Community Poetry Journal

Community Poetry Journal

A collaborative journal for poetry YWS-ers have read!

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  • Created Wed Jul 21, 2021 1:34 pm

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  • Liminality Creator
    Liminality · Dec 29, 2021
    This December's Poetry Discussion covered a wintry poem myself and other YWS-ers love: White-Eyes by Mary Oliver.

    Image

    Source and text version here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetry ... white-eyes

    (Note: image used to preserve formatting)

    As a group, we found that the fun sound devices like the assonance in where/wind/white and the mix of realistic and fantasy-like imagery stood out the most (especially the words with dashes, like "pine-crown"!). @Spearmint also caught the detail of the interesting diamond-like shape of the stanzas that kind of resemble bird wings.

    The bird in this poem seems to be the focal point of interpretation. @InuYosha spotted that it seems to be "drifting away" from the reader's grasp, becoming more otherworldly as the poem goes on. Could it refer to something spiritual or divine, as @alliyah suggested? Could it depict the majesty of nature, being able to command clouds at will? Either way, the contrasts and connections between the bird's more earthly, coarser images like "shoves and bushes" and the more fantastical ones like "glittering beak" make this a super interesting piece.

    I'm eager to see thoughts on this from anyone in this club and beyond. :D

    Also, just for fun:
    Which funky image from this poem are you?
    1. "wind-bird",
    2. "big, round music",
    3. "glittering beak", or
    4. "some unimaginable bird"

    Hijinks replied · Dec 30, 2021

    One little thing that I find interesting is that, for the most part, you could say the poem is in the third person (as it refers to "he"/the bird), but then a narrator pops in at the start of stanza 6 to interject some first-person narrative. It's kind of jarring, in a way, because I felt like I was observing this winter scene alone at first but then all of the sudden I realized I had company.

    Ooh a pop quiz :3 I think I'm image #1, "wind-bird", because I absolutely adore that super windy, dramatic weather that you get right before a big storm.


    Liminality replied · Jan 7, 2022

    Oh that's a neat observation! Yeah, that's true - the first few stanzas could be read as 'this is a story about a bird', but the addition of an 'I' suggests that it could be a 'poem about a particular person's experience of the bird'. I think I picked 4. "some unimaginable bird" during the discussion, because I just like the cadence of that phrase and I think it fits me xD



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