Sample HW Logs

Sample HW Logs (by previous students)

Reading Response #2: “the mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks [MORAL AMBIGUITY IN RE...]

This poem has always elicited a tremendous emotional response from me. It is one of my favorite poems because Brooks captures the grief associated with an abortion so well. The speaker does not condemn her actions, nor does she excuse them; she only grieves for what might have been.

The way she accomplishes this is by exploring what might have been. Brooks uses lists of possibilities. In the first stanza, she lists what the mother will never be able to do. She “will never neglect or beat/ Them, or silence or buy with a sweet” (5-6), and “will never wind up the sucking-thumb/ Or scuttle off ghosts that come” (7-8). In the second stanza, Brooks lists what the child will never be able to experience: “Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths” (20-1). The speaker acknowledges that she has stolen the wonderful parts of life, as well as the horrible.

The lists elicit emotion through quantity, by overwhelming the reader with possibilities. The other technique Brooks uses to produce emotion is the rhyme and meter. The feet are almost all anapest, which causes the rhythm to be slower. The slower reading causes contemplation of every possibility, a deliberate reflection of each missed opportunity. The places where she deviates from this rhythm are not lists, but more abrupt statements:

Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made. (26-28)

These statements stand out because of the changed rhythm. The rhyme is almost all couplets, which is reminiscent of children’’s poems. This is appropriate since the poem is spoken to the speaker’’s dead children, as in the last two lines, “Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you/ All” (34-5). In this way, the poem becomes a tribute and an elegy.

Response to Robert Hass

I really connected with Robert Hass’s poetry. He holds on to words both as the representation for larger ideas and feelings as well as for salvation from these signifiers. In “Meditation at Lagunitas” Hass explores the notion of the sign versus the signified. According to the poet “each particular erases/the luminous clarity of a general idea” (3-4). For Hass something is lost when one tries to pick apart or explain the notion, or sign.

He expands this thought pattern as he discusses the things he thinks of that signify his lover: “a thirst for salt, for my childhood river/with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,/muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish/called pumpkinseed” (20-23). No part of this list actually describes the woman nor does the list describe Hass’s “violent wonder at her presence” (19).

Hass conveys the message that this list does not relate with the woman, his lover, by stating “it hardly had to do with her” (23). But by describing things that are not representative of the woman, Hass is somehow able to relay a feeling. From these descriptors I gather the intensity of emotion Hass assigns to this lover. Hass grasps paradox here and in discussing how his list lacks the ability to accurately define the woman, he defines his relation to the woman.

In “Faint Music” Hass assigns words the responsibility of salvation and tells a story of a man about to commit suicide. The man, standing on the edge of a bridge thinks about the word “seafood.” The word leads him into an internal thought process of dissecting the meaning behind the word: “No one said ‘landfood.’ He thought it was degrading to the rainbow/ perch…and he realized that the reason for the word/was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise/the restaurants could just put ‘fish’ up on their signs” (27-8, 31-3). It is this internal dialogue, the search for meaning in words that lulls the man to sleep and saves him from killing himself.

I really enjoyed Hass’s poetic discussion on the meaning and value of words. It amazes me that in one poem he can show that words lack the true ability to illuminate the true and in another poem he can show how words and the rumination about words has the power to save a life. This is a powerful discussion of the humanistic relationship with language.