All in all, I do not think that deformation is a helpful tool, but I can see where others may think that it helps to better understand the original poem. When switching out words, we are able to see exactly how the meaning of the poem is altered and how the author had originally intended it to be. I think this is most helpful when we decide which words to switch out ourselves. When the words are predetermined, we lose that sense of examining the original. By having to look deeply at the poem and pick out key words, we are able to distinguish the poem’s meaning better. However, I personally do not think that deformation does anything. I think that maybe if instead of random words replacing the original they were instead replaced with synonyms or antonyms to see how the poem would function then. By simply replacing key words with gibberish, nothing is gained. Sure there is a funny poem here or there but nothing of actual importance. In the future i’d like to see more of a controlled deformation that the deformer has planned to some extent, just as random antonyms/synonyms rather that random parts of speech. However, I realize that having any control in deformation defeats the purpose, so I will respectfully walk away from the whole thing.

I think that this was a tricky assignment. I don’t think that changing the words in the poem using this engine does anything to show us new meaning about the poem or the words. I think it’s all just random and rarely does it turn out to make sense. What I did really like about the experience was learning how to program which I feel like is deformance in itself because you’re getting to the core of something. I was most interested in the word “forgive” and if it would be changed to anything that would change the meaning slightly but it didn’t. I think that “plums” brought up some fun changes because the word “goats” would come up and it would be funny because goats were kept in the freezer. I don’t think it would help me in my examination of any other poem but it would be fun to pop a Shakespeare sonnet into the program and see what it makes. I do think it’s more helpful when you’re not changing as many words in the poem rather than having every other one changed because then you completely lose the meaning. It’s helpful in getting to the core of the poem and analyzing single words and seeing how they fit into the poem as a whole, while also showing the importance of a particular word. I think that deformance is only effective when used with poetry because they’re more succinct than books or plays. It would be cool to use this program with “The Raven” and change a few repeating words and see what it would make the raven say.

The first time we did deformation with the twitter bots, I thought that it was kind of entertaining, but I didn’t think that it was really beneficial to understanding the meaning of the poems. I also don’t think that it would have been as entertaining to people who like poems less.
When we did the programming to make it generate new words on our own, it was cool to see how much effort went into deciding which words would change and  figuring out how to do it without breaking the poem. I think that if there was a way to make the computer look for synonyms instead of random words, it would be a better tool for understanding the original poems, and the words that were chosen for them. For example, in the red wheelbarrow,  there are a lot of words that mean white, especially in terms of poultry, but the author chose white. Why did he choose white instead of one of the other words, such as light, pale, or colorless? What happens to the poem is the wheel barrow is sitting next to pale chickens, rather than white.
I think that changing the word, in this example, helps to highlight the improbability of white chickens in a wet world. White chickens suggests a more pristine, clean, chicken, whereas pale would still suggest that they have white feathers, but doesn’t have to mean they’re clean. Their cleanliness suggests the farm isn’t abandoned. Random other adjectives like “young” which could come up in the poem are not as revealing, which is why I think that synonyms would be a better way to replace words.
I liked the mad-libs when they made sense, but they were strange and incomprehensible much more often than they were understandable. I don’t think that deformance is really the best way to use your time when trying to analyze a poem.

In William Blake’s “Introduction,” he sets the tone for the rest of the Songs of Innocence. Just as the rest of the Songs of Innocence, “Introduction” has a sing-song nursery rhyme kind of tone; due to its iambic pentameter. In this poem, it is easy to see inspiration from Paradise Lost. In the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton calls upon the muse to help him tell his story. Similarly, Blake sees a “child in a cloud,” presumably a holy figure because of its innocence and celestial position, that calls on him to write poems. After this, the child begins to cry with joy at Blake’s poems, and Blake goes on to create a “rural pen” as if he is the God of writer and “stain’d the water clear,” representing a blank canvas that he is the first to write upon. Just as we discussed Blake’s “The Lamb” as himself being the creator of the lamb because he wrote the poem, Blake is claiming himself to be a great creator that is doing a service to all of the children by writing happy songs for them, causing such beauty that they physically weep.

As for the engraving for the poem, it matches the poem pretty well. Just as a nursery rhyme is typically older and more nature oriented, Blake’s engraving features a tree with little images on the sides of what appears to be of the poems or people. Most of the engravings are typically brighter, so the tone is not altered by the engravings. I think the archive makes research on Blake incredibly easier than it had been in the past. I could not imagine having such easy access to all of the engravings without the archive.

William Blake’s “A Poison Tree” is an allegory for the negative implications of holding grudges towards one’s enemies. In the poem, Blake did not confess his anger to his enemy, as he did with his friend, so his “wrath did grow” (4) into a tree that was “waterd […] in fears,/[…] with [his] tears” (5-6) which he “sunned […] with smiles/And with soft deceitful wiles” (7-8). After a while, the tree “bore an apple bright” (10). When his “foe beheld it shine,” (11) he snuck into the garden and ate the apple, and the narrator found him there the next morning, “outstretched beneath the tree” (16). In writing this poem, Blake is trying to say that ignored emotions, anger and wrath especially, can become volatile if they are not put on the table and talked about. In this instance, the narrator’s pent up anger grew and grew into a poison apple which eventually killed his enemy.

Perhaps it is not a cautionary tale, though, for the narrator remarks that he was “glad [to] see” (15)  his enemy lying dead beneath his tree born of wrath and resentment. This poem can certainly be read allegorically, or it can be read in the exact opposite way. Maybe Blake doesn’t care about the implications of repressing anger, and the “poison tree[s]” and fruits that such attitudes nurture. In contemplating the ambiguous message of this poem, I turned to Blake’s etchings for new insights, and was met still with ambivalence. In some of Blake’s pieces, the tree and the body are dark, suggesting an ominous nature behind them.  Copy R, for example, shows the enemy’s darkened body shadowed by a brown, nearly black branch, with a dark blue and purple sky lurking over a black mountain in the distance. The foreboding nature of this particular copy suggests that the “poison tree” of pent up anger is not a good thing, for it brought death to the narrator’s enemy. Other copies, however, such as copy B, do not suggest the same. In copy B, there is a lovely pastel sunrise over a mountain, as the narrator’s enemy stretches out pale and gleaming beneath the tree’s white branch. It’s a lovely image, and it almost looks as though his enemy is asleep underneath the tree. This image, beautiful, airy, and light, brings glory to the enemy’s death, painting it as a success for the narrator. From what we’ve read of Blake’s work, though, this ambiguity does not seem to be out of place. If we had read this poem alone in an anthology, though, without any of the engravings present, perhaps my interpretation of the poem would be different. When I read the poem on its own before viewing the engraving, I thought that the poem had a moral message behind it. However, upon reflecting on other of Blake’s works and his etchings for this particular poem, my stance became more fluid. The poem’s meaning changes from person to person, as well as from engraving to engraving; there isn’t one concrete message.

In reading Blake’s “Nurses Song” and viewing the images that are provided, Blake’s poem from “Songs of Experience” remind me much about a mother telling her children “been there, done that” and how mothers want more for their children, than what they had as children.  My mother always told me that she grew up with nearly nothing and she wanted to give my sister and I everything she never had.  She was never granted the freedom of playing all day and could not afford most of the luxuries that a lot of other kids had.  She recently told me, “When I was little, and I asked for something and my mom would say ‘When we get the money, you can have it’ it usually meant I would never have it.”  I can see this image from the images that were provided for this text.  The child in the image has an expressionless face and the mother is combing her hair and I feel like the mother is telling her something disciplinary.  I feel that these images mirror Blake’s unpleasant childhood and not his children’s childhood.

Therefore, when I read Blake’s “Nurses Song” it elicited somewhat of a motherly tone to it; like he’s writing from a mother’s perspective.  Before looking at the images and just reading the text, I imagined a mother speaking to her child and when I viewed the images, indeed, there was a mother and what looks to be two young people beneath her.

When Blake hears “the voices of children.  are heard on the green” he reminisces on his own childhood when he says, “The days of my youth are fresh in my mind” (2-4).  It is tangible and blatant that the sounds of children remind him of his youth but, following this he states, “My face turns green and pale” (5).  From this, memories of his childhood are obviously not pleasant.  Although the children are enjoying themselves and innocently playing outside, when he reflects on his own childhood, it does not elicit good memories.  Perhaps he was not given the same freedom that his own children have now.

As he is calling his children to come inside for the night, he describes the night as a “night in disguise” (6-9).  I can see this as a metaphor for growing up.  Your childhood is the purest and more fun years of your life, as the sun goes down and the night approaches, a new day is to follow.  If a new day is to follow, that means you are another day older and another day closer to adulthood.  Thus, the night is not just a time to alternate into the next day, though it is the beginning of a anew day, meaning you are becoming older.

I see this text as more of a reflection of his childhood and his own children remind him of his unpleasant childhood.  However, why is it called “Nurses Song”?  A nurse always provides care regardless of the circumstance; nurses tend to have a motherly essence.  Therefore, I think in many ways, regardless of Blake’s unfortunate childhood, he will still provide care to his children because he cares for them and only wants the best for them.  Rather he is speaking from experience in that he knows what a lousy childhood feels like and he does not want that for his children.

I think that Michael Field was a really interesting author for this project, because it wasn’t really the authors name. The poems published under Michael Fields name were largely love poems, including “Methinks My Love in Thee Doth Grow” and they appear to be written for a women. The interesting part, is that the poems were also written by women.

Works published under the pen-name of Michael Field were actually the work of Katherine Harris Bradley, and her niece Edith Emma Cooper. There seems to be no distinction between which of them wrote specific poems, or even if every poem was a collaborative effort. It is suggested, though never proven to be positively true, that the two were having a lesbian relationship with one another. This could have been one of the reasons they chose to publish under a pen-name.

Using a male pen-name make an unknowing reader assume they are reading the words of a man, which is who they would typically expect to be writing about love for a woman. The pen-name Bradley and Cooper used also unified them together as one person. It took the bond between them to a very strong level. It also helped to hide the fact that there was a lesbian relationship at all, whether there was or not people would have wondered, even then. Hiding the lesbian relationship overall helped to hide that it was potentially one between and aunt and a niece.

If we can assume that the poem is written by one woman or the other, it seems likely that “methinks my love in thee doth grow” is written by the aunt, Bradley, because it discusses a child growing, learning, and wanting to potentially find their own goals in space. The first line of the last stanza declares “my love is grown.”

This poem is also interesting with the themes, because there are some religious references. While we are learning that Queer lifestyles were more common in the Victorian era than we might have expected, there still would have been religious tension there, as many read the bible to say God wanted love and marriage to be between one man and one woman. The first stanza of the poem states that the beloved wants to find God, and may leave the lover because of it, but the lover feels she “cannot blame thee.”

I really liked how this poem fit the theme of Victorian Queer Literature, even though you had to look a little deeper to find it. It wasn’t blatantly about two men falling in love with each other, because it was covered in layers of secrecy.

In her poem “Borderland,” Amy Levy is writing about a night in bed with her love, whose very presence brings her immense amounts of joy. It is not until about three-quarters of the way through the poem that the gender of Levy’s love is revealed. “It is she,” (11) Barnfield thinks in her dreamlike trance, realizing that her beloved is there with her. In her hazy state between “waking” and “sleeping” (1), Levy becomes aware of her love’s presence. “Half in a swoon,/[she] spread[s] [her] arms in slow delight” (11-12) to reach for her love and likely embrace her and hold her close as they sleep.  At the end of the poem, Levy laments that “the nights are short in June,” (14) giving her less time to spend in this lovely, dreamy haze with her beloved. It is important to note that this poem, which is celebratory of Levy’s love for the woman sleeping next to her, is written as a sonnet.   Its rhyme scheme, AABCBDEDEFGGF, does not necessarily mirror that of a Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet, but it still has fourteen lines and a prominent theme of love throughout the entire piece.

When learning about the Victorian era (or any pre-modern era for that matter) in history and English classes alike, there is definitely a suppression of queer content, to a point where it can be considered erasure. Prior to coming to college and taking more open, liberal classes, I was not aware of many queer figures in history or queer literature that’s been produced. This project was really interesting and enlightening, though. It was really fantastic to look at so many openly queer poems written in a time where societal standards were very rigid and prominently heteronormative. Hopefully, queer poets and literature with queer content will gain a permanent place in classrooms and the canon alike, so its importance can be celebrated accordingly.