DDCPoetry

 "Either he's dead or my watch has stopped."  This Groucho Marx joke puts times in a duality perspective either what he's seeing is someone who stopped and is dead or what he's seeing is time not moving.  In either case, the quote sets up the poem to have some silliness and some insight on movement of time -- it's the other person not moving, or time has impossibly stopped. And the humor is definitely in the beginning of this Elizabethan sonnet, "Away they go, with their outlandish names, / saddled with human baggage, desperate wagers--" There's a certain cynicism and snark boiling down the experience to seemingly projected judgements: "outlandish names" "human baggage" "desperate wagers".  The speaker first identifies the names on the horses and then sees jockeys as "human baggage" but also makes them symbolic as a burden on the horses, and then finally with "desperate wagers" the speaker then fo...

  "Will earth stop spinning?"  There's a certain coldness with Earth being lowercased.  It's just another planet known by designation rather than the place we live, or used to live if it's the world end.  The opening line goes from a cold grandiosity to "Will there only be hair left?" which is human.  I get the sentiment.  After we die, hair will continue to grow.  But I've read that this is a lie and hair appears to grow because we the body decays and shrinks giving the appearance of longer hair.  But this line is not about truth, it's about what a possible human leaves behind -- something personal that grow out even after death -- or rather would any physical trace of humanity be left? After these two rhetorical question, the poem makes a statement, "We are made of war--" which juxtaposes the hair line what physical makes us.  If we are made of war, a concept, then this is the psychological us, the metaphorical us, the us that's a...

 "One afternoon you fixed me" is an interesting first line and the line break foreshadows a relationship with the other in a positive light.  Will the speaker be fixed at the end of the poem?  The line also foreshadows the end, but the first stanza is the start of an anecdote and should be read all at once to make sense of where we are at and when we are at: One afternoon you fixed me lunch in your tiny apartment cream of mushroom soup from a can and English muffins We are observing a couple in the middle of eating something.  I pointed out how "from a can" points to class -- poverty, simple things.  So it looks like the speaker is being nostalgic about a past relationship and simpler times.  I'm trying to think of other stories and ideas that fit this trope.  I know there are many, but what comes to mind is past presidents like Obama and Clinton who talk about living in poverty to be relatable, but also true.   But we're observing here -- th...

  Apologies for the gap in-between as I copied this and the rest of the poem was on another page.  This poem should be a single stanza. With that being stated, this poem works as a joke where there is a punchline at the end.  However, we start at the time "Shorter Russian Poem" which could mean that the poem is about Russia or it could also mean that the poem is a shorter version of a Russian archetype of poem.  My guess it's about the former rather than the later. So we start with natural devastations like "famine, plague / floods, rains / droughts".  The placement of "floods" next to "rain" and then "droughts" brings an interesting duality to this poem.  I would think it'd be something like "drought, rains, floods" but this set-up kind of brings a positive trajectory: drought at least there's rain.  But the disasters are separated and are added up rather than to be thought of as a trajectory.  Devastation is Deva...

  The first thing that pops up when I look up "pathetic fallacy" is this: Pathetic Fallacy Definition and Examples I'm trying to see the emotion in the inanimate, and it doesn't look like this poem deals with this concept, so I think the title, like the poem, separates the definition. Pathetic:  1: having a capacity to move one to either compassionate or contemptuous pity 2: marked by sorrow or melancholy : SAD 3: pitifully inferior or inadequate the restaurant's pathetic service 4: ABSURD , LAUGHABLE Fallacy : 1 a: a false or mistaken idea  popular fallacies prone to perpetrate the fallacy of equating threat with capability—C. S. Gray b: erroneous character : ERRONEOUSNESS The fallacy of their ideas about medicine soon became apparent. 2 a: deceptive appearance : DECEPTION b: obsolete : GUILE , TRICKERY 3: an often plausible argument using false or invalid inference This seems to fit the idea of the poem more as we get to the first idea with: Never mind there...