Form: "The Victims" by Sharon Olds

An American poet born and raised in San Francisco, California, Sharon Olds earned a BA at Stanford University and then continued her education at Columbia and received a PhD. Over the years she has received many awards including: The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, The National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and The James Laughlin Award.

The Victims

 

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and
took it in silence, all those years and then
kicked you out, suddenly, and her
kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we
grinned inside, the way people grinned when
Nixon's helicopter lifted off the South
Lawn for the last time. We were tickled
to think of your office taken away,
your secretaries taken away,
your lunches with three double bourbons,
your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your
suits back, too, those dark
carcasses hung in your closet, and the black
noses of your shoes with their large pores?
She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it
until we pricked with her for your
annihilation, Father. Now I
pass the bums in doorways, the white
slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their
suits of compressed silt, the stained
flippers of their hands, the underwater
fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the
lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and
took it from them in silence until they had
given it all away and had nothing
left but this.

 

“The Victims” written by Sharon Olds is a poem with structure that depends on its shifts in tone, focus, attitude, and subject to divide the poem. The poem is divided into two major parts. The speaker’s attitude in the first part of the poem (from line 1 to 17) reveals anger towards her father. She evokes him by referring to him as “you” (this you being used can almost be seen as disrespectful towards the father).  The subject throughout the poem is not solely about the victims (the speaker’s mother and siblings) but it is about the father. In the first part of the poem he is revealed to have an extravagant life at work separate from the one he has at home. The speaker refers to his fancy clothes (lines 12-14) and his descendent lunches (line 10); but he loses it all after his divorce and after being fired. The speaker reminisces how her mother had constantly taught them to be happy about his failures; were they truly the victims?
The poem shifts in the second half of line 17 and this second half of the poem brings to light a whole new definition of victim.. Suddenly, instead of calling him “you” she refers to him as “father”.  The speaker begins to have sympathy for her father which shows through her sympathy for “bums in doorways” with “their suits [are] made of residual waste (lines 18-20).
Change is a significant factor in the poems structure. The change of views from the speaker’s childhood to later years about her father creates a structure which makes up the meaning of victims and therefore the meaning of the poem itself.



 



Metaphor: "At the Hospital" by David Ferry

David Ferry, a man with a creative brain that spills out beautiful poetry. Ferry is not only an American poet but also a translator and educator. He recently won the National Book Award for Poetry (2012) as well as the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry (2000).

At the Hospital

 

She was the sentence the cancer spoke at last,

Its blurred grammar finally clarified.

 

David Ferry’s poem at the hospital is short yet contains a plethora of meaning. The poem’s effectiveness depends on its brevity. On the surface, the poem alludes to a death that was long awaited. The comparison that Ferry makes is between a person with cancer and a simple, short sentence. The hidden meaning of the poem is the brevity of life and how quick death itself can come upon us. The person that the speaker presents to us in the poem is not a human at all but is a simply sentence. The speaker does not compare the person to a novel or even a paragraph but simply one sentence. This sentence is ironically about the death sentence of cancer. The speaker concludes with “grammar finally clarified” (Line 2) meaning that the person’s death had cleared the uncertainty if the person would beat cancer or not. The word grammar here represents the questions of family, friends, and even the deceased on how it would end.

This metaphor of death is supported with irony and shock. The speaker does not show signs of remorse and remains completely detached; because of this the death shocks us. Ferry’s title “At the Hospital” even produces irony by associating hospitals not with health but instead with death. What is also ironic about this poem is the clarity that makes us feel remorse and possibly even regret for knowing. With death, many of us are always searching for answers to the question why here we have the answer but don’t want it. The irony is what helps to create the strong metaphor Ferry produces in this piece.



 



Language: "Marks" by Linda Pastan

Known for her poems on the topics of motherhood, family, ethics, aging, and death, Linda Pastan is a American poet. One of her great accomplishments was taking on the role of Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991-1995.

Marks

 

My husband gives me an A

for last night's supper,

an incomplete for my ironing,

a B plus in bed.

My son says I am average,

an average mother, but if

I put my mind to it

I could improve.

My daughter believes

in Pass/Fail and tells me

I pass. Wait til' they learn

I'm dropping out.

 

The poem uses marks (or grades) as a metaphor. The use of grades as a metaphor in this poem makes it clear to us that as a mother she is constantly being judged on her performance. Instead of receiving thanks and praise for all that she does as a mother, she is constantly being assessed on how well she does it.  All of her responsibilities as a mother are listed throughout the poem with a mark from her family to follow. There are three different systems mentioned in the poem that are used to grade her. Her husband grades with letters, her son grades using a charting system, and her daughter uses a pass/fail method. These different systems represent the multiple standards in which she must meet. To create the metaphor the poem uses school jargon. Besides the grading systems, the speaker uses other school related language and ends the poem with “I’m dropping out” (line 12). This phrase brings to light the mother’s irritation with the grading system in which she is constantly judged with. The way the system is forced upon her relates to the way schools force the compliance with a grading system on students. Just as a rebellious student who drops out of school, the concluding phrase suggests that she will no longer be subjected to the judgment of her family. The metaphor uses the familiar idea of grading systems to help the reader to visualize and think of how we feel about what motherhood entails.



Context: "Daystar" by Rita Dove

Rita Dove is an American poet from Ohio. he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995. She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and a National Humanities Medal.

Daystar

 

She wanted a little room for thinking:

but she saw diapers steaming on the line,

a doll slumped behind the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage

to sit out the children's naps.

 

Sometimes there were things to watch-

the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,

a floating maple leaf. Other days

she stared until she was assured

when she closed her eyes

she'd see only her vivid own blood.

 

She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared

pouting from the top of the stairs.

And just what was mother doing

out back with the field mice? Why,

building a palace. Later

that night when Thomas rolled over and

lurched into her, she would open her eyes

and think of the place that was hers

for an hour-where

she was nothing,

pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

 

In Daystar by Rita Dove the speaker is talking about a mother. The situation that the poem develops around is caring for children. Mothering in this poem is conveyed as a full-time job. The speaker places us in the home of a mentally and emotionally exhausted mother who works day in and day out for her children.

                The poem places the reader in a home full of complete disarray—“diapers steaming on the line, a doll slumped behind the door” (2-3). The setting creates an image of a messy house, run over by children. In this tiresome job the mother looks forward to her one hour break mid-day when the children are asleep. She escapes to the backyard, hidden behind the garage with the field mice. This simple place is calm, and despite the almost boring simplicity it is a place of the mother’s away from the children and away from the clutter—it is hers. She cherishes her short, precious moments isolated behind the garage.  

                The poem revolves around a mother’s daily events from cleaning diapers to having intimate relations with her husband. Being a mother is a full time job; the setting of the cluttered house and her single hour of isolation convey that situation of a full time job. Just as a man working in a factory all day and receiving a lunch break, she works in her home all day receiving an hour to herself in which she enjoys in isolations with simple maple leaf floating before her.





Speaker: "The Silence of Women" by Liz Rosenberg

Liz Rosenberg is a renowned poet and children's book author. She is currently an English professor at Binghamton University. She has won many prestigious awards over the years including the Claudia Lewis Award for Poetry and New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age and the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Prize.

The Silence of Women

 

Old men as time goes on, grow softer, sweeter,

while their wives get angrier.

You see them hauling the men across the mall

or pushing them down on chairs,

"Sit there! and don't you move!"

A lifetime of yes has left them

hissing bent as snakes.

It seems even their bones will turn

against them, once the fruitful years are gone.

Something snaps off the houselights,

and the cells go dim;

the chicken hatching back into the egg.

 

Oh lifetime of silence!

words scattered like a sibyl's leaves.

Voice thrown into a baritone storm--

whose shrilling is a soulful wind

blown through an instrument

that cannot beat time

 

but must make music

any way it can.

 

The speaker is the voice of a poem but this figure is not always the poet himself. Most often the speaker of a poem is a character that the poet creates to speak for him indirectly. There are different classifications of poems based on how many speakers there are. Some poems are narrative meaning that they have one or more voices as well as a narrator describing who said what.
In Liz Rosenberg’s poem “The Silence of Women” she uses a narrative voice to paint a picture of gender criticism in society. Rosenberg uses the narrative voice paired with the voice of the stern, tired women to convey her feelings relating to women’s place in society. The poem is used to display the idea that with age women rebel against their role to be silent and become demanding and full of anger and possibly even resentment towards the men who put them in the corner for so long. In the first stanza the poem reads, “A lifetime of yes has left them / hissing bent as snakes” the narrator is portraying for us what years of silence do to women. In the final stanzas the narrator’s diction helps to create the tone that produce’s our speaker’s attitude and helps us to understand the poet’s stance on the issue. The speaker compares the women’s new found voice with music, “shrilling” music. We get the sense that the speaker’s attitude toward the topic is one of anger and sorrow for the women who were so long silenced.



 



Tone: "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden

Born and raised in a poor neighborhood in Detroit between his parents and a foster family next door, Robert Hayden wrote astounding poetry with his emotions. He became the first black American to be appointed as the poet laureate to the Library of Congress.

 

 

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blue-black cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

 

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking,

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house

 

Speaking indifferently to him,

who ad driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices?

 

 

The poem’s attitudes or feelings toward a theme are known as the tone; it is how the theme is presented throughout the poem. Tone is related with style and diction and it is the style and diction which present the speaker’s feelings towards a certain topic. Short lines, an abundance of punctuation, and words are all things that may contribute towards the tone of a poem.
                Even with a direct theme there is always more to a poem than meets the eye. On the surface this poem is about the cold winter and how a father helps to provide warmth. Yet, if we look deeper we see that this poem has a central theme of love and need. The tone that the speaker provides to us through his 3 stanza poem is how he feels about the theme. The speaker cannot understand his father’s expression of love which is noted at the end by diction with the words “love’s austere and lonely offices.” The speaker’s tone is dually noted in his final lines when he says, “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” these words are full of remorse and sadness. The speaker comes upon understanding with age that his father did love him but showed it in different ways. We can feel the speaker’s pain and sorrow through the words used throughout the poem. The frequent use of commas also provides pauses which stop us to reflect. This poem has a deeper meaning that is found with the tone—love is about responsibility but it is also about emotions and empathy and we can feel through the poem that our speaker craves just that—and emotional love.



"To Enter That Rhythm Where The Self Is Lost" by Muriel Rukeyser

Born in New York City in the year 1913, Muriel Rukeyser became a poet who encompassed the past and present, science and politics, and anti-war and activist movements.

 

"To Enter That Rhythm Where The Self Is Lost"

 

To enter that rhythm where the self is lost,

where breathing : heartbeat : and the subtle music

of their relation make our dance hasten

us to the moment when all things become

magic, another possibility.

Tat blind moment, midnight, wen all sight

begins, and the dance itself is all our breath,

and we ourselves the moment of life and death.

Blinded; but given now another saving,

the self as vision, at all times perceiving,

all arts all senses being languages,

delivered of will, being transformed in truth -

for life's sake surrendering moment and images,

writing the poem; in love making; bringing to birth. 

 

Muriel Rukeyser uses a single stanza free verse poem to convey the idea of what poetry is. Rukeyser describes poetry as the art in which our self is lost. This simple yet complex metaphor of losing oneself is the entirety of the poem. Rukeyser uses imagery throughout her poem to take the reader to the place where we are lost and poetry is born. Poetry is brought to life when we are lost in the “subtle music” of ourselves It is not in the day when we are surrounded by loved ones, smiles, and chatter that we find poetry, but “that blind moment, midnight” where we find poetry. That blind moment being a metaphor used by Rukeyser to represent that instant in which we lose sight of what is on the surface and begin to dig deep within ourselves, finding the truth. Beneath the surface of her poem, Rukeyser makes it clear that poetry is much more than a few words that rhyme strung together for people to enjoy. Poetry is something deep within us, a common language among us all, one in which we all understand. It is found at a blind hour when we are isolated from all else and able to hear our own heartbeat and get lost in the web of thoughts that was created by the spiders while we were living our lives mindlessly. Poetry is an art that exists in us that we may have not known was even there. It brings to life truth. When we lose ourselves we find that truth.