"Yoko" "Dover Beach" "My Lover the Sea"

"Poetry is the silent voice that is heard everywhere inside of us..." - Unknow
The doorway to the soul...

Here it comes again another interesting class with Shawn. Today we read three poems and I really enjoyed them. The first one was called “Yoko” written by Thom Gunn, while the second one was called “Dover Beach” written by Matthew Arnold; whereas the last one was called “My Lover the Sea” written by Reinaldo Arenas. I never thought that I am going to like the pomes as much as I do now since I always was interested in short fictions and rarely in reading poems. When I was in primary school my teacher used to read to us short poems and she wanted us to memorize. I had difficulties in memorizing every single word of the poem so that was the most difficult part of it.  On the other hand, when she asked me to recite the poem I started to say it by my own words and all my classmates were laughing. I guess that was the reason why I did not like them. Anyhow, the poems that we read today in class were from different authors and they provided me with lots of emotions. Now I am going to write about each of them separately by expressing my thoughts and feelings…

" Yoko"-Thom Gunn

THE AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY

     Thom Gunn was born on August, 1929 in England. His father Herbert Smith and his mother Ann Charlotte were both journalists. When he was only ten years old, they divorced. Later on, his mother commits suicide and that was the reason why he started to love reading. He became interested in the work of Christopher Marlowe, John Keats, John Milton, and Alfred Tennyson, and as well as other prose writers. As a child together with his father he travelled all around the world and served in the British Army for two years. In addition, he attended University College School in Hampstead, in London. He studied English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge and graduated in 1953. As soon as he graduated from the college, he published his first collection of poems called “Fighting terms”.  In 1954, Gunn decided to move to the United States where he begun graduate study at Stanford University. In 1957 he published his second collection called “The Sense of Movement”. Most of his life he spent in America. Gunn said, "Being English is very important to me since I spent my first twenty-five years in England. On the other hand … living in America is very important to me too, since I have spent more than half my life in this country.  On the other hand, he was interested in different issues such as homosexuality and exploration of drugs. Many of his friends died from AIDS, therefore in “The Man with Night Sweats" and "In Time of Plague” he wrote about AIDS and how people face death. His final book of poetry was “Boss Cupid” published on 2000. He received many literature awards such as the Levinson Prize, an Arts Council of Great Britain Award, a Rockefeller Award, the W. H. Smith Award, the PEN (Los Angeles) Prize for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Prize etc. Consequently, because of acute polysubstance (he was a user of methamphetamine) he dies in 2004. 

ANALYSIS OF THE POEM “YOKO”

What grabbed my attention right at the beginning of the poem is the title of it “Yoko”. I don’t know why! Maybe it is because I have never heard it before and somehow immediately made me think of Japanese and Chinese world.  Actually, I made some research because I wanted to know what does the name “Yoko” means. I found out that it is a Japanese girl name and means “good girl” and “sun child”. It seems to be unique and it is used only in Japan. Now going back to the poem as we discussed in class the speaker of it is a dog. It is the first time that I read a poem in a way written by a dog. It is the dog, the one who is narrating about his life and his owner. Here in this poem I noticed the dog a little bit scared because of the firecrackers mentioned in the poem. In the real life in many events we hear firecrackers and we too as humans sometimes are scared of them. But here the dog is extremely afraid and it is mystified by them. He cannot even find a tranquil place where to hide. Even though the dog tried to avoid them, he cannot stop thinking of them. On the other hand, there it comes the part when the dog tells the readers about its owner and how much he loves him/her. I never get to understand if the owner of the dog is male or female. Anyhow, the relationship between the pets and humans is untouchable. They consider each other as a part of their daily lives and cannot live without each other. In today’s society dogs are so much part of humans. The relationship they create between each other no one can interfere. It is like a child who cannot live without its mom because he/she is used to have her around. People who own pets they treat them as their own children, they even speak to them. For instance, when they are feeling lonely they start to talk to them and suddenly they become close friends.

It is him, my leader, my love
Now I can smell him, what a good man he is
As he enters I yodel with happiness
I care about him more than anything

 

The lines which I highlighted in red color are the best ones for me. From these lines we can see that Yoko cares and loves its owner. Moreover, “he can smell what good man he is”. I can see here that that dog knows every single step of human so Yoko in this case he can even the smell the goodness of its owner. For Yoko its owner is everything and cannot even see itself without him. Finally, I just want to share some quotes related to dogs: 

Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in?  I think that is how dogs spend their lives.  ~Sue Murphy~

If dogs could talk, perhaps we would find it as hard to get along with them as we do with people.  ~Karel Čapek~

Happiness is a warm puppy.  ~Charles M. Schulz~

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.  ~Christopher Morley~