Monday, January 31, 2011

Week 2 Poetry

In “The flea,” “Valediction, Forbidding Mourning,” “Fox Trot Fridays,” and “Memorandum,” different aspects of love are displayed through word play. The authors use “real life occurrences” to shed light on their feelings.

John Donne’s “The Flea” is the story of a lover trying to convince his partner to have sex with him using a flea as an example of their love. Donne says how their blood is combined in the flea, and therefore should be combined in their love. He feels that the fact that their blood is so easily combined in nature, their love can do the same.

Rita Dove’s “Fox Trot Fridays” shows how a woman is able to escape the distresses of daily life on her Friday dances. Rita Dove uses dance the fox trot as her paradise. Through her poem she makes the reader feel like her dancing is her only way to get through daily life.

In Donne’s “Valediction, Forbidding Mourning,” Donne states how time apart between lovers should make the love grow stronger. He feels that the love should not be mourned, for it is not dying. Donne feels that strong love cannot be destroyed, and it will persevere and grow through time apart.

Unlike the other poems, Billie Bolton’s “Memorandum” focuses on the darker side of love. In this “poem,” Bolton is expressing the things that she is sick of. This poem expresses how love is not all “rainbows and butterflies.”

These poems all explain different forms of passion. My service taught me about a different kind of love. My junior year in high school, I went on a service trip to Tennessee. While there, we build two houses for families that were struggling to make ends meet. The family that we built the house for was a young couple with two boys. The father walked five miles to and from work every day. The gas prices had risen too high for him to drive to support his family. He worked all day and his family still struggled; yet somehow he was always positive. When he would arrive at the work site after coming home from work he would greet us all with a big smile. This was a man that was doing everything he could do give his family the best available opportunity. The love he showed for his family is not the love that we see in movies or read about. Passion is too often considered the greatest form of love. I have never seen the love that this man showed for his family equaled.

The love expressed in all of these stories is very different. The authors use different styles and touches to express their feelings. All the stories show that the authors passion is the greatest driving force for their actions.

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