Transcript of "Serene Words"

"Serene Words"
By: Gabriela Mistral

Now in the middle of my days I glean

this truth that has a flower's freshness:
life is the gold and sweetness of wheat,
hate is brief and love immerse.

Let is exchange for a smiling verse

that verse scored with blood and gall.

Heavenly violets open, and through the valley

the wind blows a honeyed breath.

Now I understand not only the man who prays;

now i understand the man who breaks into song.

Thirst is long-lasting and the hillside twisting;

but a lily can ensnare our gaze.

Our eyes grow heavy with weeping.

yet a brook makes us smile.

A skylark's song bursting heavenward

makes us forget it is hard to die.
"Now in the middle of my days I glean"
1. to gather grain or other produce left by reapers. 2. to gather information or material bit by bit.
Picked up the produce of the field, or she gathered information everyday.

Gabriela Mistral
She was born in a deeply cut, narrow farm land in 1889.
1957: The African American students in Little Rock.
Spoke up for women's rights, poor, minority people.
Loved writing about nature and the rights of people.
"This truth that has a flower's freshness:"
Truth that feels so good.

"Life is the gold and sweetness of wheat,"

The color of wheat is like gold.
Gold symbolizes power, strength and perfection
Life is perfect.
"Hate is brief and love immerse."
Hate is short
To plunge into something that surrounds or covers;
When you love you do it whole-souled and put your all into it.
"Let us exchange for a smiling verse,
that verse scored with blood and gall."
Something bitter to endure
Exchange the blood and out of control behavior for a smiling verse.
A compliment of something nice or pleasant to hear.
"Heavenly violets open, and through the valley,
the wind blows a honeyed breath."
Soothing, soft, intended to please or flatter.
The flowers bloom through the meadows.
The wind speaks a soothing and soft voice.
Like a cooling breeze.
"Now I understand not only the man who prays;
now I understand the man who breaks into song."
Understand not just sad, prayer.
Happy people; breaks into song
"Thirst is long-lasting and the hillside twisting;
but a lily can ensnare our gaze."
The longing for something.
The "hillside": Temptation or something else that takes our eye of the prize.
The "lily": Easily takes focus.
"Our eyes grow heavy with weeping,
yet a brook can make us smile."
Our eyes get tired of it.
Nature, peace.
"A skylark's song bursting heavenward,
makes us forget it is hard to die."
Type of bird
Bird's song explodes towards the heaven
Hearing the song makes you to live life and enjoy it.
Attitude- Calm and relaxed as if she has no worries on her mind
By: Hannah Rawls, and Courtney Nimmers
Connotation- The poem means that with all the war and trouble going on you can always escape it and go to
nature to take your troubles away.
Shift-In the poem there isn't a shift. She has the same tone and meaning throughout the length of the poem.
Title Revisited: Now we see that the title goes along with the serene words nature tells her daily. The breeze
blowing a honeyed voice, and then the Skylark's song bursting towards the sky.
Theme: That nature can calm you through the roughest time or point in your life.
Title: "Serene Words"- Words somebody tells you to make you feel better when you are feeling down.

The Word

The word was born

in the blood,
it grew in the dark body, pulsing,
and took flight with the lips and mouth.

Farther away and nearer,

still, still it came
from dead fathers and from wandering races,
from territories that had become stone,
that had tired of their poor tribes,
because when grief set out on the road
the people went and arrived
and united new land and water
to sow their word once again.
And that's why the inheritance is this:
this is the air that connects us
with the buried man and with the dawn
of new beings that haven't yet arisen.

Still the atmosphere trembles

with the first word
produced
with panic and groaning.
It emerged
from the darkness
and even now there is no thunder
that thunders with the iron sound
of that word,
the first
word uttered:
perhaps it was just a whisper, a raindrop,
but its cascade still falls and falls.

Later on, meaning fills the word.

It stayed pregnant and was filled with lives,
everything was births and sounds:
affirmation, clarity, strength,
negation, destruction, death:
the name took on all the powers
and combined existence with essence
in its electric beauty.

Human word, syllable, flank

of long light and hard silver,
hereditary goblet that receives
the communications of the blood:
it is here that silence was formed by
the whole of the human word
and not to speak is to die among beings:
language extends out to the hair,
the mouth speaks without moving the lips:
suddenly the eyes are words.

I take the word and move

through it, as if it were
only a human form,
its lines delight me and I sail
in each resonance of language:
I utter and I am
and across the boundary of words,
without speaking, I approach silence.

I drink to the word, raising

a word or crystalline cup,
in it I drink
the wine of language
or unfathomable water,

maternal source of all words,

and cup and water and wine
give rise to my song
because the name is origin
and green life: it is blood,
the blood that expresses its substance,
and thus its unrolling is prepared:
words give crystal to the crystal,
blood to the blood,
and give life to life.

Pablo Neruda Analytical Essay

Posted on February 5, 2013
Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet, was recognized for being one of the best worldwide. Neruda, with his South
American roots, has won us over with words that leave lingering feelings in our hearts. Neruda favored
communism, and often wrote politically influential poetry. Furthermore, even though Neruda was highly
successful by the age of 20, he was still struggling financially, and had four unsatisfying relationships; these
came to inspire many of his conflictive love poems. Neruda in the poem “If You Forget Me,” expresses himself
through the art of poetry, leaving behind subtle hints of his true theme: love is mutual and both parts of the
relationship have to put equal effort for it to work, he shows this by using literary devices and distinctive diction
to prove this theme.
Pablo Neruda constantly uses metaphors that are symbolic to the message of his poems. Metaphors can be
strong and useful because they’re a comparative point where the reader manipulates the metaphoric object,
then sees how it resembles the emotion the writer is trying to convey. Most of what Neruda writes in the poem
“If You Forget Me” is metaphoric of his relationship. For example, “If you think it long and mad, the wind of
banners that passes through my life, and you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have
roots (…) ” The first part uses a metaphor, which he then uses to explain what he believes she will do, which
is that if she overthinks all their love’s downfalls she’ll end up focusing on the negative side thus leaving him
forever. Through his metaphors Neruda describes an inner message about people and how they will only look
at the negative side of things when it seems most convenient. Additionally, the second metaphor in this stanza
is, “Shore of the heart where I have roots” is so deep, and perfectly describes how lost he is because he is
restricted to loving her; she whom he has loved so much and perhaps for so long that it seemed as though the
“roots” of his “tree” were deep inside her heart. In other words, he could never really stop loving her; you can
never stop loving someone you once loved that much. Brilliantly, Neruda handles metaphors that explain so
much in just a few words.

Pablo Neruda writes strongly about his loved ones at specific times in his life, so we must also rely on his
diction to find out his true meaning. For example, “Remember that on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off to seek another land.” That fragment right there can be interpreted in so many different
ways; some may say his relationship was lacking passion or perhaps she didn’t really love him back when he
needed her to etc. But, when analyzing his word choice it was led to believe that Neruda was tired of living in
doubt, of not knowing if she really loved him or not; but if she were to accept she didn’t have feelings for him,
he says this: “On that day, at that hour” meaning that he would begin to forget her in that instant then, “My
roots will set off to seek another land” he would begin to find someone else worthy of his love. Another
example, “But if each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me with implacable sweetness, if each
day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek me, ah my love, ah my own, in me all that fire is repeated, in me
nothing is extinguished or forgotten.” When I read this passage I see a theme, or idea, that the writer is trying
to communicate to us; in the passage above, he rephrases the beginning as, “But if each day, each hour.” This
is significant because he is implying that he could forget any doubt he had of her if she could just love him
back. Through these lines, Neruda shows that his great diction expresses the true meaning of his poems.

Meaningful metaphors and a specific diction are some of the many techniques Pablo Neruda uses in his writing
to enrich his poetry. He says so much in so little, and his words are so carefully crafted to exploit a variety of
emotions, and feelings without losing any value in trying to explain his meaning directly. All that Neruda went
through, all of his values, ideals, principles, beliefs, relationships; all of the ups and downs in his life; the
moments of desperation and seeking for help, and the years he had to hide below basements because of the
warrant for his arrest, or when his first wife left with his only child or perhaps the happier times when he loved a
women so much. All of those experiences, everything that life taught him, he poured his heart into his poetry
leaving us with writing so meaningful and substantial it leaves us stunned.
.
The poem we spent the most time discussing in class was—no surprise—
“The Red Wheelbarrow”:
so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens
We haggled for a period or two over what exactly depends upon this wheelbarrow. Explanations such as “a
wheelbarrow is really important for farming, and chickens represent farming” were offered. We wondered if the
poem might be a tribute to the ways that nature (“rain / water”) could surmount humans’ mechanical
encroachments (“wheel / barrow”), but nothing about the poem seemed to hint at that kind of reflexive hostility.
Nowhere does Williams tell us why “so much depends / upon” his little scene; he leaves us to ask, and answer,
that question.

Williams had an unusual life for a major literary figure. He was college buddies with Modernism’s high
priest, Ezra Pound, at the University of Pennsylvania. But rather than spend his nights cavorting in Europe’s
literary salons, he chose to become a doctor and live most of his life at 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford, New
Jersey, an address that became a pilgrimage destination for younger poets. In between house calls, in the
midst of delivering countless babies and treating the ailments of Rutherford’s working-class population,
Williams wrote tiny poems on prescription pads or holed up late into the night in his upstairs study, from which
his wife, Flossie, could hear the clatter of his typewriter as draft after draft raced through it.

This is not to say he didn’t live a literary life—he and Flossie frequently traveled to New York and hung out with
poets and painters. He was a friend of Marianne Moore’s and felt himself engaged in a lifelong rivalry with T.S.
Eliot, whom he thought had turned poetry back toward high diction and the literary past, while Williams,
like Frost, believed that “modernizing” American poetry meant incorporating contemporary,American speech
into its fabric.

His poems were filled with regular people talking. They were set on neighborhood streets, in hospitals, in
backyards—places I’d been. When, in “Blizzard,” I read “[h]airy looking trees stand out / in long alleys / over a
wild solitude,” I could look out my window in Westchester, New York, and see those trees. When he says,
“[T]he blizzard / drifts its weight / deeper and deeper for three days / or sixty years, eh?” that “eh?” was as
familiar to me as the misunderstandings my father and I bandied back and forth.

“The Red Wheelbarrow,” like so many Williams poems, is experimental. It lacks punctuation, relies on erratic or
unusual lineation, and generally dissolves the traditional boundaries between one thing, or idea, and another.
He had a famous maxim, “No ideas but in things,” which I take to mean that to speak about ideas, emotions,
and abstractions, we must ground them firmly in the things of the world. All but the first two lines of “The Red
Wheelbarrow” is devoted to one image.
 Sonnet 43
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Published in 1850

Text of the Poem Annotations

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. thee: the poet's husband, Robert Browning
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height depth, breadth: internal rhyme
when . . . Grace: when my soul feels its way into
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
the spiritual realm
(out of sight) to find the goal of being alive and
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
living uprightly
I love you enough to meet all of your simple
I love thee to the level of everyday's
needs during the
day (sun) and even during the night (candle-
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
light)
freely: willingly—and just as intensely as men
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
who fight for freedom
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. purely: genuinely, without desire for praise
with an intensity equal to that experienced
I love thee with the passion put to use
during suffering or
mourning; I love you with the blind faith of a
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
child
with . . . saints: with a childlike fervor for saints
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
and holiness that I
seemed to lose when I grew older. breath:
With my lost saints!—I love thee with the breath,
echoesbreadth, Line 2
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose, Smiles . . . life: perhaps too sentimental
I shall but love thee better after death. their love is eternal, never ending