As I was doing a little bit of research on Clifton, I found that many critics had similar things to say regarding her style. A Christian Century review of Clifton’s work said, “The first thing that strikes us about Lucille Clifton's poetry is what is missing: capitalization, punctuation, long and plentiful lines. We see a poetry so pared down that its spaces take on substance, become a shaping presence as much as the words themselves”. An American Poetry Review article said, “Clifton's poetics of understatement—no capitalization, few strong stresses per line, many poems totaling fewer than twenty lines, the sharp rhetorical question—includes the essential only". After I read these reviews I realized that they are completely accurate—Lucile Clifton manages to convey a lot in the most minimalist way possible.

            I think that this poem is all about the persisting separation between blacks and whites. The barrier is no longer physical, for the Jim Crowe laws are long gone, but it is psychological. She illustrates this in the first stanza, where she shows that the exact same thing—a river—can have a very distinct significance for blacks and whites. She also demonstrates the discrepancy between the mentalities of both races in the second stanza, where she points out how African-Americans have grown used to asking for help, since it is sometimes the only way they can survive.

            I really like how she states that the differences between blacks and whites go beyond color—it is mostly about how they see themselves. I think that she is saying that if African Americans never stop seeing themselves as poor, they will never stop being poor. Ultimately, what is still keeping them back is not only society; it is also their mentalities. That’s the river that drives a chasm between the two races. 

The first five times I read this poem I was not able to figure out what it could possibly be talking about. Therefore, I went online and did a  little research on “Buffalo Bill”’s life and reputation. I found out that Buffalo Bill came to be a figure that “embodied the spirit of the West”. Born in 1846, he spent his younger years as a prospector in the gold rush, as a rider for the Pony Express and as a scout in many Union campaigns against the Kiowa and the Comanche. However, he earned his nickname and his fame when he started working as a buffalo hunter for the constructions crews of the Kansas Pacific railroad. People started to call him Buffalo Bill because of the colossal quantities of buffalo he hunted. According to him, he killed at least 4,280 in just seventeen months.

e.e cummings’s poem is short and ambiguous. In my opinion, it can definitely have more than one plausible interpretation. I came up with to different analyses, and I think that the two are equally valid. In my opinion, cummings could be either using juxtaposition to highlight the irony of Buffalo Bill’s death or praising the cowboy’s everlasting fame.

I came up with my first interpretation because I saw a very pronounced difference between the first half and the second half of the poem. In the first half, cummings describes Buffalo Bill hunting on his “watersmooth silver stallion”. To provide even stronger imagery, cummings experiments with words and joins them together when he writes “onetwothreefour pigeonsjustlikethat” . The effect of this device is that the words sound like gunshots when they are read aloud. All of this first half of the poem pertains to Buffalo Bill’s killing of other creatures, but the second half deals with Buffalo Bill’s own death. When cummings asks the rhetorical question, “how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death”, he highlights the idea that nobody can escape death, not even legends. The juxtaposition of both ideas creates irony, for Buffalo Bill became a “hero” by killing other creatures but he obviously was not able to escape death himself.

As I re-read the poem again and again I thought of another interpretation, and I personally don’t think that it is any less correct than my first one. I think that the poem might actually be a celebration of Buffalo Bill, rather than a satire that highlights the irony of his death. The use of the word “defunct” in the second line is interesting. The word itself pertains to something that has stopped functioning. The way I see it, cummings might have used that specific word to emphasize that Buffalo Bill just lost physical abilities, he “stopped functioning”, but still abstractly lives on in legends and people’s memories. Also, it is important to consider cummings’s intention when he chose to mention Jesus in the poem. The name stands out because it is completely isolated. I think that cummings might have been trying to draw some type of parallel between Jesus and Buffalo Bill, a comparison that could serve to communicate Buffalo Bill’s immortality. Finally, the same rhetorical question that I mentioned before, “how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death” can be seen through a different lens. Instead of referring to Buffalo Bill’s inability to escape death, the question could actually be read with a slightly sarcastic tone and be interpreted as a subtle mock of “Mister Death”, who is unable to completely take Buffalo Bill because he definitely lives on in American culture.

Even though both poems talk about God, they do so with completely different tones.  “The Lamb” describes God with a very innocent, naïve and maybe even idealistic tone. It presents him as a benevolent being that has created tender creatures. “The Tiger”, on the other hand, brings out another face of God: the maker of evil. A major difference between the two poems is that in one  (“The Lamb”) the author assures the reader that God was the one who created cute creatures such as lambs, while in “The Tiger”, he is not sure if God was actually the one who engendered cruel creature like tigers. The author struggles with the idea that the same being who created all of the good and sweet things in the world could have also designed the things that bring suffering to humankind.

This idea is further supported by the imagery in both poems. In “The Lamb”, phrases such as “Softest clothing wooly bright” make the reader think of soft things, which reflect God’s gentle nature. However, in “The Tiger” God is instead compared to a blacksmith.  Words such as “hammer”, “chain” and “furnace” make the reader think of God as someone harsh, rather than someone gentle.

The question that arises when these two poems are read together is if it is possible that the same being who created the good things in the world, such as love, kindness and tenderness could have also created those things which cause suffering, such as war, disease and violence. It is hard to wrap our heads around the idea that love originated at the same place as hate, but the origin of evil has always been a question that has baffled humankind.  

            During the first half of this poem, description and imagery play a very important role in setting the mood. The description of the night in the first four stanzas transmits serenity and peacefulness. This is probably what Carruth feels when he drives along the streets of Vermont late at night. However, even though the mood is mostly tranquil, there is always a certain sense of melancholy that is hard to ignore. In my opinion, this melancholy is represented with the disappearing moon. Without a moon shining in the night sky, it always seems that there is something crucial missing, and maybe this is something that Carruth feels and wishes to transmit with his poem.

            This feeling of melancholy is carried on into the second half of the poem, when the author encounters the cows. I believe that the cows are important to the poem because their eyes remind Carruth of something from his past. He goes through a few moments of remembrance, during which he recalls two innocent, sad girls he once knew. It is unclear who these two girls are and what they represent. The author never lets the reader know the story of the two girls—he never reveals why they are sad. Nevertheless, I don’t think that it is crucial to know this story in order to grasp the essence of the poem. I think that this is a poem about nostalgia and reminiscence. It describes those moments when we are so alone and tranquil that we can actually look back on our lives and, in a way, relive the past. Furthermore, it describes those moments when something that seems trivial, such as a bunch of cows, actually reminds us of things that are important to us. 

Nature is a common theme in poetry. For some reason, it has been inspiring human art since the beginning of time; and evidently it continues to do so. However, when I read “A Blessing”, it didn’t feel like the typical ode to animals—it had something more. The first time I read this poem, what stood out to me the most was the tenderness and affection that Wright manages to transmit. Wright does so much more than merely describe the ponies—he tries to express the strong connection he feels as soon as he finds them grazing on the pasture. I personally think that this sudden connection that Wright describes is something characteristic of our humanity. Sometimes, for reasons we cannot understand, we are drawn to a certain animal (be it a dog, a cat, a horse, etc.) and feel a special kind of tenderness and warmth. We sense the vulnerability of the creature, and feel a certain responsibility to take care of it. In my opinion, these are the feelings Wright tries to convey with his poem.  

I think that Wright successfully uses imagery to show the ponies’ innocence and vulnerability, two of the main characteristics of animals that charm humans. In the eighth line, Wright explicitly says that both ponies are grazing alone on the pasture, and in the twelfth line, he writes, “There is no loneliness like theirs”.  According to my interpretation, Wright probably stresses this point to underscore the animals’ vulnerability and therefore justify his approach towards them. Furthermore, the ponies’ dark, kind eyes and their happiness show their innocence, something humans have always been drawn to in animals. 

Thankfully, I have never dealt with the death of a close family member. I can’t identify myself with what Bukowski is describing, which really affects the way I connect with the poem. I can only understand what he says to a certain degree, because the emotions he seeks to transmit with the poem are completely unknown to me.  For instance, at first I was rather confused with the third and fourth lines of the poem, “they have long taken your blood / you are a dry stick in a basket”. Being used to the romantic language that is so widely used today, I was perplexed by the dry tone and the appalling imagery-- I couldn’t understand why Bukowski would describe somebody he loved in this way. After reading the poem a couple of times, it occurred to me that the real significance of these two lines can be discovered if they are contrasted with the last three lines of the stanza, “in this room/ the hours of love/still make shadows”. Even though Jane is no longer anything more than a “dry stick”, she vividly lives on in Bukowski’s mind, for he can still feel her love and see her shadow.

Something that stands out to me is the choppy rhythm of the poem. There is no consistent meter and sentences seem to be divided into small fragments. I am not sure if this was done on purpose, but when I read it aloud I realized that in a way, the rhythm of the poem imitates how we sound when we sob. When we cry, it is very hard for us to speak smoothly—we constantly stop mid-sentence to catch our breath, so our sentences sound like small fragments put together, very similarly to the way this poem is written. 





            

            I believe that with this poem, Glück transmits the melancholy she feels when she sees how humans alter nature. After I read the poem, it seemed to me that there must be some sort of story behind it. In my interpretation, I inferred that the author probably spent a day in a place like a woodshop— somewhere where she saw firsthand how trees are chopped and polished in order to form more “perfect” shapes. As she witnessed this process, she probably asked herself why it is that people desire to change nature’s original form—is it really necessary?
            However, when Glück writes this poem, it is nighttime already, and she has found an answer to her own question.  She knows it is not necessary, and she actually goes a step further and feels “bitter sadness” for all humankind. For her, the issue now goes beyond desire versus necessity. She now outright condemns the practice of altering nature. She uses powerful images and metaphors to show how “stationary” trees are unnatural, and they are therefore “writhing” as if to break free. Her use of the word “twisted” in the last line is very interesting. Normally, we think of trees as twisted in their natural state, because they have imperfections— they can be misshapen or deformed. However, the word “twisted” also has another connotation. This word can be associated with something corrupted, perverted or abnormal. This is the idea that Glück seeks to emphasize in her poem. Nature is not meant to be shaped by human beings—it is good as it is. Tampering with it just takes its charm away. It corrupts it, transforms it into something that is no longer natural.
            I really liked this poem when I first read it because it is extremely relevant to what is going on in the world today. Nowadays, we tend to see the earth just as a provider of resources, which we then alter in order to meet consumer preferences and necessities. However, I do think that we have to consider Glück’s ideas on what nature should really be.  If we acknowledge that nature is something we have to respect, that it isn’t something we can just corrupt as we please, we might even find a more sustainable way of life, something that the world desperately needs. 

 
My mask is my shyness. It is sometimes frustrating to feel like two different people, with two completely different personalities. At home or with close friends, I am normally the one who can’t keep her mouth shut—I ramble on and on about whatever pops into my mind. However, most times I venture outside of my comfort zone and interact with people I don’t really know, shyness acts like a mask, impeding others from seeing who I really am. Masks are made to cover faces—my shyness covers my personality. It’s a mask that keeps me from loosening up and starting a casual conversation, from thinking about possible icebreakers, and from speaking up when I’m with a group of people I have just met.

Some people wear masks willingly because they want to hide some aspect of themselves. This is not my case. I would happily get completely rid of my mask if I could, but I have discovered that shyness is an inherent part of my personality. I know that I will never be that type of person who can approach absolutely anyone and be a friend within ten minutes. My best friends are those who have seen beyond the mask, who didn’t think I was boring or stuck-up when they first met the quiet version of me. However, this doesn’t mean that I am 100% content with my personality. There are, of course, a couple of things that I am willing to tweak to become a more outgoing person. When I was ten, I read Billie Jean King’s autobiography, and there is one sentence that has stayed in my mind for the past eight years. She wrote, “Every day, do something that scares you…” Ever since I read the book, I have actually tried to follow this little piece of advice. For me, that scary something normally involves beating my shyness, making my mask weaker and weaker.