“Tonight I can write the saddest lines” by Pablo Neruda

This is a very sad poem of a man who just lost the love of his life. In the first main lines of a poem we get the theme of the distance. It’s clear that something has happened today, so tonight he can write the saddest lines, and that yesterday things were different. Then the author continues by showing the love that he Has for the woman, and explaining how heartless she was, that she only loved him sometimes. He then goes on to describe the woman’s ‘great still eyes’ that it was impossible not to fall in love with them.  Then we get the theme of loneliness and remembering, when he is alone in the dark staring outside, when nights before they used to be together at this time.

The disappointment that he has lost her and won’t get her back continues throughout the poem, but the author is trying to convince himself in a way that it was not meant to be, and he doesn’t love her anymore.  He ends the poem with “Tough this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her” in trying to put an end to all this suffering that he is experiencing.

My favorite line of the poem is: “Love is so short, forgetting is so long”.  I think it’s just so beautiful and so true!

"Yoko" by Thom Gunn

“Yoko” is a dramatic monologue; it’s a kind of a love poem. The interesting thing about this poem is the dog perspective view of the world that we get.  A lot of poets choose to write about love, landscapes, different things, but a poem about a DOG, we don’t get that very much.

The poem starts with the dog describing the everyday activities that he does, the scary feeling when the firecrackers on the sky explode, and his master – the one man he cares more than anything in this world.  The view of the world from a dog’s perspective is very interesting and Thom Gunn describes it in vivid details i.e.  when the leader takes the dog on a walk, he starts investigating with his nose the road he walked previously mentioning along the way certain activities that he did like taking a piss, certain smells he remembers,  the wind , the running… 

My favorite line of the poem is: “returning to you (as I always will, you know that)”. It just shows the strong bond a human being has with a dog.

"The Stranger" - Part Two - Chapter IV - V

In the final two chapters of “The Stranger” Meursalt starts becoming aware of what people really think about him. He starts showing some emotions and seems to have matured while in prison. The trail continues, but it’s a weird trail and Meursalt doesn’t really feel a part of it. The prosecutor connects the upcoming case of a son killing his father with ‘the stranger’ as “killing” his mother.  Attitude towards other people is taken into account more than the actual killing of the Arab. Later he gets the verdict that his head will be cut off in a guillotine.

               
As the clock is ticking, so are the seconds remaining in Meusault’s life. That little hope he has for the appeal to succeed and to be a ‘free-man’ again is keeping him alive. While behind bars, he wonders how to escape, how to stop the guillotine, and even comes up with his own idea of what he would do to the inmates who face death penalty ahead of them. He thinks that he would give them a ‘dog’s chance’ that the killing pill would work nine out of ten times, but they would still have a chance. He views the justice system and the whole process as a ‘machinery’ and when the priest comes to talk to him about God it doesn’t interest him and feels like the priest is a part of machinery also.

He tries to convince that life is not worth living and at the end of the day we all die, it’s just a matter of time. In fact he is preparing himself mentally before the due date comes. Every night he waits for the d-day to come and remembers his happy moments in his life, but he feels that the society which chose the way he was going to die would view his whole life by the final chapter – the killing of the Arab. ‘Because the world is indifferent towards me, I will be indifferent towards the world’ Meursault keeps thinking. The novel ends with Meursault last wish being a big crowd cheering when he was going to be executed, so Albert Camus gives us food for thought whether the process did go through or not!