Poetism Commentary: "What Lies In Wait"

The poem in question: What Lies In Wait

There is a great jump in time from Accepting Denial to What Lies In Wait–just over two years. By this time I was in my junior year, had my first (and only) high-school sweetheart, and had an English teacher who both hated my best friend Ben and me, and had not a clue what good poetry was (in this way, she was similar to our sophomore math teacher). More detail on this will be brought to light in the upcoming commentaries for The Poem Within A Poem, Pretense, and A Dream.

What Lies In Wait takes a theme I explored in a few other poems, most similarly Can’t Run: the captive power of the devil. Thinking back, I believe that the aforementioned sweetheart and I had broken up by this point, having only gone out for a couple of months. During and after the time we were dating, however, I had started to desire some changes in my life, and I often thought about this theme (though admittedly not as often as more depressing and morbid ones, depressed-morbid-wannabe that I am).

In What Lies In Wait a group of people are being herded toward their final resting place, having surrendered their freedom and now beginning to understand the full import of said surrender.

The tainted light shining from afar / Was fainter than a noonday star

Satan’s power is tainted, obviously, and quite faint compared to the power of God.

Yet fear tried to hold them at bay / Fear of what must, in wait, lay.

Though Satan has little power in comparison, once one is solely in his power with no recourse, it is quite terrifying.

Driven they were, against their will / Driven they were, by force so great / And that is what made them press on

They did not want to go, once they realized what would await them, but they had no more choice.

And when allowed to raise their eyes / The air was pierced with frightened cries.

This poem ends somewhat abruptly, as “Accepting Denial,” but the difference is that I think it works here. Not knowing what the final revelation is, in this case, useful, because it lets the reader make full use of his imagination.

Now, one problem with this interpretation is that they were herded “Throughout the night, into the dawn” and “By midday next they’d reached the place.” Another being “herded at deadly pace.” If these people go to their final resting place, as it were, do measurements of time really apply? They don’t, really, and I am bothered a little bit by the wording. Also, why is it on a hill? If I were to rewrite the lines at this moment, the new verse would go something like this:

They were driven, against their will,
Toward the source of every ill.
They were driven by force so great
It could crush them with its mighty weight.
And that is what made them press on:
Realizing hope was gone.
All too soon they reached the place
Where they’d been led through time and space,

I hadn’t intended to do such a thorough analysis of this poem, much less rewrite some of the lines, but I’m glad I did. I knew this commentary this was a good idea for someone.

And yes, there’s no air in space, boo hoo.

Bring out yer comments!

For the 3.4 readers of the grassmonk.net blog, there is now an extremely limited comment system in place. By “extremely limited,” I mean the following:

  • Looks like crap in IE (surprise!)*
  • No editing system
  • Does not come with fries or onion rings
  • No spiffy CSS yet
  • Ekcetra

Enjoy.

*To be fair to IE, it is good for letting you know when your site is standards compliant, i.e. it looks like crap.**

**Please forgive the terrible pun.

Maybe there’s still hope!

If I ever have a book of my poetry published, I want it to be called “Poetisms.” I realize that this is a foolish thing, because there are probably already millions of other people who have the same idea, and surely sub-millions of those millions have already published a collection with that name. Also, the word “poetisms” is really silly.

But guess what? Googling “poetisms” results in my site being the second result. Interestingly, the first result doesn’t actually contain the word “poetisms,” but rather is linked to by a site that does.

Now I just need to find people who actually google the word.

Poetism Commentary: "Accepting Denial"

The poem in question: Accepting Denial

This is the last in the series of poems coming from assignments in my freshman English class. Unlike Aftermath and Achievment, I remember the details of the assignment leading to Accepting Denial.

Each member of the class was given five note cards with a word on them, and we were to take those words and incorporate them into our poem. I distinctly remember wanting something “paradoxical,” and I imagine this was because I was still taken with Thomas Covenant and all the discussion of the “paradox of white gold” found within. I remember mentioning the desire for paradox to Mr. Williams, and I also remember a note scribbled from him on my final copy: “I like the paradoxical title!” I suspect he was just humoring me, but I guess we’ll never know for sure.

I am going to dig around some more for the original copy of this poem, because I think some of the wording changed a few years later as I went through a revisionism period. I also want to see if I can find out what my five words were, because I can’t remember, and that bothers me. My best guess is that they included some form of “tattered,” “loathed,” and “denial.”

Now, thus far in my commentaries, I haven’t really touched on what the poems were about. This one, fairly obviously I would imagine, is about being a teenager (or not, but I was teen-age when I wrote this, though it isn’t autobiographical), feeling like you don’t belong, and trying to cover up who you really are to fit in. Of course, often when people do that, others can see right through them, and the acceptance-seekers end up feeling even more unbelonging. In this way, it is also hilarious that the poem was written on Valentine’s Day.

So, they feel like they have “little to lose,” by pretending, but in reality have even “less to gain.” One unforunate part of this poem, though, is that they are “Loathed by many, / Rejected outright by all, save one.” It makes more sense to me now for it to read the other way around: “Rejected outright by many, / Loathed by all, save one.” It seems more fitting that everyone would loathe these people (though “loathe” seems too strong a word), but that there would be some who exercised enough compassion, or at least restraint, not to reject them outright.

I like to think that the one who accepted these tattered youths is God, who I believe loves us as we are, no matter where we may be in our lives, and no matter who in the world doesn’t love us. Unfortunately, the poem feels unfinished from that perspective, as I also believe that God would have some sage advice for these kids, and the fact that is left unoffered strikes me as un-Godlike. Still, I could not then and cannot now pretend that I have all the answers, and will leave it at that.

As a postscript, I am still taken with Thomas Covenant. The Chronicles and Second Chronicles are among my favorite books that I have ever read. I greatly anticipate the concluding books of the Last Chronicles, something I anticipate (ha!) doing for the next several years until they are published.

Poetism Commentary: "Achievement"

The poem in question: Achievement

This poem was for another assignment for Mr. Williams’ class, and, being as lazy as I previously mentioned I am, I used the same theme, just from a slightly different perspective: that of the victor of the Great Battle. In fact, Achievement could probably just be tacked on to the end of Aftermath and we could call it a day. This is double dipping at its finest, folks.

The only thing I wonder is if “All is dark, save a lone flame / Held by the victor / Of the Great Battle,” how exactly is he “crowned / In his triumph / And mirth”? Are bats doing it? Perhaps Daredevil got a sonic resonance from the weeping woman’s sobs? The simplest explanation is that he is only metaphorically being crowned, what with him being the last one standing, as it were. I imagine him taking the weeping woman as his new queen to rule over with him. He hopes she has some mining skills to fetch the gold for their real crowns.

I wonder what kind of grade I got on this poem? I hope it wasn’t very good. I dug through a few boxes last night to try and find the original copy, but I haven’t found it yet.

A funny thing to note: many of my poems begin each line with a capital letter. A lot of the poetry I have seen follows this practice, and I am unsure why. Perhaps Wikipedia knows the answer, but I don’t care enough to go look right now. I continued this practice for quite a while until I realized that was downright silly (though, to be fair, possibly no more silly than another trend I took up: all lowercase letters except for words like “I”). As I do these commentaries, it will be interesting to note the different styles I used throughout the years.