In his poem A Supermarket in California, the author, Allen Ginsberg, strolls out of nature "under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon" and into the local grocery store in an attempt to go "shopping for images" as he thinks upon the man, the poet, Walt Whitman and all he and his poetry stood for in America.

Ginsberg's writing has a whimsical quality to it, as when he talks of "Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?" conveying the sense of abstract thought, pulling the reader into Ginsberg's dream-state as he cruises the grocery store aisles, watching all the different people that symbolize the melting pot of America.

"I saw you, Walt Whitman," Ginsberg writes, "childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eying the grocery boys," giving a description of what he believes the long-dead poet would do in the grocery stores of the mid-1900's, such as ask such mundane questions as "who killed the pork chops? What price bananas?" but also not-so-subtly alluding to Whitman's homosexuality when the aged poet asks of the grocery boys, "Are you my Angel?" Ginsberg follows his Whitman figment through the grocery store, walking together with the poet he so admires, "tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy," exercising freedom, "but never passing the cashier."

Near the end of the poem, Ginsberg's tone shifts from fanciful to pensive. "Where are we going, Walt Whitman?" Ginsberg asks, meaning more than just that "the doors" of the grocery store "close in a hour, which way does your beard point tonight?" as he explains in his next few lines, "Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America or love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?" Where is America going? Ginsberg wonders after his idyllic amble through the supermarket late at night. The America Walt Whitman knew and thought so highly of has changed and become something new and different and uncertain, like the swift change from the horse and carriage of Whitman's time to the automobiles Ginsberg mentions; who knows which is purest? Both are forms of transportation to take people where they wish to go, but which has the heart and soul of that direction, the direction of democracy and freedom in perpetuation? Ginsberg looks to the past to answer his question, taking Whitman's portrayal of America over his own. "Ah, dear father," he laments, "graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher," man whom Ginsberg admires and respects, "what America did you have," when you died, "when Charon," boatman of the Underworld, "quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoky bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters," of oblivion, "of Lethe?"

In her poem, A Work in Artifice, Marge Piercy compares the purposeful stunting of the mighty bonsai tree to man’s manipulation of the female body and spirit, causing both to be artful or “beautiful,” but lacking in strength and will, in order to fit man’s skewed view on desirable traits.

“The bonsai tree…could have grown eighty feet tall on the side of a mountain,” Piercy writes, implying that, left alone and natural, woman, like the tree, could soar to great heights, becoming mighty works of power and majesty to inspire all who see them. Piercy also warns of the risks of growing to such heights, that “lightning” may “split” the tree, for lightning strikes the tallest point just as society’s cruel remarks seek out the people of highest regard to tear down unto the point of obliteration, because society cannot bear to see something they thought so infinitesimal grow to surpass all expectations.

Instead of letting the tree grow, though, the “gardener carefully prune[s] it,” snipping off undesirable things, the rich green foliage, the independence of will, until he leaves nothing but what he finds attractive, a “nine inch high” plant who could claim only diminutive size, coziness, domesticity, and weakness as attributes. “How lucky, little tree, to have a pot to grown in,” to live in safety, kept away from the harsh environment of the world that would strengthen it; Piercy writes of man’s wish to protect, but in doing so, stunts the growth of a lovely creature by not allowing it freedom, and molding it as he chooses, deriding the value of the woman, the tree, “[whittling] back the braches” until the small thing believes it could have never been big.

“With living creatures one must begin very early to dwarf their growth,” writes Piercy, describing a philosophy many cultures proscribed to at the time in order to suppress women, raising them to be pliable, domestic wives, whose beauty, in society’s eyes, seemed unparalleled. They “bound feet” in China so the young woman’s foot would appear delicate and aristocratic in mouse-sized shoes, ultimately deforming the foot so much that the woman could not walk unaided. In countries all over the world, women were denied an education, causing “the crippled brain,” full of the ignorance of its potential. Women put their “hair in curlers” in order to become more desirable to men, as they have been conditioned to do since their youth, altering their natural appearance to become unnatural and “beautiful.” As Piercy’s poem’s title implies, woman, like the bonsai tree, is man’s “work of artifice;” he thinks he has done some piece of great ingenuity, some skillful work of inestimable value, but instead he has done only a work of trickery, coercing women to be malleable to his devices, deceiving himself also, crooning as the gardener does, “it is your nature to be small and cozy, domestic and weak,” until not only he believes it but woman does as well.

In her poem, Conjoined, Judith Minty describes the condition of marriage by comparing it to the seemingly unnatural binding of two free individuals into one, as with the mutant, double-bodied onion that she keeps in her kitchen cupboard. Like the onion, Minty views marriage as something strange and freakish, an “accident, like the two-headed calf rooted in one body, fighting to suck at its mother’s teats.” She recalls the infamous Chang and Eng of China, a set of conjoined, or Siamese, twins “joined at the chest by skin and muscle,” “doomed,” she says, calling to mind her own marriage and its conditions, “to live, even make love, together for sixty years.”

Most people read Judith Minty’s poem and see it only as a bleak and depressing picture of marriage, the truth that comes out after those first glorious days of the honeymoon, after the glamour has faded and you find out didn’t marry the same person you thought you did; many people can identify with Minty, feeling that their marriage has placed some kind of interminable binding upon them, like a prisoner with the dreadful weight of the ball and chain perpetually at his heel. But Minty only made me think, marriage is supposed to bind two people together; they are supposed to be as inseparable as Minty’s “monster” onion.

Marriage in America today has been deformed into nothing but a travesty, simply ceremonial. The words “until death do us part” mean nothing, certainly not when compared to the words “irreconcilable differences” on the divorce forms often filed only days after the utterance of the former. All too often couples “sever the muscle” that “could free one, but might kill the other” out of sheer selfishness. They cannot cooperate, working as two instead of the One they vowed, fighting each other like the two-headed calf trying to “suck at its mother’s teats,” with both heads, both spouses, trying to attain their own goal without regard to the other, trampling each other so that neither can survive. Yet, if they so chose, the two could forsake their own selves and embrace the other, forming an indissoluble union, that two become one, then Minty’s final thought, “We cannot escape each other,” would seem a blessing instead of a curse.

Alfred Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses, follows the contemplations of the aged King Ulysses as he nears the end of his life and seeks out one last adventure with his fellow great men, the giants that shaped the Grecian world until their glory overshadowed their human selves, placing them among the gods in the eyes of the people. As he grows older and closer to death, Ulysses wishes to do some final great act. “You and I are old,” he tells his companions, “Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end,” ere his death, “some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbecoming of men that strove with Gods.”

Ulysses talks of the port and the ship that “puffs her sail,” symbols which reveal his desire to leave his life of domestic kingship and renown in order to discover new, “untravell’d” worlds and reclaim the valiance of his youth in his old age. The constant reference to the sea and his final voyage only serves to underscore his determination to leave his land and not return. “For my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset…until I die,” Ulysses says, making his intentions excruciatingly clear. He has tired of “this still hearth, among these barren crags.” The adventures of the land have fled him and his kingly duties weigh heavily upon him, repressing his venturesome spirit that “cannot rest from travel” though it has seen many lands and known many people during its roaming of the earth.

The gloaming imagery of nature in the poem conveys a sense of mysticism that persists throughout Ulysses contemplation on death and glory. “The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; the long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep moans round with many voices;” Ulysses life comes to a close, but he sees it not as the end of things but the beginning. The day has ended, the night begun, full of wonders and glory and many other souls sharing the great adventure of death that comes to seek us all.

Throughout the poem, Tennyson alludes to Ulysses’ past, the reasons for his fame and glory. Ulysses speaks of drinking the “delight of battle” on the “ringing plains of windy Troy,” displaying his part in the infamous Trojan War and preluding to his adventures as recorded in Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey, where Ulysses goes by another, perhaps more well-known name, Odysseus. As Ulysses reflects on his adventures’ final destination, he remembers Achilles the illustrious warrior whom he knew and fought beside who, now dead, resides on the “Happy Isles” that Ulysses thinks his ship and crew may “touch” in the last voyage.

As a legacy to his people, that “savage race, that hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me,” Ulysses leaves his son, Telemachus, who would govern Ithaca in his father’s stead, making “mild a rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees subdue them into the useful and the good.” Ulysses knows that the time has come for the giants of the past to leave and let the younger men come into their own as the men of old, Ulysses and his grand comrades, seek one last great adventure, for the greatest adventure of all is death and Ulysses who would fain “pause, to make an end, to rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use” would take that death in glory, grandeur, and with strong will to “strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

David Wagoner’s poem, My Physics Teacher, reminds me very much of my own Physics class. His drab tone evokes memories of mind-numbing boredom as the teacher tries to explain to us the Laws of Physics, which were only theory, in a sense, because our own eyes could disprove them just as Wagoner says in his poem, “He tried to convince us, but his billiard ball fell faster than his ping pong ball…in spite of Galileo.” But the logic of the adult mind refuses to see it that way and must insist upon using formulas that only work perfectly in a vacuum or on frictionless surfaces, and not in everyday life where unaccounted for forces exist in droves.

Perhaps it is my simple child’s brain tempered by the skepticism of teenage years that cannot make sense of, nor trust in, the apparent neatness of mathematical theory meant to explain the untidy wiles of reality. Rarely do scientific experiments work out in reality the way the books say they should. The heavier ball hits the ground first, the prismatic spectrum lacks both orange and green, static does not always cling. Not everything goes as it should. But one law remains constant, as it did for the bumbling Physics teacher in Wagoner’s poem when “he broke his chalk on a formula, stooped to catch it, knocked his forehead on the eraser-gutter, staggered sluefoot, and stuck on foot forever into the wastebasket.” Murphy’s Law evades all physical explanation, manifesting itself at the most crucial place and time, without the say of a cleverly calculated formula or humans’ eternal optimism.

John Donne’s poem, Holy Sonnet 14: Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God, charts his turmoiled and theological thoughts about his spiritual state as he pleads fiercely with God to act more abrasively towards his heart, his soul, in order to bring about his renewal and redemption through the violent destruction of his old self. Donne’s elevated diction and distorted syntax mirror the complexity and multifaceted-ness of his perceptions.

Although Donne writes in first person, his poem easily expands to encompass all of humanity as he begs God to become a force of change in his life. “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” he implores, “for You as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; that I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.” Donne’s use of weak, passive verbs, “knock, breathe, shine,” emphasizes God’s insubstantial actions, and contrasts with his use of the same verbs in more forceful forms, “break, blow, burn,” at the end of the sentence. The increase in the strength of the verbs accentuates Donne’s insistence that God take a more active role in his spiritual refurbishment, as does the change from “seek to mend”, which denotes merely repairs made to what already exists, to “make me new,” which implies a completely pristine creation.

The parallelism between the two parts of the first sentence and Donne’s mention of “three-personed God” stresses the connection between the three persons of God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the three different verbs used. Donne associates God the Father with the words “knock” and “break” to assert His dominant nature, while using the words “breathe” and “blow” to show the more subtle, gentle temperament of God the Holy Spirit, and reserving “shine” and “burn” for God the Son, whose character defines salvation and the purification and tempering of the soul through a metaphysical fire.

In the second sentence, Donne continues his supplication to God by an extended metaphorical example. Donne compares his crisis in faith to that of a “usurped town” trying to set itself free, but failing, without hope. He writes of that despair, “Reason, Your viceroy in me, me should defend,” emphasizing by use of inverted syntax that reason, of all things, should come to his defense, should solve his dire problem and remove him from his victimized state, but instead it, too, “is captived, and proves weak or untrue.” This notion of captivity and freedom persists throughout the rest of the poem, though with drastically different connotations as the Sonnet switches to its concluding thoughts.

In the third sentence of Holy Sonnet 14, Donne’s entreaty shifts its focus from the obliteration of his former self to the redemption of his soul. He expresses his love for God and believes that God would love him “fain” if he were not “betrothed unto Your [God’s] enemy,” if he did not already belong to Satan. From this point onward, Donne uses short bursts of imperative phrases and parallel structure to enforce a sense of urgency and desperation as he makes one final, last-bid plea for God’s intervention on behalf of his soul. “Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,” he writes, alluding back to the idea of betrothal and the colloquial phrase of “tying the knot,” meaning marriage. “Take me to You,” Donne continues, “imprison me,” protect me, “for I, except You enthrall me,” unless You captivate me, “never shall be free, nor ever chaste,” shall be damned and corrupt, “except you ravish me,” unless You enrapture me, carry me away. Initially, Donne’s use of the words “enthrall” and “ravish” in conjunction with the concepts of freedom and chastity seems contradictory, but by applying the lesser-known meanings of the words, his assertion resonates truth, completing his belief that, without God’s mercy, he amounts to nothing but a doomed soul destined to a bitter end.

Robert Pensky’s poem, Dying, contemplates the significance of death in the grander scheme of life. Many things die such as the “phrases” Pensky mentions and the Golden Retriever and the Cocker Spaniel from his childhood. The people’s collective memory fades, as does the author’s own, as they grow older and new memories replace the old, and certain things like “doornails” become obsolete and with them dies the meaning behind the phrase “dead as a doornail.”

Dying, too, is someone Robert knows, and even though he realizes everyone must die eventually, he finds little comfort in the fact as others might. Everyone is dying, certainly; we die a little each day as we go from creation to birth to old age, growing and maturing and drawing closer to death with every breath we take, but as Pensky writes, “the different pace makes the difference absolute.” The closer death comes, the faster the end of life seems to fly by, until the body fails and the spirit it houses wonders, where did all the time go? What was I doing that I didn’t notice my life seeping away? To the young, death seems to come upon people suddenly, though the victim may see it afar off, and the abrupt absence of one they loved strikes hard and true. Death often catches even the farsighted off-guard, though it was spotted years away; the inevitability of it does nothing to succor the pain of those whose end is still a ways off and must yet endure the trials of life of which death is but the last.

Pensky compares death with nature in the latter portion of his poem, speaking of the “tiny invisible spores” that coalesce into a greater being, some other plant consisting of “fleshy, pale stalks” in a lawn of green and insistently growing grass, like one enlightened soul among many unaware. The colorless plant grows overnight, “without a leaf or flower,” death springing up from the steady carpet of life unexpectedly. Life still goes on as it did before, oblivious to it the death in its midst as the “nerveless moths that live their night or two.” And like a moth, so does a “bright soul [keep] on beating,” its fleeting light burning brilliant and defiant “in the monster’s mouth” until the darkness snuffs it out, and yet a still smoke lingers as proof of life’s brief triumph over death in the memory of those who yet live on.

Linda Pastan’s poem, Ethics, poses the enigmatic question, “If there were a fire in a museum which would you save, a Rembrandt painting or an old woman who hadn’t many years left anyhow?” Woman or painting, neither answer is particularly right or wrong in the eyes of the students who care “little for pictures or old age,” but it is not the right or wrongness that matters. The question simply evaluates each student’s own personal ethics, their moral constitution and the reasoning behind their decisions.

The cynical student, deriding the value of age and knowing the old woman could expire at any moment, chooses the painting, which offers seeming permanence. So does the ambitious student who perhaps has plans to sell the Rembrandt on eBay as a knock-off. The philanthropic student, whose grandmother’s face the old woman has likely stolen, chooses the lady, and the irresolute student lets the woman decide, perhaps as Pastan’s Ethics teacher points out, “to eschew responsibility.” The selfish student chooses neither and makes a mad dash to escape the burning building. The practical student, endowed with a sense of eternal optimism, would tell the old woman to grab the painting, while they grab her and both make a run for it.

In her later years, Pastan reflects on the question posed by her Ethics teacher who is likely long-dead and well beyond the concerns of its answer. Pastan, now also an old woman, realizes as she stands in front of a real Rembrandt in a real museum that in the end the impossible question of her youth is merely a vanity. Time has worn on her as well as the painting, which depicts an autumnal season of long-past, existing now only as oil on canvas as the question exists only as wispy memory in Pastan’s mind. As the passing of a true season, so will the old woman and the painting, too, pass away, “beyond saving by children.” For that is what the students were, sitting in their classroom debating a futile question; they were children fooled by youth into thinking they had broached adulthood and all adulthood’s difficult decisions, when in reality they had only entered a state of modified childhood, with adult knowledge but all of childhood’s gullibility and optimism, believing that everything could be saved, that nothing had to perish or be defeated by age or time or fire.

In his play, No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre observes three individuals, Joseph Garcin, Inez Serrano, and Estelle Rigualt, as they acclimate to hell in a Second Empire drawing room and discover the means of, and reasons for, their eternal torture. Through the portrayal of his characters’ lack of “authenticity,” Sartre contrasts the socially accepted attitudes of self and sin with his philosophy of atheistic existentialism, amplifying his belief that “without God,” morally, “all is permitted” (Ross), and then only true “sin” worth eternal damnation consists of denying what you have made yourself or acting in a way that does not follow your internal, self-created essence.

Each of Sartre’s characters possesses two flaws, the opposing nature of each emphasizing the difference between the sins of society and the sins of existentialism. Society shunned Garcin because of his cowardice for fleeing to Mexico in order to dodge the draft for World War II, and his atrocious actions towards his wife; they hated manipulative, lesbian Inez, and would have thoroughly condemned Estelle had they known she’d killed her newborn child in order to hide her adultery from her aged husband. Yet, in existentialism, none of the actions society considers sins matter; the only action worthy of condemnation is the denial of self—the denial of your essence or the denial of what you want, which gives your life purpose and meaning and defines the term “authenticity” (Ross). According to the existentialist philosophy, each character’s lack of authenticity damns them.

Garcin did not accept his cowardice, but tried to hide it, forming a Pacifist newspaper, pretending that by dodging the draft he would uphold his Pacifistic ideals and in actuality be a hero instead of the coward he would not admit to being. Garcin chose to use Pacifism as a more socially acceptable venue, a façade, to mask his life of cowardice in order to gain acceptance from society and respect from his coworkers. Even in death, Garcin does not want to accept that he led a life of cowardice and attempts to redefine his life in the hellish Second Empire drawing room with Estelle and Inez, but as Inez says, “One always dies too soon—or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. Youare—your life, and nothing else,” a purely existentialistic philosophy; Life, once lived, cannot be redone.

Estelle, the young socialite, also conformed to society’s expectations, making herself popular in accordance to society’s rules as she tried to hide the blemish of her impoverished past. She obsessed over her appearance, trying to make herself more desirable and more beautiful to please society’s eye, so she would feel important and well-liked in her high-class circles, but her gregarious attitude, too, created only a false cover for her deep insecurity that “when I can’t see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself to be sure, but it doesn’t help much.” Estelle needed people to look at her and admire her and love her; she could not survive without attention. Estelle placed her being, her essence, her self, in the eyes of other people, gaining her self-worth and self-purpose from their reactions to her beauty; she did not create her self for herself but for other people, to please them and to be admired by them.

Inez, the most existential of the group with her blunt attitude and disregard for social or societal opinions, also exhibited a need for other people, to torture them because she “can’t get on without making people suffer.” Inez compares herself to “a live coal in others’ hearts. When I’m alone I flicker out.” Her dependency on emotionally abusing other people does not coincide with Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism, but unlike Garcin and Estelle, Inez fully acknowledges her sins and her flaws as well as those of the other two individuals with her; like Inez tells Estelle, she can “be as candid as any looking glass,” but Inez still twists the truth in death as she did in life when she turned her lover, Florence, against her husband. She becomes Estelle and Garcin’s “lark-mirror,” saying, “you cannot escape me;” Inez also reveals the dangers of basing one’s self off of what others see, proposing the notion which she implements with Estelle, “Suppose the mirror started telling lies?” By showing Garcin and Estelle the very things about themselves that they cannot bear to look at, Inez, truly does become the torturer with the “frightened” face she mentions when she first comes into the drawing room, and so do Estelle and Garcin, in turn, become her and each others’ torturers, living out, as it were, the theme of the play and Sartre’s personal philosophy that, as Garcin says, “Hell is—other people.”