Sample HW Logs (by previous students)

on Galway Kinnell | on Sharon Olds

The two poems I am comparing are “First Song” (3) and “Middle of the Way” (37-38). I found, reading through these selections of Kinnell’s poetry, that he uses much of the same imagery and thoughts throughout. I have chosen to pick out the way that he speaks of darkness and nighttime.

The section of “First Song” that really stuck out to me, of Kinnell speaking of darkness, is in lines 16 and 18:

A boy’s hunched body loved out of a stalk
the first song of his happiness, and the song woke
his heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.

 

The sections of “Middle of the Way” that I am comparing to the above selection are from lines 9-10 in Ch.1, lines 5-10 and 19-20 in Ch.3:

I love the earth, and always
in its darknesses I am a stranger. (9-10, ch. 1)

In the human heart
there sleeps a green worm
that has spun the heart about itself,
and that shall dream itself black wings
one day to break free into the black sky. (5-10, ch. 3)

…I know I half live in the world,
half my life belongs to the wild darkness. (19-20, ch. 3)

What I see between the elements of darkness in these two poems is that Kinnell speaks of darkness as something in which he finds himself alive—in the way of “sadness in joy.” (10, ch. 1) It is a place he finds himself exquisitely alive, in a full way—not limited to joy or to sadness, but with the fullness of both which make life whole.

In “Middle of the Way” he speaks of darkness as something that separates him from the world, as in “First Song” the boy is separated from the harshness of his life and let into the freedom of the eternalness of nighttime.

Also, in “Middle of the Way,” I see the “black wings” (9) and the “black sky” (10) as allusions to the darkness of night, if not the night itself. It is funny to me that Kinnell associates the blackness fo the wings and the sky with breaking free, and in that sense, also freedom. I usually think of freedom as bright an dlight, and yet I understand here what he is saying about the freedom of night—you are yourself against the sky, and you are both consequential and inconsequential. What you are does not make or unmake the night, but the night adds to you wholenss and fullness, meditation and beauty. “The wild darkness” (20, ch. 3) is wehre you find freedom, alone and completely yourself, in the midst of nature, separated from the world and the rest of life.

Reading Response to Sharon Olds

...Sharon Olds walks on territory I know, goes places I’ve been but am afraid to tell just anyone about. She speaks candidly about the body, the sexual body, and for this response I chose to discuss “Early Images of Heaven” and “The Elder Sister.”

“Early Images of Heaven” embraces the masculine body and moves to climax through its pace, which acts as a metaphor for the physical orgasm. Olds repeats the words “as if” in lines 11, 12 and 13 in order to control the tempo, of the poem. Olds forces the reader to take a breath before reading or speaking these words. The break between the first breath is longer than the second; the second break is longer than the third. The quickening of the pace forces the reader into the accelerated breathing that occurs before a physical orgasm.

This poem also discusses the parallel between the feminine and masculine in that most intimate and physical aspect of procreation and human growth. Having nursed two of my own children, I know that the nipple touches the infant’s throat during feeding. Olds touches on this same phenomenon but during fellatio in lines 6 and 7; “the way the head barely fits in the throat,/its mouth almost touching the valve of the stomach-.” Here, it is the masculine, which provides that primal and physical nourishment for the feminine.

“The Elder Sister” illuminates the feminine movement from innocence to experience. The grounds for this discussion, as in “Early Images of Heaven” begin with the sexual body. Olds mentions her sister’s breasts “ris[ing] slowly, like swans on a pond,” and hair rising “on the white mound of her flesh, like/ threads of water out of the ground” (13, 16-7). These metaphors make the physical transition into maturity come alive but differ from the former poem in that they move from the body into nature.

Both images in the later poem connect the sexuality of the feminine body with the fluidity of what is natural. Olds uses water images as a symbol of femininity. When the speaker discusses the birthing process the birth canal is compared to a “channel.” This channel is the mother from whom the sisters can flow as water into the pond.