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National Poetry Month

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student Recommendations

"Siren" by Louise Glück
The title will remind the literary-minded and the enthusiasts for the mythology of Homer's The Odyssey, in which the sea nymphs attracted sailors with their mesmerizing singing, luring them to their deaths. However, in this poem, Louise seems to use the "siren" simply to mean the natural desire deep in her heart--the seductress or temptress--without any meaningful allusion to the myth. The whole poem shows us the simple progress of a young maiden losing herself when facing the desire, but with the complicated emotional changes: the furiousness to others who try to stop her from the desire, the self-awareness when she realizes this is the desire, and the helplessness when she finally find out she has been trapped by the desire. Siren leads us to the darkness of the desire, and warns us when we face the desire.

- Recommend by Jason Sun '20

Siren

I became a criminal when I fell in love.
Before that I was a waitress.

I didn't want to go to Chicago with you.
I wanted to marry you, I wanted
Your wife to suffer.

I wanted her life to be like a play
In which all the parts are sad parts.

Does a good person
Think this way? I deserve

Credit for my courage--
I sat in the dark on your front porch.
Everything was clear to me:
If your wife wouldn't let you go
That proved she didn't love you.
If she loved you
Wouldn't she want you to be happy?

I think now
If I felt less I would be
A better person. I was
A good waitress.
I could carry eight drinks.

I used to tell you my dreams.
Last night I saw a woman sitting in a dark bus--
In the dream, she's weeping, the bus she's on
Is moving away. With one hand
She's waving; the other strokes
An egg carton full of babies.

The dream doesn't rescue the maiden.

a spirit of april

For ages, poets—William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes, to name but a few—have been inspired by the month of April. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous celebration of April’s “sweet showers” in his opening to The Caterbury Tales to T.S. Eliot’s unforgettable lament in “The Wasteland” that “April is the cruelest month,” April figures prominently in some of the greatest poems. Perhaps this is because as both in nature and the spiritual season of Easter, April is a time of renewal and rebirth, a time when nature explodes with new warmth, new color, new life--or as the great Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote in his poem, “Spring,” “all this juice and all this joy.”

Thus, it is fitting that April is National Poetry Month. To celebrate and to promote the reading of contemporary poetry, the SLUH Junior English teachers are sharing a poetry “recommendation” from a SLUH junior of a memorable poem on each of the remaining school days in April, a product of the Junior English independent poetry project. Please sample and enjoy these poems and nominations; though many will offer the opportunity, as Robert Frost famously quipped about poetry, to “begin in delight and end in wisdom,” you may find some of these poems will challenge you, even push you toward growth that may make you uncomfortable. Please know we offer these poem's in a spirit of goodwill and, well, a spirit of April.

- Mr. Kavanaugh and the Junior English Team