Response to "My Papa's Waltz," by Theodore Roethke

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
    
 In class  today, my group and I were discussing the father in the poem.  Some of us believed that Roethke, (or the character he made up,)  is being physically abused by his father.  Others chose not to believe that, and to believe that well, they were actually waltzing.
  I happen to think that to believe that Roefke is writing a happy poem about just waltzing with his father as a child, and the feeling of being naive to his father's drunkenness, is deluded.  I mean, sure, i get a BIT that this poem could just be about how  when the narrator was young, he did not understand what being drunk meant.  He had thought that his father was merely acting a little off tonight.  But who's to question? You're young, right?
  Let me tell you-that's not how that happens.  I know on an intimate level that even when you're very young, you understand that something is wrong when a member of your family is drunk.  You understand that the drawl, the bloodshot eyes, the inept care of others, is not normal.  You understand that it's wrong, even if you badly don't want it to be wrong.
And so, no, I don't think that this is a happy poem.  You can tell just by the tone of the poem, can't you? It has a sad, mellow feel.
  But do i think it's about abuse? Not necessarily. I was outraged in class today when a classmate said that, "of course the dad beat him up, he's drunk.  It's what drunk people do."   That's so not true.  There are many different ways that you respond to intoxication.
However, from the tone of the poem-It is about abuse.  The lines, "You beat time on my head," and "At every step you missed/ my right ear scraped a buckle," can be hints at the fact that he was abused.
  OR, they could just be literal.  Actual, with no meaning behind the words.  But that almost violates the laws of poetry, huh.
This poem sure is mysterious.  That's almost what i don't like about it, it reminds me of myself in too many ways.
I myself write poetry to be interpreted in many different ways, but often find that it just turns out confusing or weird.
But maybe me and Roethke have something else in common: It's hard for us to let out our  emotions plainly.  It would hurt too much.

A Rhyming Poem By Ana Gross

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This wouldn't copy-paste, but I'll show it to you in class.  :)

Poem on an important memory

I continue to talk
about the same boring stuff
You continue to shush
shush
shush
shush me
You're embarrassed to be around me?
"Forgive Me," I say
"I have nothing else to talk about."
Our hearts,
once one, are separate and throbbing.
Do you remember I exist?
Salty water stains my cheeks
Those are not tears
(It's the ocean)
This is not a love poem
(Love, Ha!)
Watch me float out into the water,
so far that the I'm way past where waves crash
You don't come to me
You turn your back
My heart is not one with any person
My heart is one with the water.

Response to "The Starry Night."

In class, we established that Anne Sexton is writing autobiographically about the woes of her life in this poem.  We established that she was a very sad woman, and this shows through her violent imagery.
Sentences like "one black haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the sky," and "even the moon bulges in its orange irons to push children,"show the violent images in the mind of this sad, depressed woman.
Another signification that this poem is very personal and about the author's sadness is the repetition of the line "I want to die." Every stanza ends with "Oh starry starry night! This is how/ I want to die."
A different theme i find in this poem is the author's feelings towards the sky. It seems as if she's confused.
In some lines, she shows it as being harsh, violent: "The night boils with eleven stars."
But mostly, it just seems like she loves the sky, and, like Van Gogh, feels more connected to it than she does to the world: "The town does not exist," and "Oh starry, starry night! This is how i want to die."
I can connect to her (mildly) in that way. I know how it feels to feel like you feel more connected to some place than the world you live in.  For me it's the ocean, or water in general.  I can literally feel like it can just lift me away and take me.  And i wouldn't resist.  The water is where i belong.
This poem is really nice.
I LIKE it.

My Interpretation of an Art Piece

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.artquotes.net/masters/salvador-dali/the-persistence-of-memory.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.artquotes.net/masters/salvador-dali/the-persistence-of-memory-painting.htm&h=355&w=495&sz=46&tbnid=Bz3vS0QYiv4nkM:&tbnh=93&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dthe%2Bpersistence%2Bof%2Bmemory&zoom=1&q=the+persistence+of+memory&usg=__TMpKL_lIzdRdiIRVwzc5ftezpaY=&sa=X&ei=yZcrTeTeH4H6lwfXhaTWAQ&ved=0CBwQ9QEwAA

^That is my amazingly long ling to Salvador Dali's painting, "The persistence of memory."

Observations:
I notice that not only is the land and everything dull and flat in this painting, the clocks are flat too.
The clocks have the look of a balloon without air.
The clocks look wilted.
There's a large gray thing on the floor, which i first thought was a walrus or dolphin or something? Now, I'm pretty positive it's a surreal drawing of a sad, gray face. With a very large nose.
The colors are very bold and the way the image was painted doesn't match the surrealist art period it belongs to, or the surrealist painter. (Otherwise, this painting is pretty surrealist.)

Inferences/Interpretations:
I inferred that the wilting, disturbing clocks have a deeper meaning. It could do with memory, as the poem is titled "The persistence of memory."  I'm guessing that the painter is showing something about how time has wilted since some big event happened, by showing clocks that are...deflated, for lack of a better term.
The clocks can also have kind of a "time stands still" meaning, where he depicts the clocks not working to show how time has paused.
  A third idea is that he has a very pessimistic, neurotic view on the world. He shows this with having the land be flat and barren, brown and gloomy. < I'm guessing this means that he feels his life is dull and he isn't satisfied with it.  As for the big, gray face lying on the ground in the painting, I still can't really infer what that means.   The eye is closed with the eyelashes hanging over the bottom part, which could show that this weird, gray thing is either tired or sad.  I'mma guess sad.
The one thing that gets me confused about this painting is the background.  Whereas the foreground looks barren and sad, the mountains contrast this, and so do the jolly colors of the sea.
I feel that the artist is using the background to represent happiness, as if happiness was far away, long gone in the past or the future. (THE CLOCKS.) Or, that happiness was just not with him.
Either way, I see the artist making himself the gray person and living a sad, flat life. I think he saw his world as very depressed, and that time made him depressed, or the way that time functioned.