Tone blog!

The Night Before Finals Week

I plopped onto my bed, arguing with my drooping eyelids. I squinted at the words in my heavy stats book that at eleven o'clock at night seemed to be shrinking into the glossy paper on which they were written. My fear of unpreparedness the only thing keeping my zombie of a body from slumping back against my tantalizing pillow, I began to study. Every minute spent awake seemed to pass like an hour. Finally I felt as though my mind would retain the information I had poured into it like a paper cup: not for long, but long enough. As I prepared to pass out, something sparked in me a little paranoid thought: I still needed to write my poetry blog. I pulled out my iPod as I thought to myself, "Wow... This is going to be a long week."

Poetry Blog 6

I read the poem "Vergissmeinnicht" by Keith Douglas, and thought it painted a very vivid picture and captured the true horror of war. It seems to be written from the perspective of a soldier who had been there when the man had been killed, and saw his body on his return home. The personal details in this poem made it very touching and relatable: the reader can picture themself and their loved one in the same situation, which is really a scary thought. I looked up the translation for the word written on the picture of the girl and it means "forget me not," another touching detail that leads into the second half of the poem, which is all about contrast. the third to last stanza in the poem shows how dishonored and almost pathetic the man's defeated and decaying body looks next to his gear that is perfectly intact. The next stanza is sort of a segue into the last; a gruesome detail of the soldier's current state and empathy towards his lover and the lover he once had been. The last stanza then, contrasts both the woman's lover and the brutal killer the man had been. It makes an impactful statement, showing what war can turn someone into. By the last two lines, "And death who the soldier singled/ has done the lover mortal hurt," Douglas reiterates his point that when engaged in war, the innocent lover can be murdered by the the killer created when men become soldiers. Douglas died in 1944, at the height of WWII which he could ironically have been killed in.