ShAdows oF tHe pAst (Assignment # 6) September 21, 2008

How can tears be “idle” – can you cry without knowing why?

Tears can be idle in the sense that they are happening without any real reason they are just happening because you have this feeling inside yourself that makes you cry, I think that this poem refers to idle tears as tears of the past, tears that happened and are in a sense frozen in time.

Yes, you can cry without knowing why, you do cry for a reason but it is just because of the moment and the time and place; It may not be because you are happy or sad, but because you need this releasing of emotions.

 

What do you think the “divine despair” is in line 2? Could you relate it to Adam and Eve’s fall in Genesis -would that story explain the speaker’s existential sadness?

I think that the divine despair in this poem is a reference to the time that life, the past present and future and how event have been; It can be related to Adam and Eve because after they committed the first sin they changed everyone’s faith and life, it can explain the speakers existential sadness because he longs for what could have been had they not been so weak.

 

Does the contradiction in the phrase “Death in Life” (line 20) make sense to you? Explain. What is your response to this line? Have you ever felt this way?

Yes, because it is speaking of something that is past and that you can not get back, something that is dead while you are still alive and longing for it. I really like this line because in a few little words it can express so much; I have felt this way before, I have longed a lot for things that are dead in a sense and that I can never recover even if I want they very much, I have to live with the fact that they will not come back and that now they are just memories of what has been.

PoeM acRoss tiMe… April 21, 2008

“To Althea, From Prison” By Richard Lovelace.

 

What is interesting or special about any poem? Poems are a piece of soul that authors are willing to share with us. Every time you read a poem, you are looking into someone’s soul and someone’s life. We should give a lot of attention to poems and what they want to say. One of the poems that I read recently and I really liked is called “To Althea, From Prison” by Richard Lovelace.

 

This poem is about a man who is in prison, but he is in love with this girl named Althea. She loves him back, and even though he is in prison the love that they have for each other is really strong and doesn’t stay trapped inside the prison walls.

 

Today we can see that even though this poem was written a long time ago, the main concept of the poem is still applicable today. Many people have a very strong love and they know that it can surpass any difficulties that it has on the way; and that is the main concept of the poem as well.

 

We can see that this poem might inspire a lot of romantic stories, and if you analyze it well you can see that this poem is really very similar to many soap operas, novels, shows, movies, etc. that exist on our time.

 

This poem is definitely a work of art and the part when it says “Stone Walls do not a prison make, nor Iron bars a Cage” is definitely a very inspiring quote that I will carry around with me for a long, long time. Because it shows that people have been connected through time and that love is the strongest feeling that exists in the world.