Very old man with the enormous wings, The Yellow Wallpaper

I read both stories in our anthology.  I quite enjoyed The Very Old Man With the Enormous Wings.  It was about a man who was trying to get crabs out of his house (for the stench was making the baby sick) and finds a man with wings face down in a mud puddle.  The man ends up being an old angel who has fallen from heaven.  The old woman tells them to kill him, but they dont have the heart to and they keep him in the chicken coop.  Word spreads and people start to come to see the angel.  They decide to charge a nickel to everyone who wants to see him.  The angel is treated very badly and even though they are making a fortune off of him they still treat him like trash.  He stays with them for quite some time and at one time they thought he was going to die so they let him sleep in the shed.  Finally the weather changes and the wife watches him fly off.  Even though she should have been appreciative of him, and even learned the value of patience, she was happy to see him go.  It was if he was a burdon to them.  What I got from this story kind of is that you need to appreciate the simplicities of your life while you have them because life can change over night when an angel lands in your back yard.
      The Yellow Wallpaper was not so easy for me to understand.  I think that the lady was mentally ill to say the least, but what drove her more nuts was the fact that everyone else told her she was not.  The room that her husband made her stay in was horrible for her.  She hated the ugly yellow wallpaper.  She begged to not be in that room and in her story that is basically all she focused on.  She did love her husband and he made her happy because he doted on her so much.  She wrote about that quite a bit.  The story took a turn some where and she was seeing a women creeping in the paper trying to get out.  She didnt want anyone else to help the woman out.  On the last day she locked everyone out and was trying to get the paper all the way off.  When her husband finally came in he fainted because it was her that was creeping.  I dont understand what was going on there and I am curious to find out.  Was she the woman who really was stuck in the wall or did that hideous paper finally take her all the way over the edge?

Philip Larkin-High Windows

The reason this poem caught my eye is quite simple.  It dropped the f-bomb in the first sentence.  What I gathered from this poem after reading it a couple of times is that it is a bitter old man who is getting to the end of his life.  He is watching younger people and "admiring" their adtions.  He was wondering if people "admired" him forty five years ago the way he is now.  That was what I first thought anyways.  I think now that he isnt so bitter, but just notices things that oldeer people generally do, but dont speak aloud.  He thinks of high windows which probably not alot of people pay attention to and he sees an endless blue.  Kind of just makes me think he has a lot of stuff on his mind, but he just stares into the endless with out speaking.

Dylan Thomas-Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

I think that this poem is about death.  When he says,"Do not go gentle into that good night," I think he is basically saying fight death.  He says that old age should "burn and rave at the close of day" and I think that by end of day he means life.  "Rage, rage" means fight.  An early lesson that we learn in life is that someday we are going to die.  Wshen we are young we pay no attention to this lesson because we think we are invincible.  As we grow older it is no longer in the back of our minds it is real.  I think he is trying to say that when we know death is coming close instead of giving up or being okay with it we should be smart and "not go gently."

Incident-By Countee Cullen

I really like this poem.  Not for the nefativity of what happened, but for how everyone on this earth can probably relate to this poem.  There have been many experiences in my life where the only thing that I can remember is the negative experience that happened.  It is sad that stuff that cuts us to the bone is the easiest to remember.  The person in the poem lost 6 to 7 months of their life because of someone elses ignorance.  The hardest thing to do in life is to realize that we control how we choose to feel.  We should never give another human that control over us.  It only satisfies their ignorance.

My Thoughts on Poetry

We just listened to a couple of guys perform a poetry slam.  I was pretty blown away actually.  I have seen slams on T.V. shows and movies and they seemed pretty lame to me, but seeing it in person was a completely different experience.  I am amazed that people can be that talented in their writing.  I am seriously thinking about going to a slam now.  As far as the poetry that we have been reading in class I have a little more respect for it.  Reading that paper on how to read it helped some, and the discussion on the wheel barrow poem helped.  I do not think that poetry writing is for me though. I promise that I will be more open to it and not roll my eyes when I see it, but as far as writing it I think I will leave it to the professionals. 

How to read Poetry.

This helped me change my bad attitude about poetry a bit.  I am the kind of person who gets easily frustrated trying to understand it.  This paper made me feel better by stating that you aren't going to get it the first time you read it and just because you don't understand it doesn't mean you are stupid.  One thing it emphasized was that you need to ask questions about the meaning.  In class we discussed the red wheelbarrow poem.  My first thought was that this is a pretty lame poem.  I couldn't believe someone would publish this and people liked it.  As the class discussed it I noticed that the other students got more from it than I did.  It was pretty impressive.  As they told their feelings I could somewhat put it together better.  One thing that will probably confuse me is that everyone is going to get something different out of it.  That makes me feel like you are taking away from what the author intended.

Where I lived, and what I lived

I guess a person would say that this guy writes beautiful.  I'm sure he does, but I was lost almost the whole time I read it.  Somewhere I got that he was talking about living a simpler life.  My opinion of this is if you want people to live a simpler life then you should probably write it so the "not simple" people can understand it.  I did like paragraph 15 when he said, "It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and meduim through which we look, which morally we can do."  Now I do not exactly know what that means (and yes I have been thinking about it) but for some reason it just stuck out to me

USFS 1919

This book was extremely difficult for me to get into.  The narrator started off by stating that he was a 17 year old boy who worked for the United States Forrest Service in 1919.  He was in the wilderness of Montana and Idaho.  He talked a lot about the setting that he was in more than the people he was with.  I realized right off that he was a man that appreciated nature to its fullest, but not so much people.  He somewhat idolized Bill Bell, but dispised the Cook.  He was up there with more crew,  but didn't go into much detail about them.  The story started getting more interesting to me when the Bill put together a plan where the crew was to go back into town and bet on the Cooks talents as a cardshark.  The Narrator was a tad bit jealous because he felt that Bill favored the Cook over him.  It was then that he chose to walk the 14 miles up and 14 miles down (and then some) in one day. This was all to impress Bill.  He made it in one day, but when he got there his body was strained and he passed out (after floundering on icecream sodas) in the chinese restaurant. He chose not to tell Bill because he felt ashamed.  The night of the card game they were watching as the Cook was slowly winning, when one of the house players tried to deal the Cook a sixth card. The Cook caught it and tricked the house players.  That's when the Narrator went in tograb the pot and procceeded to get the snot beat out of him.  It was a total brawl, but in the middle of it Bill threw the Cook (whom the Narrator didnt like) into the wall to protect him.  The next day the Narrator got himself cleaned up and it was the Cook who got beat up and lost his money.  The Narrator was the bigger man and gave him enough money to get to Butte.  After that he met up with Bill to help him pack and realized that he had earned the respect that he had wanted from his mentor.  They parted ways with the thought that they would meet up the next summer, but it never happened.