Marwan Alnoaimi
10/2/17
Prof. Ali Hasan
September Song
September song is a poem that describes the holocaust that saw six million Jews killed in Germany. The poet attempts to explain particularly the damages brought about by the Holocaust, primarily by looking at the death of a ten-year-old child. In this poem, Geoffrey Hill depicts the ugliness of the Holocaust and attempts to write an elegy, he soon figures out that the subject is too difficult to address, and does that by changing the subject.
The first line explains how the Nazis considered the child undesirable, due to ethnic differences. The child in this poem has been used as a symbol to represent all the innocent souls that died in the Holocaust. However, as much as they were considered undesirable, the Nazis could not forget about them and let them live.
The second paragraph opens with a line that shows that, over time, the Germans who felt more superior to other races had already planned to kill them, ‘as estimated’. The second and third line expresses the severity in which the murders happened, with soldiers marching to show the energy and effort used. The third and fourth lines depict the setting in which the massacre took place with Zyklon gas that was used to burn them. Hill shows the agony and pain endured by describing the cries of pain coming from the burning children and adults.
The third stanza is a clear expression of the empathy that comes with the memories of the Holocaust. The poet says that it is true he makes an elegy for himself since as much as it is a tribute to the dead, only he who is still alive can read and understand it. It is clear that up to date, the living still feels the pain of having lost all those innocent souls. The last line shows the unbearable torture that comes by simply talking or thinking about the Holocaust.
In the fourth stanza, Hill completely changes the subject of the poem. He realizes the emotional difficulty of the Holocaust is too much to endure. The last stanza clearly shows how difficult it is to write about the Holocaust. In the last line, the pot says “this is plenty.” Trying to talk about the holocaust is an almost impossible task due to the emotional difficulty and extreme sensitivity of the topic. Words cannot express the real horror in the occurrence and the pain is so deep that it gets too emotional to a point that he even feels like he has said more than enough. The Holocaust is too sensitive of an issue for the poet to address in a poem.
This Be the Verse
This Be the Verse is a poem that exposes the evil human nature that we cannot change. People witness certain natural traits passed on to them by older generations. It is common for a child to inherit certain behaviors depending on how they are brought up. The poem portrays this nature of history repeating itself.
The first stanza is expresses disappointment. Larkin is explaining to us how our parents mess us up. In the first line, he blames both parents for fucking us up. However, the second line confirms that it was process passed down in which the parents do not mean for that to happen. The first stanza contains some truth in that we can observe weird behavior in a child and link it directly to the parents. The poet deliberately avoids using indirect phrases or words to stress the magnitude of the situation. His word choice in the first line of stanza one gives the reader a clear picture of the extent of the damage that parents cause on their children by using the phrase “fuck you up.”
The second stanza blames those older than our parents, for having corrupted them and passed the corruption down to us. The poet says that it is not our parents’ fault that they fucked us up since they were also screwed up by their parents while they were growing up. It just happens that they went through the same process that they take us through. One of the key aspects of human nature is heritance, most commonly, behavior inheritance. The older people are considered to have been even more foolish and primitive, allowed their kids to inherit these barbaric traits.
The last stanza explains how it is natural for humans to pass down misery to their children. It is not a choice made by an individual, but a generational cycle that continues. The first line emphasizes the inevitability of an endless cycle of typical behavior being passed on from parents to their children generations over. Larkin concludes by suggesting a solution to this problem by warning us. He warns us that the only way to avoid passing down these negative characteristics to the next generation, we should stop having kids. If we have kids, we will mess them up even more than we were messed up by our parent