Poetry

Reflecting on the Poetry

I enjoyed reading the poetry from this week. In choosing five poems, I decided to choose: “The Secretary Chant,” “Those Winter Sundays,” “Dog’s Death,” “Introduction to Poetry,” and “Titanic.”

“The Secretary Chant” by Marge Pierce sounded like a humorous take on secretarial duties in an office. Many items plagued the mind of this secretary. She compared parts of her body to parts of the office supplies and equipment. It does appear from the reference of once being a woman, that a secretary may feel overwhelmed by the amount of work she does or even dehumanized. From the poem, it also feels like the secretary’s head is filled with all the things she must do each day. The poem does have a humorous tone on what it feels like to work as a secretary.

In “Those Winter Sundays,” written by Robert Hayden, it reminds the reader of Sundays. That day of the week has a different feel to it than other days of the week. For instance, Mondays bring a dreadful feeling. Fridays bring and excitement feeling and anticipation. The poem felt like it had a female tone while speaking of the father throughout it. The father took care of the family by getting up early and warming the house up before his family arose. The poem also felt like maybe it was just a girl and her father in the home. When angers of that house was mentioned, it felt like other members of the family, perhaps the mother, may have died leaving just the father and the young girl. The child character in the poem should feel thankful that the father cut wood and warmed the house up while she slept. No one wants to get out of the covers in a cold house!

While reading “Dog Death” by John Updike, it had a sad tone to me. I thought of my family’s pet, a Yorkie named ChaCha. It would break my heart for him to get ran over. He was also a difficult puppy to train as many dogs are. It would feel sad to me to tell my children that their dog died while they were at school as well. This is how I felt reading this poem as I reflected. Maybe this scenario happened to the author of the poem. There seemed to be a love for a pet in the theme of the poem. This appeared to me by the references to taking the dog to the vet and the feelings that accompanied that. It also appeared in the reference of the puppy finally using the paper just before dying. By using the title “Dog Death,” it gave the poem a sad tone.


“Introduction to Poetry” by Billion Collins felt like directions to approaching poetry. In the beginning, it explains to look at a poem closely. Sometimes it requires reading a poem more than one time to understand what it means. Towards the middle of the poem, it felt like the author is trying to say reading poetry is open to a reader’s translation also. Readers often spend a lot of time trying to figure out and ponder about a poem’s actual meaning. More thinking about the poem than needed may often result. “Introduction to Poetry” describes the feeling that many readers get when reading a difficult or hard to interpret poem also.

When I saw the title, “Titanic” by David R. Slavitt, I wandered if this poem could be about the actual sinking Titanic. As I read the poem, that was the case. Many people go on cruises like the size of the Titanic on a seasonal basis. This poem seemed to suggest that passengers would not feel bad to go down on a ship if people were with you. The poem tells that people will be remembered by those who love and write about them and how they died. The theme of this poem seem to suggest that death wouldn’t be so bad. Dying this way would not be as terrible as one may think. People who die are remembered by their loved ones in a sad, melancholy way whether it is an accidental death or one they are prepared for.