Poetry Class

A common assignment in university writing classes is to take a first line from someone else's poem (or any line from someone else's poem, for that matter) and use it as your own first line. The Collins poem that I posted earlier this week utilized a pretty similiar device. Creating this springboard is a terrific way to make a commentary on the other poem or just to get an easy start on your own ideas. It might seem like cheating, but it pays homage to the pieces of poetry and language that are part of the spiritus mundi or collective conciousness or whatever you want to call it. Your safe as long as the other poet is given their due (and is dead).

Try it for yourself with one or all of these lines or one of your own:

My love is like a red, red rose (Robert Burns 1794)

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting (William Wordsworth)

Do not go gentle into that good night (Dylan Thomas)

Through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

I was of three minds, like a tree, in which there are three blackbirds (Wallace Stevens)

Time does not bring relief, you all have lied (Edna St Vincent Millay)

Something there is that doesn't love a wall (Robert Frost)

She walks in beauty, like the night (Byron)


We can post the results throughout the week, if you like. At least, I will post my attempts, and hopefully you will feel inspired to submit yours as well.