The Love Story

The "Love Story" is a short story which talks about a Harvard student Oliver and a Radcliffe student Jenny. Oliver meets Jenny in the Radcliffe University Library where she works as a librarian. Jenny starts talking about how Oliver should use the Harvard library instead of the Radcliffe University one because Harvard has more books. After that, they start a sort of a friendship. Jenny goes and watches Oliver in a game. During the game they get to talk during the 2 minute ejection which is given to Oliver by the hockey referee. Another important thing (after their friendship turns into a romantic relationship) is that Jenny won a scholarship to go to France and practice with this popular music professor. She tells Oliver about it and of course he doesn't like it. He also proposes her marriage just to let her know how serious he is about their relationship.

The Drunk Poem

The poem You are My Drunkenness written by Nazim Hikmet is very short but also very interesting. Again it connects to the fact which we mentioned in class that for feelings we do not have a lot of expressions. The author, instead of continuing with something between the lines of "you make me feel like..." he simply stops in the first stanza.


Here is the poem:



"You are my drunkenness...
I did not sober up, as if I can do that;
I don't want to anyway.
I have a headache, my knees are full of scars
I am in mud all around
I struggle to walk towards your hesitant light."

I think that the author is talking about an experience of being drunk and seeing a potential courting candidate. When I read it I get this image of a person who is drunk, all dirty and scarred, and trying to walk around, following the girl that he liked.

e.e. cummings ...is this a name?

somewhere i have never traveled by e.e cummings is one of my most favorite poems in the second package of poems. as you can notice by the title, one reason why this poem was interesting to me was because it didn't have any capitalization rules applied. other than that, the title is pretty self-explanatory. the author talks about an imaginative place in which she has never been:

"somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:"

i like the part where it says "your eyes have their silence". based on my opinion i think that the meaning of that sentence is that the eyes are silent because their are content with the view that they are getting. 

"(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)"   

this is also a part that i like because I think that it would be great for a romantic line that you could tell to your girl/boyfriend.

To Lose is to be an Artist

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop is a poem which I liked very much because it connected to my personal life a lot. As we discussed in class, we do not have a rich vocabulary when it comes to explaining feelings but for some reason the author wrote enough for me to be able to relate to what is she trying to explain. She says that losing is an art, and that we should keep losing in order to work towards the perfection of the aforementioned "art". Elizabeth Bishop also gives us examples on what we should lose in order to master the feeling:

"Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster." 

As you can infer, in the 2nd stanza above, the author also gives dimensions to losing (farther, faster). 

I have had the chance to lose a lot in my life, so in a weird way, I know what the poet is saying about losing.




 

This is How I am Going to Die

The poem which I really liked from the first group of poems is Cesar Vallejo's Black Stone on Top of a White Stone. In this poem the author imagines his death, and gives us some details about the place, the time, and the situation in which he will die:

 "I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris-- it does not bother me--
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn."

Later on, in the second stanza, the author gives us hints that he actually wishes to die:
 
"As I put down these lines, I have set my shoulders
To the evil."


In the last part of the poem he also tells the readers about the way in which he will die:





"They hit him hard with a stick and hard also
With the end of a rope."

Ultimately, I think that the author himself was in a depressive mood and depression in many times can lead to thoughts about death or suicide.

The Stranger - Final Part

The last part of The Stranger is the one in which I expected for something big to happen - some kind of an unexpected climax. But unfortunately the story's intensity went down with Mersault being found guilty on the charges that were pressed against him. During the last days of his life, before his execution using a guillotine, he spends his time thinking about life. At some point he comes to a conclusion that everyone is going to die someday and that he is just dying earlier than the rest. In my opinion, this is what happens when you let fate make the choices that you are supposed to make. If Mersault was punished for something, (except for the murder) it was for wasting his life.