AMERICA by Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg is one of the most complex poets I encountered so far. America is an intricate poem filled with political and cultural references. The stanzas are irregular and the lines have different lenghts sometimes lacking punctuation. It's characteristic to Ginsberg's style which I find difficult but compelling. Ginsberg starts his poem with incriminating statements and accusatory questions addressing America directly as if preaching to it, vehemently criticizing it. I was suprised by the ending of the second stanza:
"It occurs to me that I am America
I am talking to myself again"
I enjoyed the speaker's identification with America and changing from accusations and lamentations to an acceptance of his condition of being part of America.

The poem can be fully understood only if getting familiar with the political and economical history of America during the 50's. There are many references to the military, political, economical, cultural and religious issues in America at that time. Ginsberg creatively uses humor such as in the last line of the poem : "America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."

A TIME PAST by Denise Levertov

A Time Past is a beautiful, nostalgic poem about a lost love in which the speaker chooses to reminisce about the beautiful moments of the ended relationship. The first stanza starts with the memory of a fall morning that the speaker shared with her husband that she loved very much. The "old wooden steps" are symbolic, representing the memories that she is so fond of. The wooden steps have been replaced by granite ones and they remained to live only in her mind. The memories of her great love would live in her mind although other newer and even beautiful things happened in her life. I would like to speculate on the fact that in this second stanza the "wooden steps" could represent her husband that she separated from and is now "gone". Maybe the "handsome" stairs that replaced the old ones represent a new lover in the speaker's life. The granite is a stone somewhat cold which could represent a new relationship that lacks the passion and ardor although "handsome".

The image "my hands still feel their splinters" is one of my favorite. Even though the speaker chooses to remember the great times she is still feeling the painful moments that come with every broken relationship. Memories bring more memories of other tender moments the speaker spent with close friends. The steps are meaningful for the speaker and could represent also a space of personal time, of meditative thoughts and definitely a space filled with memories of love ("And sitting there 'in my life', often, alone or with my husband).

Levertov's steps remind me of Frost's ladder.

SEX WITHOUT LOVE by Sharon Olds

"How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love?"

Sharon Olds starts her poem with a very mundane question and proceeds to answer it in the next 23 lines not using symbols but inspired irony. She writes poetry about something that lost its poetry. In our society sex and love became almost independent of each other. "How do they do it...." Not that I dare give an answer to this question but I see how in our modern society we are more disconnected from our own emotional selves, the vicious circles continuing from generation to generation. Romance became over-rated. Sex became just another activity. Olds using interesting similes associating sex with endurance sports such as running. I love her play with contrasts. The emotional is cold as ice and the physical is hot and sweaty.

         "Beautiful as dancers,
         gliding over each other like ice-skaters
         over the ice, fingers hooked
         inside each other's bodies, faces
         red as steak, wine, wet as the
         children at birth whose mothers are going to
         give them away." 

Olds uses a beautiful simile at the beginning of this stanza, the lovers looking like dancers, gracious and beautiful. However she ends on a different note comparing their faces with those ones of the unwanted babies resulted from the loveless union. "Beautiful as dancers" is indeed a sarcastic remark.

The ending of the poem is a sad conclusion. They are alone. They are missing on an important emotional and spiritual connection furthering away from the truth, from the essence.

      "they know they are alone
      (...)just factors, like the partner
      in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
      single body alone in the universe
      against its own best time."

AFTER APPLE-PICKING by Robert Frost

If we look at this poem from a simple narrative level, we will identify a simple story of a farmer tired after picking apples, working hard and being taking over by sleep and the dreams that are about to come. But this poem is very intense. It's dominated by the sensation of sleep; but what does this sleep mean? "This sleep of mine / Whatever sleep it is" . The sleep and winter could mean the latest stage of the speaker's life. Maybe this sleep, "just some human sleep" is associated with death.

The apples are also symbolic, representing the fruits of the hard work in the speaker's life. He still had one more barrel to fill and a few apples to pick but he is done.

For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the greatest harvest I myself desired.

I could almost relate to this feeling of working hard for all the much wanted achievements which at a certain point become draining.

The images in this poem are so powerful. The ladder pointing to the heaven might even have biblical connotations. The smell of the apples that make the speaker drowsy reminds me of the winter nights at my grandma's house filled with the smell of baked apples on the wood stove.

THE FISH by Elizabeth Bishop

"I caught a tremendous fish" is the first line in Bishop's poem The Fish, and I wondered where this statement was going to take me. It felt like I stand at the entrance of a labyrinth that later unveiled elements of beauty and ugly. In contrast to the beginning, the poem ends with the conclusion "And I let the fish go" which represents a strong decision; and if you only read those two lines you understand that so much had happened in between. What kind of struggle and what revelatory moments the speaker had in order to come to that conclusion?

The beginning and the ending verses are very simplistic statements yet powerful; but the whole poem is very detailed and complex spattered with strong symbols where colors accentuates the abundant imagery (e.g."the dramatic reds and blacks" ; "rags of green weed" ; "pink swim-bladder"). I like how the poet used the "aesthetic of the ugly", two antonym terms which show the beautiful side of something disgusting, ugly. (e.g. "he was speckled with barnacles/fine rosettes of lime"). But isn't it true that we can find beauty in ugly things, we can find positive in terrible experiences, and we can find good in bad people?

The fish was sacred to the Greco-Roman mythology having the symbolic meaning of change and transformation. In Buddhism, it symbolizes happiness and freedom. We can find these symbolic meanings in the poem. The speaker releases the fish in the end, the gesture representing freedom. And we can see the transformation from the beginning of the poem where the speaker was heavy, dark and burdened to the end where "everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow".