Kubla Khan

My first thought after I finished “Kubla Khan” was, “What?” Something about the structure of the poem and the shift that it has part way through and the incredibly large amount of imagery in the middle left me completely and totally unable to understand the poem at first go. So I read it a second time, with little luck. Then, I started to think, ‘This is ridiculous. I am good at English. I should be able to understand this. I must be tired’ So, put the poem away for the night and decided to try again in the morning. Of course, in the morning, I was only marginally more successful. That was when I decided to look it up and see if I could figure out, after having done a very thorough job of trying to understand it, what this poem was talking about. I found out, not exactly what the poem was about, but rather the fact that Coleridge, the poet, was on opium at the time of the authoring of this poem. That was when I decided to wait until class to figure out what it was about.

After the class discussion, I am still not clear on what the poem is really about, but no longer fuzzy on what it is saying. I like the theory that we talked about in class, where the poem is saying that dreaming is dangerous and to beware of it, but I don’t know that it’s the only meaning, or even the best one. The very nature of this poem seems to be that no one really knows what it’s about, and critics and scholars have come up with a wide range of possibilities.

Of course, all of this analysis is done ignoring the fact that Coleridge was on opium when he wrote it and while that’s the obvious and only strategy that we have to look at this poem literarily, I was still left wondering how the opium effected the writing. Was it as descriptive as it was because of Coleridge? Or because opium makes you more detail-oriented? I’ve never tried opium and I simply didn’t know. So, resorted back to my trusty internet and looked it up. My research pretty much corroborated what I had already suspected. Opium increases the senses, making everything seem more so. Thus, the high level of imagery in Coleridge’s writing.

I can’t say that I hated “Kubla Khan”. I think that it is an interesting poem and its vague, sort of indistinct meaning is rather fascinating. The circumstances under which it was written provide another level of interesting discussion. However, despite all of this, I can’t really say that I liked it either.

"Ice House"

The poem “Ice House” by Anne Michaels (Skin Divers, 1999) is an incredibly moving piece of poetry, where Michaels has assumed the character of Kathleen Scott, a real woman of history, who lost her husband. Part of what makes this poem so moving is the incredible way that Michaels writes from Scott’s point of view, capturing her and her emotions so well that many readers could fall into the trap of believe that Michael’s actually is Scott, or rather that “Ice House” is a narrative poem, written about Anne Michaels’ life.

I really enjoyed the emotional journey that the poem forces you to take. From the first line, it starts out with a note of mourning and sadness, saying, “Wherever we cry, / it’s far from home.” (Michaels 168). The reader goes through the emotions of grief, anger, bitterness, and the hollow, heavy sorrow of love, not lost, but torn away.

There were two lines, in particular, that struck me. The first was, “ We mourn in a place no one knows, / it’s our right that our grief be unseen.” (Michaels 172). This line struck me, partially because of its literal meaning, that grief is private and not something to be displayed or scrutinized, but primarily because of its second meaning, that no one understands or sees our grief because the place where we grieve is so detached from everyone and everything else that they could never hope to reach it.

The other line that stuck with me is at the very end of the poem. “I love you as if you’ll return / after years of absence. / As if we’d invented moonlight. (break) Still I dream / of your return.” (Michaels 172). What makes this line so powerful is, some what, the context of the poem. Michaels has woven as story of hurt and slight despair, of bitterness and deep sadness before this point. Now, in the final two stanzas, she comes back with this note of longing and tragic hope, that do nothing to lighten the mood, but rather remind the reader that she never stopped loving her husband. It think that it is stunning and sorrowful, all at once.
When we were reading this in class, I found myself suddenly remembering a song that I had on my iPod that I had found in my dad’s music. It is called “I Miss My Sky”, by Heather Nova. This song was written in a first person perspective about Amelia Earhardt’s last days, after she’d crashed her plane on the way back to the United States. It is beautiful and tragic, and part of the reason that it so much reminded me of this poem is the masterful way that Heather Nova wrote/sings this song so that you feel like it is Amelia Earhardt’s words. Go ahead and have a listen:
http://www.pilab.ch/Heather%20Nova%20-%20I%20miss%20my%20sky.mp3

And the lyrics:
I bury myself in the leaves to sleep
The sun so strong and rage so deep
I keep waking to find I've been dreaming again
And the sound of the ocean is not a plane
And far away they talk about me
In newspaper columns they write about me
round dinner tables and cocktail parties
I'm a heroine and a tragic figure
I'm a heroine as I'm lying here
Beneath my sky

And sometimes
Sometimes I cry
Sometimes
Sometimes I wonder
Why we're always coming down
And why we need to touch the ground
And why I didn't keep on heading
right on up to heaven
I miss my sky

Here from below the clouds are shadows
Not the golden mountains I used to fly through
Here from below the sky’s a painting
In a child's room with the future waiting
But not for me

I look up at the birds flying overhead
My sentinel's true but the signals dead
It's been 500 days of hope and sorrow
500 nights with no tomorrow
And the poetry and the best of me
And the heart and the spirit and the sex of me
All fell into the azure sea
In the tailspin with the last of me
And my wings, and my song, all that I knew is dead and gone
I'm weak and tired but my will is strong
And my hope lives on, my hope lives on

But sometimes
Sometimes I cry
Sometimes
Sometimes I wonder
Why we're always coming down
Why we need to touch the ground
Why I didn't keep on heading
Right on up to heaven
I miss my sky
I miss my sky

Summer Reading Response

My summer reading was interesting, to say the least. I worked on the mythology sources on and off through-out the whole summer, because it was something that I could to on partial auto-pilot, which was the state that I remained in for the six weeks when I was working, stage managing and acting. I would do a few here and a few there, and even though I would complete nearly half a page to a page every time I worked, the list was so long that I never seemed to make any progress. Those, I think, were the worst part of the summer homework.

The rest of the homework, the reading, although it appeared to be considerably larger and a lot harder, was actually the most enjoyable part of the homework. I started a little late in the summer, so at first I was feeling pressed for time and slightly stressed. However, once I started Frankenstein I was less worried. I found the language a bit dull and difficult to muddle through to the point sometimes, but I really and honestly enjoyed the book. It was so different than the pop-culture view that I had always been receiving, where Frankenstein is the monster’s name and he is green and moans a lot. It was interesting finding the parts where the novel’s matched up with pop-culture and yet how truly distorted today’s view of it is.

The part of Frankenstein that I did not enjoy was the part were I had to muddle through the language to get to what turned out to be a fantastic plot. There were parts where I had to pause and take a breath to keep myself focusing too much on the language and not enough on what the language was saying.

East of Eden was the last part of my summer homework that I did, partially because it is so intimidatingly huge. However, once I got over my fear of reading it, I found that it was so much better than I was expecting. I would get into the story and the description and then look up and find that I had read thirty or forty more pages than I had intended. The characters seemed much more real than in Frankenstein and the language was not only more modern – and therefore easier to understand- but also more inviting. I wanted to pay attention more. There were pleasant plot twists and moments when I felt horror at what might becoming up around the corner. It had been a while since I really set down a book I was reading and went, “Wow.” I couldn’t wait to discuss it, because there was so much that I saw in it, and I was sure there were a thousand and ten things that I had missed. Out of the summer homework, the scariest part was the best.

If I had the option to read-do the summer homework, changing the curriculum as I saw fit, I would drop the list of mythological figures, and opt for a packet or email or website of some kind, with those sources, that we could read. The sources were the most tedious and most difficult part of the work and made me dread the reading, which turned out to be a million times better.