Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Poetry Appreciation Discussion - March 2024 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-03-07 21:14:12
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:
haven't archived this post yet. have a subscription? use the importer!

Downloads

  • Seize the Night - Poetry Appreciation - Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell.pdf

Missing 1 full-res photo, 1 file, as this post has not yet been imported.

Content

Dear Book Club Readers ---

Your appreciation of great poetry in February was phenomenal, and it would be lovely to hear about the poems you're enjoying this month.

Our poetry appreciation thread is the place to mindfully check in and share what poetic works have resonated with us recently. So let us know:

What poems are you appreciating at the moment?

Let us know anything that has resonated with you during your poetic excursions:

  • Resonant lines
  • Striking imagery
  • Sublime musicality
  • Intriguing allusions
  • Compelling themes
  • Your favourite poets
  • Powerful metaphors
  • Elements you want to examine
  • Poems you want to recommend
  • Reflections, musings, and insights
  • Passages you're learning by heart

This is the place to put your poetry appreciations and get other readers weighing in on your thoughts!

Curated Poetic Vintages:

Your responses to our last three poems were beautiful. It was exciting to see the different links you discovered. And you can see the poetic connection I had in mind, along with my appreciation, in the downloadable PDF at the bottom of this post.

I have specially curated three more poems for you to enjoy. There is another link running through these poems for you to discover. It could be thematic, stylistic, or philosophical. Indeed, it will be possible to see multiple connections.

You don't need an in-depth knowledge of poetry to uncover the connection. You only need to read, reread, and feel. And the more you read, the more you will discover.

I would love to know what you make of the chosen poems. Which one is your favourite? Which poet resonates with you the most? And what lines stand out to you?

I will reveal the link running through them in the next poetry thread, along with the next three poetic vintages. And all poems can be found in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, which makes an excellent poetic textbook.

Thank you so much for sharing your love of great literature with us.

Happy reading, everybody!

Files

Previews only

Comments

Chrissy

Poetry appreciation has fast become my favourite part of our HCLBC, and I say this as one who had previously had little exposure to, or interest in poetry. I find myself dipping into Norton, regularly. When I’m anxious or depressed (which is often, these days), a poem can feel like a tonic at a time when I don’t have the mental energy to engage with a novel. Well, some of them can! My favourite of the three poems Benjamin has presented this time, is Motherhood. When I began reading, I thought it oddly cruel and crude, but as the second stanza unfolded, and the penny dropped, I laughed gleefully, and snorted coffee all over my iPad. I’m still processing this poem, some hours later, and I am still moved. We have so much in common, we creatures who share this planet. We feel, we see, we feed, and we all love our children. I’d also like to share my favourite Sylvia Plath poem, also about motherhood (well, about a foetus, to be more specific). It’s exquisitely tender and affectionate. I first read this, umpteen years ago, in another life, when I was studying to be an English/history teacher. Years on, I still love this. You’re Clownlike, happiest on your hands, Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled, Gilled like a fish. A common-sense Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode. Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, Trawling your dark as owls do. Mute as a turnip from the Fourth Of July to All Fools’ Day, O high-riser, my little loaf. Vague as fog and looked for like mail. Farther off than Australia. Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn. Snug as a bud and at home Like a sprat in a pickle jug. A creel of eels, all ripples. Jumpy as a Mexican bean. Right, like a well-done sum. A clean slate, with your own face on.

Maria

Sylvia Plaths’ poem is by far my favourite of the three, it is stark, spacious, haunting. Although she starts with the word love, her unsentimental, almost clinical, sober prose creates a sense of ambivalence but not without presenting imagery so vivid and experiential. I love how un claustrophobic and uncluttered her perceptions are, yet so hauntingly beautiful and impregnated with life nonetheless. I find it interesting that she is so clinical in relation to motherhood in “Morning Song” yet in stark contrast so raw and rhythmic in her poem “Pursuit”, which is unrelated to motherhood but ties in with the recent themes in Shakespeare’s Othello - passion, how we often lack the strength or will to control our emotions & desires to tragic ends. In “Pursuit” Sylvia starts by directly quoting a similar themed tragedy - Racine’s Phèdre (Acte II, scène 2) “Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit. RACINE There is a panther stalks me down:
  One day I'll have my death of him;
  His greed has set the woods aflame,
He prowls more lordly than the sun.
Most soft, most suavely glides that step,
  Advancing always at my back;
  From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:
The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.
Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,
  Haggard through the hot white noon.
  Along red network of his veins
What fires run, what craving wakes? Insatiate, he ransacks the land 
  Condemned by our ancestral fault,
  Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;
Meat must glut his mouth's raw wound.
Keen the rending teeth and sweet
  The singeing fury of his fur;
  His kisses parch, each paw's a briar,
Doom consummates that appetite.
In the wake of this fierce cat,
  Kindled like torches for his joy,
  Charred and ravened women lie,
Become his starving body's bait. Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;
  Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;
  The black marauder, hauled by love
On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.
Behind snarled thickets of my eyes
  Lurks the lithe one; in dreams' ambush
  Bright those claws that mar the flesh
And hungry, hungry, those taut thighs.
His ardor snares me, lights the trees,
  And I run flaring in my skin;
  What lull, what cool can lap me in
When burns and brands that yellow gaze? I hurl my heart to halt his pace,
  To quench his thirst I squander blood;
  He eats, and still his need seeks food,
Compels a total sacrifice.
His voice waylays me, spells a trance,
  The gutted forest falls to ash;
  Appalled by secret want, I rush
From such assault of radiance.
Entering the tower of my fears,
  I shut my doors on that dark guilt,
  I bolt the door, each door I bolt.
Blood quickens, gonging in my ears: The panther's tread is on the stairs,
Coming up and up the stairs.”

Janet Bannister

Thank you, Benjamin, for this post and assignment. I read the three poems over Cobb salad and a Guinness at a bar next to my hotel, as I'm traveling. I last read Morning Song in 1996, I think, in one of my first college classes- literature and composition. With so much more life behind me, I read it with more understanding now. I know what it is to be cow-heavy and floral. I ended up following the Sylvia Plath trail, reading her sad bio and a bunch of her other poems. It's been a hard and heavy week for me, and her words, her whole vibe, felt good and also made me cry. This morning, I brought Mary Oliver down to the complimentary hotel breakfast. Loved this: I DON’T WANT TO BE DEMURE OR RESPECTABLE I don’t want to be demure or respectable. I was that way, asleep, for years. That way, you forget too many important things. How the little stones, even if you can’t hear them, are singing. How the river can’t wait to get to the ocean and the sky, it’s been there before. What traveling is that! It is a joy to imagine such distances. I could skip sleep for the next hundred years. There is a fire in the lashes of my eyes. It doesn’t matter where I am, it could be a small room. The glimmer of gold Böhme saw on the kitchen pot was missed by everyone else in the house. And them I wrote this: My hotel room— A protective womb. I regress into my simplest form, Anonymous as I was preborn. I join the herd at the watering hole, Dispense raisin bran into cardboard bowl. No one knows me in this town, I ride the elevator up and down. My car is sleeping at the curb, My door is shouting don’t disturb, I got 99 problems wearing me thin, But none of them live at the Holiday Inn!

Terri Matter
>>131956654

Ah Maria, Thank you. I have been struggling to pull into focus how I feel about Morning Song. Your description did that for me. It is all the things you describe. But I don’t love it. I think it brings me too much discomfort. Having suffered post partum depression 40 years ago with my first child, I think it is just too real for me—the sign of a brilliant poem, but not something I want to revisit at this stage of my life. I think that is how I feel about Sylvia Plath in general. Her writing is too raw, and I don’t want to live in her soul.

Stephanie Jeannette

After a week I am still struggling with Anne Bradstreet. Ouch.

Hannah
>>131964033

Enjoyed your poem Janet! I love what Mary Oliver I've read. Hope the next week is less hard and heavy for you.

Terri Matter

Read this today, and it felt like it should be shared here: Ars Poetica BY ARCHIBALD MACLEISH A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit, Dumb As old medallions to the thumb, Silent as the sleeve-worn stone Of casement ledges where the moss has grown— A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds. A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs, Leaving, as the moon releases Twig by twig the night-entangled trees, Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves, Memory by memory the mind— A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs. A poem should be equal to: Not true. For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf. For love The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea— A poem should not mean But be.

hardcoreliterature
>>132340472

Wow! I love this so much! Thank you so much for sharing this, Terri :) I'm feeling the yearning to learn this one by heart. Extraordinary!

Catherine Egan

Motherhood is so complex. Primates can be loving mothers. Humans can be animals. Of the three selected poems I choose for my favorite—Morning Song by Sylvia Plath. Two lines that I relate to deeply are— 1. Your nakedness shadows our safety I recall feeling this fear with the birth of each of my three sons, literally questioning my ability to care for these gifts; and 2. We stand round blankly as walls Oh yes, and I would add: with gaping mouths! What is this wonder before my eyes, I can scarcely comprehend. I lost my youngest son Luke in 2021, he was a high school history teacher, he was 35. I am barely here some days, this book club is literally helping me find my way. Poetry seems to be the most difficult thing for me to read, although I’ve written quite a bit—it’s fierce and awful. Thank you for listening. 💛

Linda Hall
>>132365299

My heart goes out to you, Catherine. I send you love across these waves. Motherhood, with its responsibilities and joys, makes us fragile and vulnerable. Thank you for finding your way with HLBC, as I feel many of us are.

Stacy

My favorites are Morning Song and Author to her book. I really like the few poems by Sylvia Plath that I have read and this one is no exception. The first apparent link is that of motherhood or creatorship (yes I just invented that word) but an interesting secondary connection is the use of supercharged imagery. They all create super vivid visuals for me. Morning song makes seemingly disconnected images pop up in my head:People standing still and admiring a statue. A cloud drifting in a blue sky. A woman stumbling from her bed. A cat. Balloons. Motherhood feels like I am watching an orangutan swinging in her cage with her new baby. The Author to her Book is also quite visual, in a more mental and less material way. I have recently been liking Romantic poetry describing nature or describing love in a natural environment, like Love’s Philosophy, several of William Blake’s Songs and quite a bit of Emily Brontë. Here is one of my favorites: Song Memory, hither come, And tune your merry notes; And, while upon the wind Your music floats, I’ll pore upon the stream, Where sighing lovers dream, And fish for fancies as they pass Within the watery glass. I’ll drink of the clear stream, And hear the linnet’s song; And there I’ll lie and dream The day along: And, when night comes, I’ll go To places fit for woe, Walking along the darkened valley With silent melancholy. William Blake. Honorine, 13 years (I always want to add this disclaimer 😂)

Mary-Ann Maronski

I got my copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry in the mail today. I treated myself to it as an Easter present. It’s a giant collection so I’m sure I will get a lot of reading out of it.

Mary-Ann Maronski

Of the three featured poems, I think all three were excellent. I’m afraid I must be an outlier with this one Motherhood by May Swenson stood out as the favorite for me. Going into the poem directly after the Sylvia Plath poem my mind started out with the assumption that Motherhood would be about a human mother. The poem never directly mentions the species of mother, though the great detail of the poem’s description suggests the image of a mother Orangutan with her small baby. It may just be my odd mind but the images that it brought to my mind seemed to be the most beautiful and vivid of the three.

Cherian Philipose

The Plath poem was beautiful and also disturbing, as it showed a mother unable to bond with her child. It could be because the mother is depressed, or, perhaps, too detached and intellectual. The Swenson poem was brilliant, and reveals itself slowly, we have that progression from human mother to simian mother, there is rather too much physicality to it, but it is still apposite.