In just one paper, I am going to go from two inspirational poems, to a more depressing one. The inspirational poem I will be responding to is The Tyger, written by William Blake. This piece is by far one of my favorite poems read. I read it often just to remind me not to wimp around with my lifting and my getting bigger, just like the song by Survivor, Eye of the Tiger, does for me.
It keeps in mind what its going to take to do this. The second piece of inspiration I like is, I will put Chaos into fourteen lines, by Edna St. Vincent Millay. On a depressing side of things, I am then moving on to a more disheartening type of poem.
This poem is Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa. In The Tyger, by Blake, I really enjoy many lines of this poem. This whole poem gets me going. In line six, the words Burnt the fire of thine eyes give me a picture of a tiger lying in the jungle and all you can see are his eyes lying somewhere within those woods. The tiger is definitely a very intimidating creature, especially at night. Then late the author talks about a furnace burning inside the tigers head, just upsetting the tiger even more, getting him to feel a rage within.
His heart began to beat Crilow 2from this intensity. It mentions many powerful objects, such as a hammer, a chain, an anvil, and a deadly grasp. All of these you could probably feel when the tiger would pounce on you. I can venture to say, it wouldnt be a very good feeling.
These are the most important of lines that I find within this poem. They just do something to help get me going before I head into the weight room. The second poem that I found inspirational to me was I will put Chaos into fourteen lines, by Millay. The author tries to describe how to attempt to hold chaos back. Through this poem, she describes chaos as a male type of thing by constantly referring to chaos using he, his, and him.
She shows chaoss many features, such as its adroit designs, amorphous shapes, and its arrogance. I dont like how the author tries to contain chaos, because really it could never happen. Chaos is something that once released or started, is a very hard thing to get put down or stopped. I know that this is under the title of the poem, that she is putting chaos into the fourteen lines, but I still dont like how its written. I think the poem should be more uncontrolled, and having the chaos breaking out of the poem in the end.
Saying that she maybe thought she could contain it, but then realized she couldnt. I like the line of Past are the hours, the years, or our duress for the fact its talking about how chaos takes so long to take care of. When I enter the weight room, I want to go in with the mindset of complete chaos, and that Im going to cause chaos and treat the weights in a way that if they would happen to be human, they wouldnt want to Crilow 3be treated. Along with The Tyger, these both contain things that I like to go in to lift with the mindset of to cause fear and chaos. When I read Facing It, by Yusef, I thought of the stereotypical Vietnam veteran who could not escape the trauma. I can picture him staring at the wall crying.
The lines about turning one way and being let go, but turning the other way and being inside the wall made me feel like he was thinking that it was easy to get away for non-veterans, but he would always be trapped inside. The way he said that the names shimmer on the womans shirt but when she walks away they are still on the wall, that also led me to see how its not as easy for him to escape the wall as it is for normal people. I believe that maybe he wanted to die in Vietnam and that is why he wanted to find his name on the wall. He may think that he is already dead, his pale eyes look through mine. Im a window(Lines 25-26). There was an unspoken connection between the two veterans.
The eyes are the window to the others soul. The pale eyes were almost lifeless, and his soul was gone.
