A Beginner I Am

            I used to hide from poetry. Poetry always seemed too complex and difficult to understand—I felt I could never find the “meanings” of poems, so I just left poetry to its confusing nature. But over the past few weeks, the more I read poetry, the more I grow to enjoy and find pleasure in it. My favorite aspect of poetry is when you read poems you feel things. Sometimes, certain poems bring out emotions you forgot you had felt before, or they help you to ascribe new meanings to the emotions that are most common to you. Poetry has many complexities about it besides the fact that it evokes emotion, but with my beginner’s eye, this is my favorite thing about poetry.

           

             “The Haunted Oak” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, is a beautifully written, yet tragic poem. When reading Dunbar’s “The Haunted Oak,” one may feel the same despair and pain felt by the tree that physically witnesses the hangings of African Americans on its very branches. The reader may also feel sorrow and sympathy for the people who are hanged, and anger towards the men who are responsible for the hanging. There is darkness and deep-seated sorrow felt and seen in this poem. Dunbar writes with the theme of slavery in “The Haunted Oak.” The title alone evokes an eerie, unsettled feeling for the reader, and as the poem progresses, the reader is saddened by the maliciousness and deceit of the white men in this poem. I am not quite certain if this poem could be classified as prose poetry, but Dunbar’s “The Haunted Oak, “ is story-like and is easy to follow like a story.

In Emily Pettit’s “After Calming Down You Have an Old Feeling,” there is no story to follow or rhyme scheme within the poem. This poem is free verse, and is not even broken up into stanzas like Dunbar’s. Pettit makes a firm declaration in the second line of her poem: “We are not calm.” (Here, I wonder… is she referring to the human race as a whole, a particular group of people, or does she mean everything in the entire universe is not calm??). There is a sense of restlessness in Pettit’s poem, and a push to take the time to slow down and recognize things. When we (I think she may mean the human race in general) are less distracted and pull out of our own individual worlds, we begin to notice the things around us. There is also a sense of discovery in Pettit’s poem that is very childlike in description, but is not unusual or abnormal for an adult. Honestly, even with my speculations about Pettit’s poem, it is still a mystery to me. I am not quite sure what to make of it, and even after reading the poem multiple times, I am still left with a feeling of confusion and uncertainty. Although I do not have a brilliant explanation for Pettit’s poem, I found her poem pleasurable and very nostalgic. Maybe it was her talk about an “old feeling,” or the title itself that produces a nostalgic feeling inside of me.

Between these two poems, we are able to get a clear picture of something old and something new. Dunbar’s poem, even within the bounds of the topic itself, holds elements of the past. And while Pettit’s poem does not explicitly revolve around a specific time period, it has been written in a different time frame. It is very interesting to see the different types of poetry written and how poetry has developed over time. Even though they are both categorized under the umbrella of poetry, they are vastly different, in style, theme, rhyme scheme, descriptive elements, language, time frame, etc. the list could go on and on, but both poems are works of created art that produce more inside of us than we may realize at first glance. Poems make us feel things, and those things cannot be ignored!!