The most over-analyzed poem in existance.....why?

[Loonman]

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens


------

I don't get it, it's a simple word picture.

[Richardo]

1. I've never heard of it before.

I thought you were going to post 'Trees'. Or 'There once was a man from Nantucket...'

[anarch]

2. I don't know, I'd have to go with "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

by Robert Frost, as the most over-analyzed.


Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping there
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.


That or that other Robert Frost one, "the Road Not Taken" or whatever.

[LynzM]

5. The Road Not Taken gets my vote....

That should really be read later than high school, to be appreciated, IMO.

[anarch]

14. it's funny to go back and read it, after the interpretation

it usually gets in a high school reading. The irony is generally underappreciated until one has lived a little bit, I think.



Anyway, I changed my mind. The most over-analyzed poem of all time has to be Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" (at least the last as far as the compass metaphor at the end is concerned...):

"A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING"
by John Donne



AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

[wildhorses]

3. I love that poem

the connatation...if you "read" between the lines....
so much is there
it paints a scene of waiting and working
I wondered if RL was going to post it
one day in his daily thread

[DS1]

6. Really?

I read it as a young boy, thrust into the world of a chicken ranch owner after his father's tragic chopping block accident.

He's looking at his waterlogged red ryder wagon, as he's not yet able to reach the pedals on his father's tractor, and wondering if the water that collects on the bottom will give his small handful of chickens gangreenous trenchrot before they make it to market. There aren't many chickens, because he's still too small to reach the second tier of the chicken coop. Those chickens are just doomed to starve.

And it makes me :cry:

[wildhorses]

8. do you know the history behind the poem

and how it came to be written?

and I love your "paraphrasing" of it

:hug:

[DS1]

11. No idea whatsoever

:shrug:

[wildhorses]

13. should I tell in this thread? or would you prefer a PM?

whichever you prefer...


this might just be my all time favorite poem


or maybe it is just a phase I am going through:shrug:

[DS1]

18. Why not share it with everyone?

[wildhorses]

22. ok then

the man that wrote it was a doctor, he wrote down what he saw looking through his patient's window.
the patient was a little girl who was dying....
IIRC

where is RetroLounge when you need him?

[DS1]

23. oh

mine at least made sense to me :shrug:

[wildhorses]

26. may I offer up my paraphrase?

that is what paraphrasing does ...it helps you to understand the poem ....and you understood it most excellently IMHO

[DS1]

28. yep, go ahead

:-)

[wildhorses]

33. by the wildhorses

here sits work
just waiting to happen

isn't life
a wondrous thing

in the waiting
and
in the happening

[SiobhanClancy]

4. I think this one is the most over-analyzed..

The Second Coming------W.B. Yeats



Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.



Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[crispini]

7. Yeah, but that one still makes my hair stand up.

I mean, WHAM, what words, eh?

[SiobhanClancy]

10. It's my favorite poem...

But I've heard it discussed and analyzed a lot. Then again,it probably deserves to be.

[Loonman]

9. It even ends with a prepositional phrase

:shrug:

[Strong Atheist]

12. AAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!

I HATED

this in college! We spent TWO class periods going over the "deep" meaning of this PIECE OF SHIT!

That experience convinced me all poetry is complete bullshit, and to this day I LOATH poetry more than mere words can express...

[wildhorses]

15. I am beginning to understand why you and I are having

trouble communicating...:pals:

[Strong Atheist]

16. We are?

News to me ...:shrug:

[wildhorses]

17. well, it seems to me that you have confused me a time or two

and...vice versa

but then again maybe I am mistaken


it is just that I LOVE this poem and you HATE it

so it is like we see different sides of the same coin???

:shrug:

[Strong Atheist]

19. sigh.

well, it seems to me that you have confused me a time or two
and...vice versa


I guess you are right ...


so it is like we see different sides of the same coin???

When it comes to this subject, we are not on different pages, we are in different books, literally...

[wildhorses]

21. you mean the subject of poems?

what about the songs you post?

are they not poems set to a melody?

[Strong Atheist]

31. IMO,

songs and poems are different beasties ...

[wildhorses]

34. ok

have it your way...

[Strong Atheist]

35. Well, I don't try to find the "hidden"

"deep" meaning of most songs; there aint none! Poetry seems snobby to me; spend hours looking for the "deep" meaning hidden here. IMO, if the meaning aint on the surface, you need to learn to communicate better ...

[wildhorses]

36. some poetry is straight out

[Strong Atheist]

37. Ok. We disagree on this subject. Peace.

:pals:

[wildhorses]

38. peace brother

:pals: I hope you don't think I am snobby cos I like poetry?

[Strong Atheist]

41. Nah, it's just me. I don't like poetry.

You're cool ...

[DS1]

20. I hear ya

but I've learned to not get worked up about it. People like what I consider crap. Perhaps I'm incapable of just letting go of my tendency to look for meaning and some people are capable of that.

Kinda like those 3D pictures where you have to focus beyond the picture to see it. I can't do that, perhaps there's a level of trust it requires, but without hard data I have a very difficult time trusting.

So fuck it. :shrug:

[Strong Atheist]

29. It took me a long time to get the

3d pictures. Once you learn how to unfocus your eyes properly, it comes easily, even years later, as I discovered recently...

[Loonman]

25. EX-actly

Stick your symbolism up your ass, professor!

[Strong Atheist]

30. Heh,

:toast:

[RetroLounge]

24. Google is my frend

Simple, elegant, and wonderfully evocative... this is more painting than
poem.

"Reading this poem is like peering at an ordinary object through a pin
prick in a piece of cardboard. The fact that the tiny hole arbitrarily
frames the object endows it with an exciting freshness that seems to
hover on the verge of revelation."
- Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry.

Biography:

William Carlos Williams was born September 17, 1883 in Rutherford, New
Jersey, to middle-class parents who were lovers of literature and visual
art. But Williams showed little interest in art until he attended the
University of Pennsylvania's medical school. It was there that he became
enamoured with poetry and was for some time torn between his parents'
wishes that he become a doctor and his own, less conventional
aspirations. While in Pennsylvania, Williams befriended the poet Ezra
Pound, a relationship that he later termed a watershed in his literary
career. Pound not only helped Williams develop his aesthetic of magism -
a poetic approach that emphasized the concrete over abstractions - but
also introduced him to a literary circle that included the flamboyant
poet Hilda Doolittle (H. D.). By the time Williams completed his
studies, he was committed to his writing; yet he still pursued a medical
career and maintained a private practice in Rutherford for over forty
years. From his medical practice Williams gained not only the financial
freedom to write what he wished, but also a rare and intimate insight
into the lives of common people.

Williams's immersion in and attachment to the lives of Rutherford's
townsfolk was mirrored in the aesthetic principles he developed over the
years. He consistently advocated and wrote literature that took its
themes from ordinary life and its voice from the patterns of common
speech. During much of his poetic career, however, these values ran
counter to those of the critically acclaimed poetry of the day - namely,
the classicist, academic, and formal poetry exemplified by T. S. Eliot
and Wallace Stevens. During the 1920s and 1930s Williams labored largely
in obscurity; with the publication of the first Paterson volumes in the
1940s, however, he gained wider recognition, and the emerging Beat
Movement poets of the 1950s venerated him for his rejection of
formalism. Shortly after receiving a Pulitzer Prize, Williams died on
March 4, 1963.

Commentary:

The opening lines set the tone for the rest of the poem. Since the poem
is composed of one sentence broken up at various intervals, it is
truthful to say that "so much depends upon" each line of the poem. This
is so because the form of the poem is also its meaning. This may seem
confusing, but by the end of the poem the image of the wheelbarrow is
seen as the actual poem, as in a painting when one sees an image of an
apple, the apple represents an actual object in reality, but since it is
part of a painting the apple also becomes the actual piece of art.

Notice how the monosyllabic words in line 3 elongate the line, putting
an unusual pause between the word "wheel" and "barrow." This has the
effect of breaking the image down to its most basic parts. The reader
feels as though he or she were scrutinizing each part of the scene.
Using the sentence as a painter uses line and color, Williams breaks up
the words in order to see the object more closely.

The word "glazed" evokes another painterly image. Just as the reader is
beginning to notice the wheelbarrow through a closer perspective, the
rain transforms it as well, giving it a newer, fresher look. This new
vision of the image is what Williams is aiming for.

The last lines offer up the final brushstroke to this "still life" poem.
Another color, "white" is used to contrast the earlier "red," and the
unusual view of the ordinary wheelbarrow is complete. Williams, in
dissecting the image of the wheelbarrow, has also transformed the common
definition of a poem. With careful word choice, attention to language,
and unusual stanza breaks Williams has turned an ordinary sentence into
poetry.

******************

RL

[wildhorses]

27. thanks...I was going to google but did not know really

which one would be the best to post

[EstimatedProphet]

32. I would have figured it would be this:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

[cleofus1]

39. delete

for stupidity

[displacedtexan]

40. This poem is the perfect example of...

the definition of poetry that pupils and students alike hardly ever grasp:
the poet chooses a few deliberate words to paint a picture or to describe
a scene which the prose writer would take paragraphs or even pages to
describe.

Try to write a descriptive essay based on the poem.

How many words would it take? How much more could your imagination add
to the scene?

Try painting this scene. What else is there? Grass? A Fence? A farmhouse?
Everyone has a slightly different take on the images.

How many hours would it take to paint the picture?

Poetry is compact and powerful.