In Which I Ramble About Poetry

Poetry is like painting with words. It's an art form, to be sure, and that's hardly an original statement, but that's at least part of what I got out of "You, Andrew Marvell." When he describes the various places in the first stanzas with snippets like "And Baghdad darken and the bridge/Across the silent river gone." This, of course, could be completely wrong, but in my view that's also kinda that thing about poetry: it's really up to the interpretation of the reader. Which is another thing I've thought of here, as Strand made me think of when he said that "[his] response now is pretty much what it was then. [He is] still that figure face down in the sun." While when he brings this up he is more so meaning that he still doesn't get it and that the time really hasn't changed his ability to understand the poem, it just made me think of something else, likely completely tangential and mostly just related to the line in the poem itself. Before I read on in the essay I thought he was taking a potshot at the fact that he was analyzing the crap out of the poem instead of enjoying it for what it was, which was something I understood and kinda agree on. That isn't to say that I think we should never try to discern the meanings behind poetry or strive to understand all the effort put into it. We totally should. I just think that maybe sometimes we make some leaps and bounds on exactly what it all means. 

Meanwhile, "To His Coy Mistress" is quite easy to grasp the meaning behind. Though not written in the clearer language of "You, Andrew Marvell" it has an idea behind it that many people can easily understand: a sort of carpe diem, or as the kids sometimes say, "YOLO." This is easiest to tell in the first two lines, "Had we but world enough and time/This coyness, lady, were no crime" which I can paraphrase as "if we had forever then you could play hard to get but since we're gonna die some day we should totally do the frickle frackle." Poetry, however, has a way of making this much more crude paraphrase sound beautiful and, well, not so crude. Which is probably one awesome thing about poetry. 

But yeah, I like the idea of poetry-as-art and carpe diem. I like poetry - just don't ask to read anything I've written because I was not born with that talent - and the idea that we should make use of the life we've been given and do what we want with it is probably one of my favorite ways to look at the world. Poetry isn't strange, but it's also certainly not my forte.