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“Sir Patrick Spens” -anonymous

“Sir Patrick Spens” is a ballad written in the 13th century by an anonymous author. This poem talks about the brave knight Sir patrick Spens who agrees upon a fatal journey ordered by the king. 

This poem follows ballad meter, where the lyrics are divided into quatrains. The quatrains are composed of a line of iambic tetrameter, a line of iambic trimeter, a line of iambic tetrameter, and a final line of iambic trimeter. 

The classic ballad form of this poem allows the lamenting aura of the lines be emphasized. This poem tells the heroic tale of Sir Patrick Spens, who knowingly accepted his death when agreeing to attempt an impossible quest for the king. Patrick Spens’ extreme loyalty and devotion are what him heroic, but are also extremely tragic due to the fact that they have brought him to his death.  In line 13, the speaker goes on to say “the first line that Sir Patrick read/ a loud lauch lauched he/ the next line that Sir Patrick read, The tear blinded his ee”. This stanza shows how Sir Patrick knew immediately that this voyage would be the last thing he did, but his extreme loyalty to the king is what made him complete the task regardless. 

The choice of the classic ballad structure in this poem captures the sorrowful tone. The way the poem is obedient in following ballad structure mirrors the obedient actions of Sir Patrick Spens toward the king. The structure of the poem acts as a symbol of the main character and his decisions.

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“Rorschach” by Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Jeanne Marie Beaumont is an American poet who is author of three poetry collections, the most recent being Burning of the Three Fires . Beaumont has also taught at Rutgers University. 

This poem contains a deeper meaning beneath the words denotations. A Rorschach test is that test commonly glorified in Hollywood productions where a psychiatrist holds up an image and the patient says what they see in the image. Each response is a metaphor. Although there really is no way to know what is meant by each of the speaker’s lines, we assume some things immediately. The person speaking in italics is the psychologist who is talking with the speaker based on their responses to the speaker. In this session the speaker is responding to a set of pictures, she is undergoing a Rorschach test. We don’t get actual pictures, only what the speaker sees in them.

 From each short response we can assume a few things about the speaker. Images of useless and aesthetically unpleasing items are described throughout the poem: a stained napkin, ruined tie, a fluke, and a ground up cigarette and these items could represent the speakers dis-contempt with this counseling appointment and shows that she is referring to it as useless. It could also relate back to all the imagery of a childhood: her childhood bedroom, and a child’s dress hanging empty. Because of this we can infer that the speaker may be showing dissatisfaction with her childhood. This is something that she she would never admit to, but is brought out through her interpretations in the Rorschach. In this different interpretation of this poem, the test and the speaker’s answers are a metaphor for poetry: everyone sees something different in poems, but no interpretations are wrong. Every interpretation reveals something about the mind of the reader: what touches them, what they ignore, and what seems to be the most important. 

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“This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams

Williams is a well known American poet, one of the four credited with starting the Imagism movement. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1883, and continued a medical throughout his life while writing. Early in his writing life, Williams was heavily influenced by Ezra Pound, a close friend, but then began to disagree with the European influences of Pound’s writing. William’s set out to invent a new, simpler American genre with his writings. Williams died in 1963 from continuous heart failure.

In “This Is Just to Say”, Williams writes a simple, three stanza poem that uses minimal words to express the meaning behind what could have been a sentence, or a note left behind explaining the consumption of plums. The entire poem is written in colloquial language that lets the audience know this poem is depicting a conversation between the speaker and what could be their spouse or someone else they live with. The spacing of the words forces the reader to add pauses that make the message seem whimsical, and far-off. The pauses capture the hesitation in the message along with the simple diction that expresses the innocence of the speaker, for they could not bear to resist the plums because “they were delicious/ so sweet/ and so cold”.

The entire poem uses the plain diction and spacing of the lines to build uo the apology that seems to be taking place in the poem, but is all undone in the last three lines. When the speaker says “they were delicious/ so sweet/ and so cold” it shows the audience that they have forgotten about the apology and the problem the small action of eating plums has caused, and instead are now refocused on the attractiveness of the plums that got the speaker into the problem in the first place. The word choice of delicious and so sweet are the most descriptive words used in the poem, which explains that the speaker has more passion towards the beauty of the plums than she has towards her apology. 

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"To a Daughter Leaving Home" by Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan is an American poet of Jewish descent. She is former Poet Laureate of Maryland and a current mother of three, all three who have grown up and moved out. Pastan uses her experience of motherhood to compose this poem on children leaving home. In this poem Pastan uses the setting to express her emotions on her feelings of her daughter leaving home. She tells the story of the anxiety and fear she experienced when first watching her daughter learn to ride a bike, and uses this past situation as a comparison to her current situation and feelings as she watches her daughter leave home. By using a different setting but parallel situations, Pastan expresses to her daughter the fears she has for her moving out, but also shows how things will be ok, just as they will be ok after the daughter moves out. By looking more deeply into the setting and situations presented in the poem, we learn that Pastan is using this parallel situation but contrasting settings to tell her daughter that she is worried and anxious about her departure, but confident it will all work out in the end.

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“Bedecked” by Victoria Redel

Victoria Redel is an American poet born in 1959 and currently lives in New York.  Redel is currently the mother of two sons.

Being the mother of two sons is what inspired the message and speaker in this poem. “Bedecked” is in the form of a mother directly speaking to the audience about her parenting techniques with her son. The speaker is assumed to be Redel herself, since she is a mother of two boys. Throughout the poem, Redel repeats the phrase “Tell me...” with various statements that other mothers have told her throughout her time as a mother. Repeating this poem emphasizes the idea that Redel has heard these various comments from disapproving mothers multiple times throughout her son’s life, and become accustomed to them.

By choosing to have a first person speaker, Redel allows the audience to be more inclined to take her side on this issue, because the audience is able to witness the speakers emotions and viewpoint raw. This advantage of having the audience seeing the situation through the lens of the speaker allows Redel to more easily express and convince the audience to take her side on the issue. An issue such as breaking gender stereotypes is one that creates controversy in contemporary culture, but also is one that needs to attended to. Redel advocates for the destruction of gender stereotypes by using the technique of a first person speaker in order that we as readers can experience first hand her opinions and see why applying gender stereotypes is wrong through the example of a real life experience with gender discrimination. 

To conclude, Redel used chose to have a first person speaker in “Bedecked” in order to get the audience to witness a first hand experience as to why gender stereotypes are wrong, and need to be broken. The last line “Now try to tell me-man or woman-your heart was ever once that brave” allows the speaker to end the poem by directly interrogating the audience with a question that forces them to question the effect of gender stereotypes on children as they grow up.

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“Barbie Doll” by Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy was an American poet born in 1936 in Detroit into a family affected by the Great Depression. She claims to have had a happy childhood until a near death experience after having the German measles, After contracting this sickness, Piercy had a frail body shape which caused her to be insecure about her appearance. 

Piercy’s experience with body insecurity helped her compose this poem with a satirical spin on fantasy endings. The poem opens with a pleasant tone with simple diction that extends throughout the plot of the poem. This pleasant, and warm tone is an assistant in creating the satirical tone throughout the poem because it creates a contrast between the tragic events of the girl in which she “cut off her nose and her legs/ and offered them up” because society told her she wasn’t beautiful enough.

Piercy chose to display a pleasant tone in this satirical poem as a way to comment on the absurdity of the extents that girls go to just to feel beautiful and pretty with society’s standards. The pleasant tone creates the largest contrast in the final lines when Piercy writes “Doesn’t she look pretty? everyone said/ Consummation at last./ To every woman a happy ending”. These last three lines are ironic in that everyone claims she looks pretty now with a putty, fake nose in her casket; so the girl finally got her wish of wanting to be considered pretty. She literally died to achieve her goal of being perceived as beautiful by society. The final line hits the audience right in the feels, because we know that this is not a happy ending to all woman, but instead the opposite. If women have to die in order to be perceived as beauteous, then that is not a win for them.

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“Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins

Billy Collins is the former American Poet Laureate from 2001-2003 and grew up in NYC. As of now, Collins is a distinguished English professor at Lehman University in the Bronx.  

In this poem, Collins puts us in a controversial position. He describes to us his want for students to not label poetry with a single meaning, and wants us to interpret every poem in our way while considering and appreciating the interpretations of others. Collins writes “But all they want to do/ is tie the poem to a chair with rope/ and torture a confession out of it” to express his discontent with the students wants to only use the poem, abuse it, find a meaning for it, then leave it alone. To label a poem with a single meaning is a form of torture to the poem because a poem is a form of word art that not only expresses the feelings of the author, but also is open to differing opinions of the audience. 

When Collins wrote “to hold it up to the light.../or press an ear against its hive” he expresses his want for the students to use different approaches and perspectives when interpreting the poem opposed to just labeling it with one meaning. Using a different lens every time you read the poem will allow you to see new ideas and meanings come out of the text.

In a way, writing this text post on Collin’s poem shows that I haven't really learned from his poem’s lesson. To understand this poem and interpret it the way Collins’ would wish us too, we must understand that the meaning we find behind the words is not the only meaning in the poem. Someone else could disagree with our opinions or find a totally new meaning and it would be incorrect. Poems are open for interpretation, and to assign one meaning to the poem would be doing it an injustice.