Reflection: Two Poems

The Poems that I have chosen and decided to do my blog on is April, by John Greenleaf Whittier, and Autumnn, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  Both poems are similar right away just by their titles.  Autumn and April both describe a time of year.  When you think of autumn you think of maybe the leaves falling, different pretty colors, and the harvesting of crops.  Harvesting of crops is really what Autumn is about. "Upon they  bridge of gold; they royal hand outstretched with benedictions o'er the land, Blessing the farms through all thy vast domain! Thy shield is the red harvest moon" (Longfellow 6-9).  They are hoping for a blessing that their crops turn out to be healthy and numerous.  They pray for rain and they hope for the best when it comes to the season and time to harvest their crops (Longfellow).  It exemplifies they romanistic style of writing by when it is descriptive in some of the things that they poem talks about.  The golden bridge, red harvest moon, golden leaves, etc. all describe the object to a further extent (Longfellow).  Instead of saying something like different colored leaves, which is boring, Longfellow says "golden" which everybody likes gold, and it adds life to the story.
The other poem, April is a very good poem that I fully understood and I enjoyed reading it.  It is similar to Autumn, but it is about the waiting for spring and the warm weather, kind of like when they are waiting to harvest their crops in "Autumn".  It starts by them opening up and describing the cold weather.

" 'T is the noon of the spring-time, yet never a bird
In the wind-shaken elm or the maple is heard;
For green meadow-grasses wide levels of snow,
And blowing of drifts where the crocus should blow;
Where wind-flower and violet, amber and white,
On south-sloping brooksides should smile in the light,
O'er the cold winter-beds of their late-waking roots
The frosty flake eddies, the ice-crystal shoots;" (Whittier 3-10).

It goes on, but you get the understanding of it.  It is cold and is still winter, and everybody is hoping for the spring to come, where, the buds sprout into flowers.  Also, when the warm weather comes,  when it brings life to death is something that comes out of this story.  When spring comes, the weather goes up and makes nature and all of life happier.

"The life of the spring-time, the life of the whole,
And, as sun to the sleeping earth, love to the soul!" (Whittier 34-35).

I found this quote very true, because when winter leaves, everybody is excited.  They are excited for the warm weather, and the cold weather to be gone.  It is a very pretty season when it comes too.  It is not too hot and not too cold. It is very comfortable.
"The chief inconvenience of the isolation imposed by blizzards like the one made famous by his poem Snow-Bound was that it kept his parents from their 16 mile round ride to the meetinghouse in Amesbury and back on Sundays" (Huff).  He may have wrote about the nice weather, because he wanted the snow to leave and the warm weather to come in.

Greenleaf, John. "April by John Greenleaf Whittier." Poem Hunter.Com-Thousands of Poems and Poets. Poetry Search Engine. Web. 12 Dec. 2011.

Longfellow, Henry. "Sonnets. Autumn. The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1893. Complete Poetical Works." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and Hundreds More. Web. 12 Dec. 2011.

Huff, Randall. "Whittier, John Greenleaf." The Facts On File Companion to American Poetry, vol. 1. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.

Upon thy bridge of gold; thy royal hand
Outstretched with benedictions o’er the land,
Blessing the farms through all thy vast domain!
Thy shield is the red harvest moon, suspended

Upon thy bridge of gold; thy royal hand
Outstretched with benedictions o’er the land,
Blessing the farms through all thy vast domain!
Thy shield is the red harvest moon, suspended

Upon thy bridge of gold; thy royal hand
Outstretched with benedictions o’er the land,
Blessing the farms through all thy vast domain!
Thy shield is the red harvest moon, suspended
So long beneath the heaven’s o’erhanging eaves

Upon thy bridge of gold; thy royal hand
Outstretched with benedictions o’er the land,
Blessing the farms through all thy vast domain!
Thy shield is the red harvest moon, suspended
So long beneath the heaven’s o’erhanging eaves

Upon thy bridge of gold; thy royal hand
Outstretched with benedictions o’er the land,
Blessing the farms through all thy vast domain!
Thy shield is the red harvest moon, suspended

Journal 20

The poem that we are reading is about how great autumn is and how beautiful the time is, but more about the farmers and their land.  The farmers are hoping that their land will produce vast amount of crops so that they can have plenty of crops.  They are praying that the rains come that they can water the crops so that they grow and they are strong and healthy.  It is understanding for them to be like this because it is what they do, they make their living and money by how the crops come up and you do not want your crops to be not very good.  They are praying that the rains will come.  I am not a farmer, but living in Illinois, which is consumed with fields, you understand how important it is to rain for the crops to grow.  They base their life off planting and harvesting their crops and they do their best at that, and that is all they can do.  They pray that their is rain that comes and nourishes their crops.  They really can not do anything else besides pray and hope for the best and that is what the characters in this poem do.
It exemplifies the romanticism because it is very descriptive.  Two examples of this is when they describe the moon, and the bridge.  They say that the bridge is golden.  Is it really golden??? Probably not, but it describes the bridge and it gives it a cooler meaning than just saying wooden bridge.  It makes the poem a romanticism writing by this.  The other is when it says that the shield is the red harvest moon.  It makes the poem more exciting when they give a more meaningful description of something, instead of some boring reason.  I am not going to lie, I have trouble finding the meaning of poems because I find it hard to understand.  I have to get help a lot because it is hard.  It does help to slow it down and take it one line at a time though.

Reflection: Chambered Nautilus

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,	10
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,	10
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,	10
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,	10
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,	10
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

The Chambered Nautilus is a poem about a creature who lives in a shell and is on a journey to magical lands.  There are five paragraphs, or parts to the poem, and each one has an impactful meaning. 

The first paragraph is a basic background of what is going on.  

This section of the poem is basically saying that the nautilus is sailing in a magical land with mermaids.  There is really not much to this part of the poem, besides what is here.

I was having a little trouble getting my insertion point in the right area so, I instead of going each part at a time, I put the poem and will  reference it below it.

The first paragraph does not have much significance besides the fact that the creature is sailing to magical islands that have mermaids.

The second paragraph, the shell breaks, and everything inside of it is seen “Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl” (Holmes). It is kind of depressing to hear that it was broken because it had worked hard to become how big it was.

The third paragraph, is saying that the creature had worked so hard every year to build its shell to make it bigger because it was growing. “Year after year beheld the silent toil” (Holmes). It had become bigger so it needed to build up its shell.

The fourth paragraph is telling us that the nautilus is dead. “From thy dead lips a clearer note is born” (Holmes).  The nautilus is no longer living.

The last paragraph is saying that the nautilus needs to continue to grow and build his shell, each level, better than the last. “Let each new temple, nobler than the last” (Holmes).

Oliver Wendell Holmes began the poem by recalling a myth specific to this animal; as "poets feign" (line 1), it could stretch "webs of living gauze" (line 8) across the shell and use that living sail to cross the open ocean. This gives rise to speculation as to the enchanted gulfs it could explore, home to Sirens (line 5; in Greek mythology these were sea-nymphs who called sailors to their doom) and sea-maids (mermaids; line 7) that lie on naked coral reefs "to sun their streaming hair" (line 7).
He cannot know any of that since he has only the empty shell on hand. He accurately describes its discrete chambered cells and their "irised ceiling" (line 14; the inner shell has a mother-of-pearl shine), but returns to speculation in describing its "frail tenant" and with a "dim dreaming life" (lines 11–12) (Huff).  I thought that this criticism was all relevant so I put it all in.  It brings up the question of how the author, Holmes could know everything with only the shell.

"801. The Chambered Nautilus. Oliver Wendell Holmes. 1909-14. English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman. The Harvard Classics." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and Hundreds More. Web. 07 Dec.

Huff, Randall. "'The Chambered Nautilus'." The Facts On File Companion to American Poetry, vol. 1. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007.Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.

Reflection: R.V.W and Irving

Rip Van Winkle and The Devil of Tom Walker are both examples of romanticism writing.  According to my literary criticism, romanticism is not just being romantic (lovey-dovey), but it includes one's individual aspect of being center of life and having thought of individual thought and response. It also includes a sympathetic view of what has already happened, the past, mysticism, etc (Werlock).  The biggest mysticism example is when Rip Van Winkle falls asleep after drinking the liquor from the keg (Irving Rip paragraph 25). This keg had been given to him by a stranger.  When he woke up, everything was different.  He slept through the American Revolution.  He had not experienced anything that went on for the past twenty years.  He had seen a sign of George Washington as the new leader, where King George the Third had been the king when he went to sleep (Irving Rip paragraph 33).  It is mysterious because he had slept for twenty years, over some mysterious drink that had been given to him (Irving Rip paragraph 19).
"The children of the village, too, would shout with joy whenever he approached. He assisted at their sports, made their playthings, taught them to fly kites and shoot marbles, and told them long stories of ghost, witches, and Indians" (Irving). As I will get to later on in my blog, both males in their stories, are quite childish in their ways, which is a characteristic of romanticism.  Here, Rip is doing nothing with his life and is playing with children which drives his wife crazy.
Between the two stories they do share one same thing that stands out right away.  They both do not like their wives, and they believe that they are very nagging. In The Devil of Tom Walker, "However Tom might have felt disposed to sell himself to the devil, he was determined not to do so to oblige his wife, so he flatly refused, out of the mere spirit of contradiction"( Irving 246). Here Tom does the exact opposite of what he is told to do.
One of the most important descriptions or qualities of romanticism writing is the description that is used in the stories.  They go out of their way to give you a very descriptive detail of the surroundings, which I like about this writing style.  A perfect example is right when The Devil of Tom Walker starts off. "A few miles from Boston, in Massachusetts, there is a deep inlet, winding several miles into the interior of the country from Charles Bay, and terminating in a thickly wooded swamp or morass. On one side of this inlet is a beautiful dark grove, on the opposite side the land rise abruptly from the water's edge into a high ridge, on which grow a few scattered oaks of great age and immense size" (Irving 242).  He is very descriptive right out of the book and goes into detail about the surroundings.  You would not find this in any other style of writing which is unique about romanticism.

Irving, Washington. "Rip Van Winkle." Bartleby.com. Web. 06 Dec. 2011.

Irving, Washington. "The Devil and Tom Walker." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 240-250. Print.

Werlock, Abby H. P. "Romanticism." The Facts On File Companion to the American Short Story, Second Edition. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2009. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 06 Dec. 2011.