September--La Marseillaise

Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé.
Contre nous, de la tyrannie,
L'étandard sanglant est levé,
l'étandard sanglant est levé,
Entendez-vous, dans la compagnes.
Mugir ces farouches soldats
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras
Egorger vos fils,
vos compagnes.

Aux armes citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons!
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons.

Amour sacré de la Patrie,
Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs,
Liberté, liberté cherie,
Combats avec tes defénseurs;
Combats avec tes défenseurs.
Sous drapeaux, que la victoire
Acoure à tes mâles accents;
Que tes ennemis expirants
Voient ton triomphe et notre gloire!

Aux armes citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons!
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons.

by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle

This anthem reminds me of the dolphin slaughter focused in Taiji, Japan. There, thousands of dolphins are slaughtered violently every year for no apparent reason as these animals are too heavily laced with mercury to be consumed. There is rhyme splattered throughout the anthem. The lyrics are not at all subtle. The direct, frank, brutish ideas explicitly used make the anthem much more forceful. Because this song was used during the wartime, everything in it can be taken very literally: the bloody banners, ferocious soldiers roaring. However, there are metaphors involved such as the English translation of "All these tigers who, mercilessly; Rip their mother's breast!": a description of the immoral enemy. In September, the Japanese temporarily suspended their hunt after the movie "The Cove" made the little town of Taiji infamous.

March--Hard is the Fortune of All Womankind/Wagoner's Lad

Oh, hard is the fortune
Of all womankind.
She's always controlled,
She's always confined.
Controlled by her parents,
Until she's a wife,
A slave to her husband,
The rest of her life.


I found this poem in a novel, page 61 in The Curse of the Blue Tattoo by L.A. Meyer, that I had been reading. It is part of a folksong, although there are a few different ballads that use it in their first stanza.
The Wagoner's Lad:
Wagoner's Lad
Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind
She's always controlled; she's always confined,
Controlled by her parents until she's a wife,
A slave to her husband the rest of her life.

Well, I'm just a poor girl and my fortune is sad.
I've always been courted by the wagoner's lad.
He's courted me daily, by night and by day
And now he is loading and going away.

My parents don't like him because he is poor.
They say he's not worthy of entering my door.
He works for a living; his money's his own
And if they don't like him, they can leave him alone.

"Your horses are hungry; I'll feed them some hay.
Then sit down here by me as long as you may."
"My horses aren't hungry; they won't eat your hay,
So fare ye well, darling; I'll be on my way."

Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind
She's always controlled; she's always confined,
Controlled by her parents until she's a wife,
A slave to her husband the rest of her life.


Hard is the Fortune of All Womankind:
Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind,
We're always controlled and we're always confined,
And when we get married to end all our strife,
We're slaves to our husbands for the rest of our lives.

All young girls, take warning, take warning from me,
Never place your affections on a young man so free,
They will hug you and kiss you and tell you more lies,
Than the cross-ties on the railroad or the stars in the sky.

Of meeting is a pleasure and parting is a grief,
And a false-hearted lover is worse than a thief,
For a thief will just rob you and take what you have,
But a false-hearted lover will make you his slave.

He'll call you his darling, he'll call you his pearl,
And go behind you with some other girl;
You'll cook just to please him and scrub all his floors,
And if you won't love him, he'll call you a whore.

This poem expresses how I sometimes feel when I am in a more cynical mood. Save for the rhyming of the last word in lines 6 and 8, it has no apparent structure. In the book, it was sung by a rebellious girl during the French Revolution who was forced by the British Royal Navy to attend finishing school in Boston. It is for March because that is the month leading right up to the Nationals when I have to work the hardest and practice a lot of squash and do a lot of fitness training. It is probably my worst and busiest month of the year when I feel the most depressed and pessimistic.

July--Flashbacks

summer heat under

the stars winking up ahead

for here, our old selves

alive from our memories,

what has past and yet to come

This poem is called Flashbacks and it is about the past summer in July when it was ridiculously hot. My theme is an autobiographical self-reminder of happenings and memories from the past year. It connects to my theme because it is the essence of what happened last July. In that month, I did a lot of catching up with old friends having fun like we used to. I repeated past summer traditions of going out on summer camping trips by the water with a friend. I met new people and time with them felt like there had never been a time we didn't know each other.

This is a tanka poem, which is similar to the Japanese haiku. I tried to make it somewhat free by not weighing it down with poetic devices. However, I used many s and h 's throughout the poem as an almost theme and to give an impression of structure.