I sauntered up to the door of his Intended, and it reminded me if the trees along the river. The fog closing in, suffocating me and my thoughts of the Intended. The horror.
Three knocks, an eternity to wait for a crack in the door that would never come. I rumaged through my pockets for my pen and pad. She had wanted to know to know about Kurtz in his final days, his final breath, and his final words.
Upon that piece of paper the lingering words:
The horror, the horror.

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver

In this poem, Oliver spends the first five stanzas describing the beauty of a forest: “Giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders.” She then goes on to talk about fires which leads me to believe the antecedent scenario was a forest fire that destroyed the woods. She makes the point that humans will never know the true meaning of salvation because we can’t save everything from harm, including forests. 

In stanzas eight and nine, Oliver describes what humans can do to make up for not knowing salvation. “You must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” The last task she states humans must be able to do to live in this world has a strong impact over the entirety of the poem. Throughout it, you feel the sense as though she loved the forest very much, but when it was destroyed, it was a terrible loss. In order to recover from the loss, you need “to let it go.”

Evening Concert, Saint-Chapelle by John Updike

Even without a picture in front of you, John Updike’s vivid descriptions of Saint-Chapelle display the beautiful image of a Catholic chapel – the stained glass windows with brilliant colors and the images upon the windows that make the chapel so unique. The descriptions used to depict the concert pull together the chapel’s beauty mixed with the music. The music seems to match the fantastic colors and style of the windows and the beauty of the church as a whole: “That held the holy glowing fantasy together.”

When we were presented the picture in class, it was actually climactic of a sight than what Updike’s words had put into my head. To me, the picture didn’t do the poem’s illustration justice. Maybe I was just in a bad spot to see, but the way Updike put together his words in a specific way and used alliteration made the image of the chapel so real and fantastic – “Then violins vaunting Vivaldi’s strident strength, then Brahms, seemed to suck with their passionate sweetness, bit by bit, the vigor from the red, the blazing blue…”. Saint-Chapelle sounds so beautiful.

Blackberries for Amelia by Richard Wilbur

Blackberries for Amelia by Richard Wilbur is a simple poem to go along with a simple pleasure:  picking blackberries with a grandchild. The descriptions leading up to the picking give the simplicity incredible imagery, but they seem feel endless; as does the time it takes for the berries to ripen. “Dark berries, savage-sweet and worth the wait.”

The structure of the poem is interesting:  it is a timeline for a blackberry bush – not something poets commonly write about. It is not original in the sense that it is a small detail in life that had a major impact on someone’s life, but the fact that the majority of the poem is about the process of blackberries ripening gives it the aspect of being original. 

The antecedent scenario for Blackberries for Amelia is a grandparent picking and talking with their grandchild. The time affected the grandparent so greatly, the story of the bushes blooming and the berries growing and the grandparent and grandchild picking needed to be told.