The Impressionist
Masterman's Home for Creative Literary Work
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Peach Orchard, Maryland
By Brady Santoro
The fruit, like stones
Rattle the bones
Of the Earth
As they fall
As I walk
They bitingly cry
It is a sin to live while others die
It is a sin to be as hollow as I
Late dynamite
The apples bloom
Towards the Eastern wall
And fall in the night
As the peaches rot
They explode like written words
First spoke
A taut shibboleth
From the tongue
As the western wind catches them
In descent
And carries them
Through the darkening rows
It is nearly a sin
To withhold within
The seeds of a half-lived life
Unsown
I have come to be glad
And yet by night
I walk false fields
When hours before
In holiness
I saw two souls unite
United then by an
Unseen
Ineffable
Hand
They had been-
Or at least had
And now two thousand
Surround me
As I follow the path
Between the boughs
Towards the beckoning light
Of the telephone tower
Towering over the dusk
The hungered lust that made these shadows
Was frozen once
In a sieve of snow
Yet now it sees itself in a suit of hearts
In an overcoat
Of internal wars
Towards the battlefront
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It is a sin to spurn
The peace that by note was learned
In spite
It is no good
To be alone
On a summer’s night
And so, the seconds go
And I stand
On desolate land
To consecrate two lives
Both foreign
In a darkness to my cataracts abhorrent
As the river carries it all away
Too late
As I slip into the Earth
Too late
To avert the currents
Of swiftly falling sleep
As the fruit trees weep
The crop of leaden memories
I am overborne and overcome
By night
As the wedding party makes its way
To lifeless day
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On Athens (or “Heaven”) by Stuart Mitcher (or Ron Overton)
By Jason Zhang
Ms. Rowley says to begin by reading the poem out loud, but I am in a car with two boys playing basketball on their phones..
The purpose of this poem is to invoke feelings of peace and general life/death, as indicated by the title “Heaven.” This also relates to its other title, “Athens,” given that the poem has a very timeless, old feel. Despite ancient Athens not being particularly Catholic (I’m assuming the title is referencing ancient Athens since I don’t care about modern day Athens) they both can be connected through “simpler,” times of peace and nostalgia (though of course nobody living has memories of ancient Athens or ancient Christianity).
The poem begins with a narration of the author at his uncle’s funeral and continues with his subsequent experiences and thought processes throughout the whole poem. I found it interesting that he is writing about his uncle, rather than his parents or grandparents, which would be more typical. He navigates the chapel (? I am not well versed in Christian architecture) and is transported into his memories of this same chapel, but at a time when his uncle was alive and was with him at the chapel. The poem maintains a calm tone but interestingly, this lapses in the middle of its first two stanzas, where he uses the line “I had been raised in the red hot fear of hellfire and brimstone”. This line seems very out of place, given that the author is describing his younger times as very romantic and graceful. Besides this one, the line that stood out to me the most was “(sometimes art gets in the way)”, directly after he describes how there was an absence of stained glass in the chapel.
I think I enjoyed this poem because I am so infatuated with nostalgia, but it is interesting to see it from an adult’s point of view, especially one who takes a death quite calmly, at least based on this poem. The poem ends with the author describing the past as “endless as the sea, which is not endless, seemed as endless as the summer sky, which is, or seems to us to be, until it washes up upon the shores of God”. I interpret these last lines to mean that good times seem to be endless joy in reflection, but also endless in experience, whether tedious or peaceful. All of this reflection ultimately “washes up on the shores of God,” which naturally means death.
Yarrow Visited. September 181
by William Wordsworth
For Reference With Essay Below
And is this—Yarrow?—This the stream
Of which my fancy cherished,
So faithfully, a waking dream?
An image that hath perished!
O that some Minstrel's harp were near,
To utter notes of gladness,
And chase this silence from the air,
That fills my heart with sadness!
Yet why?—a silvery current flows
With uncontrolled meanderings;
Nor have these eyes by greener hills
Been soothed, in all my wanderings.
And, through her depths, Saint Mary's Lake
Is visibly delighted;
For not a feature of those hills
Is in the mirror slighted.
A blue sky bends o'er Yarrow vale,
Save where that pearly whiteness
Is round the rising sun diffused,
A tender hazy brightness;
Mild dawn of promise! that excludes
All profitless dejection;
Though not unwilling here to admit
A pensive recollection.
​
Where was it that the famous Flower
Of Yarrow Vale lay bleeding?
His bed perchance was yon smooth mound
On which the herd is feeding:
And haply from this crystal pool,
Now peaceful as the morning,
The Water-wraith ascended thrice—
And gave his doleful warning.
​
Delicious is the Lay that sings
The haunts of happy Lovers,
The path that leads them to the grove,
The leafy grove that covers:
And Pity sanctifies the Verse
That paints, by strength of sorrow,
The unconquerable strength of love;
Bear witness, rueful Yarrow!
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But thou, that didst appear so fair
To fond imagination,
Dost rival in the light of day
Her delicate creation:
Meek loveliness is round thee spread,
A softness still and holy;
The grace of forest charms decayed,
And pastoral melancholy.
That region left, the vale unfolds
Rich groves of lofty stature,
With Yarrow winding through the pomp
Of cultivated nature;
And, rising from those lofty groves,
Behold a Ruin hoary!
The shattered front of Newark's Towers,
Renowned in Border story.
​
Fair scenes for childhood's opening bloom,
For sportive youth to stray in;
For manhood to enjoy his strength;
And age to wear away in!
Yon cottage seems a bower of bliss,
A covert for protection
Of tender thoughts, that nestle there—
The brood of chaste affection.
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How sweet, on this autumnal day,
The wild-wood fruits to gather,
And on my True-love's forehead plant
A crest of blooming heather!
And what if I enwreathed my own!
'Twere no offence to reason;
The sober Hills thus deck their brows
To meet the wintry season.
I see—but not by sight alone,
Loved Yarrow, have I won thee;
A ray of fancy still survives—
Her sunshine plays upon thee!
Thy ever-youthful waters keep
A course of lively pleasure;
And gladsome notes my lips can breathe,
Accordant to the measure.
The vapours linger round the Heights,
They melt, and soon must vanish;
One hour is theirs, nor more is mine—
Sad thought, which I would banish,
But that I know, where'er I go,
Thy genuine image, Yarrow!
Will dwell with me—to heighten joy,
And cheer my mind in sorrow.
Why I Love Yarrow, Visited
Michael Lowry
First, I love the way this poem sounds. Recently I’ve been trying, but struggling, to write some poetry of my own, so I know how hard it is to make poems rhyme while keeping a coherent message. William Wordsworth manages to do this stanza after stanza. Every rhyme isn’t perfect, but it never feels like Wordsworth had to stretch the meaning of the line to fit a particular word.
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Of course, I also love the message of the poem. I love being outdoors, especially in nature, and I think Yarrow Visited. September 1814 perfectly captures why, in a way that only a poem could. The poem extolls the glories of a river valley that the narrator is looking upon for the first time.
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Wordsworth describes things to be untarnished, as if everything is precisely how he feels it ought to be. The mountains are reflected in the lake exactly as they appear above the water. The river goes where it wants to. Even the man made objects feel natural, like they might have been there forever. The cottage “seems a bower of bliss,” like a natural shelter. I love how the narrator looks at the valley and sees all the great things that one could do there. It’s a place for a child, a young man, or an old man. It could be a place for happy lovers. Reading this poem transports me to my favorite places. It’s a cross between the wild Cascade Mountains that I’ve hiked in so many times, and the Woodland Cemetery in West Philly that I love to go walking in. This poem is a great example of how poetry can describe things in a way that might seem silly in other forms of writing, but is able to create a vivid image that those other writings could not.
#1 is Overrated
by Jenna Makuen
I hope your eyes never cross this page
Never hear the words I will say
to make this all go away
I hope in the future, every day,
You never waste time thinking about
If it could have been that way.
Drive around with your friends,
Run around until you have to rest.
I'll just be sitting here,
Wondering why I was only second best.
I close my eyes and think of all my mistakes.
You’re the only one who comes to mind,
Is that a coincidence or fate?
I’ll never feel as good as I felt that summer night,
And I’ve accepted that,
accepted that with pain inside.
I always wonder what you’re thinking of
What are your opinions on politics, friendships,
or even falling in love?
What is in your mind,
Floating around in your head.
What makes you want to say,
“No, not you, her instead?”
​
I’ve lived a life that could last me a lifetime.
I've been on a plane, won a race,
Even met someone with eyes that were kind.
Kinder than yours ever were, that's for sure.
Yours make me want to crawl into a hole,
But at the same time,
Make me want to crawl into your soul.
I’m unable to explain why each side of me is different.
One knows it is wrong,
But the other can’t help but listen.
To your words that break me,
Piece by piece.
I fall into a deep sleep.
A sleep with a dream where you stand
in the center of a room
and a question in bold says,
“Her or me?”
I’m ok with number two,
number one is overrated.
Now I have a plan.
A smart one indeed,
maybe not so realistic.
I’ll go about my day and pretend that you never existed.
On Tulips by Sylvia Plath
A Reflection by Helena Saven (12-4)
When I read “Tulips” for the first time, I looked up at the high ceiling and cried, calmly, slowly, on the floor of the Parkway Central Library Literature Department. I couldn’t remember the last time I had such an emotional reaction to a poem. In retrospect, I can’t identify the reason why I found myself holding a carnation pink copy of Sylvia Plath’s posthumously published poetry collection entitled Ariel (1965). I had seen it before, perched delicately and modestly upon the shelf, but admittedly I had been intimidated by the complexity of Plath’s well-known works such as “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” that live within. Perhaps it was merely a habit that I had once again turned to literature in an attempt to forget the events of the bitter day I discovered “Tulips.”
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“Tulips” describes a feeling so unique: the desire to be left alone. There's a certain serenity that comes with vulnerability, to be weak and assured that no one is paying any mind. The first few stanzas establish the scene that surrounds Plath’s headspace. She is in a hospital bed, in which she suspiciously surveys the bold tulips that were gifted to her by someone who evidently cared enough to visit. Maybe the giver of these flowers remembered Plath liked tulips and brought them to her for this very reason. Maybe once she caressed their stems and smiled warmly into the bouquet. But Plath recognizes that she has lost this former self and only remains a shell of a woman. With acceptance, she does not hold on. The smiles in her family portrait hook onto her skin and the tulips sink into her neck in a staggering attack, as though they, in their states of flourish and liveliness, are hurting her more than the condition she has been hospitalized for. When I write poetry, I am always writing about nature. Until only a few months ago, it seemed I was incapable of writing about anything else. I love the implications that the tulips bring because I can understand how Plath feels, despite my usual feeling of gratitude at the sight of tulips. The contrast between the snow in the wintertime setting and the tulips, as a hallmark of spring, help establish the red and white theme of the piece to deepen the association between the red petals and a newborn wound.
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The phrase “learning peacefulness” flaunts a well-crafted understanding of quietude. Learning peacefulness is welcoming emptiness and I interpret it as a method of meditation, lying with hands turned to the sky. I do not think “Tulips” is pessimistic; I think it is vivid and intimate, alarmingly so. Plath’s distinctive writing perfectly exemplifies why she is a paradigm of the mid 20th-century confessional movement. I tried to incorporate some Plath-inspired techniques in writing this very piece, such as starting with a confession in my first paragraph. Like much of Ariel, “Tulips” can be interpreted as a foreshadowing of her suicide in 1963. There are hints of frustration that her previous attempt was unsuccessful when she laments over her role as a “stupid pupil,” as an eye that cannot control what it perceives in the simulated state of an otherwise tranquil death. I imagine her staring at the flowers from the corner of her vision and trying not to be stunned by their brightness, squinting her eyes so they crinkle at the edges. As she prays for night, the tulips are a stubborn sun that refuses to set.
On The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins
A Reflection by Brady Santoro
There is a certain feeling of poetic ascendancy one feels upon perceiving something for the first time and being absolutely overrun by its aesthetic efficacy- the grandeur and supremacy it holds over its subject. It is a sense of being hit over and over by glitteringly brazen waves, a florid simplicity that is rattling to the core, yet its greatest force is its utter mystery, its elusive beauty; it is its abstruseness in being appealing that makes it so appealing.
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It was an old copy of some dated poetry anthology that did me in. Compiled tellingly while T.S. Eliot was still alive, it was fairly predictable- one-poem poets making up the back half of the book while the front was occupied with bottom-half work of the trinity of Yeats, Eliot, and Auden. It was all iambic quatrains for two-hundred pages. However, to my great surprise, the first twenty pages were devoted to an obscure man, a lonely Jesuit recluse with a mystical bent, presented as a kind of mad forefather to modern poetry, an unwieldy gift passed down to winners of Nobel Prizes to open. To the best of my knowledge, none of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems were published in his lifetime but somehow they were slowly turned out enough that in 1950-something they were significant enough to be granted twenty pages of small print. In the good holiday spirit, I am thankful enough for that.
His style, surreal and conservative both, is unlike anything I have read elsewhere- rapid switches of haste and torpidity and anguished, religious language of fervent devotion, coupled with intense internal rhyme and thematic torsion, creating an utterly fantastical spiral of words that, to my first glimpse as I finished the introduction of the book, was euphorically exhausting. After reading through five or so poems, some mind-bending and completely original, others mediocre and fitting more with the book’s Victorian sensibilities, I was struck in the face by The Wreck of the Deutschland, an eight-page poem of piety in a consistent downward gyre plunging to the bottom of the ocean. The poem, recounting a shipwreck off the English coast, as the dedication reads: “to the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns... drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875”, is not as straightforward a descent as the plain dedication makes. The poem, â…™ of the length of Hopkins’ exhaustive Poetry Foundation biography, is an exercise in Hopkins’ radical religious devotion, delivering praise for delivering five nuns from the drear of the mortal world- and yet, it is an intensely personal work. As the first stanza goes:
Thou mastering me God!
Giver of breath and bread;
World's strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones & veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.
Hopkins, like a biblical figure, invokes a second-person God as a first-person man, finding his pulse, insouciant, almost to his own mortality while utterly entranced by it all the same, embracing, like Adam, the electrifying finger of God while shocked from the socket by the action of the act. The next stanzas continue:
I did say yes
O at lightning and lashed rod;
Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess
Thy terror, O Christ, O God;
Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:
The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod
Hard down with a horror of height:
And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.
The frown of his face
Before me, the hurtle of hell
Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?
I whirled out wings that spell
And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.
My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,
Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,
To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.
Hopkins is a mortal man. He bleeds, he dreams, he fears- and here, he is suffocated by his mortality and his doctrine’s divinity. He stands before the storm like man at a crossroads, before the circle of angels and the jaws of fire, utterly amazed; amazed by himself, amazed by nature, and by their juxtaposition by the deity. This existential amazement, a terror without fright, propels the poem forward through a fragmented, anxious meter and the stuttering assonance of a heart-skipping beats, with only the constant limit of the end rhyme like a post to which his leash is tied as he courses towards heaven away from earthly form, only to be choked back by verse.
She drove in the dark to leeward,
She struck—not a reef or a rock
But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her
Dead to the Kentish Knock;
And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel:
The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;
And canvass and compass, the whorl and the wheel
Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured.
Skipping over several many stanzas, the narrative is finally revealed through the pinhole of Hopkins’ ontological suffering, as the Deutschland strikes and sinks. It is a treacherous end met, not valiantly but instead through bluff; underwater, like sin endured, is the ship broken up by a cloud of sand, deceit and artifice devilishly bring the boat to keel. Here is Hopkins’ power sustained. The tremulous hand that dared touch a destroying god of the opening here holds back the curtains on a destructive case, biblical and primeval and real, a depraved scene of nature, of the realm of good and evil under Hopkins’ desk-bound contemplation- yet they are the same as through his pen. His glimpses of destruction, though different somewhat in language, are equivocally and poetically told. The tone is neither subdued nor raised- it remains one of inner amazement. And so the poem moves on, churning towards its end:
Now burn, new born to the world,
Doubled-naturèd name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled.
Hopkins is desperately meant to be read aloud; here with all the curved consonance and tongue-twisting internal rhyme; mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne is a veritable challenge to even read internally. The first time I saw this poem was approximately thirty minutes after midnight on a summer’s morning, surrounded by thick, dry heat- in my imagination, perhaps: the acidic static of a summer rainstorm outside, dim electrical light, failing eyes, a sweltering room with the dull chopping of the fan, and the turbulence of this discovered poetry out of that brittle orange-covered ancient serifed book; it was too late and I could barely see what I was reading aloud, stumbling in bewilderment over the grandeur of the verse. I do not remember finishing the poem but I remember reading the opening several times and getting lost eventually as the verse got so dense that I eventually had to put it down and go to sleep. I was under a roof here, I was at rest, and they the prey of the gales- there was something so mystifying that I read it again the next day in expectation that my sober self would be utterly unimpressed with the poem in the light of the morning, and yet it was still arresting. There it was, that overpowering feeling. I had been drowned by the poem, its undulating rhythms, the tossed-about rhymes and sounds, the intensity of the tone. I felt Hopkins’ perception of grace and mine begin to move towards each other- I myself not being a Roman Catholic or for that matter a Christian, still I was drawn- I had been beaten down by the cadaverous and could not rise without having the impression of water seared into me. It was both ridiculous and beautiful, almost majestic in a colossal way. The majesty, bemusing, what was it? I do not know- but the mastery of the tides, in the end, is overwhelming again and I give in to drowning.