Good evening class mates,
I took English 101 three times before I passed
it. For whatever reason when I started
junior college, I was simply not ready to commit to school, I believe that
college would be too difficult for me, as all my teachers made it sound like
almost an unattainable, expensive luxury-rather that was my interpretation. It took a girlfriend to escort me to class
like a prisoner being taken to road to lay concrete. The third time around I truly enjoyed my
experience. Since I was a child I always
loved to write, but family discouraged, and school hammered away at form, or
rather, the three paragraph essay. “You
like to write, wonderful, but you can’t just write, you have to write my
way.” Again, perhaps that was my
interpretation of what I heard. So
sitting in English 101 for the third time around, our professor hands out one
of two “life changing” essays, “Shitty First Drafts.”
“Shitty First Drafts,” was about writing very shitty
first drafts, emphasizing that no one would grade them, no one would look at
them, no one would care about them, except you, the writer. The fundamental driving point was to simply
sit and write everything that would come to mind about the piece or project
that you are writing on, and then revise as many times as you need to. I found this liberating, and it was part of what led me to decide to
become an educator. To inspire and to
let lose the imagination of any student who finds joy-or has difficulty with
writing. Write it out first, write it
all out, then clean it up from there. I
don’t remember the story exactly, but I believe it was Michelangelo who was
asked how he sculpted so well, I understand he responded with something close
to, “The sculpture is there within the block, I just take a chisel and whittle
away to let it free.”
Here is my first
block, I’ve only removed a few pieces.
Jenny kiss'd Me
JENNY kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat
in;
Both jenny and the speaker are young possibly pre-adolescent, as it is
revealed that Jenny jumped out of her chair, unable to control her
excitement. This can also suggest that
love in its first stages is still child-like, possibly innocent and even free
of sexual complexities.
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that
in!
The speaker then chastises Time, personified as a thief who steals
sweets, which suggests the physical attributes if that then beauty as a sweet,
and placed on the list of time. Recorded
or the very act of recording one person at any given moment, is the next day,
aged by one day, and one day less beautiful than the day before. Time steals the attractiveness of a young
body, the sweetness of being young and in love and the human form slowly
withers, as time steals days , one by one.
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, 5
Say that health and wealth have
miss'd me,
This stanza implies weariness after the first stage of jubilee, further
implicating sadness, it is possible with e passing of time after time stealing
said days, the speaker eventually married and spent a lifetime with Jenny, but
the n lost her to time.
During their love, his focus was his love, jenny and as a result,
success, and great health were not his focus and therefore he did not excel in
those areas.
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.
The first stanza implies a young state of love and energy unconstrained
The second speaks of time and how it steals days away from the
individual
The third stanza speaks of having lost or never earned wealth and
recognition, or never having focused on the speakers own body, beauty and
health. But although all the speaker
laments all these aspects of the decay of the human form, lost opportunities,
experiences and ultimately a lost love, the speaker has no regret and therefore
has minor comparison of los or lamentation as all those things lost, are minor
in comparison to having received the love at one time of the revered Jenny, or
at the very minimum, a having lost opportunities and other experiences, it was
all worth having received a single kiss.
Reading it again now, “Jenny,” can easily be replaced by the name of
any other woman. Not necessarily
specifically referring to a single name, but replacing the name with “she”
would have a global affect for the reader, which is to reflect on the having,
loss, and then reflection on the experience of love, even at the cost of other
ideals which society holds valuable.
Cover also
Formal and literary elements
Figurative language
Sound devices
Use of white space
Line length
Punctuation
Speaker
Voice/tone
Audience
Two sources MLA
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