Review:
There are many poems that were assigned to us, but I chose “Sea Rose” by H.D., which I chose for my second essay that we have assigned because this poem is my favorite among the others. I love debating about women stereotypes, and women’s perfections and imperfections, which the poem is focused on. My essay is mainly on those themes so creating a short imitation of “Sea Rose” will be a good idea since I already analyzed a lot of this poem. For my imitation of the poem, I combined the two themes of women’s perfections and imperfections that shape stereotypical society.
The original poem has lots of imagery which I also included in my imitation of the poem. I tried to follow the similar structure of the original poem. The original starts off with listing the characteristics of the weak and fragile rose, which I tried to start off as well. I used a lot of imagery to give you a picture of the rose. I did give the rose a pronoun because the poem is about how women are seen in society based off the stereotypes. The “dark rusty rose” is to show that the rose is decaying and dying making her weak and “weightless like a feather.” For line 2, I said that she is dancing very weakly which I tried to connect with lines 5 through 8 to show how she has no control over her body because of how weak she is. The wind in the original poem represents the society and how people in society control women in following their expectations. I made this point clear in the second stanza saying how the wind (society) hits the rose (women) and controlling her movements to paths that societies want the women to follow. In the last stanza, I tried to connect its back to the last stanza in the original. In the original poem, H.D. compares the spice-rose which are considered beautiful and perfect to the rotting rose which is seen as imperfect. For my imitation for that part, I tried to make it seem as if the weak rose saw the perfect spice-rose as perfection but couldn’t relate to that cause of society sees her as imperfect for having flaws and not meeting their exceptions. I also tried to make it seem as the flawed rose is admiring the perfect rose to point out how many women in the world want to be perfect for society, but because of their flaws that are seen as different.
For my imitation on “Sea Rose,” I used a few poetic elements H.D. also used for the poem. H.D. used a lot of imagery, which I also incorporated for my imitation. In the second stanza of my imitation, I wanted to mainly use imagery to show how the wind is controlling the roses movements and guiding it to certain directions to compare it in the real world on how society is controlling women and how they should be. I characterized the flawed rose as H.D. did and using simile to compare woman to the “dark dusty rose,” and then compared the weight of the rose to a feather to show its weakness. H.D. didn’t have much of a rhythm in “Sea Rose,” so I didn’t really focus on having a rhyming scheme. My focus was on the imagery, comparison between women and roses, and women stereotypes.
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Gurranvir Kaur
Introduction to Poetry 