Poetry 2

At this point I have read both the poems but have not yet read the essay about them. I would definitely call this a poetic conversation. At first I didn’t know what was going on until I looked at the titles and authors and realized that “To His Coy Mistress” was written by Andrew Marvell, and the poem by Archibald Macleish is called “You, Andrew Marvell”. Upon rereading I found this to be sort of confrontational. Marvell talks about how he and his mistress have no time to waste and need to make love while she is still young. For example, he says, “while the youthful hue sits on the skin like morning dew…let us sport us while we may.” Macleish kind of mocks Marvell by also talking about the quick passage of time, but he does so in a dark, ominous, almost creepy way (I went through and circled all the dark, negatively connotated words and there were about 22, including ‘night’, ‘creep’, ‘silent’, ‘loom’, etc), sort of like he’s telling Marvell he’s a nutjob. Me being a person who avoids poetry at all costs, I found this really interesting and powerful, because I didn’t know poetry was used for reasons like this. It does give poetry a whole feeling of power. The poets basically talk about how life is so short and the end comes so quickly. While sometimes I agree and feel like I was 5 years old yesterday, sometimes I also feel like I’ve been alive forever.

I’ve now read the essay by Mark Strand. This guy can dig deeper into poetry than I’d ever dream. However, I felt comforted because at the beginning he says, “When I read it for the first time, I knew little about poetry. I didn’t know who Andrew Marvell was, nor did I know where half of the places were that MacLeish mentions,” and I was like hey, me too. He talks about how “You, Andrew Marvell” makes time a “private matter instead of simply a geographic one” and that’s “probably why it appealed to [him] as a teenager.” I think all teenagers could relate to this feeling of privacy and self. It seems that he and I both caught on to the theme in the poem of awareness of mortality, but he points out that “Beginning with ‘and’ and ending inconclusively with an ellipsis, the poem as a whole hints at this suspended circularity.” Upon going back I agreed, though at first I thought the ellipsis was just to create an ominous ending. Something that I didn’t catch onto that he did was that “what it suggests is not just the simple diurnal round of night and day, but the more tragic rise and fall of civilizations.” With all this new information from Strand’s essay I came to realize that this poem goes much, much deeper than just a poetic conversation with Andrew Marvell.