Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star / Mood - Poetry Blog 1 (For Week 2!) (Bright Star)

The poem Bright Star, by John Keats, describes a man who looks into the sky and sees a star; he tells how he would act differently if he behaved as the star. The way I see this poem, it can be divided into two parts.

The first part is his description of the star's action. It watches the world and sees the beauty of it - particularly, nature. The star is compared to an insomniac who watches the "moving waters" and "snow upon the mountains and the moors." What the star is observing is later contrasted with what the man would.

The second part describes what the man would do if he were as loyal and constant as the star. He would watch, instead of the world, a woman. He says that if he were to do one thing for the rest of his life, he would "awake forever in a sweet unrest, still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, and so live ever - or else swoon to death." (It was definitely an "aww" moment.)

While the poem is creating contrast, there are several similarities in it. The narrator tells what he would watch forever and what the star continually watches, but they are both unchanging. They both are watching something. Also, the woman and nature are being indirectly compared. Each is the object of something's/one's attention, and each is beautiful enough to be so. Both the woman and nature are depicted as gently moving, which helps the reader make the comparison and creates a soft, peaceful mood. The narrator also uses words like "eternal" and "forever" to make time seem almost non-existent; this also contributes to the peaceful mood.

So We Meet Again, AP Lit Blog (The Nature of Proof in the Interpretation of Poetry)

Well, it's time to blog once again. This first piece I'm reading is called The Nature of Proof in the Interpretation of Poetry by an interesting fellow named Laurence Perrine.

Laurence Perrine thinks that there is a correct way to analyze poetry - that one is either right or wrong. It seems as if he wants to make this a math problem, and you either can figure out the right answer or you can't. "For logical proof, though not experimental proof, is at least as possible in the interpretation of poetry as it is, say, in a court of law." Well, I've got news for you, Laurence - this is literature, not math, and literature requires a little more depth than correct or incorrect.

Laurence overlooks the ambiguities and grey areas of literature - he assumes that a "far-fetched" answer is automatically completely wrong. The monkey solution he was ranting about? Yeah, it's kind of weird, but it, in this situation, is just as possible as the human thief breaking into the house. Art is not necessarily real or logical, and  it can't be judged that way. Think of how many artists were pathologically insane when they created some of their finest works; that means that the meanings behind those works probably reflected their mental statuses. Let's look at a couple of these great figures and see how crazy they and their works were.



Vincent van Gogh: Obviously, you have to be a little crazy to voluntarily cut off your ear. This guy definitely had some problems, but his work is incredible and evokes emotions that you can't call wrong.

The Beatles: They may not have necessarily been crazy, but tell me, Laurence, could you give me the correct interpretation of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds?"  

All I'm trying to say is that poetry isn't ever wrong, and even the professionals know that (T.S. Elliot: "The meaning maybe different with everyone."). Only an artist knows what he or she meant by the work, but a reader's idea may add truth to that initial meaning. If we can gain perspective, knowledge, and understanding from a new idea about a poem or a song, how is that incorrect?