hat I did. With guidance, many people can see a poem the way another looks at it. However, a poem is still never the same for any two people. There is always that “something more” on which no one can ever quite put their fingertips. This is what poetry is. The feelings that we get deep inside, the involuntary ones that we can never help but feel, those are the ones that give us the real feelings for a poem.In example, in the same poem as before, my initial feeling was one of sympathy for the mother and her children. As revelations were told, it changed with the author to that same feeling of justice she must have felt as her father was fired. I understand the childish glee at seeing revenge in life taken out on someone who has hurt us. Knowing, like Olds must have known later on, that the mother was teaching her children something- namely hatred- that she really should not but cannot help, I felt a sort of sadness. The mental images of the bums dole out the pity and calm maturity of a grown woman as she remembers her father when she was very young.These emotions are just a few prominent ones of the many that raked my mind as I read and reread “The Victims.” The mixture of them all come to form an overall mood for the poem that nobody else can quite duplicate. This sentiment cannot be expressed in words, nor can it be kept to oneself. This sort of reaction to a poem shows how a person sees it from the inside. When reading a piece of poetry, the reader is transported into the poem by these feelings and emotions.As one can see, there is a great distinction between a reaction to a poem, and its train of thought to come to a conclusion, and the unconscious feelings one receives from a poem, whether they be physical, emotional, or otherwise. When reading literature, these ideas are ever present. In poetry, there is never a “wrong” or “right” answer as to what feeling a poem convey...
