I think Ginsberg is driving the "madness" theme here with the different methods of psychiatric "help". I noticed that the psychiatric treatment started with a frightening method, then tapered down to less intense treatments, but ended with another frightening method, which I'm thinking is a lobotomy? These word choices are making me think that these treatments are not helpful.

Why did Ginsberg write the word "Terror" with a capital T? Is he personifying "Terror"? Is it because "the Terror" is something bigger than the speaker or the "best minds" Ginsberg is writing about?

I noticed that the speaker used "minds" as in plural. I wonder who these people are and I wonder which generation. Also the line "starving hysterical naked" is grammatically jarring. Ginsberg didn't separate them with commas, so it added to the "madness" tone of the line.

After reading the entire poem, there are some word choices in the poem that suggests this is a poem about birth, especially at the end when she writes, "I must not give you birth". However, this line is interesting, the speaker is telling their child that they "cannot let [them] in", but when a woman gives birth, the baby is being let out. I wonder why she chose the word "in" versus out.

By writing "exprest" does she mean "expressed" but is spelling it as "exprest" so the couplet can have a perfect end rhyme? Yet, "there and stair" doesn't have perfect end rhymes, so why not just write it out as "expressed"?

i think it's clear she is talking about war with words like "wasted fields" and "grotesque things". I get an imagery of mangled bodies and empty war-fields from fighting. However, I wonder if she is referencing WWII with the line "holocaust of hell". Or is she using it as a metaphor for something else?

Similar to Gwendolyn Bennett, Dunbar-Nelson is writing about themes of "domesticity", but it seems as if she doesn't want to sew or she feels that it is pointless to sew from the day to day things that makes her tired.

I see here Johnson is relating the end back to the beginning and is comparing the young man to the sand. I wonder what Johnson means by "glass", is she using the glass as a metaphor to say that the people who are laughing at him only see what he looks like from the outside, but not where he comes from?

I wonder if Helene Johnson was using the "sand" from "the Sahara desert" as a metaphor for slavery. The word "taken" is what makes me wonder this because this person is taking something from a different land to keep for himself without permission.

This section here, most of the words start with the letter "s", in other words she is playing around with sibilance. I wonder why the repetition of the "s" sounds, when I recite this part out loud, the "s" sound reminds me of a snake, but I don't think that was her intention. Is it supposed to imitate a steady beat like banjo strumming?

I noticed that around here the diction starts to change and it reminds me of the way Sterling Brown writes his poetry. I wonder why she only wrote part of the poem this way and not the whole poem.

What I noticed is that Bennett started the poem off with the imagery of palm trees standing tall in the sky, At first I didn't know the setting of the poem or if the palm trees were vague, but as I keep reading the poem she references more imagery like "silent sands", "Sphinx", and "the Nile", so I am wondering if she is writing a poem about Egypt.

I noticed that the diction starts to get specific here, and sounds like there is a southern accent there, which continues throughout the poem. I think by doing this, perhaps Brown's intentions were to make the poem more personal to the folks who are from the south, since the blues started in the south. However, what's interesting is that the speaker mentions that everyone from "Miles aroun'" travel whether by "ridin' mules / or packed in trains" to come to see Ma Rainey perform in the "New Orleans delta". The diction used is specific to a region or place, but the language and tone also gives an idea of how wide spread Ma Rainey's popularity is.

I think it's interesting that Slim said he was going to "drop by a spell" and the lines in this stanza rhyme. I felt that the rhyming gave this stanza a mystical or chanting element, like someone casting a "spell" on someone.

The repetition of "they" is strong in this poem and strengthens the tone of resentment towards the people the speaker is referring to. When we get to this line, Brown breaks the stanza and stops the repetition of "they" and begins the repetition of "You Sang:". So he uses a mix of third person and second person voice, and in the second person voice, the diction is again specific and different from the diction of the "they" stanzas. Perhaps he did this to establish that the conflict is between two different groups?

Just like lyrics from a blues' song, Hughes echoed this line from line ten but with variation, which makes me think he was trying to incorporate elements of blues music into this poem, since he is writing a poem about the blues.

I noticed that these lines mirrors the second line of the poem, "I've known rivers ancient as the world". He is referencing three rivers that have been around for a long time with the last two being rivers that are in Africa. What is interesting is that the speaker is speaking in first person. I get this impression that the speaker may be more than one person and I wonder if Hughes is referencing the phrase "I have an old soul" and is and possibly introducing the theme of ancestral history, since the speaker moves through different rivers in different places but from an earlier time. It does present the theme of migration, since the speaker went from rivers, that were in a different country, to the Mississippi river which is in America.

These lines, to me, connects with this image from The Migration series by Jacob Lawrence. When you read the caption for this painting, it states that the migrants would miss their trains when they got arrested, which made it hard for migrants to go north. So when the speaker of the poem asks "what happens to a dream?" I imagine that perhaps these migrants, such as the ones sitting in this car under arrest who couldn't go to a place that seemed to have better opportunities for them, were also asking about what will happen to their "dream". Furthermore, the figure in front of the car looks like they are blocking their way, "deferring" their "dreams", and possibly letting their "dreams", "dry up / like a raisin in the sun".

https://youtu.be/h6sFG7qOd4A?t=46

This stanza reminds me of the chorus in the song “Wastelands” by Linkin Park, especially the lines, “I can connect / Nothing with nothing" and "My people humble people who expect / Nothing”. In the song, Chester sings, “In the wastelands of today / When there's nothing left to lose / And there's nothing more to take”. The idea that in both ends, you will be left with “nothing” or that you will have "nothing". This idea of having "nothing" reflects this stanza, when the speaker mentions that there is “nothing” for them to “connect” and because there is “nothing” left, their “humble people” expects “nothing”.

“There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will”.

This stanza reminds me of “Old Yellow Wallpaper” because it seems that the speaker is seeing another person, but they don’t know if that person is real. In this part of the poem there are two people walking together, but the speaker sees someone else. The speaker doesn't confirm whether or not the person they are walking with sees this "third" person as well. Therefore, similar to the narrator in "Old Yellow Wallpaper", perhaps this "third" person who is walking "beside" their friend, is someone "nobody knows but" the speaker.

This line here pairs well with Arthur B. Davies' painting from the Armory Show, titled, Moral Law--A Line of Mountains. In the painting we see a line of people and some look as if their eyes are staring "before [their] feet". Especially the 7th person toward the right of the painting. The 7th person toward the right looks disconnected from everyone else and they are just looking down toward their feet. I imagine the "men" in this stanza to look this way.

The constant repetition of the word "said", either "I said" or "she said" and so on, i think it mimicking dialogue, but there are no quotation marks like some of the other stanzas. The repetition reminds me of the Gertrude Stein poem we read last week. Perhaps Elliot wanted to incorporate a style of repetition in this part of the poem by using elements of dialogue.

I noticed here how the line begins to break off, is Elliot trying to turn this line into fragmented pieces?

I think Elliot is referencing the nightingale bird's sound, but I think I read or learned somewhere that the nightingale is commonly associated to poetry. Perhaps Elliot is trying to reference poetry itself with using the bird as a symbol.

The men are possibly sick from the "brown fog" and they seem isolated from each other as "each man fixed his eyes before his feet". It's almost as if they are walking corpses or people with blank minds.

Sounds a bit ironic here, usually winter would be cold and not warm. I wonder what Elliot meant here. Was the weather warm? Or did Elliot meant the speaker kept themselves warm during the winter?

Elliot starts the poem (epic poem?) in a narrative tone. This could probably work as a prose poem since it has fiction like elements, but with more metaphors; however, I don't know if prose poetry was common during the 20's. I notice that Elliot starts the poem with the setting. I also see Elliot mixing two kinds of imagery concerning nature. The lively and earthy imagery such as "lilacs" and "spring rain" with the baron and flat imagery such as the "dull roots" and "dead land".

In terms of rhythm or sound this works, but I wonder (along with multiple lines in this poem) what her intention is with comparing "needle less" and "never the less". Is it just for alliteration?

Speaking again on repetition, sometimes if things get repeated over and over again, it starts to sound like something else. Which is happening here. "Push sea" spoken over and over again sounds like it's starting to blend into one word. To me, it sounds like "pushy", and after reading the rest of the poem it does have this "push" tone to it also. For example, the speaker sounds like they are pushing themselves to "believe it will finish" .The pus or forceful tone is emphasized by, again, the repetition.

With the repetition, it sounds like a chant or a beginning of a chant. She isn't repeating this line over and over again after this line, which doesn't give the line a full "chanting" tone. Therefore, I think she wanted to play around with repetition in different ways, where some lines are repeated in several lines, or certain words are just repeated in one line, such as this one. Yet, that habitual feeling of repetition is still there. It sounds like someone convincing themselves that they "love honor" and they "obey".

Again, I see that Williams is playing around with form and is writing in enjambments. In fact, there are no punctuation breaks at all so the poem was quicker to read. this stanza, as well as the others, is more straightforward and conversational. This stanza was more narrative compared to the other two. There was less emotion in this stanza. I wonder why he started the poem this way?

Each stanza is short and consists of only 3 lines. This one, in particular, looks like it would be in an enjambment but the dashes provide a break. The form is more free verse since not all the lines, including this one, does not rhyme. So I see Williams bending poetic form to not be conventional. However, his dashes makes the text recognizable as a poem as we read it.

I wonder why Pound only wrote one couplet for the entirety of this poem? Why not a series of couplets or one quatrain? Did Pound wanted to give his readers a large space for interpretation? Although the poem is very short, the imagery is specific and comes through. I do like his metaphor of the faces as "petals", I can image light colored faces against a black background. Yet I wonder, are two lines enough for the reader to have some sort of perspective?

Why did Millay break this line apart with two sets of ellipses? I assume it's to keep the line in that abab format, since making "releases" it's own line wouldn't match the format she was trying to achieve. However, she made two words in the previous poem, "Here lies, and none mourn him", their own line. So what is she trying to achieve in this format for this poem? The measure might be in fours, so she wrote this piece in a tetrameter rhythm? Yet, the ellipses provide extra pauses, so wouldn't that stall the four meter rhythm? Either way, I assume she wanted those extra pauses. With the extra pauses it makes me focus on that line more, and it does make the line, "yet that hour will come", more haunting. I am now anticipating what "will come".

I'm not sure if "silenced' and "column" are considered internal rhymes. If they are, then I noticed by having an internal rhyme, she tried to give these lines rhythm, but in an unconventional way. I suppose. The end rhymes are still conventional, so she didn't stray too far off from format. The lines themselves, I get an image of maybe a soldier with the mentions of "riveted pride" and "rusted iron column". Is this perhaps a nod to an elegy poem? I know elegies are poems that expresses sadness for someone who had passed, which she does here. Furthermore, I believe, from past English courses, subject matter that concerns war often appears in elegies or written in an elegy format. I wonder if this was her intention?

The form of this poem seems straightforward, it appears to be a Shakespearean sonnet. I wonder if there are slight alterations of the format, but I didn't catch any shifts from style. I wonder why she chose the Shakespearean sonnet? Is it because she simply prefers it over other formats or a matter of habit? Even subject matter is normal to what one would find in a sonnet, and for this sonnet, the subject is love. She even added the volta at the end, which changes in tone from the previous 13 lines. the volta emphasizes the love for this person. So, again why this form of sonnet?

This perhaps is expressing the idea of, as cliche as it sounds, doing something unexpected. Instead of following the same path one is used to,try something different. In other words maybe the theme is, don't stick to what you know, explore other ways to experience things? At the same time however, in the first line of this stanza, he is "telling this with a sigh" so this either means he is making this statement in relief or in a melancholy tone.

Is the speaker suggesting that the other path is thought to be better because of the scenery of nature, but the experience is more or less the same as the first path?

This reminds me of the discussion we had in class on Tuesday about form and staying within the "village". It seems to me that the speaker is reflecting upon the idea that his neighbor is set in his traditional ways since "he will not go behind his father's saying". The speaker's neighbor is mimicking the lifestyle that was set before him. Perhaps not progressing further. Also, with the line "He moves in darkness as it seems to me" reminds me of Master's poem, "Petit, the Poet" with his line, "Blind to all of it all my life long" because in a way, the notion of moving "in darkness" is similar to being "blind". Both allude to the idea of not seeing beyond what they know or their confinements.

Here he is listing different types of poetry, which is pretty meta to write a poem about poetry. Was it intentional that Masters wanted to create a meta tone for this poem?

Here I get a tone of regret, that perhaps he never noticed the beauty of nature as much as he should've.

It seems that there's no one left in the town that he knows, and that all his friends or acquaintances that once lived in the town are all gone. Which adds to the notion of him growing old, and his time ticking away.

With this line, it reminds me of Milton's sonnet, "How Soon Hath Time..." because it eludes to the idea that Mr. Flood may not have much time left, and the "bird is on the wing" perhaps also means that his time is flying away.

The language she uses here is very interesting because not only is she describing the physical details of the "wall-paper", she's giving it characteristics. It's like the "wall-paper" is an object and a person,

This use of imagery here is an interesting way to use space to compare and contrast the experiences of prisoners who are African American and prisoners who are white. The use of the word "strait" implies a narrow path but still an opening nonetheless. However for the "sons of the night", the prison walls offer no escape, therefore no freedom. Even with the use of the word "son" gives a feeling of being second or having a lack of authority which highlights the disparaging feeling the author is trying to describe.

I thought the author's use of color was a useful way to provide imagery and emotion to this excerpt. When the author wrote "the sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race.." I found it interesting that he used the imagery of the sky being blue to describe his happiness, for blue skies does give an impression of warmth and brightness.

The imagery here is interesting, albeit violent in terms of describing his experience of being overwhelmed by these "forces". It provokes a sense of shock, but it's very intense.

If this is a part of his "autobiography", why does he refer to himself in third person? I'm a bit confused to that bit of the excerpt.

Why does the author choose to use religious examples to describe Adam's work? So far he used this analogy a few times, how big of a role does religion play to Adams and his work, life, or time of place he was in?

Why did Levine choose to not state the line "They Lion Grow" at the end of this stanza like the other stanzas? Is it because he is implying that by the end of the poem, the "Lion" is now fully grown?

This section is interesting, Levine writes "Kiss My Ass" in a way one would write a title. The beginning of each word is capitalize which he didn't do for the rest of this line, I wonder why he singled this phrase out that way. It does make this part stick out more, was that his intention?