Shobhit Dhamania, Mackenzie Vanacore, Lavender Vandewal
Group Five: Form
Central Question: How does the form of a poem affect its interpretations?
There Is A Garden In Her Face by Thomas Campion: Blazon
For this poem, there is a lot of imagery going on. Since it’s a blazon, there is a hyper focus on the physical attributes of the woman in the piece. The mentions of fruits and flowers can be interpreted as a metaphor for the woman’s virginity or purity. When discussing this poem, we talked about how the blazon could be a commentary on puberty. The connection between the woman and divine/heavenly comparisons is also another reason why we are to read this as a poem about virginity and purity––since heavenly things must or should be pure. We also noticed that there is a change in diction towards the end of the piece. We interpreted this change as urgency in the speaker. Since each stanza ends in the same line, this can also be a sign of urgency from the speaker as well.
Women by May Swenson: Concrete
The first thing we talked about for this poem was about how we should read it. Since there is no punctuation, it can be harder to know where to pause or when a new line might begin. We noticed that there are capitalized words in certain of the sections so we interpreted that as a place to “pause” or a pause in the line. Our group also talked about how the lines with no breaks, like “the gladdest things in the toyroom” as a break or separation in what could be considered as stanzas. The form for this poem is really interesting because while it looks like it could be a pair of legs (women’s legs) it also looks like a chair. And, towards the end of the poem, there are a lot of ‘S’ words which kind of mirror the shape of the poem itself. It’s interesting to see how the shape is also influencing the contents of the poem.
Poem #1 → Poem #2
Transformation Explanation: For this poem we decided to work off of the cherry motif in the poem and build the poem into a picture of 3 cherries, each one being one stanza. We took the last line of each stanza, since it is repeating, and made it into the stems of the cherries. This emphasizes the repetitions by making these lines literally parallel to each other.
Poem #3 → Poem #4
Transformation Explanation: This poem was a tad bit harder as it was taking concrete poetry and putting it into a box. So we took all these single words and worked them into lines that made the most sense together. We also wanted to keep things into sections like the concrete poetry had it so we separated it into 3 different stanzas cutting off in slightly different places to make it make the most sense.
