Poetry Responce #3 for the 3rd Quarter/I'm Presently Lamenting the Lack of Snow

Virginia Byde Pacetti

Mrs. Jernigan

AP English IV

7 February 2011

Poetry Response #3-Second Semester

            Moira Egan wrote a dramatic monologue entitled “Dear Mr. Merrill.” The speaker currently resides in Olympia, Greece, although by her language, need to clarify her location, and admission of newly exploring staple art pieces of the city, it seems she permanently resides, or at the very least hails from somewhere else, possibly the states. Egan leads me to believe the woman is most likely an art professor, and of middle age. The poem is addressed as a letter to Mr. Merrill, a man who has also observed art in Olympia. She first apologizes for the “informality of this letter.” And to some extent this clarification indeed implies to the letter, if examined from a purely poetic standpoint. The poet herself may be apologizing to the reader. While there are five stanzas each compromised of six lines each, the structure becomes more lax from there. The writer makes no attempt at an overall common rhythm or syllabic parallelism.  A common rhyme scheme shell of ABABCC only comes to full fruition in stanza four. Elsewhere inexact appears: “lines” with “shine,” “pomegranate’s” with “sonnet,” and “him” with “him.” Other times the speaker abandons rhyming altogether.

            The most common feature in this story would be the allusions, most of which are Greek in origin and relate to the reader a sense of unfulfilled sexual passion. She cites her desire to render a statue of Hermes holding grapes (a symbol of pampering and sometimes of bondage of the one holding the fruit) into her own Pygmalion statue (Pygmalion carved a statue of a perfect woman and then married it turning it to life).  And later after expanding greatly on the promiscuous dreams that revolved one of her students, she references a pomegranate, the fruit Persephone ate after being taken to the Underworld against her will to serve as Hades’ Queen. Yet, despite what I might consider bleakness for her love life on the horizon, the story lacks actual evidence to any real love life, she finishes the poem positively: “Love held tight in a sonnet.”