Poem

Warmth 

It’s been a while since I saw that smile on your face, 
The one that used to reach your eyes 
And light ’em up like the 4th of July fireworks. 
It seems as though all the reasons why I was the one 
Suddenly become the reasons why now, I wasn’t. 
Even though you were my happiness 
I failed to make myself, yours, 
Though you were my world 
I couldn’t be farther from yours. 
When did the distance become so much?
When did you cringe at the sound of my voice? 
When did it become a chore to call me? 
I tried but I’m sorry baby, to have pushed you this far. 
Some days it seems like you’re better off without me,
Without all the drama I come with, 
But most days, I let myself be selfish 
Because I know that if you leave,
So would all the warmth and safety leave, 
And I’m not ready to live in a cold world without your fire to keep me warm. 
– RiRi

Achievement – Google search

So I decided to just type ‘Analysis of nothing gold can stay’ in Google search, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised! My post is the first on Google! Isn’t that awesome?!

Haha, okay, yes I do get a bit hyper on small things, but to me it’s still a big deal, and besides it is advised to find happiness in the small things, so I have to say I’m very happy 🙂 And I have to say that this wouldn’t have been possible without all you amazing bloggers out there! You have motivated me and helped me so much in this journey, so I’d just like to thank all of you and all the people who searched for the analysis of the poem and found mine to be helpful! Thank you so much!

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Analysis of Dulce est Decorum est

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The title ‘Dulce est Decorum est’ means, ‘How sweet and fitting it is to die’, so merely by just looking at the title it tells is that this is a poem about death. The title is written in Latin which makes the poem sound very old but powerful at the same time as Latin is a powerful language till today.

The poem is very powerful and it conveys the same message throughout, ‘War is devastating’, and this gives the readers the exact feeling that the poet wanted us to have. The poet uses powerful devices like similes, metaphors and most of all very strong imagery to convey the sense of hopelessness and loss. The 1st line grabs and pulls the reader in the poem. The poet uses simile in the first line ‘like old beggars under sack’ which shows that the soldiers had been fighting so much that they had become like beggars who hadn’t slept for days. The strong use of figurative language shows a clear image of the poet’s emotions. In line two, when he says, ‘Coughing like hags…’ it shows us that poet was very angry, frustrated but at the same time sad and depressed because his heart went out to the soldiers. The word ‘trudge’ in line four shows us how tired and hungry the soldiers were as they weren’t running but trudging as though they were using up all the time they had and walking really slowly because they knew that once they entered the war, there would be no turning back. ‘Men marched asleep…’ these three words create a very powerful image in our mind and gives rise to very intense emotions. The line, ‘Drunk with fatigue, deaf even to the hoots’, tells us that the soldiers had been fighting for so long that they were so tired and had no idea what was going on, They were fighting just for the sake of it. They also had heard so much noise that they were so used to it they couldn’t even hear the hoots.

The poet describes the droppings of gas-shells as ‘softly’ which tells us that here was no way of surviving from them as you wouldn’t even hear them coming. In line 7, he says ‘deaf even to the hoots’ but in line 8 he says ‘Gas! Gas! Quick boys!’ and then he says there was an ‘ecstasy of fumbling’ which tells us how disturbingly the soldiers had got up from their sleep and were fumbling to put on their masks, in order to save themselves from the gas. The phrase ‘ecstasy of fumbling’ is also an oxymoron as it shows us the intense fumbling that the soldiers were doing as if they were still very young and in ecstasy, but here it portrayed the opposite. The author uses ‘floundering like a man in fire…’ which shows how much the soldiers were confused and just dragging themselves in hopes that the war would get over soon. The poet shows us that they didn’t have time when he says ‘the wagon we flung him in’ which tells us that there wasn’t a single moment to lose as they didn’t even have time to put their fellow soldier’s body properly and had to just fling it in.

The use of words such as ‘guttering’, ‘choking’, ‘drowning’ arise such ghastly images in our mind that it is painful to even think about it. The description of the face of the man is very vivid, ‘white eyes withering in his face’ and ‘his face like a devil’s sick of sin’ which shows how bad the war was and dying was not at all sweet and fitting. The phrase ‘of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues’ tells us how the wounds made by the war, mentally not physically were so ugly that they were incurable and these innocent people did not need to see all of this.

In the third last line he addresses the reader himself almost as if saying very sadly and giving us advice that the ‘Old lie – How sweet and fitting it is to die for our country’ is nothing but an old lie which only brings more and more deaths to the country. The whole poem also emphasizes the stark contrast of the poem with the title, as it is not at all sweet to die in such a way.
All in all this poem gives us a very realistic idea of what war is and describes it very clearly stating that war brings devastation, frustration and sadness for many years to come, and that this bruise can never be cured no matter what you do.

Hidden Beauty

There used to be a time when I thought writing poetry was all about rhyming the words,. I’d spend countless hours arguing with anyone who told me that a paragraph without rhyming words was a poem, I just couldn’t grasp how a poem could not rhyme?! Until, one day I wrote a poem without thinking; without hunting for words that rhymed with today and children. I just let the thoughts flow, penned down the emotions as the came in waves in my head. After I finished, I realized it was perhaps the most beautiful poem I had written – No, it didn’t have a rhyme scheme, but it did rhyme quite surprisingly.

I wrote the poem after reading Khaled Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, the book, I must say is brilliantly written. It touched something in me and made me write the below poem.

There’s a sad beauty

In war,

that goes unnoticed,

The barbed wire fence,

The solemn faces of children,

The emotions louder than words,

The hope in the eyes,

The struggle to fight,

The conviction to stay alive,

The united soldiers,

The persistence to live,

The pride of a martyr,

The battered homes,

The mysterious smog,

The confused wails,

The faith in God,

Indeed there is a sad hidden beauty,

If one looks deep within

With the eyes of the soul.

-RiRi

What is your view on poems? Do you believe that they need to rhyme?

Butterfly Effect

Somewhere sometime

A new world of possibilities lies ahead

Somewhere someplace

Untested waters eagerly wait

Somewhere somehow,

The choices you didn’t make affect someone

Somewhere sometime

The choices you made shape you

Somewhere someplace

Your dreams are being set in motion

Somewhere somehow

Your happiness is someone’s sorrow

No matter how or when

Somewhere somehow

You affect someone.

-RiRi

Analysis of Song: Tears, Idle Tears

The poem, “Song: tears, Idle Tears” was part of a longer poem, and it was written as a song, as the title clearly states. Alfred lord Tennyson was British and was born in 1809 and he died in 1892.

Th title of the poem is the same as the fist few words of the poem and this suggests that it is a continuation from the title, perhaps like a narrative.

“Tears, idle ears, I know not what they mean”, this probably means that his tears have been flowing for so long tat he doesn’t even remember why he is crying. The repetition on tears emphasizes that he was crying a lot. “tears from the depth of some divine despair…”, despair was considered a sin, so ‘divine despair’ is an oxymoron as divine is something good and despair is not. This probably shows that Lord Tennyson; a) Didn’t believe in religion and its teachings or b) he considered despair as something great. He may have used the word divine to show the d=greatness of his despair.

“Rise in the heart and gathers to the eyes,” here, enjambment from the previous line helps in continuing the rhyme scheme as well as the narrative story. He describes his tears as rising in the ‘heart’, which tells us that his tears were genuine and thy were not fake as they came from his heart. He flashes back to the memories of ‘Autumn-Fields’ and laments on them, “thinking of the days that are no more.”.

“Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail..that brings our friends up from the underworld.” This creates imagery of a ‘sail’ first coming into view. This perhaps means that he is hoping his ‘friends’ come back from the dead. These two lines are a contrast as he says that the first beam was fresh, but the people from the underworld will not be fresh as they are buried underground. “Sad as the last which reddens over one…below the verge.” This creates reversed image of the first two lines of the stanza 2, as in the first two lines, it shows how they emerge while in this one it shows how it sinks. This probably shows the cycle of life and the dipping and rising of the sail creates a moving image int he readers mind. He says “sinks with all we love…”, this may probably mean that his love was also buried which shows that his lover also died. The word ‘all’ may suggest that he has lost a lot in life. “So sad, so fresh, the days that are more more…” this probably is a sort of lament and the reader can almost hear the ‘sigh’ in his voice. He says the sad days are still fresh which may mean that it was something recent, but this then contrasts wit the first statement, “Tears, Idle tears…” as this tells us that he has been crying for so long that he forgot what his tears were for but when he says ‘s fresh’, it means that the memory is still fresh in his head and that’s why he’s crying. This suggests that he is subconsciously revisiting the old memories and crying.

The third stanza of the poem is probably showing that last few moments of the dying person; “To dying ears, when unto dying eyes…grows a glimmering square,”. Dying ears and dying eyes suggests that it is the last few moments before death and his/her eyes are slowly closing. This contrasts with “Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns…the earliest pipe of half awakened birds…” as these lines describe the beginning of the day while the next two lines describes the last minutes before death. This may probably mean that the lover died at a young age as just when the world was about to start living, he/she was dying. Lord Tennyson, repeats the last line of the second stanza in the third stanza to re-emphasize.

The last stanza shows regret of loving his lover as he says, “…sweet as those by hopeless fancy feinged, on lips that are for others,” maybe his lover cheated on him and yet the narrator loved him/her and this makes it much more difficult for him. He says his love for his lover was ‘deep as first love’ and ‘wild with all regret’. which suggests that perhaps his lover had hurt him.

The last stanza may perhaps change the perspective of the reader as it might be that the poem was a metaphor for the ‘death of love’, not ‘death of lover’, for the narrator as his lover cheated on him as he says ‘O death in life’ which means that his emotions were dead even though he was alive.

There is no consistent rhyme scheme as it is a blank verse, yet the internal rhyme and the narrative pace of the poem helps give it a rhyme. The tone of the poem is filled with regret and lament, it is slow and steady and this probably means that the narrator is having a flashback to these memories quite often, A lot of descriptive imagery is used to create a picture in the reader’s mind to express the narrator’s despair more vividly.

The poem is written to describe the narrator’s love for his lover and how devastated he is and Lord Tennyson successfully achieves this by using a simplistic yet descriptive way of writing the poem which makes it very easy for the reader to understand and sympathize with the narrator.

 

A thank you to God

Thank you Allah
For life
When millions die
in Palestine

Thank you Allah
For water
When thirst kills thousands
in Djibouti

Thank you Allah
For food
When hunger consumes children
in Somalia

Thank you Allah
For shelter
When many are homeless
in Syria

Thank you Allah
For a family
When some may never see theirs
in Egypt

Thank you Allah
For freedom
When innocence is sold
in China

Lastly, thank you Allah
For every small blessing
Because somewhere, someone
may not be lucky enough for them.

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Moving on

I'm moving on 
Leaving behind the pain and scars 
Making a fresh a new start 
Taking the reins 
Playing the games 
In this world of fame 
I will not forget my aims 
We might meet again 
But I won't be the same
and you'll have lost your chance 
All your efforts will be in vain 
Because now I'm truly moving on