a burger and fries

Colorado college studied Florence Mayer's poem, "All American Sestina," when I visited one of their english classes.

Mayer takes the Sestina and stirs up its structure a bit. She does not end every line with the same word but begins each line with the repeated word (with a few exceptions). She takes the words of numbers one through six and uses those words as her repeated phrase.

The poem acts as a sort of cultural pledge of allegiance for America. She begins the poem like the beginning of the Pledge of Allegiance, “One nation, individual,” and then shifts to naming icons of the progression of America. Her poem acts as a cultural collage for America. She includes food, accomplishments, and economics in her lengthy ode to America. The beauty of this method is that is applies to most citizens of the US, so that she may hit a broad audience. But there are aspects of her collage that seem random. For instance, she seems to move forward in time while she writes but on the second to last stanza she mentions a one-room schoolhouse, reverting to more simplistic days.

Her most chilling image is her closing one, “six feet under, one horse town.” The six feet under symbolizes death, but I cannot comprehend what one-horse town means. She paints such a vivid picture of America and then relates it back to the concepts of life and death. Even though this is a great nation it can still die. Even though we may seem invincible, we will still die.

Those that master the villanelle, who craft so eloquently the two repeated lines, soar above the art of poetry. Dylan Thomas, among others, creates two lines which appeal to the imminent end which everyone faces: death. Thomas writes this poem in response to his dying father, proven by his last shift in stanza six, "And you my father." Thomas meddles in the phase of life where he must wrestle with the concept of death both tangibly and emotionally. He moves into the philosophy of Albert Camus, taking of the role of Sisyphus who faces his mortality as he rolls his stone daily up the hill. But Thomas never moves into Sisyphus's ardent nostalgia for life, his momentary lapses from the imminence of death.

No, Thomas seems to chide the men who pursued pleasure, who relied on their "good deeds." He tells them to forget this, that all they have left is the struggle before death. What remains is their writing or their legacy, but the men Thomas mentions possess no legacy. They were too caught up in themselves. Camus believes that in the end the only thing of matter is one's experiences. Thomas's philosophy (from this poem at least) seeps with a Byronesque tangibility, a need to embrace the earth, to leave a mark and then escape, fighting into the night.

These repeated images of fighting and raging peek through the poem in the two repeated lines. The villanelle allows Thomas to emphasize his point. Unlike Camus, who relies on the past, on the beauty of experience, Thomas writes that man must rise and leave life with fiber and fight. He should leave behind a legacy of strength. In the end though, Thomas merely wants his father to fight, for the tears of death to subside and for some sort of comfort in his struggle.

John Keats jubilantly praises the solitary, steady nature of the Grecian Urn in his ode, “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” Traced throughout Keats’s poetry, is the idea that the ever-present and unchanging objects in life carry immense beauty and character, but that they lack the vitality and brevity of life.

Keats constantly probes and questions the story of this urn. Illustrated with pictures of flighty maidens and evergreen boughs, it holds a tale frozen in time, a silent saga. Instead of insulting this statuesque nature of this story, Keats praises the beauty of imagination, of dreams, or fables. He revels in the untold, in melodies unheard. When Keats says, “not a soul to tell why thou art desolate, can e’er return,” he draws a parallel to Aeschylus’s watchman, who refers to the silent nature of the House of Atreus. They both draw on an inanimate object’s story. Expanding this belief to all of life, imagine the untold stories that lie in classrooms, in shy students, in the disgusting. Everything that resides on this earth, holds a story, a history. Keats desires truth, for the untold to come to the light.

His final statement affirms this belief; “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” Truth may lie in a sunset or nature or a beautiful woman, but it also lies in the mundane, in the stories untold.

why do you stay up so late

The sonnet by Don Paterson draws on themes of the past and of the beauty of the night time. He breaks the sonnet into two stanzas: one directed towards the listener and one in first person. The poem responds to some person’s question about why the narrator stays up at night. The speaker and listener obviously have a history together, as seen in the phrase, “remember that day you lost two years ago.” Describing dull stones that rarely blink with a dazzling color, the narrator compares those rocks to the night. He writes that some objects appear lifeless in the light of day and they need to cover of life to arouse themselves. Sometimes the blanket of night serves as not a hindrance but an opportunity. The narrator sees things which hide out in the day time.

The separation of the poem into two parts ties into the theme of duality weaved into the poem. There is the contrast of day and night and dark and light. The emotions that Paterson relates to the symbols of day and night are somewhat inverted. The night represents enlightenment, allowing moments of gleaming glory to shine through.

Paterson also utilizes the form of the sonnet to succinctly tell his story. The sonnet revolves around steadfast ideas like day and night. The sonnet reflects this constant nature with its uniform lines and structured form.

A poem based on memory, “Why Do You Stay Up So Late,” not only answers a question, but addresses a time that everyone experiences. He illuminates the beauty of night and that everything my not be as it seems.