I enjoyed the poems this week. The most interesting poem was "And What Do You Get" by Heather McHugh. I thought she was had one of the most clever poem. She says, "excise the er from exercise," which is cool because excise means take out, and when you take out the er from exercise you actually get excise. Another example of this is, when she writes, "example, take the ex out: now it's bigger." The remaining word would be ample, which means big or a lot. I thought that was cool how she makes you think and involves you.
When I was in high school, I took English AP and we read a lot of Shakespeare mostly just plays, and I used to dread reading them. But after reading some of his sonnets in class I actually have an appreciation for this style of his work. I have a few favorites, the first one being 116. It seems the sonnet is about love and discussing the false claims of what love is. He says, "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove, o, no! it is an ever-fixed mark," so to me he's saying love is permanent, and doesn't go from place to place (or person to person.) The last four lines of the sonnet are very powerful, "love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but it bears out even to the edge of doom. If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor man no man ever loved." I deciphered it as, love is extremely powerful and lasts forever, and if I'm lying then that means no man has really ever loved.
Sonnet 127 was a bit confusing to me because I could not tell if Shakespeare was referring to Black women or perhaps dark haired women. I could relate to the ideas in the poem about not fitting standards of beauty which he explains in the first two lines and last two lines, "yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe, that every tongue says beauty should look so." Also, overall I found that I really enjoyed the last two lines of most of the sonnets, I felt like they were very profound and thought provoking and helped understand the sonnet better. In 129, a sonnet which to me is about the dangers of lust Shakespeare ends with, "all this the world well knows,; yet none knows well, to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell!" I think that's something most men should read :)
great.
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