OK, most of us have no idea what it would be like to lose a twin sibling in a ship-wreck before cross-dressing as a singing eunuch, only to discover that we are in love with a man, who is in love with a woman, who is in love with our disguise.
But, anyone who has ever been a teenager (yep, that’s everybody over the age of twelve) knows a little something about being in love. We’re betting you know exactly what it’s like to try to keep that love a secret, too.
If you think about it, this is what Viola in Twelfth Night deals with. Check out how she describes her secret crush to the guy of her dreams without revealing to him that he’s the object of her affection:
She never told her love, But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud, Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like patience on a monument, Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
We don’t run around talking like this in our day-to-day lives (it might be fun, though), but Viola’s speech captures perfectly that gut-wrenching, sickly “yellow and green” feeling that makes your cheeks flush red (”damask”) and literally seems to eat away at your insides (”like a worm in the bud”) when you’re too afraid to do anything about it and you don’t want anyone to know your secret, because you’re afraid they won’t love you back if they know who you really are.
Yep. That’s it exactly. Secret crushes are brutal, especially when you’re trying to figure out who you are and you’re afraid that what people see on the outside doesn’t match what you feel like on the inside. So, the next time you think nobody could possibly have a clue about what you’re going through, crack open your copy of Twelfth Night and tell it to Uncle Shakespeare. He totally gets you.
A lot of people only know the wild, rebellious Dylan of Highway 61 or the grizzled artist of recent albums like Time Out of Mind. But John Wesley Harding, on which “All Along the Watchtower” is a standout track, presents a different Dylan: sly, evasive, understated. Listening to this song is like trying to find your way through a washed-out desert at sunset. He’s making some harsh criticisms of American society during the Vietnam era, but the music is so mellow and the lyrics so strange it’s like he’s daring you not to pay attention.
Aside from that, “All Along the Watchtower” is a song that defined the late 1960’s, when the calm, disciplined protests of the early decade were degenerating into violence and confusion. No wonder Dylan ends the song with a howling wind. Ironically, the only people you could trust were the jokers and thieves. When Jimi Hendrix got around to covering this song, it sealed the deal: the guitar solo at the end has come to embody the splitting apart of order into screeching, and possibly liberating, chaos. Hendrix’s version has been used in countless movies and television shows, from the Spike Lee JointClockers to Forrest Gump to the episode in The Simpsons when Homer’s mother, an ex-hippie terrorist, returns to Springfield. And, if nothing else, it’s cool to think that Dylan has performed this song more than any other.
As Otis Redding used to sing, “I’ve got dreams, dreams, dreams to remember.” We’ve all got dreams, and Langston Hughes turns on the floodlights and points them directly at the idea of dreams. Sometimes it’s easy to rely on wishy-washy words when talking about our dreams, but instead of going all sappy on us, Langston Hughes puts ground underneath the idea of dreams, and compares them to very concrete things in our everyday lives. Sure, we personally might not immediately liken dreams to raisins, festering sores, rotting meat, and heavy loads, but through this poem, our speaker wants us to understand the reality of dreaming and the danger of not acting upon our dreams.
There’s a danger to thinking about dreams too abstractly. Our speaker wants us to consider dreams to be as real as flesh and as vital as food. Dreams don’t dwell in the cloud palaces. Dreams crawl on the earth, and, if they are not cared for or acted upon, they’ll haunt us. Through this poem, we are reminded of the importance of doing (rather than thinking) when it comes to dreams. It’s no wonder Nike used Hughes’s poem in one of their ad campaigns (featuring Sanya Richards and Danny Glover). Don’t let your dreams sit around gathering dust, just do it.
Have you ever wanted to escape from the world for a little while? Perhaps to go watch some woods fill up with snow? Leave Facebook to accumulate friend requests and wall posts for you, let the e-mails pile up, record a mischievous away message on your cell phone, stuff the homework, the papers, and the tests under the bed? Well, then this is a poem for you.
Sometimes we crave a little vacation from responsibility. Sometimes we get hungry for alone time like the speaker does in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” In a world in which we are constantly stimulated by the Internet, TV, phones, and ads, and in a world in which we are busy little bees, do we get to spend much time alone anymore? Do we have time to stop and smell the roses?
So, when we say the words “love poem,” what pops into your head? Maybe you’ve always thought that a love poem had to be sappy, like something you’d find in a Valentine’s Day card. If we told you that the love poem we had in mind was over 400 years old, that might make it even worse, right? Old love poems bring to mind flowery language and the kind of unrealistic glop that you could never bring yourself to say with a straight face.
But, if you think sappy love poems are ridiculous, you’re not alone – that’s pretty much how Shakespeare felt too, and he spends these fourteen lines ripping that kind of poem apart. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 is a parody of the kind of insincere, sickly sweet love poems that authors have been writing (and a lot of people have been hating) for centuries. Now, don’t get us wrong, we’re not anti-love poetry and we can get into the sappy stuff sometimes too. But we’re not fans of lame clichés, and we think it’s pretty fun to watch Shakespeare go to town on them in this sonnet.
“There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.” – William Carlos Williams
Maybe you are walking into “The Red Wheelbarrow” as a young scholar who is brand new to the study of poetry. Maybe you are reading it as someone who has lots of experience with poetry. Maybe you are slapping your poetry book against your head, exclaiming, “Why? Why? Why?!” and feeling anxious in a way that you haven’t felt since the second grade when your classmates were always able to find Waldo, and when you never could see his red striped shirt in a sea of penguins. Don’t worry. In the case of “The Red Wheelbarrow,” it’s as though you’ve already found Waldo, even before you begin reading.
William Carlos Williams, as you’ll come to know, happened to be quite a rebel. “The Red Wheelbarrow” is revolutionary because of its simplicity. While many of his contemporaries were writing poems that locked meaning away like precious jewels in secret rooms, Williams wrote poems that captured ordinary moments and ordinary objects, such as a red wheelbarrow. Think of “The Red Wheelbarrow” as a painting, rather than as a Where’s Waldo puzzle. Think of it as an homage to a tool that is thousands of years old and that rarely is appreciated. You’ll be writing poems about forks in no time.
It’s the stuff of campfire horror stories: what if you died and were buried…but were conscious the whole time? Few things sound more terrifying to our ears. But admit it: even the cheeriest of us sometimes picture how things will go once we’ve passed away.
If you’ve ever suffered something traumatic in your life – something you wish you could “bury” and forget – then we don’t have to sell you on this poem. But if you’re maybe not so keen about reading yet another literary work on the subject of mortality, think of it as satisfying that subtle curiosity you have about what the world looks like from “the other side.” Or if you’re a fan or horror, you can think of this poem as similar to a Stephen King story without all the dialogue. If “I felt a Funeral” were a horror novel, the back-of-the-book blurb would read something like this:
“From Emily Dickinson, Master of Suspense, comes another thrilling poem about the world beyond. A young woman wakes up to find that she can’t control her brain. A shadowy group known only as the “Lead Boots” has taken control of her most prized possession: her mind. Worse, they have decided to host a funeral…for her! Before it’s over, she must voyage through the void to make it back to earth. Will she make it – or will she fall through the universe forever?”
Why should you read this seemingly childish poem about a lamb? For that matter, why read its counterpart, “The Tyger,” Blake’s most famous poem? That lambs have soft fur or tigers like to hang out in forests should come as news to no one. But the division of daily life into periods of “innocence” and “experience” – two sides of the same coin, really – is something that we grapple with every day.
On a very simple level, Blake’s conception is similar to the Chinese division of the world into “Yin” and “Yang,” forces of light and darkness that can never be fully separated from one another. As Blake puts it, they are “the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.” For him, there are no neat divisions between good and evil.
What’s your take? In your life, are there clear cut boundaries between innocence and experience, good and evil? Or do you see the world more like Blake did?
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