So, my English teacher gave me a bull assignment. Write an essay, informal, about two poems from our poetry book. Must be two pages, double spaced, typed, yada yada yada. Standard stuff. Short essay. Then she says she won't be reading them, just checking that they were done. So this is what I came up with. (please don't be offended by anything here, it is all mocking stuff she has said during the year, and the use of sledgehammers on kittens is something I do NOT approve; also, I love Tennyson poetry, these two poems were actually quite good. I just didn't feel like dissecting them for an un-graded assignment)



“Ulysses” was written by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It has really old vernacular, from way back when, something like the 1800s. That changes the way the poem reads. In all honesty, it sucks to have to read it in modern times because students aren’t taught to understand and appreciate the style of language, which is much more beautiful and complex than American English. “Ulysses” is about Ulysses. Not Ulysses S. Grant! Ulysses from the really old ancient tale, with the Greek ships and the Trojan Horse in the Trojan War. Have you seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Well, if you haven’t, you should, they mock the Trojan Horse with a giant rabbit, but forget to get inside the rabbit, and then the rabbit is catapulted over the wall back at them. They leave screaming “run away!”

Well, the Ulysses story is a bit more dense. Actually, more than a bit. Did you know the word bit has more than one denotation? It can mean a small amount or a thing you stick in a horses mouth. Denotation is a word from the poetry book in case you forgot. Well, on it being dense, its long! It’s 70 lines, and those 70 lines each run around 10 words. That makes something like 700 words, if you can do simple multiplication. And the 700 words are written in older English, making it hard for us to read. This makes Ulysses seem like one old-ass man, and it sort of kills relevancy to the modern English (even though we really speak American) student.

“Curiosity” is very modern. It starts off talking about curiosity killing a cat. CLICHÉ!!! I thought we were taught that clichés are bad! Yet here we get to learn to appreciate a poem that starts off with a very old cliché. Perhaps it wasn’t curiosity that killed that cat, maybe I went after it with a sledgehammer and got a bull’s-eye? Or a cat’s eye! Then the poem goes on into sexual meanings. Because English teachers love to put sex everywhere in every poem! “Fathering” kittens means he had to have SEX to do that! Oh no, now the poem is unholy, it’s filled with sexual acts!

Then the author goes on to reverse the cliché about curiosity killing a cat, and says that not being curious will cause us to die. I’m going to go with old age causing death. Or being shot, stabbed, hit by a car, smashed by a train, clubbed, blown up, torn in half, poisoned, pumped full of irradiated material, getting tetanus, being afflicted by an STD, or starving. But curiosity killing one? That’s just weak. If I died from a lack of curiosity, I’d be so pissed that I’d come back to life, kick every single person who thought I wasn’t curious enough right in the testicles, blow up a few buildings, then commit suicide. This would be after killing the author of the poem “Curiosity,” because he would be the reason that lack of curiosity killed me. So what if I don’t want to pry in other people’s lives? I’ll keep to my own business, and I won’t die while I’m at it. Unless some maniac decides to knock me off. Speaking of which, since this poem is about sex, or at least it starts off with a graphic bestial sexual image, I like knockers.

Neither one of these poems connected with me. The only connection is a sledgehammer (covered in cat blood) in my hands hitting the authors in the face. Well, since Tennyson is already dead, I just smacked his headstone in half. Twice. This is what happens when English (should be called American) students are told to write an informal essay that WON’T be graded and will only be checked. Busy work rape for the win. AYB. The end.