I don't like poems. Especially poems with many metaphors, symbolism, and so on. It gives me a headache. So when Mr.Allen gave us poetry reading assignment last week, I almost freaked out. John Updike, I didn't know exactly about him but I have heard about him before, so I started to read his poem first. Matisse, Vermeer, Cezanne...... The list of names (I assumed) seemed like some foreign language. I put the paper back into the folder where I took it out. Few days later, I realized the assignment was due tomorrow, so I started to take more serious about it. This time, I read "The Writer" by Richard Wilbur first.
The poem was apparently about a father worrying about his daughter because she didn't listen to him as he tried to give her advice and the suggestions. The first time I read I noticed the daughter was a writer, and I had this feeling that the father didn't want her to be a writer because it's hard to be a successful writer. I read about five times more and each time I re read it, I was more confused by the point which the author tried to make. But I enjoyed some of author's symbolism, like starling was the symbol of daughter and house was "thinking" as the daughter tried to write.
In the class, Mr.Allen introdued me to totally different view of this poem. Richard Wilbur used three metaphors to reveal the theme of the poem. The first metaphor is the daughter’s life compared to a ship’s voyage. Also metaphor "great cargo" was used to the daughter’s life struggles. And the father wished his daughter a “lucky passage”, like wishes sent to passengers on a ship about to set sail. These expressions show how a journey at sea is like the journey through life. How cool is that? This assignment changed my view of poetry.
