The Joy of Cooking

The tone of this poem helps to characterize the figurative language. Harsh language is used such as "scrubbed," "skinned," "carved," "firm and dry," and "sour". This bitter tones describes the speaker's true feelings of her brother and sister. The tongue of the sister represents how she constantly talks or tells secrets. The heart of the brother represents his cold, sour, and bitter heart. The speaker uses this tone throughout the poem to show her hostility towards her brother and sister. She wishes to get rid of her sister's tongue and her brother's heart, metaphorically. The figurative language is brought about due to the bitter tone.

I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain...again

This poem really irritated me and intruiged me all at once. What irritated me is that I could not figure out what it was about! While we should be focusing on imagery and literary skills (which I did, I promise), I couldn't help but wonder what this poem was about. At first, I thought it was about a headache. Now that I read it more thoughtfully, I wonder why I even thought that? Even though the imagery proves that it is happening inside the brain, I wasn't exactly right. The diction used leads me to believe the speaker is going insane. What I love about this poem is the metaphor that it's a funeral in his or her brain. The diction futher makes the metaphor more interesting and deep.

London

This poem by William Blake was one I really enjoyed interpreting and figuring out. What stood out to me was the repetition of "every cry" in the first two stanzas. It really had a tone of distress and mourning. The third and fourth stanzas were important in the fact it told you what the poem was about. The third stanza places blame on two parts of society: royalty and the Church. Both have pushed away the ordinary in society or the soldiers. The fourth paragraph has a tone of sympathy. Specifically, the speaker is sympathetic towards "harlots" and infants who tear apart marriages. What I love about this poem is that once you read the fourth stanza, you have to connect it back to the third in order to decipher what is really to blame in this society.

The Convergence of the Twain

What struck me the most from this poem is the rhythm and pattern. Rhythm is the fluctuation of voice using stressed and unstressed syllables. However, each word at the end of each line in a stanza rhymes. For example, in the first stanza, the words "sea," "vanity," and "she" all rhyme. This truly allows the reader to follow the poems rhythm because the rhyming words give it a flow and a voice that is easy to catch onto. The structure also includes stanzas of three lines. Without the use of the rhyming, the poem wouldn't flow as well due to the number of syllables in each line. The division of the stanzas also contribute to the easy flow of the poem.

Spring

In this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a specific alliteration jumped out at me. He  uses the letters "w" and "l" to do this. "When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush." This alliteration uses two consonants to really slow down the reader while reading this part of the poem. He does this particularly to emphasize the imagery he's using within the alliteration. "Long and lovely and lush," is strong imagery. It shows us the visual detail of the weeds during the spring. Without the alliteration, the reader could miss the importance of the imagery. It's significant because his poem about spring really connects to how we see, feel, and hear spring.

I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain

Although this whole chapter is about imagery, this poem has specific qualities. While reading through this poem by Emily Dickinson, you'd notice that there is no imagery that connects to sight. It uses strong hearing and feeling imagery. For example, drums beating and heaven's bells are used for sound. "My mind was going numb--" applies to imagery connected to feeling. There is importance that there is no imagery for sight. Because this is something happening inside the speaker's mind, there's no sight. Simply, the speaker is going crazy. In the midst of going crazy, the speaker hears and feels things, yet doesn't see anything. This is significant because it gives the reader a hint into what going crazy really feels like, and doesn't look like.

Laurence Perrine Article

To be honest, I disagreed with this essay up until the last paragraph. While I completely agree with Perrine's approach to determining "correct" interpretations of poetry, I don't really believe there is always a "correct" interpretation. While some poems might have a right answer to it, I believe there are some in which the author wants the reader to make their own interpretation. What specifically struck me was when Perrine said that an author should not explain their poem, or they have failed as a writer. If we don't get the right answer, how are we sure that anyone's interpretation is right? That concept confuses me. Even if someone tries to explain to me that there's always a right answer, I don't think I'll ever believe it. Humanity is so opinionated and words are so limited that there cannot always be one right answer. Even if some interpretations might be widely accepted or make sense, there could always possibly be another interpretation that makes sense.

One concept I do agree with, however, is that symbols are limited. His idea that dropping a rock in a pool will send out ripples in all directions, but with walls on the pool is spot on. With language, there are many words and phrases that mean the same thing. However, not all words mean the same thing. While there may be multiple interpretations of a symbol, it is limited in a way. Although I do not agree that there is a right interpretation, I assume my teacher thinks there is. Therefore, this artile will help me greatly. From this article I can see that I need to focus on little details such as singulars and plurals of words and sometimes not using context clues to help me decifer a poem.