The form of this poem is really rather interesting. It feels like he is writing in a stream of consciousness, which was a convention greatly used by novelists in the era of Modernity: call to mind James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The break here really exemplifies the stream of consciousness along with the fact that the first section is all one sentence.

Jazz is a recurring theme within this section of the poem. He uses it here to represent the howling in which the title of the poem alludes to. I believe Ginsberg is the "madman bum and angel beat in Time" who "blew the suffering of America's naked mind" into a "saxophone cry". It seems that jazz and the musicians who played it are connected to the "who" in which he speaks about.

The use of anaphora is interesting in this poem. The repetition of the word "who" at every clause keeps the focus on this group of people, but the group constantly shifts within the poem. It brings to mind "the low down people" Hughes spoke of in his manifesto. Almost every sentence gives the "who" group a new location and action. It is as if he turns these people into an idea, and the "who" becomes a symbol.

I believe these lines are about the use of drugs. Which might be obvious but I think its important to note that up until this point poetry was never really used to delineate the experience of people who struggle with addiction, those who use drugs to alter the way in which they perceive the world. It reminded me of "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin which was published a year later who writes a story about the brother of a jazz musician who is addicted to heroin. Often it is the novel as a medium that is used to embrace themes such as drug addiction so I find it interesting in what Ginsberg is doing. I feel like he's subverted many of the traditional conventions of poetry with this poem. Form is somewhat lost and he speaks of a world in a bare and harsh manner.

Here he delineates the experience of what I am presuming is poetry. To him it holds the ability to trap "the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images" and join the "elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pate[...]". Poetry holds power for Ginsberg. It brings to mind the notions of force we have discussed in class, the ability to speak to some liminal part of the human experience. I find that poetry at times often exposes the desire one has to escape, yet Ginsberg uses poetry to expose a reality of the world that many perhaps have tried to avert there eyes from.

This poem is incredibly beautiful and haunting. I find the lines "Wait in the still eternity / Until I come to you" rather interesting because if the child has already been conceived then it could imply notions of abortion which would have been considered more than taboo by the masses at this time. The notion that to save the child she must deny it life is such a resoundingly powerful sentiment.

The way the author calls for mutual understanding in this poem is incredible. The allusions to religion to create imagery widely understood as being representative of humility and empathy as she calls us to action to mend the pathways to each other's hearts is extremely persuasive.

It seems that her poetry focuses greatly on the social limitations of women at the time. The inability to provide more service to the war cause other than sewing is truly an amazing way to explicate the relative experiences that men and women had at this time. Both are arguably is necessary contribution to the war, yet the problem lies in the lack of choice one has inn which role they serve.

This poem very much reminded me of Nella Larsen's 1928 novel "Quicksand" in which color is also used to mediate sexual desire, in particular a desire that is often oppressed by the societal conventions of the time. The imagery of flames conveys passion, but also destruction. Perhaps alluding to the beauty of this romance, and also the consequential reality of it as well.

I think it is interesting how the speaker admits to laughing at him before seeing his face. I what type of person the author is trying to evoke in this poem? Would she herself be laughing at the man or is she evoking a sort of caricature like figure to convey her message of lost identity?

I think the form of this poem is rather interesting. The way the author seems to be directly addressing the reader is a fascinating stylistic choice for poetry at this time. It invokes a colloquial tone that seems to be a theme among many of the Harlem writers. It makes me think of Hughes' "low down people," and how they are taking autonomy over the poetic form by subverting some of the elitist methods of writing poetry in which only a select few could understand it. An example to contrast this poem with would be The Wasteland.

Really amazing use of personification and metaphor here. Personifying "abandon" and "sadness" are interesting stylistic choices that I feel strengthens the sentiment she is trying to make. It is not just her personal feelings of abandon and sadness, but a generalized one which the reader may relate to more. It detaches the emotions from herself so that she can place herself in relationship with them. That is why they can "tell" and "whisper" to you. Then the metaphor of "That I am the cry of the soul" is a powerful line to say the least.

Heritage seems to be a recurring theme of her poems so I looked up the Oxford English Dictionary's definitions of the word. "1. a. That which has been or may be inherited; any property, and esp. land, which devolves by right of inheritance. c. transferred and figurative. The ‘portion’ allotted to or reserved for any one; e.g. that of the righteous or the wicked in the world to come." "2. The fact of inheriting; inheritance, hereditary succession." "3. a. Anything given or received to be a proper and legally held possession."

Most people are already aware of what the word means, but I feel like the definitions help to really drive home the message she is creating in her poem. The sentiment that she herself wants the heritage that is rightly hers to have: the sights, the sounds, and the feel of a history and tradition presumably taken from her and her people. The anaphora furthers this sentiment by placing focus on her in the beginning of each clause, "I want to".

I think this is a really fascinating simile, and so I looked up what the symbolism of ginger might be. It is commonly understood as being representative of civility and tradition. I am uncertain if Bennett used this simile because she also shared this knowledge or for other reasons, but it does make sense if one reading it now interprets it according to the aforementioned symbolism. It creates connotations of a peoples that contain a longstanding tradition within them; a people who have yet to bring that out of themselves.

Comparison of the South to Hell is overtly apparent, but it does not make it any less impactful. Interesting how he uses a sort of comedic little story to convey such a strong message.

I think the poets choice to write how the figures being portrayed most likely spoke in real life is a great choice. It makes the sentiment in these lines all the more impactful when it sounds like it is coming from a real person. The sentiment of being captivated by Ma Rainey, the music singing to their souls pushing them forward despite the tragedies in their lives.

Anaphora really creates a powerful sentiment here. It puts a lot of emphasis on the "they" he speaks about, yet he never explicitly says who they are. Although I am about 100% sure we all know who "they" are. Then the break of anaphora from "they" to "You sang" is also really powerful. It's almost like the abrupt you breaks the history being spoken about in the previous lines.

This entire poem is resoundingly powerful and harrowing to read, but I find that this last line is especially so. Yet, it is not an escape from the circumstances of this individual's life. The blues/jazz are a form of release for the singer to express the feelings of depression and sorrow. I also think it is important to note Hughes' decision to incorporate AAVE (African American Vernacular of English) into his poem.

The change of the word from "sing" to "am" in the first and last lines is an extremely powerful choice that is so seemingly subtle. It shifts his sentiment that he too will be eating at the table tomorrow from a hope into a reality.

Hughes starts this poem with an amazing comparison of the rivers of time with the veins of the human body. The poem speaks of a longstanding history of the African/African American through the use of the pronoun "I". This creates a sense of community and connection for he makes this history scattered through time a collective experience to strengthen the bonds of those still facing oppression. His soul grows deep like the river showing that it has made them stronger perhaps, or more rich in spirit.

This part made me think of Albert Ryder's "Moonlit Cove". When I read this part of the poem the imagery seemed to me as if it were a sense of forced tranquility. On the surface it seems to be a peaceful scene (possibly representative of rebirth/fertility/redemption), but it also still felt quite eerie/unsettling. The "arid plains" and the "lands" the fisher (the fisher king perhaps) has to set in order make me think of a sort of falsified peace. This piece entirely encapsulates the theme of fragmentation within the poem, and it is even explicitly in the lines as presumably the Fisher King speaks, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".

To add a lil something to the feeling of fragmentation accompanied by an underlying hope for rebirth and beauty is Beethoven's Piano Sonata #14 in C# Minor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tr0otuiQuU

Here the finals lines of the poem are thought to be taken from the Brihadaranyak Upnishad, and they respectively translate to "Give. Be Compassionate. Control" and "Peace Peace Peace". The repetition of the lines operates like the booming of thunder in the sky, and it seems as if the thunder, the heavens themselves, are speaking these lines to the reader. It is a chance for change, for progression, and for rebirth. Yet, it also instills connotations of an impending fate that will come upon humanity if they do not follow these instructions. In a similar sense it is reminiscent of Philip Levine's "They Feed They Lion" because of the sense of repetition and the forewarning it offers in it. Recall the lines: "Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow." The ebb and flood of the meter makes it seem as if some unimaginable force is drawing nearer and nearer. Similar to the Spiritus Mundi in Yeats' "The Second Coming" that marches through the desert signaling the start of another cycle through the ending of this our own. In particular the lines that read, "A shape with lion body and the head of a man, /<br> A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun[...] / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, /<br> Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" Just as the lion slowly approaches in both of the aforementioned poems I feel as if these word indicate the coming of some unforeseen consequence of mankind.

This part of the poem reminded me of a line from Herman Melville's novel "Moby Dick" in which he speaks of a William Turner painting. I do not remember exactly what he said word for word but it was something along the lines of "it was if he had delineated chaos bewitched," and I feel like that best captures how this part of the poem felt to me. I chose the above Turner painting because I felt it best encapsulated this sentiment. I feel as if the figure of Moses shrouded by what seems like chaos bewitched definitely parallels this part of the poem.

This seems like a direct reference to the prophesy made by Madame Sosostris in the Burial of the Dead which I find extremely fascinating. It is the shortest and most abrupt of all the sections of The Wasteland. The reference to an earlier part of the poem makes it seem almost like even the text itself is trapped in some sort of cycle. It makes me think of the cycle of death and rebirth. In this instance Phlebas is perhaps liberated through his death, or it is merely another tragedy of the wasteland.

These lines are sanskrit. "Datta. Dayadhvam. damyata" translates to "Give. Sympathize. Control". "Shantih" translates to "peace". I am uncertain as to why Eliot uses these words to end the poem and am interested in finding out more.

I think this is an allusion to the Fisher King story we talked about in class. I do not know if The Wasteland is entirely centralized around it, but the themes of paralyzation/infertility/waste and fertility/rebirth would make sense within the poem.

I feel like this line sets the whole tone for this section of The Wasteland. April, a month typically associated with spring and new life has its symbolism inverted with notions of death that will continue to pervade this section. The "dead land" in which they grow out of becomes a major point of symbolic force within the poem.

The juxtaposition of these characters and the brief glimpse we are given of their lives make this poem seem like a collage in which all of them have been cut out from their existence and placed next to each other via the medium of poetry.

This whole poem reminds me of the individual frames that compose a film. Individually they are just pictures that stand alone, but when put in motion they form a film, a coherent narrative.

I find this poem rather fascinating. It seems as if he is almost mocking poetry (or at least playing with the relationship between form and content) as he takes what seems to be a simple note to another person, and attempts to turn it into a poem by spreading it out and using enjambment.

Find it interesting that he does not include Sunday? Possibly because of its ties to religion as being a Church Day/ the Lord's Day

The brevity of this poem almost makes me feel like it is attempting to mimic a photograph. It is a brief yet deeply impacting poem. The word choice creates a deathly sentiment as if we are looking into the past.

Here is another great use of personification using flowers to create a notion of implicit choice bearing consequence. The rose must put on the armor to survive within the "brutal age," it is an act of survival, but this decision carries a great weight with it. Do we regret the decisions we must make for ourselves that hurt others, or are they cast aside as being necessary to for an "iron cortex" of our own?

These lines create a great sentiment of vulnerability with the imagery of the flower. I feel like flowers are symbols typically associated with femininity when used as metaphors for people, but their is a reversal here as she uses the delphinium to represent the fragility of man.

I like that she uses the elizabethan sonnet for this poem. It talks of the necessity of love without explicitly stating why we need it to survive but rather by directly contrasting it with literal material needs a human has to fulfill to stay alive. In this poem perhaps love is force, and the material needs of the world are sentiment.

I do not think this poem is about making the choice to travel the road less travelled, but rather about making an implicit decision that would later be assigned meaning retroactively. Either path he took would have made all the difference, but the point is we must make a choice for it is simply the way of life. It is only once we have looked back upon a choice that we truly understand the nuances that came along with it.

These lines make me think of the theme of force that we have been covering with the other authors. I think he uses the word "design" to describe a sort of providence, or otherworldly force, rather than the actual material appearance of an object. Here the design is a negative force of "darkness" that instils an underlying feeling of fear. It is a mystifying poem that ponders on the nature of death.

This is one of my personal favorite examples of this trope. The first “I sleep” implies actual slumber and rest, and the second time it is repeated it takes on a new connotation of death or eternal rest. It creates a darker tone for the poem, but not necessarily a sinister one. The traveller sees the beauty that lies at the end of the journey in one’s life, and the sweet unrelenting darkness of the woods that will one day embrace him in a wave of overwhelming nostalgia.

This poem has a very resentful and seemingly bitter tone to it. I feel as if the poet is talking about an actual individual that lived in this town and who actually passed away, and he is perhaps speaking on his behalf for the poem.

I feel that this line is very important because it makes it seem as if the speaker is talking in retrospection, and that perhaps they have reached the end of their lives as a poet or as an individual altogether.

These lines create a rather dreary sentiment. Poets and Kings serve the purpose of documenting time, yet time has not changed. Discontent and sadness remain in the annals of history and it is their job to give it credence. A rather dreary sentiment indeed.

I think these two lines carry a great deal of weight with them. The notion that one must place themselves in pain to achieve a state of grandeur and beauty is quite saddening, but I feel as if there is great truth to it. The word choice of "feed" in the second line is rather interesting as well. It creates the connotation that the fall from this peak state of beauty is a necessity for whomever the "you" is in regards to, as if it were necessary for their survival.

This among other parts of the text leads me to believe that she might have been suffering from postpartum depression. Then the enforced alienation from her peers by her husband only added to her growing sense of detachment from the world around her. Perhaps in the wall she is searching for a lost sense of self, a lost sense of purpose.

These are just some extremely well written sentences rhetorically. The use of apposition and simile in the first sentence makes the search for freedom seem so elusive and futile. The parallelism in the second sentence is intense as he lays down some of America's greatest tragedies side by side. They are just very powerful lines.

I feel that this is a very important line because it ties into his notions of "Double Consciousness". This notion is understood as a feeling that there are two identities one possesses living in an oppressive racial society.

I feel that this is an important notion to address. The acknowledgement that what once was a great and noble symbol of power was now something to be shamed and oppressed. It feels like a reversal in progress that contrasts the theme of scientific progress in the passage. Humanity takes two steps forward and three steps back.

I feel that these brief lines encompass an important theme of the passage. It seems to signify a crossroads of symbolism between technology, the force of women, and pre-existing art. Three subjects that became widely focused on during the era of Modernity. Movements like Futurism would soon come to take place. Woman's Suffrage would soon make major accomplishments. Art as they knew it in form and value would go through a major shift. 1900 marks a crossroad between history.

Here, anaphora immediately instills a sense of factory like repetition setting the tone for the rest of the poem. It invokes notions of a creation process, which will later be revealed to be not only the "burlap sacks" of food and the "lion", but perhaps the underlying animosity of the workers as well.

When I first read this line it immediately reminded me of William B. Yeats' "The Second Coming" in which a lion-like figure approaches slowly, marking an impending fate for mankind. throughout history the symbolism of the lion has been heavily entwined with the figure of Jesus, and it creates an interesting contrast against the backdrop of the industrial imagery. It leaves you wondering for what reason the lion is coming.