When looking at deformance with the Mad Libs version of “This is Just to Say,” I learned something aside from the fact that some really funny poems can come out of the random word generator. I noticed that no matter what you changed the words to, the meaning of the poem stayed the same. When I was talking to Laura about what we learned from using the website, no matter what words replaced “plums,” “eaten,” or “icebox,” the first stanza always stated what the speaker has done. This is because of the words “I have.” In the second stanza, even when the words “saving” and “breakfast” were changed, the speaker was still always telling us what the person was going to do with the object. Then in the last stanza, even after replacing “forgive,” “delicious,” sweet,” and “cold,” the meaning of the stanza does not change and the speaker is always asking the person to do something and describing the object. The meaning of the poem stays even if it makes no sense. I used this tool to examine “The Red Wheelbarrow” and I didn’t really learn much about it but I’m sure I could if I looked more into it or, perhaps, changed different words. I think deformance was helpful with “This is Just to Say” because it shows that although we thought this poem was so random, when comparing it to actually random words in the poem, it is not as random as we thought after all. To be honest, I don’t think it helped much with analysis of the poem and I don’t think I would use it again but it was fun. I would like to do more mad libs with other forms of literature because I think it could be funny but I don’t think it helps with examination.

William Blake’s poem “The Little Boy Lost” from “Songs of Innocence”is about a boy who is following his father in the woods but his father is going too fast for the boy to keep up. Once the darkness comes, the boy is alone in the woods crying and lost. Metaphorically, an interpretation of the father in the poem is that he represents God. Blake is writing at a time when religion was a popular theme and it was controversial to challenge the works of religion however, he does so in this poem. The boy is looking to follow God and hoping that he will lead the path. God is too quick for the boy to keep up and he is left behind. It is representative that even having belief in God does not mean you cannot get lost or lose your way. This is an example of how the poems from “Songs of Innocence” are not exactly innocent because it is a critique of society and religion.

The engravings that Blake created of this poem changed the way I read it. In each engraving, a young boy is chasing what looks like a white light in the woods. As I scrolled through the engravings, I saw three things happen. First, I saw the pictures become darker . Each picture was colored with darker shades and looked more eerie than the last. Copy U is colored entirely in black and white and really showed the darkness of the woods that this boy is looking for his father in, giving a sense of despair that this boy has no chance of being found. The second observation I made is the brightness of the white light that the boy is chasing. Towards the last of the engravings, the focus tends to be on the white triangle that the boy is reaching out for and it appears as if it is glowing (like in copy AA). This gave me a sense of hope, that something is present but he is still chasing after it and looking for it. The last thing that I noticed is the angels that are drawn in the border around the words of the poem themselves. At first I did’t notice the angels but towards the later engravings, such as copy R they are colored in with bright colors making them more noticeable as if to tell the reader that this poem is symbolic of religion.

An archive changes how we read things because it places poems from the same time period or author next to each other and it allows us to compare and contrast them to find common themes. In this archive, we’re able to compare the words of the poem alone to the engravings that Blake made for the poem. We are also able to look at other poems from this book and poems from “Songs of Experience” that are often linked to the poems in “Songs of Innocence.” Online archives are different from reading the poem in an anthology because you are able to easily access other poems and the engravings that go along with it without having to look for a chapter or another book entirely.

The poem that I analyzed and added to the Victorian Queer Archive is “Sicilian Love Song” by Lord Alfred Douglas. The themes in this poem clearly emphasize what it was like to be gay in this time period. The poem is about Douglas and his lover having to wait until day is over to be together because their love is forbidden and must be hidden in the darkness of the night. He expresses how long day seems to be and how hard it is waiting for that because he wants to be with this man so badly. The theme of sexual desire is present because he wants to be with this man but has to wait and that is so difficult for him. Douglas structures his poem to actually show the wait for day to end so that night can come and he can see his lover by not introducing the man (the subject of the poem) until the last stanza. He is making the reader wait to meet his lover in the same way that he must do every single day.

Looking at Victorian poems that have a common theme of queerness changed the way that I saw Victorian literature. There are many queer writers that had to hide the sex of the subject of their writing because love between the same sex was illegal. “Sicilian Love Song” shows that even though it was illegal, some writers were not quiet about it and wrote poems (such as this one) that clearly talk about a lover of the same sex and address the unjustness of the law.

Reading Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Footnote to Howl,” I imagined the tone of the speaker to be different from how he performed the poem when listening to the audio. The poem has lots of repetition of the word “holy” throughout, followed by a noun and then an exclamation point. When I first read this I assumed the speaker would be reading this very enthusiastically, like a hysterical and happy prayer or that it would be happy because everything is holy, even the asshole is holy (4). When I listened to the poem, I was surprised by his tone. At first he sounds almost like he is crying or whining, he elongates the pronunciation of the world “holy” and puts added stress on the word, speaking it louder than the other words in the sentence. He still sounds pretty hysterical but when reading the poem, I thought it would be hysterical with joy but instead I got a feeling of despair upon listening to it. This feeling got stronger as the poem went on and he started to shorten the length of the word “holy.” Around the line that begins “Holy my mother in the insane asylum” (13) he starts to speak the word “holy” softer and with less of an emphasis. The lines are spoken softer and calmer with less hysteria. This continues through the rest of the poem making the mood of despair more prominent throughout. The tone he uses almost forms a howl in the beginning, as the title suggests but by the end, the speaker seems like he is tired of the repetition and stops “howling.”

For this assignment I looked at Neil Hilborn performing his popular slam poem “OCD.” Slam poetry is usually performed theatrically however, this poem specifically always stuck out to me because of the way that he performs it. For one, he begins the poem in sort of a comical way and it is funny to watch which helps show the contrast between his feelings before “she” left him versus after. Because it starts out so comical and light hearted, when he suddenly becomes serious it makes the audience feel the drastic change in his mood. Another thing that is only shown through performance which may not have the same effect if just reading the words is when he stutters and repeats a word or phrase. He does this often to show what it is like to have OCD. He stutters in the beginning because it “has to be perfect” just like everything else he does, and it doesn’t seem to bother him. After “she” leaves him towards the end, he stutters on the phrase “blows out candles” and acts as if he has to force himself to stop saying it. Unlike the other times, he is upset for stuttering because she left him for these little OCD issues he has and now he feels like he has to stop letting them happen. The last thing I noticed is his hand gestures and body language as he performs the poem. He is very descriptive in the poem and sees the smallest things in beautiful ways and by making hand gestures while he describes them I feel like he is giving us a better picture of what he is seeing and making that image appear in our heads. Overall, I think this poem written on paper doesn’t relay the same message as Neil does in his performance.