Cottonmouth Country

The poem “Cottonmouth Country” was kind of weird… When reading it I got this weird sense from it. I didn’t know where Hatteras was and I also wondered why the poet chose that place to put in the poem. I found that Hatteras is a place on the east coast of North Carolina and it is called the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” because of such dangerous shipping conditions there. Then the next thing I didn’t know was what a cottonmouth was? I knew that it definitely not that nasty dry feeling like a cotton ball is in a persons mouth, so I looked it up and it is actually a snake, and a kind of dangerous one at that. The cottonmouth is not the typical snake, this snake lives on the east coast, and it goes in water and even the Atlantic Ocean. From that, this place Hatteras sounds like a not very fun place at all. All the description such as fish bones, death, cottonmouth, and pollution, etc. that makes the reader feel like this isn’t a happy place. The author obviously doesn’t like it there. The last two lines bring things together a bit more, “Birth, not death, is the hard loss. I know. I also left a skin there.” From the build up of the description of Hatteras and what it is like there, with the death of many in the ocean, the snakes, the fish bones, and the pollution, this place sounds horrible and I think that is where the “birth, not death, is the hard loss” comes in. I think the author was trying to say there that being born in a crappy place is harder than dying in a crappy place. When a person is born in a place like that they usually stay there all throughout there childhood without a choice and have to kind of suffer there. Then death on the other hand, if they are dying in a place like this they must have made the decision to stay there. I kind of look at it the opposite from the poem. I look at being born there a person has no control and they just deal with it a leave when they get older, but then I look at dying there and I would think it would be harder to look back with regret that I didn’t leave a place like that? The last line reveals that the author lived there and left there… leaving only skin behind like a snake; they shed their skin as a symbol that the place is no longer a part of them, and that they are starting fresh somewhere new. Looking at the poem as a whole, I noticed that it is only one stanza and it only has eight lines, and think that it contributes to the meaning, showing that the author doesn’t see the place as something important to them and just dreary and boring. In the end, I thought the poem was kind of interesting and I liked how the author described the place where they were born in such a different way than many would have expected.

The Book

I think we did the poem “The Book” by Miller Williams last class, and since then I have thought about it quite a bit. One of the ideas I liked quite a bit was the thought that it was a person living in someone else skin rather than his own, or that he had become a different person. I felt the poem came from a war because the book was found in a fallen bunker. The part that revealed that he used it as a diary and a sketchbook means a lot. When a person uses something like that, they let their guard down and show who they really are. Finding out what that book really was―a book bound by human skin, and knowing what it held I think maybe made the soldier question himself and who he had become. The last lines describe it perfectly,“I stared at the changing book and a horror grew, I stared and a horror grew, which was, which is, how beautiful it was until I knew.” From that, there is that sense that the soldier is now lost, and he is questioning all that he thought he was and what he knew. Maybe that book allowed him to change and become a different person after the war, and then to find out that the place that his new self was, was not what he thought it was, it made him question his new self altogether. So, then the question comes would it have been better to have not found out at all? There is no clear answer, but I am not sure even what I would want? Find out my changed life is based on a something else from what I thought, I don’t know if I could overcome that? The book alone was not the only horror, the thought of where does he go from here only added even more to the overall horror…and that what was once beautiful and good was not anymore...

Alone

The poem Alone, by Edgar Allan Poe, is exactly what we all expect from Poe― sad. One of the first things I noticed when reading the poem was the rhyme of the last word in every two lines. It is a pretty interesting structure to the poem, and it is kind of strange but it makes the poem seem a bit matter-of-fact? So, obviously the poem is about being alone. The reason for him being alone is said in the first line, “Form childhood’s hour I have not been as others were.” So, he was always a different from the other kids when he was a kid. Next he said, “I have not seen as others saw,” and that makes me think that he had unusual things happen as a child that a normal child would not have seen, and for that he was maybe more mature than the other kids, making him be alone. It seems that no matter what he did he could not find joy in others, “I could not awaken my heart to joy at the same tone― And all i lov’d―I loved alone―” The last two lines really sum everything up, “(When the rest of Heaven was blue) of a demon in my view―” From that it makes me think that it doesn’t bother him that he is alone, and that it is something he has learned to deal with. When everyone had happy images like heaven he always had those different and unhappy dark images like demons. At the end of the day, the poem is seen sad to someone like me, but to someone like him it seems like something he has just learned to deal with and it doesn’t faze him anymore which is even more sad.

Personal Helicon

“Personal Helicon” by Seamus Heaney can be seen as a pretty straight forward poem, but looking into the poem a bit more I found a bit of a deeper meaning. The very first thing I asked myself after reading the poem was what is a Helicon? I found that in Greece it is a mountain, and it is believed to be a source of poetic inspiration and the home of the muses. So, after finding out what a Helicon was, I began to look at the poem and pick out what his muse was; what was his source of inspiration? As a child it began that his muse was a well, and all the buckets, moss, and all the childhood memories that came along with it. There was a name that I didn’t know, and I felt there must have some importance to it because it looked like it was possibly a Greek name. The name was Narcissus, and I found that it was a Greek name, and he was a man in a myth that fell in love with his reflection in a pool and pined away, and he became the flower which bears his name now. This allusion to the myth of Narcissus really brings the whole poem together. “Now I pry into roots, to finger slime, to star, big-eyed Narcissus, into spring is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing,” with that first line it becomes a bit more clear that the well was his muse in to poem, and maybe that well represented his childhood and likeNarcissus, he fell in love with that child that he was. The parts, “Now I pry into roots” and “darkness echoing” I believe represents him in adulthood and him looking back through the memories of his childhood that he loved, his muse, and how it is fading… The sadness of his fading memories is represented perfectly by the tone with his use of dark words like “dark drop” and “trapped sky” and “dank moss,”ect. The sad tone also makes me think that maybe he is a little lost in adulthood because he uses dark words a lot, and I look at dark like being lost because nothing is clear in the dark. In the end, the poem was a cool, yet it was sad because of fading memories and him being a little lost in adulthood.