Moore and Stevens

While I don't share the anger and frustration that Elise feels, I too was a bit confused at...let's say the "wording"...yeah the "wording" of the assignment. I think i got what we have to do though...i hope.

I'm going to talk about Steven's poem "The Idea and Order at Key West" and Moore's poem "What are Years?" The first thing that I noticed right away was that Stevens ends all of his stanzas with punctuation while Moore uses the stanza as a "unit of poetry" and will have stanzas lead in to one another. Because Stevens is more straight foreward I liked him better.

Both of the poets use the idea of singing in one of their poems. In "The Idea and Order at Key West" the "sound effects" Steven uses a lot are singing and mention of the sea. The reader gets the image of the ocean and the sounds it makes. The first line is, "She sang beyond the genius of the sea." so if one was to think that the singing of the sea is what we normal imagine the sea sounding like on a windy day one can image this "she" is singing/sounding much better than that.
Stevens uses other sound words such as "fluttering", "cry, caused constantly a cry" Stevens goes so far as to eventually rhyme, when he states, "Since what she sang was uttered word for word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred the grinding water and the gasping wind; but it was she and not the sea we heard." I think it's one of my favorite "sound" sections of the poem. Another cool example is when he uses an alliteration and says, "the sunken coral water-walled," you can actually kind of hear the gurggling of water. My other unrelated favorite part was lines 38-40, "And when she sang, the sea, whatever self it had, became the self that was her song, for she was the maker."

In Moore's poem "What Are Years?" he almost focus' on the silence by stating, "dumbly calling, deafly listening" which is impossible because dumb is not being able to speak and deaf in not being able to listen. However he uses other words like "stirs" and the rhyme, "the sea in a chasm, struggling to be free and unable to be," this is one of the only rhymes in the poem other than, "So he who strongly feels, behaves. The very bird, grown taller as he sings, steels his form straight up. Though he is captive, his mighty singing says,"

So I hope this complied if it didn't...my bad

Good talk we'll see ya out there

T.S. Eliot

Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” is unlike most of the other modernist works that we have read because He doesn’t have a lot of technology discussions. I mean he does write this poem in a new form but it reads fragmented and impersonal because it is hard to understand what he is trying to talk about with all of the fragments and references to religious stories and Shakespeare.

In High school I remember having to read The Screwtape Letters and I remember it being from the perspective of Uncle Screwtape who ended up being Satan. So in this story I’m at least aware of Eliot’s passion for religious writing. Each of the sections reads like a different story. The fourth story is the shortest and by far the simplest and easiest to read, it basically talks about Phlebas who drowns and decays in a whirlpool, it talks about his identity and how he was once hadsome and as tall as the reader.

Eliot seems to really embrace the modernist movement in what he talks about and how he forms his stanzas all fragmented, but he speaks in so much reference and footnotes that it is hard to follow the points that he is trying to get across. He doesn't make it obvious that he is trying to talk about the decay and/or change of religion.