The Latin Lesson-

This poem is from a religious girls point of view who is in school. There are nuns and priests around her. She is studying religion and its text which is a reoccuring theme in the poem. A symbol in this poem is the eucalyptus tree and its leaves. They symbolize purity and beauty before they are crushed to scent their blankets. The poem then becomes morbid when she becomes overwhelemed with avoiding the pathway to hell and what will happen probably because she is bombarded with religious guidelines at her school or possibly nunnery. Joyful adjectives and nouns in the beggining are used:light, glitters,beautiful. Then it becomes negative adjectives and nouns: shadows, hell, hunger, black.

Distances-

This narrator of this poem is in a living in a town with someone else possibly a sibling or a friend. When the friend/sibling tells her the name of a song that has the name of a place it directs her mind into focus of a better place possibly from memory, a sort of “the grass is greener” point of view. She wishes she was in this coastal town because she describes the basalt and sandstone of it, the salt-filled market, and music all that she loves.

What Love Intended-

This poem deals with the authors negative outlook of her history and what is yet to come. She says when she leaves this place and come back it will be in ruin. Possibly because she thinks she has brought it upon it. She is very self-conscious and judgemental of herself because she thinks she is destined to have love only bring pain to her. Therefore this provoked an image of a house of mirrors to me because she is very reflective of herself and her surroundings and looks at herself with self-pity.

12- Outside History. This poem talks about people being at a place before others and how they are forgotten along with their pain. It makes me think of harships and dangers of the world with “a landscape in which you know you are mortal”. It is also is sad saying they “are too late” to save those that have died. It made me think of Native Americans and the Trail of Tears.

8- An old steel engraving. This poem makes me think about determination, country, war and pretty much putting your team on your back. “The figure breaks his fall with one hand. He cannot die”. “He cannot stop staring at this hand which he can bearly raise, the patriot”. “have flashed the morse of a bayonet thrust” It talks about history, and country of “malediction” or intent of destruction.

Achille Woman- When I read this poem about a woman and her hardship in cold and famine I thought of a small cottage where the narrator took refuge. This poem talks about struggle of the working woman while the narrator is about to be warm in the cottage