Flee from Song, Villanelle

Wyatt, They Flee from me
Rossetti, Song
Hacker, Villanelle

• They Flee from me

Okay, so my first thought from stanza one was birds. Then as I continued to read on I realized Wyatt was speaking of women, or one woman in particular.
From the footnotes, it seems as though Wyatt is toying with this woman and that his gestures are not sincere, which is a reason, I believe that they would "flee" from him.

• Song

This poem, to me, seems like a letter written to the loved one of Rossetti while she is on her death bed. It seems as though she is telling her predecessors not to dwell on her passing or to mourn her, but to forget her and live happily because she isn't going to feel the earthly things they do for her. "Haply I may remember, And haply may forget."

• Villanelle

Insanely confused by this one, I literally just felt like I was reading words on a page. I'm looking forward to talking about this one in class.

Dover Beach or the beach from Twilight or the beach from Icarus.

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
p. 89-90

My sophomore year in high school, we wrote our own play based on the story of Icarus, called Icarus Flies, the second stanza in this poem, other than the fact that it's night time, reminds me of the shoreline that Icarus sees as he temporarily flies.

The entire description of the beach in the first stanza reminds me of the honeymoon beach in Twilight (sorry for my continuous parallels to Twilight)


Overall, I really enjoyed Arnold's way of describing the setting and the shoreline, it reminds me of a quote I once heard, "because there's nothing beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it is sent away," by Sarah Kay.

Feminists Unite

The Dead, James Joyce.
Feminist Criticism, pg. 175-208

The argument on page 182 caught my attention as soon as I got to it and it's a question i'd like to extend to you all, "Does feminism weaken or fortify itself by emphasizing its separateness?"

You could compare it to the Plessy v. Ferguson court case, seperate but equal, right?
We all know that seperate wasn't exactly equal at the time and it doesn't seem to be for feminism either. A good point for this arguement would be the amount of success from novels written openly by women and the amount of success from novels the public did not know were written by women. I think just as in the case mentioned above, separateness is strengthening feminism in the long run.