Three Poems

The Three Poems for today were "After A Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes"; "I LIKE a look of agony"; and "It Sifts From Leaden Sieves". There is an interesting progression in these three poems that I liked when reading. In the "Agony" poem the focus is on liking pain because it is the only true emotion, the second "Pain" poem is about the pain of dying in the snow, and the third is about the beauty of the snow. However with the background theme of pain and snow being together may mean there is something more to the third poem then it seems. In "It Sifts From Leaden Sieves" the surface reading of the poem is that the snow falls from gray clouds and it covers all the trees, fills in the cracks of the road, makes everything flat and even in every direction, it covers fences and stumps and fields all alike, and fills all the area summer had been making it like it had never existed, so there is no record of life and even people don't move. If one looks at this from a different vantage snow could very easily represent death in this poem. Death comes and covers everything. All things will die eventually and it is the great equalizer just like it says about it flattening everything, mountains and valleys alike. It also covers and eliminates any evidence that the living had ever been, especially with time. And it also stops people from moving about because once one dies time is spent in morning.