Poems For Further Study
The Poet with His Face in His Hands 2005
You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need any more of that sound.
So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across
the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets
like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you
want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched
by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.
Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing
- FIRST RESPONSE. Describe the kind of poet the speaker characterizes. What is the speaker’s attitude toward that sort of poet?
- Explain which single phrase used by the speaker to describe the poet most reveals for you the speaker’s attitude toward the poet.
- How is nature contrasted with the poet?
Connection to Another Selection
- Compare the thematic use of nature in Oliver’s poem and in Robert Frost’s “Design.”
The Big Questions 2011
The big questions are big only
because they have never been answered.
Some questions, big as they seem,
are big only in the moment,
like when you’re hiking a trail alone
and you encounter a mammoth
grizzly who hasn’t had lunch
in a fortnight, and he eyes you
as the answer to his only big question.
Life turns existential, and you can’t
help questioning why you are here —
in this place on this planet
within this universe —
at this precise time,
or why he is, and you know he’s not,
even for a moment, wondering
the same thing, because he’s already
figured it out. And you, too,
know exactly what to do.
So, this can be a defining moment,
but not a big question,
because no one ever figures those out.
Still, one day when someone does,
might it not be a person like you
staring down a bear looking for lunch?
Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing
- FIRST RESPONSE. What are the “big questions” raised in this poem?
- Explain whether you think the bear and his “lunch” have much in common.
- How does Tilley’s use of language create a poem that is philosophically serious as well as genuinely funny?
Connection to Another Selection
- To what extent does Mary Oliver’s “The Poet with His Face in His Hands” also raise the existential question of “why are you here?”
Seniors 1985
William cut a hole in his Levi’s pocket
so he could flop himself out in class
behind the girls so the other guys
could see and shit what guts we all said.
All Konga wanted to do over and over
was the rubber band trick, but he showed
everyone how, so nobody wanted to see
anymore and one day he cried, just cried
until his parents took him away forever.
Maya had a Hotpoint refrigerator standing
in his living room, just for his family to show
anybody who came that they could afford it.
Me, I got a French kiss, finally, in the catholic
darkness, my tongue’s farthest half vacationing
loudly in another mouth like a man in Bermudas,
and my body jumped against a flagstone wall,
I could feel it through her thin, almost
nonexistent body: I had, at that moment, that moment,
a hot girl on a summer night, the best of all
the things we tried to do. Well, she
let me kiss her, anyway, all over.
Or it was just a flagstone wall
with a flaw in the stone, an understanding cavity
for burning young men with smooth dreams —
the true circumstance is gone, the true
circumstances about us all then
are gone. But when I kissed her, all water,
she would close her eyes, and they into somewhere
would disappear. Whether she was there
or not, I remember her, clearly, and she moves
around the room, sometimes, until I sleep.
I have lain on the desert in watch
low in the back of a pick-up truck
for nothing in particular, for stars, for
the things behind stars, and nothing comes
more than the moment: always now, here in a truck,
the moment again to dream of making love and sweat,
this time to a woman, or even to all of them
in some allowable way, to those boys, then,
who couldn’t cry, to the girls before they were
women, to friends, me on my back, the sky over me
pressing its simple weight into her body
on me, into the bodies of them all, on me.
Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing
- FIRST RESPONSE. Comment on the use of slang in the poem. Does it surprise you? How does it characterize the speaker?
- How does the language of the final stanza differ from that of the first stanza? To what purpose?
- Write an essay that discusses the speaker’s attitudes toward sex and life. How are they related?
Connection to Another Selection
- Think about “Seniors” as a kind of love poem and compare the speaker’s voice here with the one in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” How are these two voices used to evoke different cultures? Of what value is love in these cultures?
The Eagle 1851
Fragment
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls:
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing
- FIRST RESPONSE. How does the speaker distinguish between the eagle’s movements in the second stanza and those in the first stanza?
- Although this poem is considered to be a fragment by Tennyson, how might it also be considered as a kind of complete portrait of an eagle?
Connection to Another Selection
- Why can “The Eagle” and the anonymously written “Western Wind” be accurately described as lyric poems?
Sonnet — To Science 1845
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana1 from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad2 from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad3 from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?4
Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing
- FIRST RESPONSE. How is science characterized in lines 1–4? Which words are particularly revealing?
- Given the references to Diana, the Hamadryad, the Naiad, the Elfin, and the tamarind tree, how would you describe the poet’s world compared to the scientist’s?
- How do you think a scientist might respond to this poem?
Connection to Another Selection
- Compare the speaker’s attitudes toward what Poe calls in this poem “peering eyes” with the speaker’s attitude toward the readers in Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry.”
The Supremes 1991
We were born to be gray. We went to school,
Sat in rows, ate white bread,
Looked at the floor a lot. In the back
Of our small heads
A long scream. We did what we could,
And all we could do was
Turn on each other. How the fat kids suffered!
Not even being jolly could save them.
And then there were the anal retentives,
The terrified brown-noses, the desperately
Athletic or popular. This, of course,
Was training. At home
Our parents shook their heads and waited.
We learned of the industrial revolution,
The sectioning of the clock into pie slices.
We drank cokes and twiddled our thumbs. In the
Back of our minds
A long scream. We snapped butts in the showers,
Froze out shy girls on the dance floor,
Pin-pointed flaws like radar.
Slowly we understood: this was to be the world.
We were born insurance salesmen and secretaries,
Housewives and short order cooks,
Stock room boys and repairmen,
And it wouldn’t be a bad life, they promised,
In a tone of voice that would force some of us
To reach in self-defense for wigs,
Lipstick,
Sequins.
Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing
- FIRST RESPONSE. Who were the Supremes? Why is the title so crucial for this poem?
- Explain how the meanings and mood of this poem would change if it ended with line 25.
- How does the speaker’s recollection of school experiences compare with your own?
Connection to Another Selection
- Discuss the speakers’ memories of school in “The Supremes” and in Judy Page Heitzman’s “The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill.”