Walt Whitman Connection

I do find this poem interesting, not because of the many details that Whitman includes to broaden the scene (I, myself, find that repetition tedious) but because of the main idea of the poem. Whitman says that whatever the boy in his poem looks at, he becomes. At first this sounds pretty odd, but as Whitman continues with this idea, it starts to make sense. A lot of who we are can be attributed to our environment. Therefore, the things around us do change us, at least to a certain extent.

Whitman especially makes this clear when speaking of the boy's parents. The boy gleans all of his outward personality from his parents because he's around them the most.

There was one line that I did connect with in particular:

"...the sense of what is real, the
thought if after all it should prove unreal..."

I have spent a good deal of my thought life wondering the same question. To see it referenced really did touch me, I guess. Most people take what they see in their day-to-day lives for what it appears to be, on the whole. This is necessary, or they could not function in our world (for example, if you wander around trying to prove the world to be real, and not working or something, you could lose your job. If you question whether your food is poisoned at every meal, you may never eat at all). However, I think many people don't even recognize the possibility of our world being illusion, since it's so rarely referred to outside of philosophy and sometimes poetry. I think it's refreshing that Whitman did recognize this--although I'm a bit puzzled as to how it fits into the poem's context.

I guess Whitman is trying to speak for all people, again, and assumes that everyone questions reality at some point in their lives, which for all I know is true. It would make sense.

Team Poe

...because he'd be so much better with Bella than Irving could ever be.

Lame and obvious joking aside, I'm firmly a Poe fan. Irving's work doesn't strike me as that enjoyable to read, to me personally of course. Poe, though, is deep, and (as we discussed in class) uses a lot of awesome language. I love his poetry especially. There was a time when I tried to memorize "The Raven" (and I have successfully memorized most of it, haha), and of course there's my favorite Poe poem, "A Dream Within a Dream." For those of you unfamiliar with it, it goes:

Take this kiss upon the brow
And, in parting from you now,
This much let me avow:
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream
Yet, if hope has flown away
In a night or in a day,
In a vision or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand.
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep
While I weep!--while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

(Any errors in the above should be attributed to my faulty memory, but otherwise I guess you'll just have to trust me that I didn't look this one up.)

"A Dream Within a Dream" is one of Poe's lesser-known works, but I find it resonated with me a lot. I love the rhyme and the subject, the language and the imagery, the metaphors and the emotion in it. And I suppose that's what I love about Poe's work the most. He writes creepiness really well, but he recognizes beauty within his works also.