Blog Number 2 - Poems

Nick Irvine
This week focuses on the poems: “Memorandum” by Billie Bolton, “Fox Trot Friday’s” by Rita Dove, “The Flea” and “Valediction, Forbidding Mourning” both by John Donne. These four unique poems all have one major focus: things they love or things they do not love, but all seem to concentrate on the idea of love and how that affects there lives.
John Donne the author of two of the four poems writes about the strength and meaning of love. I found that in “The Flea” he tells a story of a flea that takes something from them and he believes a sin to kill it as it has part of both him, and his lover inside of it, as it bit them and is holding both their blood. He feels sympathetic towards the flea as he relates it to their “marriage bed, and marriage temple”; meaning because it holds something from both of them this one flea is now part of them.
His other poem “Valediction, Forbidding Mourning”, also considers the fact of love and loss. He describes how his lover will be leaving him for a while, but in this poem he goes onto describe how the absence will strengthen their love. He writes eloquently describing his feelings and puts a lot of emphasis on how he will be hurt as his lover is gone but still he describes how his love means everything to him and being together, like the flea and his blood, is something he will wait for.
“Fox Trot Friday’s” focuses on something Rita Davis looks forward to because it brings out the emotion of love in her. In this poem she describes the affection caused by fox trot on two lovers dancing and pushed up against one another embracing each other, as they should do. This idea relates back to John Donne’s idea of being together and loving each other as much as possible.
“Memorandum” takes on a different form of love, she describes everything about what she does not love in someone in the hopes of finding her true love. Everything she says relates to the complete opposite of what the other two authors have tried to portray to the reader, because Billie Bolton focuses on hate and despair. In my view she wants to be with someone to embrace what the other two poets wrote about as she clearly laid out everything she despises in a person.
These different poems all written differently all seemingly relate back to the concept of love and how they all want to embrace love with their lovers or things they hold closely to themselves. Love to them is everything and getting that emotion can be shown by either writing as eloquently as Donne or as hatefully as Bolton did, but in the end what I believe these authors are trying to say comes down to love and being able to embrace that love and share it with things that mean a lot to them.