The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter

Now this is a love poem. The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter expertly captures the true love of a wife after she was forced too. The poem is filled with incredible beauty that mimics the River Merchant's wife love for her husband.

"At fourteen I married My Lord you. / I never laughed, being bashful. / Lower my head, I looked at the wall. / Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back." This line shows the nature of how their love was formed. The wife was originally distant with the idea of marrying this man, probably because she was forced to do so for political or economical reasons, yet only a year later, she "stopped scowling". She changes and grows to realize that she does love this man.

The husband leaves (to find more work, I assume) to a place "by the river of swirling eddies". The swirling eddies can be a metaphor for the turmoil and danger that he went through, and judging from the fact that he's been gone for five months, he may have died. Even "the monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead" is a metaphor for the disappearance of him.

But the wife never stops loving. After all these signs of loss and death, she refuses to believe that her beloved husband has died. She is so persistent that she tells him to let her know if he is on his way back, so she can meet him and be with him sooner.

This is a really loving tale of a wife's loyalty to her husband. It reminds me a lot of Odysseus's wife, Penelope, when she refuses to belive that Odysseus is dead, and he was away for nearly 20 years! Penelope tricks her way out of picking a suitor out of incredible love and loyalty to Odysseus even though he can't possibly be alive.

Fog

Carl Sandburg's Fog amazed with it's incredible detail and description being such a short poem. These are the sort of poems that I like, ones that seem to have no initial meaning other then what is painted, yet with each reading, more and more is taken out.

Anyone who has seen John Carpenter's The Fog (The original one, not that horrible remake they did a few years back) knows how genuinely terrifying intense Fog can be. Sandburg perfectly captures this by describing the movement of the fog as being cat-like. He then continues the anthropomorphism by describing the cat (or the fog) overlooking the harbor, quitely, and moves on.

By comparing the fog to a cat, Sandburg expertly opposes the creepiness. Cats are usually associated as being cute, fluffy, cuddly, but they also have that nasty, intelligent, introverted, and that not-a-care-in-the-world attitude that resembles the effect of a fog.

A fog doesn't really do anything besides distort our world and force us to drive slower than usual and it could be said that our way of life is nothing but "distorted reality".

The Yellow Wall-Paper

I've fallen in love with Psychological horror stories. From Poe to Lovecraft, and now to Gilman? Based on what we've read so far in class, this came as a pleasant and refreshing surprise. It reminded me why American literature is to be studied. After reading pages and pages of "local color" diologue about living in American and obtaining the "American Dream", I'm already getting tired of it.

What makes The Yellow-Wallpaper stand out is it's discription. The way the narrator describes the yellow wallpaper is eerily creepy. Early in the story, the narrator says, "The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight."

This can also be seen as a metaphor for the narrator's own psyche, as it slowly transforms and decays into insanity. With each passing day, the wallpaper consumes her, and in the end, she eventually is the wallpaper.