Hope

The poem that I decided to write this blog on is September, 1918. This poem has so many different interpretations that you can take from it since it is a modernism poem—it has many different themes or events occurring. The theme that I decided to go with throughout is hope. When reading the last stanza of the poem on page 713, I felt like Amy Lowell was feeling that someday she hoped that the world would be a better place to be again.

          “Some day there will be no war.

          Then I shall take out this afternoon

          And turn it in my fingers,

           And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,

          And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.

          And put it into my lunch-box,

          For I have time for nothing

          But the endeavor to balance myself

          Upon a broken world.”

In life we all could use a little hope; that feeling that everything is going to be okay. Everyday life throws us curve balls and to bring in personal experience, last week all my family could do was hope and pray. On Thursday we got a phone call that no one wants to ever receive. My grandmother was back in the hospital and we were given several options on what could be happening, but of course we all hoped for the best. Unfortunately, she has a battle of her own that she will have to fight off again. This reminded me of the poem because of how the last stanza starts, “Some day there will be no war”, and I pray that someday there will be a cure for cancer. “But the endeavor to balance myself Upon a broken world.” She will have to also find peace within herself to get through her battle that the world, which is broken because it isn’t perfect, has handed her.

Digging deeper, Amy Lowell was definitely trying to send a message. When I did my literary modernism blog on this poem, I didn’t realize a few things until now. The mood at the beginning of the poem brings us happiness and a beautiful scene:

          "This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;

          The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;

          The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves;

          And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows."

While we continue reading we can tell in her tone that she is losing hope, but is using imagery that shows her trying to stay positive about a negative situation. She finds ways that she can put things aside, like possible the negative thoughts.

          “To-day I can only gather it

           And put it into my lunch-box,

          For I have time for nothing”

The amazing thing about poetry is that it can be interpreted in hundreds of different ways. Before last week, I would’ve never thought of the theme being hope or anything along that order because when I researched it, I came up with themes of fall, war, and social changes—the themes were all laid out there for me.  I found that sometimes, it takes something terrible to happen to open up and see what this broken world really has to offer us. 

Tutu, Desmond. "Hope Quotes." BrainyQuote. Xplore, n.d. Web. 27 Mar. 2017.