Week 3 Journal Poetry Class

In this week, our poetry class has Middle English poetry from Chaucer to Donne to be discussed. In the night before the class, I had been wondering who they were. Even, I’m an English Department student; I still don’t know them for sure. Don’t laugh of me please. I just limit in English poetry. It’s not the real trouble, the real one is I can’t even understand a word of these poems. You can laugh of me now. I even had been laughing myself. Well, then I decided to use the internet finding out who these poets were.

The first poem is “To Rosemounde” by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400). It has 3 stanzas, every stanza consist of eight lines. It’s called as a Spenserian stanza. It also has rime ababbcbcc (check the poem, you will know it exactly). I had read it many times; I was not sure, maybe more than million times. No, that’s just my exaggeration. I read it again and again but I still didn’t understand what it meant. Then, I thought to skip this one. And finally in this poetry morning class I had some enlightened from my friend that bravely sends herself in front of class to explain this poem. Even though, now I’m still not sure what this poem really means. But I know that Geoffrey Chaucer was a poet influenced by Italian and French, so his poem sounds so hard to be understood.

The second poem is “To the City of London” by William Dunbar (1456-1513). This poem is easier than before. I can understand in the first gasp of this literary work. This poem told about London. In the first stanza it told about the extravagant of this city, and the next stanzas told about the glory of London, the water resources, and the last stanza is about the good government of this city.

The third poem is “The Paradox” by John Donne (1572-1631). It has 20 lines. This poem, as my friend – who was bravely standing in front of class, delivering her interpretations – says, is about death versus love, and also religion. I’m not so in to this poem. But, I can say it’s true because in this poem we can find words refer to death and love, such as love, lover, kill, die.

This is it, my first introduction to poetry class. I hope I’ll have better weekly journal next week. Let see will this class get more interesting or boring?