Today I will be finishing up the discomfort content text. I will start off with the poem put out the light. In this poem Tolstoy is refered to as one of those who fear death, then find God. Tolstoy is familiar to me, I remember reading about him during my undergraduate studies. I don’t recall any specific details so i google his name and find the following information http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/ .I skim through the site and notice some of his well known works (War and Peace and Anna Karenina) and I read quickly the section titled Conversion and Last Years. I begin to think back when I was working on my undergraduate degree years ago, how helpful a computer with internet access would have been for me. Continuing with the poem I infer from “its not really necessary to tremble in the gloom among flickering wax candles”, that Bukowski is referring to churches. He believes that it is not necessary to spend time in church. Next Bukowski believes that most people are too busy living day to day to even think about death. He believes that when death does arrive, people don’t mind it. He goes on to say that if people were given a choice between eternal life or death, they would choose death, coming to the conclusion that people are smarter than he perceives. I wonder if he actually asked people; are they his buddies or a random group of people.
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The next poem foxholes deals with the belief of God. Bukowski explains that there was a saying during WWII that “there are no atheists in foxholes”. I come to the conclusion that foxhole is where the soldiers hide during war. Bukowski explains that one’s fear of doesn’t mean one should automatically believe in God.
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The last poem of the selected reading is calm elation, 1993. It is the longest poem of the group. As I read the poem, I pause after each stanza making sure I understood the jest of it. The first stanza starts off on a chilly rainy night. Bukowski is sitting in his desk thinking about fate and death. He can’t sleep because of sirens and noises of the night. From the second stanza I infer he is writing in the beginning of January of 1993, because a new president is about to be inaugurated and 1993 is in the title of the poem. Bukowski thinks that the new president is too young. I google presidents of the United States and confirm that Bukowski is referring to President Bill Clinton. President Clinton took office January 20, 1993 and he is the fourth youngest president at the age of 46. Continuing to the third stanza Bukowski indicates its January as I suspected. Here Bukowski talks to a gargoyle statue that is on his desk about “the hells and joys” of the year to come. I read the next several stanza rather quickly. Bukowski ends the poem saying that its easy to give up on life, but he will continue to dream and be alive.
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I think you did a good job explaining his poems. I think your analysis of his poems are very scientific. They are very fact oriented. They do not look for a hidden meaning, but you rather use inductive logic to come to your theories. I used a very emotional and unscientific approach to writing about your content area. I tend to write from a more social or emotional view point. I think this shows that you can change the content one writes about, but you cannot change the style of one`s thinking or writing. Clearly neither style is better than the other, but just shows how there are many different ways to think.
By: donald ritter on October 21, 2009
at 1:19 pm