Dr. Julia P. Kielstra, D.Phil., Oxon., has degrees in English Literature from Bryn Mawr and Oxford and years of experience evaluating student writing for Cambridge International Examinations. I showed her the best—or worst—love poetry Harvard students could produce. The following responses are more or less verbatim, and completely unscripted.
(She also happens to be my mom.)
[Insert poem 1: “Burger and Coke”]
That certainly has a lot of words in it, and we can’t underestimate the fact that he did write down lots of words, in an order, which I think is always great. I like to be quite positive about these things.
Starting off with the imagery of a burger and coke loving a fry is great. That’s something everyone can respond to. On the other hand, “a cloud in the sky” might be a little transient for the love he’s trying to indicate, and “despondent” and “fondant” is very… brave, isn’t it? I’m concerned about “orange” and “afford in.” I think he’s losing the plot a little bit there, although he is keeping up the money theme. I don’t know if that’s something you Harvard undergraduates are concerned with?
“Promise you’ll be my princess, I will be your king” is where it gets a little concerning, because the princess is usually the king’s daughter. I can’t see he’s attempting anything like any sort of meter with this, so “Promise me you’ll be my queen, I will be your king” would work just as well, and wouldn’t have this weird undertone that he’s moving towards now.
I think that it’s great that he’s rich and this girl seems to be impressed with him in spite of that, and that he gets teary and drunk over her, because what girl isn’t going to love that? We all love men who cry and men who get weepy when they’re drunk. [Mouths “No.”]
I’m also liking the very regular rhyme scheme. It really means you can immerse yourself in the meaning, such as it is, here, and you don’t have to pay attention to the rhymes. There’s nothing much to challenge you here intellectually, which is helpful for the casual reader.
And: blue and gray? I thought you were crimson. Is Yale not blue and gray?
On the whole, this wouldn’t attract me to this person. He’s sacrificing meaning for rhyme, which you will remember from your childhood is in my book a huge sin against literature.
Tell me about this “orange” thing. Do you think this is a callback to the historical rarity of oranges?
That’s an obvious place to go, and this word is interesting when you juxtapose it with “honey pie” and “rainbow.” “Honey pie” makes you think of food as well, but then “rainbow” is a color… he’s clearly wandering across a landscape of metaphor and simile. The sheer breadth is staggering in many ways. I might even say it’s unbelievable, and I would mean that in the literal sense.
[Insert poem 2: “Sweet Maddie”]
It’s actually been texted! How exciting.
Clearly there’s a lot of heartfelt and young emotion here, which is great. I’m seeing that there’s a timeframe as well: she’s been putting up with this for a month. (It’s great that it’s written in a text, because that means she might not have had to put up with it in person.)
There are a lot of syntactic problems: if she’s “One of a kind,” then we’re not anywhere near bird imagery, so I’m not sure why she’s “more precisely” a dove. But “staying up late to talk about the day” is nice. That sort of quotidian detail is always appreciated by poetry readers.
I’m not really sure why she’ll end up in the bath. That’s that serial killer overtone, which I find less attractive every time I read it. It’s quite nice that she’s sunshine. Falling back on the tried and true metaphors and similes is good: why not use things that people say every day all the time? I think he’s trying to reinvent the way we use language. I’m not sure that that’s as successful as it could be.
Everyone who’s read even a cereal box will know that comparing love to a long dream is very… expected, but I’m always happy to be able to sleep through some of this kind of poem.
The ice cream is a surprise. I would like to say that I see some reason for it, but I think he’s just hungry now and tired of writing this.
Putting ordinary thoughts into short lines, with some words that rhyme, doesn’t necessarily make a poem. It makes a very thin bit of prose. Often, people think that typesetting is what moves something from prose to poetry. In this case, sadly, I don’t think it does. But I admire the fact that he thought he could show this to another human being and think that she might still want to date him. He’s got chutzpah and might well make something of himself.
The first line of this poem starts with “Help!” Now, when you were teaching me to read, one of the books we both enjoyed was Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, which of course starts with “So.” There’s a long tradition of epic poetry beginning with interjections. Do you think this poem is a worthy inheritor of that tradition?
No.
Could you say more?
This doesn’t really fall into epic, does it? There’s got to be a descent into hell. Although, I suppose that being without her every day is a bit of descending into hell? You could say that? Maybe the ice cream is a metaphor for a monster? Could we go there? I don’t think we should.
We do have Maddie, the Beatrice to his Dante, and the Scheherazade overlay with staying up late to talk about the day. We could pull out many, many references to other literature that’s much better than this. It might be a more enjoyable evening to think of some other epic poems, poems which have some quality to them.
Would you have any advice for aspiring love poets, bearing in mind that the man who thought he might be Maddie’s soulmate turned out not to be?
Forge and plagiarize. Find good poetry and adjust it to make it yours until you find your feet. Use imagery that proper poems have used. Also, rhyme is no bad thing, because, as we have seen, it does keep you on the rails. Free verse is very dangerous for the novice poet: you get a lot of prose. There is that indistinct and amorphous animal in the prose poem, but it requires a careful handling of internal rhythm. Just copy other people’s work—and, if you put the little quotation marks around it, then you don’t even have to change it. You can say “I read this and thought of you.” Many people will respond more positively to that than to “I thought of you and wrote a poem involving ice cream.”
Roses are red/Violets are blue/Michael Kielstra ’22 (pmkielstra@college.harvard.edu) reads the Independent/and so should you.