Baby Villon Essay

Upon my initial reading of “Baby Villon” by Philip Levine the meaning of the poem was completely lost on me. However, after reading it over very carefully, it slowly started to unravel and make more sense to me. I believe that this poem is about a lightweight boxer who is having a conversation with his cousin whom he has only met for the first time. While this is definitely a bit of a reach in terms of interpretation, I believe that I can solidly defend that idea with evidence from the poem. Not only is he a lightweight boxer, but he apparently is also multiracial which is what I believe the first stanza is referencing.

The first stanza is initially what threw me off. He’s “robbed” in Bangkok “because he’s white,” in London “because he’s black,” and in Barcelona and Paris for being a “Jew” and an “Arab.” Initially I had no idea how to interpret this unless the character being described really is all of those things at once (stranger things have happened), and I was also confused as to why he would be in all of those places. The first two lines of the next stanza began to clear that up for me though and are what led me to assuming that the character being described might very well be a lightweight boxer. The lines are “he holds up seven thick little fingers to show me he’s rated seventh in the world.” Now I understand that that could literally be referring to anything, but I really just can’t help making the connection. There’s so much referencing to fighting throughout the poem, including at the end of the first stanza where it’s describing how “everywhere and at all times” he’s facing discrimination, yet always “he fights back.”

The next stanza, which is the stanza in which we find out that the character being described and the speaker of the poem are related (cousins), is where I made my connection to perhaps he really could be representative of all of those different groups that were being discriminated against in the first stanza. The reason I made this connection is because the speaker says the character, who I believe to be Baby Villon (more on that later), “talks of the war in North Africa,” and through my own personal knowledge I am aware many different groups of people are represented in that area of Africa (Arabs, white, black, Jews, even small groups of black Jews) so it could very well be possible that this character being described is some strange cocktail of all of the people that are represented in that part of the continent. I don’t know though, I really could just be pulling at nothing.

The fifth stanza is where I really began to solidify my idea that this was indeed a fighter of some sort. Baby Villon tells the speaker he “should never disparage the stiff bristles that guard the head of the fighter. Then, in the sixth stanza, when the fighter is being described he is described as “five feet two” and “116 pounds,” which is tiny. This is what made me assume that he was the character Baby Villon, because he is kind of a small man and it could be an endearing nickname.

Overall, the poem seems to have a rather melancholy vibe to it. I get the impression that perhaps Baby Villon is some sort of tragic figure whose life, destroyed by fighting and war, is defined by fighting in multiple aspects. It definitely seems as if the speaker pities him in a sense for all the pain that he’s gone through, whether emotional or physical. The tone of the poem definitely leads me to thinking it is pity that leads the speaker’s opinion of his cousin.

"The Red Wheelbarrow" William Carlos Williams

I chose to look at “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams this week. I really like this poem and was a bit apprehensive about writing on it since it’s so short, but I actually think the shortness works in the poem’s advantage in this case. I think the simplicity of the poem itself speaks bounds as to what the author may have been trying to state (if he was trying to say anything at all). The poem itself can be read as a simple sentence, “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.” (Booth 554) I’m not entirely sure what drew me to this poem, perhaps it was the act that after reading it I couldn’t help reading it over and over and repeating it in my head. So, how much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside white chickens? To me, it seems like there is no real end to what you could do with a wheelbarrow on a farm. You could pick all of your crops and throw them in, or dig up some soil and take it to an area that you’re trying to grow things in just as a couple of examples. The reason I like the simplicity of this poem so much is it leaves a lot of room for the reader to interpret what exactly depends upon a red wheelbarrow, and, at least for me, reading the poem got me thinking about some really serene mental imagery having to do with a farm. I enjoyed that a lot.

Woodchucks

Something about reading the poem "Woodchucks" by Maxine Kumin really made me wonder if I've got it all together inside my head. For some reason, I couldn't help finding this poem strangely hilarious even though I'm pretty sure that was not the author's intent at all. I have a feeling that a lot of the humor I found in it spawns from my love for the movie Caddy Shack, and my inability to separate the idea of gassing woodchucks with Bill Murray's character and the gophers. I think I drew this comparison because of how serious the narrator/point of perspective is about taking out these Woodchucks.

"They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course and then took over the vegetable patch nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots. The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling to the feel of the .22, the bullets' neat noses." (10-14 Kumin)

Another aspect of the poem that made me make the comparison was the sheer enjoyment the narrator seems to be getting from killing off the family of woodchucks. The line "O one-two-three the murder inside me rose up hard" (22-23) seems to be a statement of enjoyment; I almost imagine the person singing it to themselves in a happy melody. Then the last line took away a bit of the humor for me, and made the poem seem a little more serious. “If only they’d all consented to die unseen gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.” (29-30) This last line of the poem struck a chord because it indicates that the woodchucks did NOT consent to being gassed, and gave them a bit more of a role as something to empathize with. Who wants to be gassed? Who wouldn’t fight for their right to live? It does not matter if you’re human or not, every living thing wants to continue living (most of the time). I really like this poem because of my own twisted humor, but also because of how the last line made me think.