A Postcard From a Volcano!

So... How awkward was it in class when I started to cry? Oh wow. Sorry for that! This is a difficult poem. I think about it now and I get tirey eyed. Well when last weekend when I was first reading this poem I was "lazy" about it. I took the easy way out and said it was about the seasons and changing. Like the house is changing, and everything leads to death and blah blah blah. Well I was COMPLETELY wrong!
I heard that one of my family members was given three months to live about two hours before class in a TEXT message. A FREAKING text message. You don't have the balls to call me and tell me? So I was agree and upset and how could this happen? What is going on? Confusion? Frustration? So I decided to get it out of my head and focus on school.
I re-read the poem and was going to practice my speech again and it hit me. He was really talking about death. How it is near for the old man and the mansion but not the kids. The kids don't know. Wow! Put yourself in the shoes of the person who has recently lost someone or about to lose someone and read this poem. You change your idea about it. Also a couple of things I have learned from this. You read poems different when you are going through different things in your life. Also Mr. Sexson told me after class on Monday that poems help you heal. Powerful words.
So back to the poem. A Postcard From the Volcano is not in the poem but it has value. Remember Volcano's are HUGE. A Postcard can be a metaphor for life and therefor you have to make it HUGE!
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that they were once
As quick as foxes on a hill;
- Children will not know that "we" were once great.

And that in the Autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
-Even the grapes are alive. They are getting older, with the Autumn. Near the end of their life.

And lease will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
-This is my favorite stanza. We leave EVERYTHING behind. Family members, our thoughts, our books with little notes on the sides of them. Nothing follows us. Beautiful. Or is it beautiful?

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house.
Beyond our gate and the windy sky
-The house is old. The new clouds that hover this old house will never know. like the first line. Spring meaning new like children.

Cried out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
"And what we said of it became."
-We as adults know we are going to die. Crying out for it to end already. We knew that the house was going to get old. We learn that we are going to get old and die. Death is inevitable.

"A part of what it is... Children."
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know.
-Children, this everlasting "innocence". The quoted parts are really important to this poem as will be the last line. What we say of something it will become that forever. Children will be a part of what it is.

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in the blank walls,
- This old man who is in the autumn of his life is yelling at these walls. He is mad that he knows his life is ending and is sad. Maybe he wanted something more from this life? He is an artist. I'll explain why at the end of the poem.

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
"Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun."
- Opulent means richly, wealthy, or affluent. This rich sun, beautiful, bright sun. A dirty house in a guttered world. A tatter of shadows are dark and gloomy like death. BUT wait, they are peaked to white. "Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun" they are all bright and beautiful.
I think the moral of this poem and what Stevens is trying to tell you is that stop living for death and live for life... like children! Beautiful. Amazing. Leave a legacy. Become an artist so that you can leave something behind. The man was an artist wondering if he was going to leave enough behind so that will people will remember him as good wonderful "gold like the opulent sun".
I am very happy that I received this poem and will take it with me for the rest of my life. I will teach it to my son! Thank you Mr. Sexson for a wonderful assignment.