Poetic Trebuchet

For this blog post (kind of an unimaginative opening, I know) I picked this poem:

"O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!"

Initially, there are three things that caught my attention. In order of most-attention-getting to least-attention-getting, they are: 1. "Christ!" is my absolute favorite exclamation; 2. I love how the author says at the end that he just wished he/she were in his/her bed again. Like, I feel that way during my 9:30; and 3. The use of the word "rain" twice so close to each other intrigues me a lot.

Probably part of the reason this poem in particular caught my eye is because, as the book points out, it contains no metaphors, only simple imagery. Usually when I think of quintessential poetry (or, bad poetry), it's boiling over with similes and metaphors, like a lot of Emily Dickinson poems that I've read. This poem, however, is not only insanely short (which I also love), but is jarring. That is to say, it only uses simple imagery and assertive language to drive a point across, rather than dancing around that point to make you guess at it. And then, at the end, the author be all like, "I just want to go to bed, holmes!" Sorry for my sudden outburst of street-talk (I was raised on the streets, you see. By gangsters. And wolves...wolf-gangsters?), but my point is that, at least to me, this poem takes all the things you would expect from a poem, and throws them out the window with last week's tax returns.

Then there's one last thing. The last line, "And I in my bed again!" can be interpreted different ways. I, personally, interpret it as a juxtaposition against the rest of the poem, like he's just tired, and he kind of interjects that at the end of the poem. But, it could also be interpreted as having everything to do with the the rest of the poem. So it's like this poem is launching this subject material at your face with a god damn trebuchet at pointblank range, and you look at the giant boulder that's coming towards your face, and you see some etching on it, and you say "oh, maybe this came from the side of a building." but then you look at the other corner of it, and you see there's some moss there, and you think "maybe the bombardiers just found this boulder in a swamp somewhere."

And then you die because a boulder the size of a Lexus that's crushed up into a crude sphere hits you square in the fucking face.

Dang.