Two Time Periods, One Image

Reading through Hamlet; it reminds me of my outside reading book A Thousand Splendid Suns written by Khaled Hosseini. Upon reading Hamlets soliloquy in class, I kept seeing the reoccurring image of isolation and the feeling of not being accepted that I found in A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Hamlet feels isolated for many different reasons. His father has recently died and it hasn’t even been two months, before everyone has moved on. His mother is even remarrying to Hamlets uncle; her brother-in-law. This was considered incestuous at the time, but Hamlet is the only one that sees the marriage as such. Everyone else seems perfectly content with it. Hamlet also feels like he cannot properly mourn his father because everyone else has moved on. He idolized his father, and while the other citizens and country people have moved on under the reign of Claudius, Hamlet refuses this and continues to think of his father as the true and better king. Hamlet doesn’t even interact with many of the other characters found in the play. While speaking in court, he only addresses his mother and never directly speaks to Claudius.

Almost the same exact story line is occurring in A Thousand Splendid Suns. Miriam has lived with her mother in an isolated area because she is considered a “bastard” child that everyone wants to forget about. They are sent away to this deserted area so people can forget about them and the original sins of the father. This is very similar to Hamlet, because Hamlet was next in line for the throne, yet people seem to want to cast him aside. Miriam also goes through a terrible loss of her Nana (her mother’s name). While she continues to mourn, others are already making plans for her future. After just 2 weeks of mourning time in her biological father’s house, he finds a suitor for her and marries her off. When she cries in front of her new husband, Miriam is continually asked why? No one seems to understand the heavy lose that she has gone through. They all expected her to move on within the course of a few weeks, which is the same exact emotional response that Hamlet is receiving from the different members of his own family.

Miriam is also very isolated. She rarely talks to different characters and when others do approach her, she rarely comments directly back to them. She prefers to spend her times alone in the comfort of her own house.

It was interesting to see almost the same exact occurrences happening in two stories that couldn’t have been more different. Although they are set in different time periods in different parts of the world, this reoccurring imagery of being alone and not being understood is prevalent in many of the stories found in literature. I thought it was very interesting just how closely related these stories were though.

Ted Kooser

In class, we discussed Ted Kooser’s “Blind” poem, to better ourselves in analyzing poetry. I found that I really liked the way that he styled his poems. They were simple thoughts and words written in a pretty simple structure, but each different aspect had a key place. I enjoyed that each word’s denotation would lead to another words connotation or denotation. The web that it created was fascinating to look at and connect to other pieces of the puzzle.

I was planning on doing a more in depth read for my blog, but when I tried to find the poem “Blind”, I could only find the poem that he wrote called “A Blind Woman”. I decided that I was just going to look at it, and see if it was at least similar, and this is when I decided that Ted Kooser is my favorite poet.

She had turned her face up into
a rain of light, and came on smiling.

The light trickled down her forehead
and into her eyes. It ran down

into the neck of her sweatshirt
and wet the white tops of her breasts.

Her brown shoes splashed on
into the light. The moment was like

a circus wagon rolling before her
through puddles of light, a cage on wheels,

and she walked fast behind it,
exuberant, curious, pushing her cane

through the bars, poking and prodding,
while the world cowered back in a corner.

I liked the imagery of the light that is streaming in. When I think of light I think of the little rainbows that show up and the happiness that it usually brings along. But the specific colors that Kooser uses are white and brown. These colors are extremely muted, which was ironic for a piece about being light and colorful. The other imagery that came from the repetition of the word light was joyous happiness and even the curiosity that follows a young girl. But then there is that repeated imagery that is somewhat of a caged animal. The “cage of wheels” and how she is “pushing through the bars” makes it seem like she is caged and only sees light on a small occasion.

This led me to think, is she literally caged within a prison cell, or caged within her own body? She cannot see, which can be told from the title (Blind), but that could mean that her eyes cannot see at all, or that she is blind to the outside world that she is trying so hard to get to. The bars could be that she cannot overcome the struggles that await her.

It also makes me think that she is a sort of animal that people want to see, but at the same time, want to keep their distance from at the same time. The speaker talks about seeing the circus wagons, but then she goes on to say “through the bars, poking and prodding,
while the world cowered back in a corner”. She’s the act that people hope to keep their distance from. But then that also lead me back to the question of what are they wanting to see from her. She might be blind to this as well. She might not see what they see.

This used to frustrate me about poetry that I could never have a clear answer to a question that I had. The poet wasn’t right there to explain the exact uses for the words that he had chosen. But this actually interests me. I like to think of all the different questions and actually using the text to support and disclaim the different theories that float through my head. Poetry is interesting once you find a poet that writes in a style that you prefer.

Not That Bad

When Ms. Clinch first told us that we were about to start a poetry unit, I secretly panicked inside. I have never been able to completely analyze poems the way that the teacher and even the other students have, and knowing that complete analysis is needed for this class, the poetry unit seemed like a difficult unit to cover.

But I’ve learned over the past week that I can find almost anything in a poem and write a semi-solid response on it.  There are so many ways that the poet both visually captures the poems central theme by using various word structures but also the specific words that can be the ultimate piece of understanding the poem and it’s so what.

My favorite poet that we have read in class so far is e.e cummings. I like that he goes against everything that English professors pick over. Nothing is capitalized and words seem to be randomly thrown around, while the stanza’s structure is so diluted that there seems to be no meaning. But every single piece of the poem has a meaning. In the poem in Just, only two words are capitalized, and even after an entire class period discussing it, a proper answer wasn’t formed.

I used to not like that poetry had no answer. That even after a lot of thought and discussion, the true meaning that the poet was trying to convey is never properly struck down. But after last semester of intense analysis, I enjoy that I can take a different meaning from the poem and not be entirely correct. And seeing all the small things that the class picks up is very interesting and adds to my own thoughts about the poem as a whole.

When Ms. Clinch stated that we would have a timed writing on analyzing a poem, my heart did sort of drop though. I did not believe that I was ready to jump into the deep end of completely analyzing a poem for myself. How would I be able to come up with my own ideas and write a solid essay without the help of Ms. Clinch or my fellow peers?

When I walked into class Friday, I was dreading writing this timed writing. I looked at the poem and had a literal pity party for myself for at least a minute, but then I looked at it, read the prompt and started analyzing the prompt. I soon started to see how the structure of the stanzas was leading me to believe one thing about the poem, and that led me to see another aspect of the poem that I had missed in the beginning. Before I knew it, my poem was marked up and I had questions scattered around the margins that would help me write this timed writing. It wasn’t as difficult as it seemed and I realized that poetry isn’t as terrible as it first seemed merely a week ago.