due Thursday 9/9

Write descriptions of these two poems. Remember that poems are almost always stories--there is a main character (or there are main characters), the re is some kind of plot, there is some kind of setting, even if these things are merely hinted at.

Lullaby

Someone would like to have you for her child

But you are mine.

Someone would like to rear you on a costly mat

But you are mine.

Someone would like to place you in a camel blanket

But you are mine.

I have you to rear on a torn old mat.

Someone would like to have you as her child

But you are mine.

Akan people (Ghana)

*

You Playmates of Mine

You playmates of mine in the scattered parks of the

city,

small friends from a childhood of long ago:

how we found and like one another, hesitantly,

and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,

spoke with our silence. When we were filled with joy

It belonged to no one: it was simply there.

And how it dissolved among all the adults who passed

by

and in the fears of the endless year.

Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the

carriages;

houses surrounded us, solid but untrue—and none

of them ever knew us. What in the world was real?

Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.

Not even the children . . . But sometimes one,

oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting

ball.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemia (Czech Republic)