The theme of Peace and Reconciliation is shown in many of the poems studied in the course. In “The Quiet Hour,” the speaker is watching another person sleeping, most likely his significant other. There is a degree of curiosity within the poem about the oddity of sleep. When one is observing the calmness of sleep from an outside perspective, which is not something that happens often, there is a palpable stillness within the lines of the poem. In “Quiet Evening,” the same themes are observable, but are made more apparent by referencing the much older great works of Homer. This augments the meaning of the poems references to the theme. There is also a high degree of similarity between the theme and the poem “An Ocean Musing.” On the subject of peace, the ocean has a lot of information that can be gleaned from it’s movements. The water is calm, moving in an unending fashion as long as it is watched. In addition, the vast view of an ocean is not something that many people get a chance to see many times in their lives, so it is something to be examined and cherished. The ponies in “A Blessing” bring a calm and peaceful feeling to the speaker. The next poem, “Youth and Calm” also features peace, but in a slightly different sense - death. As hard as death can be for those left behind in a person’s absence, the stillness and calmness of death is still quite apparent in this piece. The final piece in this selection, “Living Room,” has a slightly different take on peace as well. As the house struggles with the chaos of everything that is happening, the living room has an internal struggle to keep the peace. Being the dwelling place of the house’s inhabitants, it is ironic that the internal struggle for peace would happen in this room. Poetry should bring out emotions of all kinds in its reader, and that emotion will depend on the subject matter of the poem being read. In the case of this group of poems, it invokes a stillness and peace. With sleep, death, hope, trust, and love being the central theme of this selection, that peace is what the poems can and should do; that should be their purpose to the reader.

Begin this path: Minna Ratanapan Introduction

1. ratanapan poem 1
2. ratanapan poem 2
3. ratanapan poem 3
4. ratanapan poem 4
5. ratanapan poem 5
6. ratanapan poem 6

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