Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes - Poem #8

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

   For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

   That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

I don’t seem to know who is speaking in the poem but it is in first person, and it’s hard to interpret Shakespeare because I don’t understand his type of writing. In my mind, it seems that Shakespeare is saying about the troubles and woes of the perfect person. Nobody is perfect but in this poem, it seems to say that the author idolizes the perfect person. He wants to become like that person with their perfect life and perfect friends and wealth and happiness, but he is always left in the dust. Unable to regain his strength and rise to the challenges of life. Life is challenging but it all depends on how you look at it. Life is what you make out of it and this poem seems to portray the author as a sad, lonely man who blames everyone else for his trouble and longs for a better days. However, he seems to give us a clue in saying that he will regain his wealth someday and that wealth will bring upon his happiness. It is kind of sad that he needs money to be happy because money can buy happiness but you won’t find happiness within that money. Money is just an object and happiness is something that you can’t hold but have. Hopefully money will bring upon other desires for the author so that they can find true happiness in other objects of affection. It seems that everyone else, in the eyes of the author, are people who are blessed with the “perfect” life but that is not true because those people are just content with life. Life is what you make out of it and that is a lesson the author had to learn.

The Youngest Daughter - Poem #7

The sky has been dark

for many years.

My skin has become as damp

and pale as rice paper

and feels the way

mother’s used to before the drying sun   

parched it out there in the fields.

     Lately, when I touch my eyelids,

my hands react as if

I had just touched something

hot enough to burn.

My skin, aspirin colored,   

tingles with migraine. Mother

has been massaging the left side of my face   

especially in the evenings   

when the pain flares up.

This morning

her breathing was graveled,

her voice gruff with affection   

when I wheeled her into the bath.   

She was in a good humor,

making jokes about her great breasts,   

floating in the milky water

like two walruses,

flaccid and whiskered around the nipples.   

I scrubbed them with a sour taste   

in my mouth, thinking:

six children and an old man

have sucked from these brown nipples.

I was almost tender

when I came to the blue bruises

that freckle her body,

places where she has been injecting insulin   

for thirty years. I soaped her slowly,

she sighed deeply, her eyes closed.

It seems it has always

been like this: the two of us

in this sunless room,

the splashing of the bathwater.

In the afternoons

when she has rested,

she prepares our ritual of tea and rice,   

garnished with a shred of gingered fish,

a slice of pickled turnip,

a token for my white body.   

We eat in the familiar silence.

She knows I am not to be trusted,   

even now planning my escape.   

As I toast to her health

with the tea she has poured,

a thousand cranes curtain the window,

fly up in a sudden breeze.

This poem turned out to be a bit confusing for me the first read through, I say this because I know that it’s in the perspective of the daughter but that’s all we know. What has happened to the father or the family? I ask because the sentence ‘It seems it has always been like this: the two of us’ is what made me feel that something has had to occur for it to be just the two of them , so what happened? I enjoy reading the bond between the mother and daughter that is being talked about here because it reminds me of the relationship I have with my mother and step mother. Two different relationships but both have a lot of meaning to me. But anyway, this poem seems that they are taking care of each other. The daughter seems to be having migraines from situation which is why her mother is rubbing her temples, trying to make her feel better. Then after that it talks about how the daughter is trying to help the mother take a bath, but that is all that it says. Is there something wrong with the mother? We don’t seem to know the relationship if it’s even good or bad. All we seem to know is that there is a mother and a daughter, there is a bond and there is nothing being said about a family or what has happened. This seems to be a free verse poem, but it seems to be written more as a story then a poem, why? Overall, this poem seems to have so little information, but we can interpret it however we see it.