Frost and Stevens

Oh, me and poetry just don't mix.  I truly love poetry in all its forms and creativity, but I have the hardest time understanding it.  I'm sure many people struggle with this as well, but most hate poetry because they can't understand it.  I love poetry because I can't understand it, so I have the power to make my own interpretations.  However, I am also the kind of person who likes to know exactly what the poet is trying to say.  So I take advantage of the discussion in class to make meaning of poetry.

The poem that stood out to me the most from Robert Frost was "Design."  Honestly, I don't know why since I am deathly afraid of spiders, however, the detail and word choice are very specific making the poem as a whole to be "beautiful."  This style reminds me of one of Hopkins' poem--don't remember which one--that refers to nature as "dappled" and "speckled."  He also integrated a lot of detail, specifically about nature, in such a short poem using just the right words.  His last quote "If design govern in a thing so small" truly speaks of the detail and beauty of even the smallest living creature.  A spider may not be extremely small, but small enough for Frost to notice the spider's detail.

I preferred Wallace Stevens' style of poetry more than Frost, but I found it a lot harder to follow.  Which is why I was very grateful for discussing "Sunday Morning" in class which also happens to be the poem I liked best of Stevens.  When I first read it, I did expect it to be like a Sunday morning, however, after discussing it in class, there were deeper religious thematic elements to it.  What stood out to me the most was not the meaning or the theme, but the style and again the word choice:
"The day is like wide water, without sound."
"Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, within whose burning bosom we devise our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly."
"We live in an old chaos of the sun, or island solitude, unsponsored, free, of that wide water, inescapable."