We study Gillian Clarke's poems in year 11. Take a look at her website, and the poem, October, which you can find in the section for students. I love the way she describes the trees, as they "tremble gradually to gold".
The alliteration makes the words gradually and gold stick in the mind, and the idea of nature transforming itself into a precious metal, with a gentle, minimal, possibly fearful motion is attractive to me.I wonder why she used the word tremble, rather than shiver. Maybe the word tremble suggests fear, and the death of her friend did panic her a little.
Certainly, it makes her want to get a lot of writing done, and she does refer to "panic" later, which I associate with the idea that she wants to write everything she needs to write as a poet before she has to leave.
I feel a bit that way myself, having spent the last three years spending time on learning new things about teaching, and working in classrooms instead of doing any writing of my own.....
There is always a choice to be made when one is interested in a lot of things. I think I'm making the right choices - hope you do the same!
If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.
Robert Fritz
Robert Fritz
2 comments:
You show lots of empathy towards the poet. Do you think empathy of the poet is needed to understand the poet's poem?
That's a really good question, Melody, and here's another: there are thousands of books witten about the lives of the great poets, but do we need to know anything at all about the writer to appreciate his/her art? Would it make any difference to our appreciation of a poem to know that the poet was a Nazi sympathiser, for example? A lot of people think that it does, and the poems of Ezra Pound are devalued because of it.
Appreciating poetry is very subjective - if one empathises with the poet, one appreciates the poem differently than if one cannot really "get" what she's on about! The key word is "differently" though - I think each person understands a poem in their own way, and who's to say if their way is better or worse than their brother's way?
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