Showing 61 - 70 of 74 annotations in the genre "Poetry"

The Distant Moon

Campo, Rafael

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

A four-part poem that begins with glimpses of a man suffering the ravages of AIDS: "He stayed / Four months. He lost his sight to CMV." The man connects with his doctor through the stories he tells, but also through blood: "I'm drowning in his blood . . . . "The doctor at first tries to maintain distance from his patient ("I can't identify with him.") and even feels "residual guilts" when the patient says it's okay that "doctors could be queer." In the end, though, the healer has formed a bond with his patient. After the man dies, the doctor further identifies with him: "His breath, / I dreamed, had filled my lungs--his lips, my lips / Had touched."

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The Stethoscope

Abse, Dannie

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The physician-narrator ponders the symbolic significance of the tool that typifies his profession, the stethoscope. Through it he has heard "the sound of creation"--the sound of life to be born--and the absence of sound that signals death. Should he, therefore, treat the stethoscope as if it were a religious icon?"Never! Yet I could praise it." Were he to praise it, he would "celebrate my own ears" that can hear "Night cries / of injured creatures" and "the wind / traveling from where it began."

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Pathology of Colours

Abse, Dannie

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Shafer, Audrey

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

In this haunting poem, Abse compares the colors found around us to colors found in illness and death. The poem begins prettily, "I know the color rose, and it is lovely," an image which is immediately juxtaposed with a tumor ripening into the same color. Similarly in the same quatrain, another image of nature, "healing greens", is compared with "limbs that fester" of the same color. To emphasize the tension of the similarity and difference, Abse ends the two lines with the same word. However, the nature image is "so springlike," while the illness image is "not springlike."By the second quatrain, the images become more grotesque and frightening, as the colors of "the plum-skin face of a suicide" and the "china white" eyes or figure of a car accident victim are described. In the following quatrain, the tensions mount, as "the criminal, multi-coloured flash / of an H-bomb" is described as "beautiful" and compared to the stunning and glorious image of the mesentery dissected during an autopsy: "cathedral windows never opened."The poem closes with the rainbow, seen not only in the sky, but also in "the bevelled edge of a sunlit mirror," as well as in the striped "soldier's ribbon on a tunic tacked." Life and death, nature and pathology, health and illness are hence all united by common colors; colors which are reflected in that "sunlit mirror."

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The Origin of Music

Abse, Dannie

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The speaker has taken "two small femurs of a baby" from the Pathology Laboratory. He keeps them in his pockets. Whenever someone tells him a tale of grief ("woeful, intimate news"), the speaker takes the femurs from his pockets "and play[s] them like castanets."

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Case History

Abse, Dannie

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The physician-narrator examines a bigoted patient. As the patient maligns Welshmen, Jews, and liberals--all of which the doctor in fact is--the physician imagines prescribing deadly drugs. "Yet I prescribed for him / as if he were my brother." The encounter is not, however, over yet. The poem ends: "Later that night I must have slept / on my arm: momentarily / my right hand lost its cunning.".

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Towards Curing AIDS

Campo, Rafael

Last Updated: Oct-05-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

A patient is dying of AIDS. The physician-speaker repositions a drain in the patient's wound, taking care "to slap on latex gloves" before he does so. Another physician, "a hypocrite / Across the room complains that it's her right / To walk away . . . ." She acknowledges no obligation as a physician to care for this patient. Does she think it is too risky? What kind of risk? Might contact with this dying man somehow upset her ordered world and expose her vulnerability? Of course, nothing she could do "Could save him now." Even the physician-speaker must leave the patient "pleading" and continue with his other work: "There's too much to do."

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Carnal Knowledge

Abse, Dannie

Last Updated: Oct-05-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

In the first part of this four part poem, the medical student climbs “stone-murky steps” to the Dissecting Room, as London is being bombed during World War II. In the second part, the student asks his cadaver, “Who are you?” Probing deeply, cutting the meat, the student concludes that the cadaver was never really a person, the right hand “never held, surely, another hand in greeting / or tenderness . . . . ” In the next part it becomes clear that because of the student’s flip attitude, he hadn’t been invited by the hospital priest to the memorial service for cadavers.Finally, the speaker (now for many years a physician) reflects again on his old question about the cadaver’s identity. He realizes that the cadaver’s name is the name on every gravestone, that his figure is the figure on every human portrait, “always in disguise.” At the end, the physician goes on with his daily activities, climbing the stairs to his bedroom and winding his clock.

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Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This poem compares the grave robbing done in the 19th century in order to provide cadavers for medical training and research with the modern medical technologies that "rob" the dead of their rest by keeping them alive on machinery. Now the medical profession is "resurrecting" people before they're dead--delaying their deaths with machinery and drugs. "We cheat the dead of dying, with machines instead of spades." This poem also comments on the use of poor people who don't have the power to prevent this kind of denial of their rights.

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Lament

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

Last Updated: Jun-11-2015
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Lament is a twenty-two line dirge in free verse with one rhyme, at the end of the poem, which is almost certainly intentional. The poem represents a mother’s terse lament over the death of the father of the two children whom she is addressing. More of a soliloquy than a dialogue, one receives the distinct impression that the children may not even be present as the mother announces matter-of-factly that their father is dead, that they must soldier on, and describes the manner in which she will distribute the coins and keys in his pocket to them. The final couplet succinctly sums up the poem’s sentiment:


Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.

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Hurt Hawks

Jeffers, Robinson

Last Updated: Mar-22-2015
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

"Hurt Hawks" is a narrative poem about a wounded hawk in free verse of 27 lines divided by the poet into two parts. Part I, which is 17 lines long, describes the setting of the poem in third person. Part II is 10 lines long, written in first person, and comprises the resolution of the carefully constructed tension set up in Part I. Some critics feel that Part II is sufficiently different in style and focus that it was originally an altogether separate poem (see below). Succinct yet lyrical, elegaic yet harsh, Hurt Hawks is, like the hawk that is the center of the poem, fiercely and unrelentingly an advocate of the natural - as opposed to the civilized - world. Hawks held a special place in Jeffers' heart, whether it be this poem or the longer "Cawdor," "Give Your Heart to the Hawks" (the name of a 1933 collection of his poetry), or "Hawk Tower," the edifice that he built for his family in 1920 on Carmel Point in California.

Part I sets the stage for the action in Part II, an Ecce Homo stage where the Homo is an injured hawk living in and around the poet—who makes clear, however, that the hawk is not a prisoner, either in the poet's eyes or its own. The poem opens with:

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days:

Midway through Part II, Jeffers notes that

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.

This poem is arguably not only Jeffers' most famous poem but often the only one still taught, when Jeffers is taught at all, in undergraduate courses. One reason for the inclusion of this poem in the curriculum is the famous first line of Part II, "I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk." Aside from its popularity and this rather striking sentiment, the poem has proved a fertile source of discussion amongst critics for other reasons. First is the striking shift in voice from Part I to Part II, leading some to state that this poem was welded together from two distinct poems. Secondly, the plural "Hawks" in the title is mysterious and unclear since there is only one hawk mentioned in the poem—or is there? One interpretation of the plural is that in fact Jeffers and his family harbored two hawks and only the second was killed. Tim Hunt feels the second injured hawk in the poem refers to the saddened, or emotionally hurt hawk, i.e., the poet of Part II.

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