Optimus2g

I just had to share this on the blogs today. I experienced this sensation today while student teaching today at Francis Lewis HS. I was standing at the front of the classroom, at the very beginning of class, and some of the students had crowded around me to see their grades in my gradebook. At that very moment, I felt this EERY sense of deja vu. I had a dream where I imagined this exact scenario, and I didn't recall it until that moment. It felt COMPLETELY SURREAL. I wanted to just sit down and let it sink in for a second, but a class of ninth graders at 9 am won't exactly stand for that---by the way they are a GREAT class; I'm very lucky in that regard--no degenerates among them, well at least those who are don't show up! lol. Has anyone else experienced this before? I'm actually wrapping back around to the beginning of the blogs, when I wrote about this exact scenario in August. How appropriate! Discuss....hmmmnnn.....("Fascinating...", to quote Mr. Spock!)

This is kind of a surreal experience---Salvador Dali would be proud! Writing about the closing of these blogs, something which we've been doing since August of last year, is bitter-sweet in a way. Look, those of you who know me will probably say that he's REALLY lost it now while reading this, but wait: The blogs have been fun--not that they weren't before (Prof. Tougaw knows I'm just kidding!) whenever we've just sat down and written what was on our minds with respect to what we thought the supposed rationales were behind our dreams.

We should all be proud in a way. I mean look at tlike this: We've ALL come up with a TON of convoluted shit! Some of us took these things back to our childhoods. Others, have reflected upon failed relationships and dead relatives, just to name a few popular topics. We've also tried to tie some theory up into this dream-a-thonic bitch (please excuse the misogynistic metaphor). In the end it all came to down to this...(Please excuse me for this, but I know that I'm sounding more like John by the word---HOLY SHIT!!)---we are all trying to come to grips with certain aspects of our selves, deep within our unconscious psyches, regardless of whether we realize this or not. Our waking lives serve to spur us on with respect to coming up with more things to dream about. Repressed thought plays into this, and sometimes they don't--sorry Siggy!! (that's what they called him in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure")

I'll leave you cats out there with this last tidbit before signing off for the semester: Dreams are a smorgasbord of desire, regret, overactive minds repeating things for no particular reason--at least that we know of, and memory consolidation (to use a scientific word and pacify my scientifc side). If we get nothing else from our experiences documenting our dreams, we can at least realize that we are all going to look back at this and realize that dreams are truly the only aspects of oursleves that transcend the bounds of reality. Sometimes "escaping" from ourselves into ourselves is necessary in order for us to come to grips with who we all really are.

OK had enough? See the YOUTUBE CLIP BELOW for more of what I mean with respect to our friend Siggy...lol. Bill & Ted fans you better not blink (pay attention to the 0:24 second mark) !!

To quote Bugs Bunny!! That's all folks!!

Has anyone ever had a dream in which they envision the same scenario in many different ways over the course of the same night/dream? Is it just me, or do I have an overactive guilt complex..wait don't answer that one. Anyone who's read my psychobabble over the course of the past semester can attest to the fact that I readily admit---I could use a shrink to "talk out" my relationship issues! (it's pathetic, i know...lol @ myself)

I've repeated scenarios in which I can see myself doing things differently, but with the same result over and over and over again (breaking up SUCKS, but being dumped is even WORSE). No matter what I say or do differently each time---the end result is always the same---I get screwed (figuratively speaking of course for you pervs out there with the hairy hands!).

I'll try and see, through priming, if this dream of mine can become lucid if I experience it anymore. I guess our psyches just tend to repeat shit that is stuck in our memories---it's just never been expurgated from my "internal hard drive" so to speak, to use a "techie" metapor. Fuck Frued I say...maybe I can open a clinic!

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I feel both a sense of apprehension and excitement in anticipation of this fast approaching conference, which is only 2 days away. I feel more prepared due to the amount of work that we've put into this, both contenet-wise and stylistically. The group presentation work which we worked on at the begining of the year (way back in the Fall) will now benefit us immensely for this conference. The key is getting the jitters out, which the rehearsal will hopefully do tomorrow.

Personally, I feel that my student teaching experience has prepared me for the role of Moderator extremely well because I am now more familiar with speaking in front of large groups of students (about 60 per day). I researched the work of the 5 speakers that I will introduce and have prepared a brief introductory speech as well (SEE THE DOWNLOADABLE LINK ON TOP OF THE PAGE OR THE TEXT AT THE BOTTOM). I encourage anyone with suggestions for me to post them here, after reading my prepared introductory speech for Roundtable #2-Words & Pictures: Representing the Elusive Dream. Thank you and best wishes to everyone in performing their given part for the conference on Wednesday.

“Dreams are very elusive. It is as if they are aware that they don’t belong to the realm of waking consciousness and are eager to get back into the darkness from whence they came […] Temporal sequences seem jumbled and juxtaposed in strange ways” (26). –Appreciating Dreams by Montague Ullman (Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University)

This quote demonstrates the difficulty of capturing dreams in words or pictures. Their amorphous nature has captured the imaginations of people the world over. Theorists, authors, artists, and film makers have all thrown their figurative hats into the ring of dream theory.

Each of our speakers will address the question of how dreams are represented with respect to differing visual mediums. Tina Ramos will discuss our blogs, which we have been working on as a class since the end of August of last year until now. They reflect our class’s attempts at capturing the elusive feeling of describing our dreams and their subsequent effects on our waking lives. They range from the absurd to the heart wrenching and the solemn to the comical. Why this variation you may ask? The answer lies within the plastic nature of our dreams themselves which provides the spark for these types of dreams in the first place.

Doreen Deignan has explored this concept in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled. Ishiguro has found a new way to use dreams to create an environment that is both disorienting and familiar. His writing in the "language of Dreams" is the glue that links the form and the content in his novel. The world which Ishiguro has created is one in which the writer’s imagination converges with a setting that is as surreal as it is recognizable, turning the reader’s conception of what is real and what isn’t upside down in the process.

Caroline Yu has focused upon the surrealistic art of Salvador Dali, which is directly influenced by Sigmund Freud and aims to represent the hidden desires which are encoded in dreams. Dali’s stated desire "to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality" made him an instant star among the Surrealists, until he proved to be too surreal even for their tastes. This, likewise, aims to capture the hazy sensation of dreaming that teeters on the brink of reality and the fantastic.

Melissa Chen has focused her effort on describing how the contemporary medium of anime is dramatizing Japanese cultural and historical ideas about dreams on the screen. She discusses how one specific aspect of anime reflects the current conflicting approaches to dream theory—that is the “interpretive” and “scientific” approaches. She discusses how the interpretive approach is more “spiritual” in nature and compares this to the scientific approach which is seen as being the result of material causes.

Maria Hartolfilis discusses how film makers, such as Ingmar Bergman, have used the film making medium to portray dreams as being more concrete and less tactile. She discusses the long tradition of filmmakers incorporating psychological elements when constructing their films so that their audiences may gain deeper insight into their own innermost feelings and desires.

We all can learn more about the elusive concept of dreams by understanding how each of these respective mediums functions with respect to capturing something, which by its very definition is nebulous and fluid. By themselves, these mediums may not make the case for representing dreams in a more concrete fashion, however taken as a whole they can teach us more about the very nature of dreams themselves, but our own individual psyches as well in the process. We welcome you to explore these ideas with us…

I had a dream where I was just walking around and wasn't aware of where I was at any given moment other than knowing that I was constantly moving around without knowing where I was going. The colors around me would change and I would try to sit down, but the sense of disorientation was too great for me to overcome. I get this sense sometimes in waking life when all this shit that I'm bombarded with at Francis Lewis H.S. and here at Q.C. becomes too overwhelming for me. I don't sit down though, even though I'd like to. My worlkload has just gotten crazy and there are times where I don't know if I'm coming or going. I suppose that this is the manifestation of my waking life problems into my dreamscapes. It would be cool if I were lucid during this. I'll actually try to do this once we're done (Too bad that's not until the end of June for me...lol).

My boss at work has been driving me crazy lately. I quit my Friday shift to focus more on school and I got screwed over on the weekends because of an ownership change. To make a long story short, the new owner promised to leave me alone, and then he went back on his word. My boss is a good guy, who's stuck in the middle admittedly, however he should've showed me more resepct than he did by calling me and telling me what this new guy wants me to do when he knows pefectly well that I won't do it. I didn't care anymore and called him and said that you can do what you want, but if you don't give me an assignment that I can handle after going back on your word then I guess you're losing an employee. He knew that I was serious and I was proud of myself for once--I actually stood up for myself.

I dreamed about quitting on these bastards "Scarface style" (the famous character from Half-Baked). I actually told my boss off in my dreams and they begged me to come back...which wasn't exactly the case in waking life, but I did get the assignment that I requested. I've been with them for a bit now and felt that I had enough cache to request what I wanted, which I actually got (Thank God). Here's that famous scene from "Half Baked" where Scarface quits in style, doing something which we ALL wish that we could do!

Here are my two cents. Take 'em for what they;re worth. The web project was not what I thought it would be. I probably had the worst webpage in our class. I think I started to get the hang of it at the end--specifically the last couple of days, but it didn't turn out as well as I thought it would or could. The jargon got me at first and then the heavy toll of my student teaching added to my job on the weekend both combined to exert a heavy toll upon me. These factors--not to make excuses, but hey I gotta defend myself--combined to make my end result one that wasn't as good as it could have been. If it's not too late I'll try to improve upon it some, but I wish we had more time to work on this then we did. The tutorial should have been given earlier in the semester so we didn't have to rush the way that we did, but what do I know?...

I had a dream where I was just going through a cycle of evernts that I had recently undergone, "rapid fire" stlye. I would jump from one event to the next--without any rhyme or reason to what I was doing--it was based solely on my recent experiences the last few days. It seemed to be mental regurgitation or "diarrhea" of the dream plane, if such a thing exists. Lately things have been such a blur to me that it is no coincidence that this dream reflects this point. Has anyone else experienced this sensation where it seems that your recent memories were thrown into a blender and you could recall excerpts of these events like I did for a few moments upon awakening?

I had a dream a couple of weeks ago where I was walking down the street in my old neighborhood in Valley Stream, by my old elementary school, at 3 or 4 in the morning/night (At least that's the time it seemed to be to me in case you are interested in the specifics of the hour). I was walking and all of a sudden my cell phone went off at and I looked on the caller ID and it was my ex-fiancee. Before I could answer I woke up. That's all I can remember from that point on. Have I gone crazy? You decide. My mind seems to be playing tricks on me lately. Spatial disorientation seems to be a constant theme of my dreams--as well as in waking life now too (that certain friend who called me on the weekend and woke me up from my beauty sleep!!!! I didn;t know where I was!!), it seems (lol). Discuss....

This is obviously a big portion of our grade (30%), but it's not like it's something that we're doing for the first time. It's based on our research papers that we've spent MONTHS working on. We should all be starting off in a good place as the result of all the hard work that we, our writing groups, and the Professor put into writing and revising them. In speaking with Prof. Tougaw, this project will be a condensation of our papers to a web document consisting of no more than 1,500 words---making it roughly a third the length of our papers. We'll be adding images & links that correspond to the various sections in our papers that would arouse any specific interests, the way we would if we were blogging, except it will be on a website.

I would imagine that some basic knowledge of HTML will come in handy, but without it I doubt that it would screw people's course projects up (just correlate it to the blogs). I've already started reducing my paper down, using the MS Word auto summarize feature, to see what it would look like if I only used it to shorten my paper. It helped a little, but not that much, when I saw how some of the things that it chose were not things that I would want to include in the final version of the web project document. Needless to say, I'm going to have to work on this a lot more to get it to where I want it, and not where MS Word wants it.

I feel confident in working on this, but would like some guidance during class in narrowing down the scope of what I have somewhat. Hopefully we can get some feedback and assistance on this when we come back, but we won't have much time when we do because the class and the semester, for that matter, are rapidly coming down to a close (would you believe that?).

While waiting for the official email from Prof. Tougaw about this final major project, which is due before the conference on May 16th, we should all start to "trim down" our research papers to their bare essentials and look up images & links (I'd aim for 5 of each right now) that would be most appropriate for visitors who would be interested in our respective topics for the course project website. In the meantime, if anyone is interested in brushing up on their HTML skills, here's a link that might come in handy (if it's even necessary). I've used this website over the years to help me hone my own HTML skills---or lack thereof. I think you'll find it handy, regardless of if we even need it for this class. But hey, who the hell am I to make such a bold statement? As the great LaVar Burton said: "But you don't have to take MY word for it!" Check it out...HTML:An Interactive Tutorial

The second part of this dream was also very realistic. My ex, all of a sudden, has a new man, who comes into the room where she was verbally scathing me and starts to beat me down, interrogation style. All of a sudden, she jumps into the fray and starts to kick my ass too, making me feel like a total piece of crap! During the dream I felt a mixture of sadness, despair, betrayal, hopelessness, and anger. It's all proabably related to the guilt I carry around during waking life, but keep to myself.

On the vain side, the strange thing about this guy was that he was not better looking than me (not that I'm arrogant about my looks---I think I'm average lookin'---but I know a better looking dude when I see one, especially when it relates my ex). I would have at least expected her to "trade up", but I thought to myself, "was this the best that she could do?" I was thinking about this, mind you AFTER I woke up, and NOT during the ass whopin' that the two of them gave me during the dream. It felt SO weird, and made me want to check and see if I was in the looney bin when I woke up afterwards. I just hope that this was a dream that was based on my over active psyche, and pray that it is in NO WAY true. If it is, then this dude better prepare for a beat down from me in waking life, provided I find out who the bastard is.

P.S. One more thing: Oh yeah, my ex-fiancée was beating me and egged on the new guy to kick my ass with a virulence that was reserved for serial killers. It made me feel like I was her life-long enemy or something, which really bummed me out during the dream and after I woke up, considering all the time we spent together and the memories that we shared. Ugh...

I was dreaming that my ex-fiancée was shouting at me and was grabbing me and screaming at me how I was a "failure" and was "no good." I was sitting in a room and she just came in and began a blistering barrage of bullshit that I could not withstand. In the dream I was underneath her and she was directly in front of my face, no more than a few inches away. It felt very real and shocked me into waking up. I fell asleep again and then continued to experience something even stranger when this dream continued. This happened about 2 weeks ago and has lingered with me since then. I'm not sure if the second part of this dream occurred on the same night or the night after. I should have written it down in a dream journal, which may make things like this easier to recall when it comes time to transcribe it for the sake of the blogs. I'll say this though: The dream did NOT feel surreal. It felt as if she were right there in front of me.

I've always had dreams in which I pictured myself dying young--specifically during my 20s, which is scary since I'm at that stage right now. I've only revealed this recurring dream to my cousin and maybe my brother since he may have been with my cousin and I in his room when I told him, if I can remember correctly. I do know for a fact though that I did tell my cousin. He was very surprised to hear this from me when I revealed this to him about 3 or 4 years ago. He said the typically cliched things one would expect to hear, such as: "God forbid" and "Don't say that" and not to forget "It was just a dream."

The scary thing is that I have had a couple of close calls over the years and thank God nothing happened, but I always had this nightmare lingering in the back of my head. I try not to talk about it, but it pops up from time to time. I'm sure I'm not the only one out there that has dreams that come true or painfully close to coming true, so much so that they make you think that you actually saw a glimpse of your own future---which by the way has happened to me, to make this even creepier.

Continuing with the theme of recurring dreams dating from my childhood, in this blog I'll recall the dreams that I had in which I was falling from the sky. Much like the dreams in which I was shot, I woke immediately upon experiencing this sensation. This primal fear may be just a manifestation of the racial dreams that Carl Jeung theorized and wrote about that all human beings have. I would almost always experience this sensation while I'm at the highpoint (no pun intended) of my dream. This is proabably one of the more common dreams that people have had, I'd venture to guess, because of the universal terror that all human beings associate with falling from the sky--unless you're a sky diver, but I think they're afraid too--why else would they carry parachutes then (the pussies)?

I would have these dreams more often as I was in tense moods and would almost always wake up in a cold sweat--even if it was the dead of winter. The good thing is that I almost always forgot about them moments after awakening, but the terror would still remain. I guess that this lends credence to the theory about what those who know me say about me: I AM a tight ass. It's times like these that I wish I was as laid back as Willy Nelson and Snoop, if you knowm' sayin'...

P.S. Any one got any "Maui Wowie" aroun' here? If so please contact me usin' my...*..umm-umm..*..blog alias. Much obliged!! (check out the 1:12 mark below)

I remember having dreams when I was a little kid that were related to attending funerals. When I was little I remember seeing some Judd Hirsch movie on channel 7, on late at night, in which he gets shot and killed or something. I then remember having this morbid scene being re-enacted in my dreams of being in attendance at a funeral and seeing all the crying going on around me and feeling as upset as the rest of the people at the funeral. I don't know what to attribute this to. Fortunately, I haven't attended many funerals of close relatives, so I'm not able to relate to this experience as well as others may be able to. To quote Mr. Spock from Star Trek: fascinating....Discuss my compadres...

Have you ever had a dream in which you were someplace else and upon waking were astonished to be in your own bed? I was thinking about this and can recall experiencing this feeling several times over the years, but have never spoken about it to anyone else (SEE, this class is good for something after all! just kidding Professor!).

Most often the dream would work like this: I'd be dreaming as if I were in waking life and would be doing routine things and then would wake up all of a sudden and be shocked to be at home and in bed. I've never really thought about this much, until now, but this could have been a great topic for someone to have investigated in their research paper. I guess it could be termed as being "spatial displacement sensation upon waking syndrome" or something along those convoluted lines. All kidding aside though, has anyone else ever experienced this kind of dream before?

I could have reviewed more, but fell asleep due to sheer exhaustion from Parent-Teacher conference night at Francis Lewis High School, the night before the exam. I managed to get 5 hours of sleep and made it to the exam about 20 minutes early. I felt while I was taking the identification part of the exam that I was going to do well after immediately identifying the pasages of Sir Gawain and Beowulf. I then proceeded to find passages from "To the Lighthouse," by VIrginia Woolf and then one from James Joyce's "The Dead." These 4 got me even moe excited when I spotted the Whitman excerpt from "Song of Myself." I think I got one with Transcendental aspects to it, that I attributed to Thoreau. The good news ended there though for me. I misidentified the poem by Andrew Marvell titled, "To His Coy Mistress" as being by Kipling! Woops! I saw the Ganges river line and thought of the amount of time that Kipling spent in India, which completely threw me off. I also mistook the Sylvia Plath poem at the beginning as being by Phyllis Whatley, which also completely threw me off. I think there was a Donne poem in there too, which I might have messed up on, but I can't remember at this point anymore.

On Part II, with the essay, I think I did relatively well. I used the 3rd and 4th poems, respectively. The 3rd poem was by Emily Dickinson and the 4th was Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." I concentrated on how both poems focused on nature and emotion. I contrasted them by stating that the first poem used nature to diminish emotional sensation, whereas Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" used nature to heighten emotional sensation. I wrote about the depressed mood of the Dickinson poem and contrasted it with the vibrant tone of the Coleridge poem. I hope that this made up for the mistakes on the first part of the exam, but I'll just assume that my work was in the C+/B- range for now. I tend to undergrade myself, so I hope the pattern continues,hopefully meaning that I did better than I think I did.

I found this one to be a little more difficult. From reading what other people wrote, I have come to the simple conclusion that our success on this exam, in terms of identifying the passages, will rely on the luck of the draw, more so than our skill level. Let's face it: there's too much to cover in such a short period of time for us to know them all. The best idea may be to just identify common literary stylistic aspects of the works we're studying and listing them and compiling them, in order to walk into the exam with an added sense of security.

I felt a little more apprehensive this time around because I hesitated more at the beginning while identifying each excerpt. I'd be better off, I think, identifying the 9 excerpts I want first, and THEN outlining them very briefly by mentioning the literary period and approximate century. If I know the author I'll go into depth about the aspects I know about. For instance, when I discuss STYLE, I'll mention that James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, for example, are known for their experimental writing styles, which typify the twentieth century Modern literary period ("Stream of consciousness"). I think that this would work better for me if I employed this strategy on the actual exam, rather than just tackling a question without surveying the test as a whole to start off. I didn't do that this time around, which has made me rethink my approach for the actual exam. I hope it works.

A few years ago my brother had a dream about a situation I would deal with in the future. Mr. Nostradamus, as I should refer to him as (not as funny as the "Negrodamus" character played hilariously by Paul Mooney on "The Chappelle Show"), decided to rattle off some of his residual dream chatter off the top of his head one day to me, in front of a common friend of ours. He told me I'd have some blond or a waitress or some combination thereof wanting to tempt me by "givin' me some," as he said, at some point in the future, and that I should watch out for her---but wait, this gets even more surreal!

I actualy ran into a chick that fit this description who was checking me out in a sports bar while I was watching a Giants-Redskins game on TV. I was not concentrating on this drunk floozy at all at this point. Now mind you, I don't make it a habit to hang out in these places. The only reason I was there was to watch the football game because we still didn't get the satellite dish installed out here in Suffolk County, where I live, after we moved out there. One thing leads to another and this drunk Italian chick---who happened to be a waitress/bartender, as she told me---was starting to throw some serious game at me. Now I started thinking about what my brother told me and this chick was practically all over me without my even trying! Now things didn't get that far for the pervs out there---I wouldn't let it. This was right after I met my long time ex-finacee, some years ago, so I wanted to stay loyal to her. (Yes ladies, some guys actually ARE loyal, believe it or not.)

Now, I thought about this for a while now, but the coincidence factor seemed too surreal for me to dismiss so easily. The odd thing about this was that I'm not a "man whore", neither am I promiscuous: I was with only one girl, and that was for 6 plus years (minus some break ups). Fortunately, things didn't go too far and I left that place with a clear conscience. I will say this though: I was actually thinking about what my brother said and the weird smirk on his face while he relayed this dream of his to me---as if the bastard knew it was going to happen or something. I'm glad nothing happened in hindsight because I wouldn't be able to live with the guilt of having cheated (don't laugh dudes). On the bright side, if anyone needs their palm read or has any tea leaves or left-over coffee grinds ready to be examined, I can get you a discount! Miss Cleo ain't got nothin' on my brother!

One of the more difficult aspects of today's exam, in my opinion, was matching the period to the author. Many of us knew the authors, but were a little blaise when it came to fitting them into a specific time period (REMEMBER to say the "seventeenth century" for instance, and NOT the 1600s). I think that the idea suggested by Prof. Tougaw, regarding printing out the study guide sheets and arranging them into chronoilogical order, as indicated on the assignment sheet that was emailed to the class, will be very beneficial to us all.

Firstly, the process of actually physically doing this will allow us to become familair with the material by default before even actually beginning to process the information, unless we've done so already. Secondly we'll have an ordered sequence to refer to as we begin to review authors and their specific time periods--something that was problematic with our small group of students in the day section.

My biggest concern for the practice exam today was that I would draw a blank. Thankfully, my recognition of some characteristics of the periods as evidenced in the passages and excerpts saved me in some cases and allowed to me to recoup some points by virtue of my interpretation of the readings. Hopefully I'll be more familair with the time periods and authors than I was today through the useage of the study guides. Now I understand why they're as significant a part of our grades as they are. I'm sure that they'll be our biggest help in terms of prepapring for this LENGTHY exam---something which I'm sure we're unanimous in agreeing upon--my swollen finger is proof of this!

I had another dream recently about being shot. I haven;t had one of these dreams in a while---I think it was triggered about a dream aI read about recently on these blogs. In the dream, I was at work, and I woke up to see someone at the door who had a gun with him. He pointed it at me and I froze. I immediately felt the pain of the bullet entering me and I had to struggle to wake up , but as soon as I woke up it felt as if the dream was beginnning to fragment. Right then and there I tried to recall what happened and write it down, before I lost track of what happened. I guess I can attribute this dream to the fact that the door at my job is always left open and that I often leave it that way because so many people are always coming in and out of the office. From now on, I think I'll go back to locking it, like I did before, because I'm not going to take any chances with people taking me by surprise (That already happened witha drunk one time, but that's another story...). Now, I'll be twice as paranoid as I am now--which is hard for me to fathom consider I'm Obsessive Compulsive when it comes to locking doors since I've been a little boy....(Calling Dr. Jung!)

In preparation for the upcoming practice poetry portion of the Honors Exam we're taking this week I think that one of the more important poetic elements to focus upon should be rhythm. Last week during class, our group worked on the poem byW.H. Auden (the poem's name escapes me now) that we chose from the 4 available choices on the ditto sheet. We analyzed how its rhythm seemed to be stronger at first--giving the reader the impression of a fast procession. Yet, as the poem went on, we noticed how the rhythm of the poem slowed down, much in the same way a funeral procession would. This seemed to be a crucial aspect of this particular poem that we felt could relate to any other poem, depending upon the effect that the poet is trying to create. In order for it to resonate, the poet must use some sort of poetic effect--such as this one--to grab the audience's attention. If we keep our eye's open for this particular poetic element, I think we can effectively enough break down how the poem creates a feeling of resonance within the reader.