Acquainted with the Night

Though a morbid subject, I actually enjoyed Robert Frost's Acquainted with the Night.   After going over poetry for multiple weeks, the first thing that I noticed was that this was a sonnet.  I also noticed that the first and third line of every stanza besides that last one had a rhyming pattern to it.  

Referring to question one, I believer that the purpose of the walking at night is to see if anyone will come after him.  "But not to call me back or say good-by"(Frost 976).  This significance of this quote is that it states the purpose of the late night walks that this speaker takes.  For most, the night represents a sense of hostile solitude.  Humans naturally relate the world of the unknown as potentially hostile.  The night allows the purpose to be exemplified because walking around alone at night never seems like the best idea and the walker obviously knows that.  The night, for the speaker, really does isolate him for the society that he lives in.  When he does come into contact with another person, it states that he simply keeps his head down and keeps moving.  

The Dirty Laundry

After reading Elisavietta Ritchie's Sorting Laundry, I realized the symbolic meaning that the laundry played in the couple's lives. The laundry that the clearly female speaker is folding is her way of relating their lives to each other. The sorting of the laundry means that the couple is clearing doing very well. As we see in the third stanza, it is first clear the Ritchie is using the laundry as a metaphor for certain aspects of their relationships. "pillowcases, despite so many washings, seams still holding our dreams"(Ritchie, 841).  Initially, I passed over the "seams" in this poem as a the normal "seems".  However, doing so canceled out some of the deep meaning behind the previously stated.  The 'seams' that the speaker mentions is used as something to compare the strength of the relationship to.  By those seams still holding strong and that they are both still carrying dreams together, the readers are able to see that the relationship that the speaker obviously cares so much about is doing well. 

I taste a liquor never brewed

The first indication that this drunkenness was not correlated to the typical alcohol that normal people think of occurred on the 2nd line. "From Tankards scooped in Pearl--"(Dickinson).  Then,  immediately following the first stanza, stanza two confirms my previous thoughts.  The speaker is literally drunk on air, dew, life, nature, summer.  They are living it up until they cannot any longer.  The speaker states that even after butterflies turn away from their sweet nectar, they will still be getting drunk on the sweet nature.  
The figurative meaning behind the inns of Molten Blue is one that takes some outside understanding to comprehend.  The most basic explanation that I could derive would be that the blue represented the sky.  Inns are places that people stat and pass through.  The speaker is saying that the blue melded together sky is something that all people pass through.  

Convergence of the Twain

Upon reading Thomas Hardy's Convergence of the Twain, I could not stop correlating every action or description in this poem to the movie Titanic.   The reasoning behind this has to do with the immense imagery contained in the poem.  The first three to four stanzas deal solely with visual descriptions of things that enable us to put pictures to the words we read.   As the poem progressed, I noticed that he was using a continuing and evolving metaphor.  The first evident example of the metaphor comes in line 9.  "The sea-worm crawls--grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent"(Hardy).  This quote puts a negative connotation to the presumed and stereotyped view that the extravagant Titanic had.  Hardy, by describing the ship in such light, is characterizing the ship and placing a name upon it based on the nature of those that the ship carries.  By nature, the ship is a floating piece of human vanity.  What surprises me more is that this surprisingly harsh and realistic view of the Titanic was published a very short amount of time following the sinking.