Perkins

Wiki Poetry Project - John Davis Perkins

"Chicago" - Carl Sandburg HOG Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders: They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys. And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again. And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger. And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities; Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness, Bareheaded, Shoveling, Wrecking, Planning, Building, breaking, rebuilding, Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth, Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs, Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle, Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse. and under his ribs the heart of the people, Laughing! Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation. Carl Sandburg was an active writer in Chicago during the early 1900’s. He wrote many poems in part of a poetry surge which took place in Chicago following the Spanish-American War. He was inspired by America’s increasingly urban concentration, and the way in which many people in this urban culture were used or taken advantage of. In Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” the speaker acknowledges the cruelty of urban culture, but insists that the shortcomings of this American trend are not terrible enough to prevent the society from being beautiful. The speaker begins the poem with a four line stanza in which he lists jobs of Chicago, all of which demand hard work from laborers. As he recounts in lines 4 and 5, “Stormy, husky, brawling/ City of the Big Shoulders,” the speaker sets the tone with words that inspire vivid visual images which the audience associates with strength. From lines 6 through 8, he lists others’ descriptions of Chicago as he says “They tell me…/And they tell me…” These statements are filled with negativity in the form of emotive and visual images which include unpunished murder and desperate poverty. The speaker acknowledges the existence of strife in this environment, but reverses the mood built in lines 6 through 8 with lines 9 through 22. Descriptions of the working man, “Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action,” fill these lines as the imagery becomes positive. The speaker focuses on the hard work and spirit of the people before he finishes the poem, once again recounting the jobs listed at the beginning of the piece. The speaker in the poem makes use of wild imagery to create a strong involvement with the audience. Visual images dominate the work as expressive adjectives and powerful verbs create a picture of the working man in the mind of the reader. At the beginning of the poem, these descriptions, evil in nature, inspire a negative mood. After he finishes recounting the way an average person describes Chicago, he changes the mood in lines which are climactic as he lists verbs of the blue-collar worker to describe the depth of the city. Sandburg uses the later lines in the poem to refute the initial ideas generally accepted by the public about urban society. He uses Chicago as a metaphor for any major city as he recognizes the problems which accompany such a culture. These lines that “they tell” only apply to a first glance at the city and do not actually capture the true personality of such a culture. He depicts the heart and spirit of the average worker “Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth.” Sandburg juxtaposes these descriptions against the previous negative statements and insists the inhabitants of the city are “proud” and content with their status as an urbanite.

"Grass" -Carl Sandburg Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo, Shovel them under and let me work-- I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work. In “Grass,” a poem written by Carl Sandburg, the poet uses repetition and rhetorical questions to develop his theme. The speaker is the grass of nature in the first person point of view and the intended audience is humanity. In the first two lines, this entity makes references bloody battles in the Napoleonic Wars after telling human civilization to “Pile the bodies high” and to “Shovel them under and let [it] work—.“ The line after these commands reads “I am the grass; I cover all.” Lines 5 and 6 reference other more recent battles where many men were killed. The speaker repeats his order to “Pile the bodies high” and “Shovel them under.” The grass then indicates the passage of time and depicts a group of people asking the significance of the area over which they are traveling which is actually one of the historical battlefields. In the final lines of the poem, the speaker repeats “I am the grass./ Let me work.” The major theme noticeable in this piece by Sandburg is the failure of humanity to learn from the mistakes it makes. The poem is only 11 lines, yet 8 of them have some repeated phrase. The fact that such a large percentage of the poem includes the technique of repetition is significant in that these recurring phrases are an allegory for the way in which humans commit the same mistakes throughout history. The message of the speaker is worth notice in this poem. As a species, humans should focus less on violence since previous wars have done nothing to prevent the conflicts which succeed them. We need nature not only for consumption and sustenance, but also to clean the messes we make. The message of this poem to make smaller messes, specifically by ending violence is ironic since it is human nature to fight. The difference between other animals and humans is that we have the choice to fight or to discover other solutions to our problems. I feel this poem is asking humans to examine the history of our species and discover the mistakes and attempt to change our behavior based upon the conclusions we draw from our past.

"The Rest" -Ezra Pound O helpless few in my country, O remnant enslaved! Artist broken against her, A-stray, lost in the villages, Mistrusted, spoken-against. Lovers of beauty, starved, Thwarted with systems, Helpless against the control; You who can not wear yourselves out By persisting to successes, You who can only speak, Who can not steel yourselves into reiteration; You of the finer sense, Broken against false knowledge, You who can know at first hand, Hated, shut in, mistrusted: Take thought: I have weathered the storm, I have beaten out my exile. Ezra Pound knew he wanted to be a poet from an early age. After graduating college with a Masters degree, he tried to get a job as a teacher. His methods were somewhat nontraditional and he found that keeping a teaching job with his personality was difficult. discouraged with how his home country treated him, he moved to England where his literary work was better accepted. Pound loved “imagism,” a type of poetry which was new at the time. This genre allowed him to be more individual and less traditional, both abilities which helped him express his personality. In “The Rest,” a poem by Ezra Pound, the speaker intends to inspire those disheartened with their home countries. The audience of the poem is immediately made clear in the opening lines of the poem: “O helpless few in my country,\O remnant enslaved!” The speaker continues to command attention from the “remnant” by explicitly calling to various groups in the next two stanzas such as “Artists broken against [their country]” and “Lovers of beauty, starved.” The third and fourth stanza do not call to artists alone, but to anyone who feels persecuted in their homeland. In the final stanza, the message of the poem, the speaker tells the aforementioned groups that he has risen above the negativity forced upon him by his own country. The diction the poet uses helps to characterize the homeland negatively. The speaker describes the plight of the “enslaved” with words such as “mistrusted,” “thwarted,” and “broken.” These words are so many and various that the reader can see that the speaker is extremely passionate about this subject. Knowing Pound’s past and his inability to comply with traditions in the USA, I believe the speaker is Pound himself and the country to which he refers is the United States. One can tell that Pound was extremely upset with his experiences in his home country. I think he is somewhat arrogant when he describes the people still in the United States as the “remnant enslaved.”

"Poetry" -Marianne Moore I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. ***** Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in ***** it, after all, a place for the genuine. *********** Hands that can grasp, eyes *********** that can dilate, hair that can rise ***************** if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are ***** useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible ***** the same thing may be said for all of us, that we *********** do not admire what *********** we cannot understand: the bat ***************** holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under ***** a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea ******************************************************* the base- ***** ball fan, the statistician— *********** nor is it valid ***************** to discriminate against "business documents and school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make a ******************************************* distinction ***** however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not ************************************************* poetry, ***** nor till the poets among us can be *********** "literalists of *********** the imagination"—above ***************** insolence and triviality and can present Marianne Moore was a modernist American writer who is responsible for many poems and works of prose. She gained notice in the literary world through magazines while she taught school. Many of her poems reflect her personal beliefs. She received many awards for her literary works. In Marianne Moore’s “Poetry,” the speaker elaborates upon the hidden power of poetry. In the first stanza the poet writes that even though one may dislike poetry, it can still affect him with “Hands that can grasp, eyses\that can dilate, hair that can rise.” This use of tactile imagery with which one can identify, captures the reader’s attention. The speaker later describes the way in which “high-sounding interpretation” mentioned in line 7 has nothing to do with the power of a poem. She suggests in lines 9 through 15 that a possible reason for the reader’s disinterest in poetry is a result of his inability to understand why poetry has such power and likens the imperceptions to those associated with various natural occurrences through simile. The later lines, filled with allusion, state that the true essence of poetry cannot be forced and that one must be a true poet to write pieces with the power described in the first stanza. She paradoxically requires the good poet to create “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” This statement is not perceivable and builds upon the previous theme of the inability to truly understand why poetry has such power. I found interest in this piece because it showed Moore’s love of true art, and I can find inspiration in the theme she creates about how it is not necessary to understand an entity if you are to genuinely love it. Her theme seems further validated by her multiple allusions to other works which differ in subject and idea so greatly that her repertoire must be expansive. The ability to draw upon such different works and to mold them together to build upon a single theme show her true interest in her art and her fantastic talent.

"The Armadillo" -Elizabeth Bishop This is the time of year when almost every night the frail, illegal fire balloons appear. Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint still honored in these parts, the paper chambers flush and fill with light that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it's hard to tell them from the stars -- planets, that is -- the tinted ones: Venus going down, or Mars,

or the pale green one. With a wind, they flare and falter, wobble and toss; but if it's still they steer between the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly and steadily forsaking us, or, in the downdraft from a peak, suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell. It splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff behind the house. The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up and up, their whirling black-and-white stained bright pink underneath, until they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls' nest must have burned. Hastily, all alone, a glistening armadillo left the scene, rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out, //short//-eared, to our surprise. So soft! -- a handful of intangible ash with fixed, ignited eyes.

//Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky!// Elizabeth Bishop was an American writer who was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. She was only eight months old when her father died. After her father’s death, her mother became mentally unstable and was institutionalized when Bishop was 5 years old. She dealt with many illnesses such as eczema, bronchitis, and asthma for multiple years. Many of her poems focus on travel and ostracism. She received multiple awards for her poetry in her later years. The poem “The Armadillo” describes the happenings of St. John’s day in Brazil. In the poem “The Aramadillo,” by Elizabeth Bishop, the speaker describes the events of a celebration involving flying incendiaries. In the first stanza, these luminaries begin their journey, “Climbing the mountain height.” The following stanzas are filled with visual images, almost of wonder and awe. In stanza 5 the tone begins to change, along with diction as the previous words of celestial descriptions are replaced by words such as “forsaking” and “suddenly dangerous.” In lines 21 through 23, the speaker describes a fire balloon as it strikes a cliff near her house “like an egg.” This simile parallels the fragility of the situation as the following lines describe owls as their home was destroyed by the fire. They “shriek” as they fly away, burned on their undersides as can be observed from the way it was “stained bright pink.” The final stanza is in italics to show its importance. In it, an armadillo is uselessly curled up and not protected from the fire which threatens its existence. This poem creates a theme of the destructive nature of man. This theme is in a large part supported by the irony in that these luminaries which are released for their beautiful and solemnity end up destroying nature, an entity which is filled with the qualities man is trying to emulate with the fire balloons. The further irony in the plight of the armadillo adds to the negativity in the theme. Even this animal, evolved with armored plating, is unprotected from mankind’s destructiveness.

Baym, Nina. //The Norton anthology of American Literature//. 7th. D. New York: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2007. 1436-1439. Print.