New Mother EMS

Sharon Olds' "New Mother" is about a woman who has just given birth, and who is describing a sexual encounter with her husband. The woman is clearly not in a position of power. She describes the experience with lines like "you cornered me in the spare room", and "my milk undid its / burning slip-knot through my nipples". She seems to be at the mercy of her man. At his mercy, she describes how her vagina "had been torn easily as cloth by the / crown of her head", and other ways that her vagina has been hurt through the childbirth. This makes her "lay in fear and blood and milk", a state of hopelessness. While she does this, the man is kissing her, and "you hung over me, / over the nest of the stitches, over the / splitting and tearing." This is a really touching part, because it is describing how the man, who is in a position of power, is simply hanging over her, not trying for sex. His penis is "dry and big", meaning it is erect but has not been inside of her. This is touching. She describes it as "someone who / finds a wounded animal in the woods / and stays with it, not leaving its side / until it is whol, until it can run again."

Colossus EMS

"The Colossus", by Sylvia Plath, is a poem that I am not sure if I understand. The poem, in the literal sense, is about her building a colossus of some sorts, which seems like a large statue of greek epic proportions. She starts the poem off by saying "I shall never get you put together entirely" which makes the reader immediately aware of the enormity of the task. This colossus, the narrator believes, is self righteous in its enormity, shown by the lines "Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, / Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other." The narrator has spent much time with the colossus, staying at nights to count the stars, and seeing the sun rise from it. From the lines "My hours are married to shadow", we see that the narrator starts to resent the colossus. My guess for what this poem is comes from when she writes "O father". This makes it so the poem is about her father, and I would guess that the poem is talking about how she built the impact her father's death had on her into such a huge thing, she was always tending to it, and always having it affect her life. I really can't think of more with it, this poem is tricky.

An interesting thing i found from the poem was the flower references. You have "the weedy acres of your brow", "a hill of black cypress", "acanthine hair", and "scrape of a keel" (which can mean a pair of united petals in a flower). These aren't the happy 'roses are red, violets are blue' flower references. It seems that Plath is trying to imply organic growth rather than pretty flowers. This organic life is also shown in the first stanza from the lines "Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles / Proceed from your great lips. / It's worse than a barnyard." Again, these aren't pleasant noises, and this time she seems to be making a direct attack at her father.

Lady Lazarus EMS

Lady Lazarus, by Sylvia Plath, is a poem about the female narrator coming back from the dead, like Lazarus in the bible. Unlinke Lazarus, however, the narrator's deaths, except for the first, seem to be coming from suicides. She says "I am only thirty. / And like the cat I have nine times to die. / This is Number Three." This makes it sound as if she will continue to attempt suicide until she finally succeeds.

It seems obvious that these suicide attempts are referring to Plath's actual suicide attempts. She tried to kill herself at 20, and killed herself at 30. The accidental death referred to in the poem could be a near-death experience for her when she was younger, or possibly a reference to her father's death at 8.

While the poem centers on the return from death, it also includes a few references to her being the center of attention to her critics. These critics, "The peanut-crunching crowd / Shove in to see / Them unwrap me hand and foot--- / The big strip tease." This seems to be a reference to how Plath puts so much of her personal pain into her work, and can be see in the words "Dying / Is an art". She seems to resent her apparent selling-out of her pain, throuigh the lines "There is a charge / For the eyeing of my scars" and "And there is a charge, a very large charge / For a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood". She seems to be selling her pain, something that she really seems to detest.

Like some of Plath's other poetry, she seems to villify her father as a nazi. She says "So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy." She describes the way the nazis sifted through the ashes of their victims to find gold, and makes the imagery of a phoenix with "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And i eat men like air." This imagery seems to suggest Plath believes that through her misery brought on by her father

The Japanese Wife EMS

The Japanese Wife, by Charles Bukowski, is an ode to Japanese women, and the narrator's Japanese wife. He describes these Japenese women as "real women" who are "closing the wounds men have made". He soon after describes American women in a very negative manner, saying they "care less than a dime" and "always scowling, belly-aching", among other things. It is interesting that he includes "but American women will kill you like they / tear a lampshade". Right after saying that Japense women will close wounds, he immediately says how American women would easily kill you. These lines become even more interesting during another section of the poem, when the narrator describes how his wife "broke out the bread knife / and chased me under the bed". The difference between the American women's violence and the Japanese wife's violence is how the American women are described as killing without caring too much, while the wife was provoked. The narrator broke down the locked door, and he seems to aknowledge that he did wrong. After the ordeal with the wife, "she didn't mention attorneys, / just said, you will never wrong me again". This seems very reasonable, and a very calm thing to do, something that the "derailed" American women would likely not do. The poem takes a more tragic turn when it is revealed that the wife died. This is when the poem seems to turn into a nostalgiac piece. We are told how the narrator had to hide all of his Japanese prints covering his walls, and hid them in his shirt drawer. When he hid these, "It was the first time i realizes / that she was dead, even though i buried her".

First Kiss EMS

First Kiss, by Kim Addonizio, is a poem about a woman kissing an individual for the first time. It isn't the first time the woman has kissed anyone, just the first time she has kissed this one male. The woman is, in fact, already a mother. This is an interesting twist, and also leads to the woman comparing the look of the man to the look of her mother after drinking milk. The woman describes the breastmilk almost the same as a drug, and makes a clear point that the baby was not drinking the milk for substanance, but for please. The baby drinking is described as an act "of satiety, which was nothing like the needing / to be fed". She describes the baby by saying "She could show me how helpless / she was", and then describing the man looking the exact same way. She makes the comparison of the baby sucking on her teet, and the man sucking on her face (although she doesn't use that wording). She uses the comparison lines "when she had let go / of my nipple" for the baby, and "when you / pulled your mouth from mine" for the man.





There seems to be something tragic about the woman in this poem. She seems to be reminiscing about her daughter's infancy, making it sound like she was a while away from that point. It then seems from when the man "leaned back against a chain-link fence, / in front of a burned-out church" Those lines make it seem as though the woman is the burned-out church. She seems to also be at a loss of power, first being helpless to her daughter, and then to this man, and in both scenario's it is because she is stronger than the other and has something they want.

river merchant's wife EMS

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter, by Ezra Pound, is a story about a growing relationship between the female narrator and her eventual husband, the river-merchant. The first stanza starts off while the two were still young. At this time, the narrator "played about the front gate, pulling flowers." The future husband "came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse". These activities show the youthfulness of the pair at this point. They don't seem to be romantically involved at this point, as they are "Two small people, without dislike or suspicion".

The second stanza begins with the narrator being 14, and marrying the river-merchant. At this point, the wife "never laughed, being bashful." We still see the youth in her, still making the transition to being a wife. The next stanza, when she turns 15, she starts to mature, when she "stopped scowling". She starts at this point to love her husband, saying she "desired my dust to be mingled with yours / Forever and forever and forever." This is certainly a shift from before.

During the fourth stanza, the wife turns 16, and the river-merchant leaves. The line "The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead" shows the manifestation of the wife's sorrow. The last stanza shows even more of this manifestation, with a different moss growing where the old moss was that the river-merchant walked. The wife is getting older, and yearns for her husband. She asks that if he is "coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang", if he would let her know, so she can come to meet him.

The most significant part of this poem for me is the transition of the romance. The relationship goes from indifference, to just a marriage without significant love, to love, then despair and longing. Something beautiful to it.

The Flea EMS

The Flea, by John Donne, tells of a husband trying to have sexual relations with his wife. To make his point as to why they should have these sexual relations, he uses the example of a flea who has sucked the blood out of the pair, and "in this flea our two blood mingled be". The husband tells how the mixing of these bodily fluids is not a big deal through lines such as "Thou know'st that this cannot be said / A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead". We then have a turn, when the wife kills this flea, in the line "Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?" The husband then flips this situation on her, asking her what the flea did wrong, "Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?" And even though the wife has had her blood mingled, the husband argues that the wife is not weaker at all from the experience, and then says "then learn how false fears be". He ends by saying that when having sex, the wife will lose as much honor as how much life she lost from the flea dying.

The original question I had after reading this poem was whether the husband and wife had sex already. It seems from looking at the poem, though, that they had already. The line "nor loss of maidenhead" seems to suggest the wife is not a virgin already. When you add that with the line "Though parents grudge, and you, we're met", it suggests through "we're met" that they have had sex, and it can possibly be read that it was a forced marriage due to premarital sex. And could this premarital sex have led to a baby? There is certainly baby imagery through the flea, a third party, containing the mixed blood of the two parents. I don't feel like this is the case, although an argument could certainly be said that abortion is included in the poem, as the wife seems to have killed the flea, potentially meaning that she killed the child.