The Tree in the Garden

I love the image this poem paint in my head as I read it; "the trees in the garden rained flowers"-doesn't that metaphor just make you want to run under the tree and dance around? The beginning of this poem just gives off joyous happiness.Then the reader gets to picture this thorn of a bush amidst all these gorgeous flowers. When compared with it's surroundings it's ugly and dismal, not part of the joyous, pretty, floral picture the reader first imagines. Then the reader realizes that this thorn represents the strong who aren't always beautiful, yet they stand and are bold. The thorn bush is what deserves to be beautiful but isn't. Sometimes a person doesn't have to have the "pretties" of life to be happy and strong, yet the bare basics can make a person looked up at as a role model. This piece could definitely be interpreted many ways and there is a very deep idea behind the thorn and the flowers surrounding it.

The Hat Lady

This poem started out so happy and then went downhill so fast. At first I thought it was about a simple childhood memory of a child remembering the hat lady that came to make hats for her mom, but in the end the reader finds out that the hats are to cover up the bare head of a woman stricken with cancer and going through chemotherapy. It's awful because today in my nursing assistant class today my class watched a woman go through the process of cancer and dying in the end. If I put myself in the girl's shoes in this poem I can't even imagine watching a family member go through a painful treatment like that; it's awful to just even picture that in my head. What the reader thinks is something so innocent as a hat lady really is the symbol of death coming to take away the cancer-stricken patient. It's interesting but true because cancer is one of those diseases that comes in disguise, and a lot of times when it's recognized it's too late to treat.

Much Madness is Divinest Sense

This poem is very compare/contrast. It has words that are opposite in the same sentences such as "madness and sense," and yet it makes sense at the same time. It's kind of saying that what is madness to one person looks completely normal to another. Madness can only be defined by the interpreter. Demur, which means objecting, is different way of looking at madness, because most "mad" people object to being insane, and this is a very dangerous aspect if the person doesn't accept it as part of them. The poem says that your "handled with a chain" if you object because madness allows a person to have a kind of freedom because their thinking is unusual and out there, but it is a type of freedom. I think that everybody is a little mad in their own way, and if you agree to it then it's not as bad, but denying that your mad truly can't be because being "insane" is interpreted so differently by every individual. This reminds me of the movie Shutter Island because in the end we don't really know if the person who was suppose to be insane was actually going mad or if everybody else around him was going crazy.

The Book

This piece is ridiculous; I definitely didn't expect the book to be covered with human skin, that's disgusting. Besides that, there's a very chilling beauty behind it. It reminds me of innocent childhood or innocent love. When your a child, the person doesn't know of the horrors and hardships that he/she will face in the future. A child can simply enjoy life and play imaginary games all day without a care in the world, just like the book before was just a nice gathering of blank papers that could have innocent thoughts written on them. Even love is innocent at first until somebody cheats or life throws problems that trouble a relationship, but until then love is innocent and flirtatious. Maybe the main idea of this book symbolizes a human because a person has all these thoughts and feelings inside them (the writing in the book) and then the skin on the outside represents the simple form of a human. It was a definite realization of horror that I felt when I first read this piece.