A Vicious Cycle

"Acquainted with the Night" by Robert Frost

As a huge Frost fan, this poem interested me the most out of the six we studied this week.  It appeals, in a sympathetic way, to those people feeling depressed, forgotten, and unloved.  Frost's speaker expresses extraordinary sorrow in the poem, setting a melancholy mood immediately.  He repeats the phrase "I have" before listing a series of gloomy, saddening acts from walking alone in the rain to peering down an ominous city street (Frost 976).  He express shame, or possibly apathy toward the world, as he describes walking past a policeman with his head hung low, "unwilling to explain" his sorrow (Frost 976).  The only glimmer of hope in the poem comes when the speaker stops because he thinks he is being called.   Sadly, he only heard an "interrupted cry" completely unintended for him and destroying any hope for happiness he may have had (Frost 976).  Thus, the whole poem reinforces the speaker's depression, and the second to last line amplifies it by adding confusion.  The line reads, "[The clock] proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right," which emphasizes a world without moral judgment, confusing the speaker and leaving him lost as to how he should break his depression (Frost 976).  He can't escape his sadness.  Therefore, Frost ends the poem with the same depressing line he began it with, "I have been acquainted with the night", to reinforce the speaker's entrapment in his melancholy (Frost 976).

Over-thinking Things

"Sorting Laundry" by Elisavietta Ritche

This poem displays how people can over-analyze a situation to the point of distorting something as pure as love into anxiety and insecurity.  The speaker of the poem speaks to her absent lover, comparing doing their laundry to "folding you into my life" (Ritche 841).  Her relationship with this man appears perfect and without worry.  The two laugh at their tacky towels, do not mind each other's old clothes, and embrace each other's "wrinkles" or flaws (Ritche 841). However, after the seventh stanza, the speaker's insecurity starts to set in.  She starts focusing on minute details in the laundry like unpaired socks and miscellaneous items she finds in pockets.  This attention to minutia represents her thinking too much about her wonderful relationship and fabricating hypothetical scenarios in her head.  Her anxiety peaks when she folds the shirt of one of her former lovers. The act elicits thoughts of abandonment and the speaker states, "If you were to leave me . . . a mountain of unsorted wash could not fill the empty side of the bed," (Ritche 842).  She has worried to the point of transforming a wonderful relationship into one on the verge of collapse.  The poem should have a wide audience as there are many people that have over-analyzed something good into a distortion of its true nature due to their insecurities.

A Bold Social Attack

"The Convergence of the Twain" by Thomas Hardy

Hardy fully utilizes the Titanic tragedy to pen this poem decrying ostentation, luxury, and vanity.  He writes as if displays of wealth and pretentiousness, angering God, led to the sinking of the Titanic.  His speaker expresses an aversion to vanity by describing how a "sea-worm crawls - grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent" over luxuries on the ocean floor (Hardy 778).  This image also serves to contrast luxurious items with something disgusting in an effort to mock the vanity they embody.  Furthermore, at the beginning, middle, and end of the poem, Hardy refers to a divine "Pride of Life", "Immanent Will", and "Spinner of the Years" in relation to the boat and its superficiality (Hardy 778, 779).  Specifically, he writes how this deity, God, "prepared a sinister mate . . . A Shape of Ice" for the boat, presumably due to the sinful greed on the boat (Hardy 778).  He believes God set the Titanic in motion toward the iceberg so that the passengers would atone for their sins.  This portrays God as vindictive and angry, but that portrayal is likely an expression of Hardy's own sentiments toward vanity.  Regardless, the poem ends cleverly, lending resolution to the loneliness set out by the phrase, "In a solitude of the sea" at the start of the poem (Hardy 778).  Hardy writes that once the ship and iceberg collide, "consummation comes" and ends the solitude experienced earlier (Hardy 778).  Ironically however, this consummation leaves the ship in ultimate solitude at the bottom of the ocean.

Feelin' Drunk on Summertime

"I taste a liquor never brewed" by Emily Dickinson

In this poem, Dickinson incorporates one long extended metaphor to compare summer and everything related to it to alcohol.  The speaker in the poem adores summer.  For him, summertime is a "liquor never brewed", better than all the alcohol made in the "Vats upon the Rhine," (Dickinson 797).  In order to clarify that the speaker is in fact comparing summer to the alcohol, Dickinson employs several clever titles.  He writes and the speaker states that he is an "Inebriate of Air", a "Debauchee of Dew" (Dickinson 797).  These titles show the speaker deriving his intoxication from aspects of summer and warm weather.  Furthermore, the speaker reinforces his ecstasy over the season by expressing how even after bees and butterflies have stopped drinking in the weather, he'll continue to imbibe the essence of summer.  The entire extended metaphor works perfectly except for the problem of the negative connotation associated with drunkenness and alcohol.  Luckily, Dickinson rectifies this dilemma in the last stanza.  By describing "Seraphs" and "Saints" enjoying and approving of a "Tippler's" intoxication with summer, Dickinson transforms inebriation's negativity into something positive (Dickinson 797).  If angels and saints approve, being drunk on summer must be acceptable.