Rotation 5 Blog 2
“My Grandmother’s Love Letters” by Hart Crane
There are four stanzas, generally with 4 lines in each stanza (quatrain). Crane uses several metaphors in this poem: “There are no stars tonight but those of memory” (comparing stars to memories), “Yet how much room for memory there is in the loose girdle of soft rain” (comparing her room for memories to a loose girdle), “It is all hung by invisible white hair” (this may be cutting it close to a metaphor but it is comparing the grandmothers white hair to the great care you have to take when looking at her old letters), “Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand” (comparing the music she plays to a hand). There are also a couple of similes used: “And liable to melt as snow” and “It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air”. There is a rhyming couplet in the last stanza, “Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand Through much of what she would not understand”. I think when he says “much of what she would not understand”, he means that the world has changed, and maybe the grandmother who is older and who has been deceased would not understand the world today. Crane uses personification when saying “pitying laughter”. This poem took me a few re-reads until I got the gist of it, but overall I liked it, I thought the tone was very peaceful and a little sullen at the same time.
“Fog” By Carl Sandberg
Sandberg is personifying the fog as a person, or living creature, when he says “It sits looking over harbor and city”. The imagery of the fog really sets the tone of the poem, making it gloomy and ominous at the same time. The line breaks in this poem are also interesting like other poems I have read and enjoyed, the lines end with the reader asking a question such as: “The fog comes” – the fog comes where? “on little cat feet”. I still can’t figure out what the relationship between the fog and the cat feet though. Although the actual text of the poem is brief I think it talks about a great amount. It makes the reader envision so many things like the looming fog, harbor, city, etc.
