"The Man with Night Sweats" by Thom Gunn

The persona here is dealing with some internal issue. Something that is happening is resulting in night sweats for this person. Night sweats are the reaction to the situation, therefore, a certain level of wisdom can be found in this. The wisdom and poignancy go hand in hand because the sharpest part of the piece is not given explicitly, but it is the fact that he or she is living with this thing. "A world of wonders in each challenge to the skin. i cannot but be sorry the given shield was cracked, my mind reduced to hurry, my flesh reduced and wrecked." The reaction, night sweats, tears, tantrums, and even silence is where the poignancy and wisdom are found. It is also where I and all people should find themselves; the time of solitude in which you are the only one surrounding yourself.

"America" by Allen Ginsberg

This piece is an interesting one. The persona created is exercising free speech to speak wisdom into the ears and eyes of his or her listeners. The topic of America is potent and the apparent point of view of the speaker is shared by many. He or she is questioning America'a success and it is due to a cascade effect of multiple wrong-doings. "America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. I don't feel good don't bother me. I won't write my poem till I'm in the right mind."

"We Wear the Mask" by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

The most poignant part of this poem is the title. We mask ourselves off from the world by changing our masks according do our day to day agenda. We masks ourselves for privacy because our own sense of self-hood relies on this mask. The speaker captures a "universal persona" through her "imaginative power." "We wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes- this debt we pay to human guile..."

"Incident" by Countee Cullen

Controversy is Lyric Life. This particular piece speaks of just that. The persona of the speaker of the poem is one of disbelief and scorn. "Now I was eight and very small, and he was no whit bigger, and so I smiled, but he poked out his tongue, and called me, "Nigger." The level of elatededness of the speaker went from positive to negative in an instant. One word provides the whole message of the poem; the wisdom of the poem lies within the experience of the individual, the speaker. The creation of that very word was as a result of an incident.

"I Am" by John Claire

I Am. All that we can be in life and all that we wish to attain and hopefully someday will are products of what we know and who we are. I Am. The speaker is alone in his or her struggle through life; alone in the sense that he or she is really the only way that can relate to whatever is happening. We are alone that way as well. The world is filled with a vast amount of vanity and selfishness and not enough selflessness, and as a result we become the sole "self-consumer of our woes." The world revolves around what it knows regardless of the life cycle.

"Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races" by Lorna Dee Cervantes

Cervantes speaks of the truth of racism and prejudice's. There is wisdom and poignancy throughout the poem. The accounting of these political opinions creates the persona of the speaker; could it even be Cervantes herself? "I'am not a revolutionary. I don't even like political poems. Do you think I can believe in a war between races? I can deny it. I can forget about it when I'm safe, living on my own continent of harmony and home, but I'am not there." It is statements like this one, with a high degree of "politicalness", that I find myself in. This world would be a perfect one if the ideas of distinction and opression ceased to exist.

"A Marriage" by Michael Blumenthal

The author of this poem is obviously describing a marriage. He describes it a ceiling that needs to continuously held up by the husband and wife, if not the house will fall. The ceiling represents the shared love of the matrimony and the house describes the marriage itself. If the ceiling falls then the love is no longer shared and the marriage ceases to exist. I can relate to this poem, not because I'm married or have been before, but because I once witnessed the destruction of a house which lead to the dissolution of my parent's marriage. Blumenthal hits the nail on the ehad with this description of a marriage because that is exactly what marriage is about, carrying on when your other cannot.

"The Garden of Love" by William Blake

My initial impression of this poem, because of the title, was that it would a positive outlook on one's world of love, but instead it was more like a good dream gone bad, maybe even a nightmare. What has driven the speaker to feel this way? I can only think of some sort of heartbreak, and I say this because I immediately thought of my last relationship after reading this piece. I felt apart of the speaker's dream or account of the garden of love. "And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys & desires." That was the last stanza of the poem and it put the icing on the cake for me. That lyric penetrated me because it was so poignant; it was filled with so much pain, emotion, and a desire for things to be good again. The speaker wants it to be his or her time again, just as I did when my relationship ended.

"Up" by Margaret Atwood

The speaker of the poem is expressing a sense of confusion. Did he ar she commit some regretful act or does the speaker really have a fear of what lies out there? It seems as of he or she if having an internal battle about the pros and cons of living their own life. Sometimes they want to get UP and other times they have nothing to leave for, but death. There is nothing left to fear, but DEATH itself, and then we get up. The speaker is having a dialogue with their mind and is conjuring up these situations that will cause him or her to, "[move] an arm or the head." He or she cannot "forget all that and get up." This last line stuck with me and made me drop my jaw out of excitement, "Now here's a good one: you're lying on you deathbed. You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed to all these years to forgive." We will never know if the speaker needs to forgive themself for something or is it someone or something else that is hindering the speaker's productivity?

"Dusting" by Julia Alvarez

The speaker of this poem has the persona of a child; a child coming of age and becoming more aware of his of her surroundings. They want to be heard in the worst way. "Each morning I wrote my name." The speaker does this everyday only to have it dusted away by his or her mother. The last stanza of the poem proved to be the most poignant for me, "My name was swallowed in the towel...her, anonymous," that part surprised me a bit. The speaker seemed to be challenging his or her mother's authority because the name was written every morning, but the mother kept on erasing the name. The name was a way of establishing identity and a fear existed in the destruction of the "art," he or she did not want to "be like her, anonymous." I just have one question. Does the title refer to the actual erasing of the speaker's name or does it represent the dusting of the mother's identity making her anonymous?