Poems Read in Class.

During the last class meeting, almost the whole class read one of their poems aloud. I’m glad that they volunteered to do so because I was too scared to share one of mine. I also enjoyed hearing the meanings of the poems from the authors themselves. To be honest, I favored some poems over others because they were too, for lack of a better word, “deep.” However, I can say that they were all very creative. Some were very light hearted and some were very emotional. I especially liked Gloria Chamarro’s poem “My World.” When I read the poem the second time, I completely understood the poem and knew that it was about a baby in the womb. The rhyme scheme on the last word of each line made the poem flow, and the fourth stanza was my favorite. It was my favorite stanza because it reminded me of what I’m learning in my linguistics 417 class, about how babies’ heart rates change when they hear their mother’s voice in the womb and how they recognize their prosody and cadence.

A Third Poem.

Alarm Clock
By Emily Schwartzler

One look at my face
And the look of despise is in your eyes.
I bombard you with my sound.
You strike me just to shut me up.
You turn away, but I insist.
Time is of the essence and you must obey.
Succumb to my siren.
And each day we will do this, for weeks,
And every week for the rest of your life.
I have all the time in the world.
Oh, how you loathe me.
It's what makes me tick.

First Poem.

As You Get Older
By Emily Schwartzler

Everything is new,
Everything is changing,
Your whole world is rearranging.

Memories are a person, time or place,
That your mind yearns to chase.

Enjoy it while you’re young,
Enjoy it while it lasts,
Because soon it will only be your past.

In Class Poetry.

Death: The Number 1 Killer of People Today
By Emily Schwartzler

That sneaky silent sleep
that rests you off your feet

(That's as far as I got)

The Dark Side of “London”

     Have you ever wondered how poets can make a reader feel a certain emotion? Poets possess the power to create an emotion by implementing literary devices into their poetry. In the poem “London,” by William Blake, Blake expresses his solemn thoughts of the city of London. Blake captures the city’s gravity in the poem “London” through diction, figurative language, and rhyme scheme.

            Starting with the first stanza, Blake sets the tone by the use of diction. The speaker says, “And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe” (3-4). When he uses the words ‘in every face,’ Blake is making a generalization. He does this to set the somber tone. By making this generalization, Blake allows the reader to feel the vastness of the emotional torment being felt throughout the city. He could have written how only the faces he met or a certain few were marked with sadness or woe, but he chose to say ‘in every face’ to show the immensity. In the second stanza, Blake continues to repeat the words ‘in every cry.’ The second stanza reads:

            In every cry of every Man,

            In every Infant’s cry of fear,

            In every voice, in every ban,

The mind –forg’d manacles I hear: (5-8)

Again, he repeats the words ‘in every’ to emphasize each person’s cry, voice, or ban that makes London melancholy as a whole.

            Also in the second stanza, when the speaker states, “…in every ban / The mind-forg’d manacles I hear” (7-8), Blake is using figurative language to encapsulate the sad oppression the citizens feel. These two lines in the poem convey a deeper meaning and the manacles are a symbol for the restrictions we create for ourselves. Blake’s use of the word ban is not limited to one meaning. Ban can be interpreted as a “…political and legal prohibition, curse, [or] public condemnation” (Print). Although the speaker verbalizes that they can hear the manacles, it is not actually possible. Not to mention, it has been said that “Blake crafts many of his textual details to be heard. [He]…uses words with auditory insinuations” (Web). Society does not literally put shackles and chains on the human mind, but with every ban people create their own handcuffs or restrictions. In the third stanza, Blake uses more figurative language when he writes, “And the hapless Soldier’s sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls” (11-12). Once again, the soldier’s sigh is not blood running down the palace walls, but a figurative meaning. This nonliteral meaning illustrates the sad fact that the soldier sheds his blood protecting the palace walls that he is not even allowed to set foot in.

            Not only are the words what create the somber tone, but the rhyme scheme as well. The poem follows a rhyme scheme where the last word in each line rhymes with every other word in that respective stanza. When read, the poem gives a serious, drone, continuous feeling that matches what the poem suggests. The repetition of the rhythm pulses just as a heart does, and can be interpreted as the heartbeat of the city. The heart beats slow and monotonously because it is sad, heavy, and weary. The weakness, woe, and mind-forged manacles are all reasons as to why the citizens of London would feel this way.

            Blake may or may not have used diction, figurative language, and rhyme scheme intentionally in “London” to enable the reader to feel a certain way, but he was successful in doing so. Through these literary devices Blake allows the reader to feel what the citizens of London felt. Leave it to a poet to let you feel what you read.

Works Cited

Graves, Roy Neil. "Blake's London." The Explicator 63.3 (2005): 131+. Literature

Resource Center. 15 Sept. 2010. Web.

"William Blake." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt.

New York, NY. Norton, 2006. 94+. Print.

Media Technology In The Classroom.

I personally do not like technology, but I do realize that in some instances technology makes things easier, immediate, and more readily available. I will admit that I own a cell phone, a laptop, and an IPod from 2006, but that is the extent of my willingness to submerge myself into the computer age.  I also realize that technology is ever present in our daily lives so there is no way of me escaping its binary wrath. My feelings toward technology probably stem from the fact that I do not understand it, but when I teach I will have to put my personal bias aside because not everyone feels the way I do about technology. Technology in the classroom seems like an irrepressible idea to me considering the world we live in today. In fact, I’m writing this blog entry about media technology in the classroom for one of my classes! I have witnessed both effective and ineffective uses of media technology in the classroom. In high school I enjoyed reading books and then watching their film adaptations. Other students seemed to enjoy this as well, and watching the film helped us as readers gain a better understanding. However, seating 30 high school students in front of a computer of their own and asking them to work productively is ineffective; I think we all know why.