Noddy
  Junior Member

I suspect of all the contestants, I’m the only one who, having grown up in Scotland in the 1950s, has gone through the experience the author describes. There are I’m sure for many puzzling allusions that are drawn from the Scottish/Glasgow culture of the time. But I’m not voting for the poem because of its recognition factor or its nostalgia.
In this narrative, the poet shows him/her self as a skillful manipulator of iambic tetrameter in the service of creating this myth-like person The Ragman. With his dented bugle sound echoing in the streets he is the Pied Piper and more. This walking purveyor of dream-balloons barters cast-offs and rags for the excited poor, a momentary stay against their straightened circumstances.
But the poet and his ilk cannot join this merry band of dreamers. He has nothing to barter, and The Ragman in retrospect comes to represent dreams deferred, if not indeed denied.
It’s a poem that works by sharp imagery and the lilting tetrameters draw us into that world and support the wistful tone of the poet as s/he comes closer to understanding the personal and symbolic importance of that long-ago event.
For me, the poem transcends its specific historical and cultural moment to grapple with issues of cross-cultural importance. Kudos and thanks to the poet. more »

One comment made about Wordsworth’s poem that I clearly recall when we discussed this in a poetry group at the local library was: “This is only maybe one step up from a Hallmark card.” I still disagree, but I now find it increasingly easier to acknowledge in what ways it might seem so to some modern readers.

I think it’s the ta tum, ta tum, ta tum, ta tum of Wordsworth’s iambic tetrameter lines that have been copied endlessly over time and to less skilful effect. The Hallmark card comment should offer a note of caution to all of us who might want to explore using this meter ourselves in our own poems and have us re-read Wordsworth who shows us how it’s really done more »

Frost does revel in ambiguity, language that like that fork in the road, can be taken at least two ways. That’s why I always find his final verse so intriguing. What’s with that sigh? What kind of sigh? And he knows already he’ll be telling exactly what ages and ages hence? And what kind of difference has the choice he made back then had on his life? Does the sigh mean he wishes he hadn’t made the choice that made all the difference? I don’t know.
But I’ve read myself into the poem at various times, high and low, in my life, and depending on how I’m feeling the poem “means” something different. more »

In its apparent simplicity the poem actually is deceptively complex. From ‘wild mustang’ to ‘wild wild mustang,’ from the half rhymes ‘restrained, tamed’ to the sense that it’s not a horse that’s being addressed at all but a person, it’s a memorable image and a subtle poem. more »

I admire poetry whose apparent simplicity often conceals, like the pond, hidden depths (think William Blake). The poem is for me at once a fable and a vehicle for some important musings on relationships, death, intuitive knowledge and the discovery of surprising sources of meaning. It can stand (withstand) several readings, and with each one I noted yet another detail, another subtle change of tone and voice that added to its haunting ending. It’s crafty and artful both. All we can ask. more »

You are of course correct about the folks on the website in every respect, their motivation and their poetic preferences. Where we part company I think is over the issue of what you call technicality and I’d prefer to call craft. I truly believe we can have tears and technique. The so-called judging criteria that gets dutifully attached every month nudges us toward taking tears and technique into consideration when we’re responding and I tried to do that when responding to your poem. That it came off as heavy-handed to you I regret. I simply subscribe to the notion that every writer/artist has to at some time get to grips with the craft involved in any creative act. It’s clear to me from many readings of your poem you yourself were striving for craft. We’re not so far apart really.
My thanks for your honesty. We can keep the conversation going any time you like! Cheers  more »

Although the poem is at odds with itself both rhythmically and metrically (the abcb slips up in the second verse, recovers and just hangs on; the 5 3 4 3 iambic pattern also slips up in verses 3,4 and 6) and could use another round or two of revisions, for this reader the poem was engaging on a visceral level.
The central metaphor of a legacy, a “carrying forward “ as the poet puts it, that sense of unfulfilled potential finally brought to fulfillment, of debts paid in the very person of the son and his willingness to pick up those”shreds”(shards?),“sedentary” (sedimentary?) aspects of a life less lived than undergone, is forcefully captured in the overall wistful tone of the poem.
Although the momentary lapses of craft cause the poem to stumble and intrude slightly on its overall success, these are more than redeemed in the strong imagery and the elegiac quality of the whole. Ah yes, mothers and sons. more »