Journals on the Poems

Introduction to Peotry By Billy Collins

Main Theme and Summary

To offer a brief summary of the poem 'Introduction to Peotry' by Billy Collins and its general meaning before launching into a full poetry analysis, one should begin with the important first lines. An ant runs over a moth, and whereas the reader might believe this is leading to a poem about the intersection of the two bugs, it instead diverges solely into an image of the ant strolling right by the moth, since “His enterprise wasn't with such” and hurrying off.

The poem 'Introduction to Peotry' then takes another sharp turn and seems to focus on another ant and the rituals of the dead that are involved in the ant “kingdom”. The complicated process, involving minute ant-morticians and onlookers as well as the sense of a regal “burial” for this mysteriously significant ant, concludes with the author's commentary on this imaginary scene he has just witnessed through the method of describing.

It is the ants, “Whose work is to find out God/and the environment of time and space”

Conclusion

Here the most groundwork and personal descriptions of such minuteness are abruptly put into the viewpoint of such large and unfathomable ideas as God and the “nature of time and space”. If the nature and aim of verse is on simple attractiveness of pattern or dialect, this poem has it (in that it is a joy read and rhymes) and also, when it arrives to deepness of the final message, if there actually is such a thing in verse, this poem possesses that as well.

Lost Sister By Cathy Song

Summary and Technique

Lost Sister explores the inhabits of two generations of Chinese women. One generation chooses to depart ceramic and begin a new life in America. the other chose to remain in China and experience her heritage the way it was meant to be. This is a evaluation of the two generations of women and how they are connected by heritage and seperated by lifestyle. In ceramic, women were put in subservient places to society. They were calm, obedient creatures who accumulated patience. Song talks of how women learned to supply for their families, as they were learning to extend the family rice. Women were anticipated to serve a reason and be seen and not heard. The following generation chose to go to America and lead a very different kind of life. American culture is enormously distinct from that of ceramic and women are granted the opportunity to know-how flexibility as a a first class citizen. This collective is recounted as a sister across the ocean, who relinquished her title, giving the book book reader the effect that this generation was rebelliously declining her culture, diluting jade green with the blue of the Pacific. However, these women were both losing and gaining by their alternatives. Chinese women who chose to stay in ceramic swapped freedom for their culture. They were aghast to depart the familiarity of their lives thee for an unsure future in ...