lying. he then goes on to say that he will wither into the truth...so as he gets older his roots get deeper, which means he gains more wisdom, but he is getting older, or whithering, so its quite the double edged sword. i really enjoy this metaphor for knowledge gain!

America

when it comes to America there are many different point of views on the subject of liberty and our ablility to express our freedoms.

We just got done reading two different poems from two very different point of views. One was from the point of view of a of a white man whose last name was Whitman...haha and the other poem was written by Langston Hughes, a very famous and intricate african american writer.

The first poem, by Walt Whitman, is written in a way which evokes a free and vibrant spirit when it comes to regards to America, where men are singing in every which way to the freedoms which they all possess. They are all proud and light hearted to be Americans where all of their dreams are layed out in front of them and just within their reach.

The second poem is not so liberating. Langston comes from the point of view of a slave, or a slave type. A person who doesnt get all of the freedoms that were possessed by the white man, the freedoms which make America a great place. He states that he is a "dark brother," a man that they send to the back of the house when there are people over, a man who does all of the work but reaps no benefits. Where is the freedom and light heartedness in this man? There is none, but where there is no light heartedness there is a determination that will go unmatched. Hughes states that he will not be hidden from company, but will sit with all of the company, and the people who snuffed him before will not be able to say a word to him, because he is America too.

hollow men. no such thing

It is quite interesting how he refers to men as hollow....when in fact we are full of things. some of these things are good, and others are bad, but no, we are not hollow.

The darkness within man is immense and our lives are simply games, games of balancing and we are all balancing good and evil. Our lives are filled with temptations to do evil and even temptations to do good, and we all stuggle with doing the right and the wrong things, because we are all human. Human beings are filled with hopes and dreams, terrors and hauntings, we are filled with evil thoughts that are kept in check by good thoughts. This is what makes us human not animal. Sometimes people are more in touch with the bad side, they are more in touch with the impulsive and supposedly repulsive side, but these people are no different from everyone else not at all.

None of us are hollow, some of us are just filled more with evil, and not good.

To who?

This was a very interesting poem. I didnt understand it the first three times i read it, but i was persistent in that i wanted to know what it meant, or atleast come to a conclusion about what i thought it meant.

After the third time that i read it i decided to take a different approach to reading it; instead of reading it and pausing where i thought i should pause, i just read it straight through without pausing, which is how i think that the author intended for it to be read.

As i read it i applied the title to all of the lines, i applied to to how i would talk to myself if i were to write a poem to myself. It all started to make perfect sense. For example, when the author states that he is not last when he doesnt find himself, it makes perfect sense, because no matter how lost you think you are, you always find yourself, and you will always be there. The true you i mean. Then he refers to times when he could have sworn he remembered himself long ago, but that he could remember seeing himself just a moment ago. I can relate to this all the time because i remember how i was, and then i will catch a glimpse of the old me, or true me in instances that are close to the present time.

This whole entire poem is about losing oneself but that person is always there, that person just needs to be looked for and you will find it. The true you is never gone, but sometimes that person just gets burried under a bunch of crap, and lies, and bad things that are not the true person that one intends to be.

what does a halo have to do with anything?

I have pondered over this poem for a while now and i have thought and came to several conclusions on what it might be about. I still cannot figure out what it could possibly be about, but then i realized that it doesnt matter if u know exactly what its about just as long as u have some thought about it, its ok!

The poem is "The Halo That Would Not Light" by Lucie Brock-Broido, and it sounds like one giant metaphor. She starts out by placing this person into the mouth of a bird, a raptor, and says that the person is dropped...into a carriage...i got the picture of a child being dropped into a carriage and as soon as he or she was in it he or she became an adult. As the poem gors on she refers to the person as a childs cardboard box...maybe a metaphor for becoming dull? I say this because then right after she states something about swings being empty and the catastrophe of childhood being done...so the person is done with childhood imagination and is now as plain as a childs cardboard box.... I just talked myself through what i think the poem is about...weird.

Mrs. White! this is the one i forgot to do on the date of 9/5/10

"Beginning Again"

I get this poem.

OMYGOSH I GET IT!

it is so clear to me.

The narrator, whoever it may be, is talking about beginning again, and he begs the question on why he should begin again. He refers to a teacher figure who has sat in a room of no mirrors, but where everything is a mirror...everything is a reflection of oneself.

The teacher has said that the man must sit there with the mountain until only the mountain remains, until the man no longer exists but only the mountain, so that the man becomes a direct reflection of that mountain.

this all pertains to the budhist way of thinking where all things are tied into eachother where we are all one and so as along as we know this and see ourselves as the world, and a mirror of the world then we can truly be at peace. We all interact with eachother and with all things....

I cant believe i got this poem...i pondered over it for so long!

Review of Still Memory

This poem was really straight forward. It was just a recollection of how a habit started. maybe it was a recollection of how the author started to get in to poetry.

She awoke from a dream, where maybe her dad and mother had died because one of the first things she says in the third stanza is that her dad is not dead he is just returning from the graveyard shift, which is a slight play on words because she just reffered to death and then used the word "graveyard shift" in the same sentence.

Then she refers to her mom in the kitchen and how everything is waking up in the world around her and how her sister is walking across the cold floor so it shows that she is waking out of a dream and into reality.

i am still quite confused on why she said that her parents are not yet cremated in the second to last stanza...this poem is quite puzzling....

She is quite descriptive in just a short amount of time and it is really impactful. It allows the reader to really get an image in his or her brain about what her house is like and what is going on in her house. For instance when she describes the coffees strong arroma and the fact that her mother is rummaging through the silver...makes me feel like it is my home.

What Fear?

It's an odd thing that people give human like substance to abstract things. In the Poem "My Fear," by Lawrence Raab fear takes on a human form, it is touchable, seeable, tasteable. It is quite odd, I have never thought of something like fear or death as something human, but more like another entity outside of humanity. It is a power, more like a force of nature. It causes people to do incredible and stupid things to eachother and to the world.

Raab gives little signs of significant things. For instance, when he calls fear "Mr." it signifies that he respects fear and that he wouldnt want to provoke it because in the next few lines in stanza 3 he asks what he must carry form fear and that he wonders if "he" is sorry for giving Raab those troubles. He is begging fear to give him a light burden so that he will not be so afraid...this is so interesting.

In the last stanza in the last line he wishes that fear would give him small fears like the crickets outside that he heard before he went to bed and met "Him." This is so dark; if he falls asleep he is met on the otherside by fear....

The Kite That Crashed...Then Soared

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini...what a great book. I loved it. It could've been because i also watched the movie so i kind of had a visual to go off of the whole time and i kinda knew what was coming but the book also offered a lot more than the movie...a more vivid discription that allowed me to really get inside the writers head and understand what he was really thinking about when all of these things were going on in his life.

As i read the book i annotated by relating to the book, and relating it to other things like in the world or to other texts.

I dont really think i liked this annotating very much...i didnt really see the purpose in doing this. As i annotated i realized that the author had similarities to my life but in all it didnt really help...OOOOHHHH! IT DID HELP! haha It did help because right when i was saying that i was remembering things that took place in the book because i refreshed my life and while that happened aspects of the authors life accomponied it. Ok ok ok it does work, but not for everything. For example, when i was trying to relate it to things other than myself i couldnt make very many connections and this frustrated me. I made almost all of the connections to myself and im wondering if that is a bad thing or not because you said that it should be to other texts and to the world.... I wonder if different kinds of books use different ones, like a science book would use more of text to world and maybe a poem book would use more text to text...i will definitely have to explore those options because i only really used text to self.

This book made me the most sad out of the three...because the whole entire time i could just envision these two little kids who had to endure all of these things...but especially Hassan. The poor kid didnt have a good life right out of the whomb...yet out of all of the characters in the book he was the most happy, and what baffles me the most is that this really happened and that makes it even harder to comprehend why he was so happy all the time. I liked that about him though because everyone needs a friend like that, one who can always lighten the mood and knows what to say and how to say it. Amir didnt deserve a friend like that i dont think. Amir never stood up for him and when Hassan needed him most he fled like the coward he was. Poor Hassan didnt need to go through that.... GOSH THAT MADE ME SO PISSED!!!! Im still pissed.

Assef was the perfect shot of the devil and the fact that they met later in life really emphasises his devilish qualities in Amir's life. I hated Assef he had a great life and he had no reason to do the sort of things that he did. I mean usually the kids that turn out to be sociopaths are the ones that had a lot of problems, but he just...was. Thats it, he just was a sociopath, no reason and no excuse. That is the worst.

This book showed the perfect balance of good and evil, and i think had the greatest lesson out of all of the three books. It really showed me that everyone can get a second chance and when you get the oppurtunity to take that second chance, that you need to pounce on it and not let it slip away from you. I havent pounced enough, and i need to start, cause like Amir changed Hassans son's life, i could change someone else's.

The Not So Dark Darkness

As i read The Heart of Darkness I seem to find the subtle dark tendencies that Jospeh Conrad is trying to convey to his reader. Through the use of conspiracy and lies Joseph Conrad seems to show that perhaps the savages are bathed in white, and are not lurking in the shadows of the vast jungle that is the continent they are so vehemently trying to civilize. It is the white man that needs to learn to become civilized.

As i read through this fascinating book i annotated it for its style, which is essentially performing a rhetorical analysis of the writer. As i read i started to realize that his diction is quite distinct and that what kept popping out to me was the fact that he was very syncapated in his riding. The whole entire time i read it felt like the lines had a bounce to them in my head, and this really helped me to remember very important happenings in the book and set a very distinct pace for the book overall. I really liked how he was able to set the pace for the reader and i wanted to know how did that and i came to realize that the way in which he did this was the use of commas and prepositional phrasing that was broken up by interrupting clauses and speech. I want to learn how to apply this strategy in my writing so that i can try to set the pace for readers who may come across something i might compose.

One the thing that i didnt like was how the plot was told. The whole entire time the main character was the Captain of the ship in the present day, and he was telling the story of him going to a continent where they were gathering ivory and trying to explore the uncharted places of that continent. All the while i was trying to figure out what the people listening to the story in the book were thinking and i couldnt stay concentrated because the whole time i was thinking about the fact that maybe this guy isnt even the main character that the Captain who was telling the story should be a secondary character but no he kept on telling the story and telling the story.

I felt like one of his crew who had to sit there and listen to this story...even i started to fall asleep.

The reason why i started to lose my interest was because i already figured out the message that Joseph Conrad was trying to send so i figured the rest of the story couldnt be that important. I stopped looking for the important message throughout the rest of the book so it all kind of started to blur for me and i had to go back and re-read certain areas because i just started reading the words and not the story.

All in all i think that this book had a pretty good message about the darkness that is in all hearts and the deceit that can overtake all of us, while he contrasted it with the "savages" who were really the most civilized in the whole book.

It makes me wonder...did the white man turn "savages" into the savages they wanted them to be...?

The Record Keeper

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was extremely intriguing. I am the type of person who enjoys studying people and their slight mannerisms and this book was the epitome of what i like to call "people watching;" Nick, the narrator, describes and observes the characters within the book almost exactly as i would.

The complex story has so much to offer the over analytical mind, which I possess. The characters are all intertwined and mingle into eachothers lives in ways that one wouldnt really expect. As the story unfolds one can see the way that Fitzgerald wanted to convey the characters, and how every single one of them had a darker more sinister side to them.

I find Gatsby to be the most interesting character out of all of the others, because his motives are all for himself. He is continually fueling himself and others believe he is such a selfless man because he shares his wealth and throws all of these extravagant parties but when it comes down to it they are all to benefit him, no one else. All of the parties are for daisy. Tom is my least favorite. Tom is a controlling man...a man who thinks that he can mold every aspect of the world around him and that bugs me a lot. Also the fact that he doesnt recognize that he has a catch right in front of him in Daisy makes me want to punch him in the face.

Now for the annotating. As i annotated this book it really made me think about what is important in the book. I annotated this book in order to make a trail. I highlighted all of the important events in the book and all of the significant aspects that i recognized in the plot. For example i always highlighted the places where pieces of Gatsby's life were revealed and where aspects of his life were questioned. The reason why i did this was in order to compare the lore of his life to what is supposedly real so i could decide whether something was true or not. Another reason i created a trail was because sometimes the plot and characters got too vast so i could go back and reference places in oder to establish plot direction and what certain character's significance was, such as Mr. Wilson and his wife Myrtle. I had to keep refering back to them because I got confused with how they were related to the story. Then when I realized just how important they are i felt like an idiot. So the annotating really helped a lot in that aspect, and I never really thought that annotating would help all that much but since i was kinda forced to I've realized that it helps quite a bit.

The irony at the end was probably my favorite part of the whole book.... The fact that Gatsby only really lived for himself was shown loud and clear at the end. No one showed for his funeral and the fact that he was killed by mistake also showed some irony. It should have been tom, but because Gatsby tried to steal the life of Daisy in order to make his life better his life, in turn, was stolen.