September 8
“On My First Son” by Ben Jonson
Reading the footnotes under this poem, I learned that his first son had died on his seventh birthday. When I read through it without having known that I kind of thought that the poem was about his son getting older and not being a kid anymore and Jonson was just sad about that. When I read the poem a second time, knowing the background information, I thought the poem was very sad and depressing. I had to look up the word ‘lament’ which meant to mourn for or over and that word itself made the poem a lot more meaningful yet depressing. The beginning of the poem starts of with him saying how much he loved his son and saying goodbye to him. The middle of the poem is talking about how his son died so early and it’s clear when he says, “To have so soon ‘scaped world’s flesh’s rage” I also think that sentence though is talking about maybe, in a way, how lucky he is that he was unable to see all of the bad things in the world. I thought it was interesting because the poem is written all in one stanza. Overall, I think I liked this poem but it also kind of depressed me because child-death is the worst thing that can happen to a parent so I feel bad for the poet.
“To Waken an Old Lady” by William Carlos Williams
This poem is obviously about old age but it is hard to relate to it because I am only 17. The poet uses imagery to describe what it is like to be old like “Old age is/ a flight of small/ cheeping birds/ skimming/ bare trees/ above a snow glaze” I am not really sure what that means but it sounds pretty. The rest of the poem talks about how the weather is really bad and snowy so I guess that means that the birds are having a hard time with the cold weather which I guess means that old age is hard. I also thought this poem was interesting because some of the line breaks only have one word on them or two but the most is four. I don’t really understand why the line breaks are so frequent in between phrases and I don’t really see what point he is trying to make by doing so. I don’t really know if this poem was written by the heart because the poet wrote it when he was only 38. I don’t think you really get a sense of what old is until you are considered a senior citizen. Maybe Williams had someone very close to him who was really old but I don’t think he could of experienced the full affect of being old and being able to write a poem about until he actually was old.
