The More Things Change . . . Or Stay the Same

I think that the changing of the times is very prominent is some of the poems that were read this week. The poems seem to depart from the traditionally tragic love stories to a more uncertain romantic story. I think the changing of the times was responsible for this uncertain message of love. Instead of somebody heroically dieing or killing themselves over a lost love there is a message of “moving on” so to speak. In Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem, “The Mill”, There seems to be a message of waiting and wondering. In the first two lines this uncertainty is stated quite clearly, “The miller's wife had waited long, The tea was cold, the fire was dead”. With the rise of industrialization it becomes more common for a man to “leave” his wife and then return at an unknown time. The wife still feels the abandonment but has to wonder if that is necessary, this is shown in the third line, “And there might yet be nothing wrong”. The changing times also brought on a new threat of war. Countries were developing new technology that could be used to devastate another land with little effort when compared to centuries before. The new technology could be used for good as well as evil and people were caught in the middle of it. In Yeats’, “An Irish Airman Forsees his Own Death”, the idea of global vulnerability is very obvious. If you do not take the airman literal it can be used to describe countries as well as groups of people. I think that in the changing times people began to trivialize death and shift there allegiance to others such as there country, this can be seen in the third and fourth lines of Yeats’ poem, “Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love”. People that were caught up in the changing of times were more uncertain and began to question their own beliefs.