Friday, September 30, 2011

A Fallacy inspired Soapbox Rant

The other day I was walking around campus and I saw a very misinformed boy with a shirt that said "Shakespeare Hates Your Emo Poems." While, I'm not emo myself nor an advocate for emo kids, this shirt made me feel somewhat irate (Maybe because I posted an emo poem earlier). I like to write poetry, and I believe the occasional emo poem is healthy.

Now, in honor of the fact that I just finished reading Hamlet again (a very emo character (WHO DIES!! Maybe he does hate emo things, no, just kidding) This post is dedicated to emo poetry and I'm sure my room mate is going to judge me.

First will be one of Hamlet's Soliloquies "To be or not to be", which is all about the contemplation of suicide, how much more emo can you get.

Then will be a poem of my own, once again inspired by Hamlet, about how his despair consumed him completely until everything around him, including himself, was destroyed by it. Very sad.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Cypress Tree

There is a cypress tree
that grows inside of me

Parasitically eating
my hearts final beating
the living of my being

As all of my fears
made manifest in tears
all my soul's pain
is it's life giving rain

The agonized bleating
of my hearts bleeding beating
is it's sun softly beaming
on its leaves slowly feeding

My decomposing soul
it's dark soft rich soul
and I scream bloody murder 
as it's roots push on deeper

This tree that needs felling
to me it is telling
Like a dark Van Gogh painting
of yet another failing
and what there is waiting
when my heart stops it's beating

As I breath my last breath 
and give in now to death
this dark tree
takes the last of me
as I cease to be
nothing more that the
symbol you see
in a dark cypress tree.














Shakespeare loves my Emo poems (but I promise I'm a happy person)

7 comments:

  1. Hahaha! I love how much you defend your emo poetry. I realize how important the darker things of the heart can be, as I feel that without those we don't really know what we're feeling when we've risen above the blues (cue old Mormonad). I don't have much intellectually substantial to say, but I thoroughly enjoy the poetry you provide.

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  4. Maybe what the shirt is meaning is that emo kids these days are really just wannabes and that Shakespeare, a true emo poet, would be disgusted with what the wannabe emos are writing these days.

    PS: I saw the same shirt and I was appalled but then I interpreted it this way and saw the light!

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  5. I love this post. Especially because, like you said, Mason, anyone who knows Shakespeare knows that there is a great deal of emo in his work.

    Logan says that maybe the shirt is simply stating that emo kids nowadays are amateurs—that Shakespeare was the original and best emo writer. That could be true. But I tend to think that someone clever thought that it would be good to say that emo poetry is a lesser art form; so, they did it by comparing that "lesser" art form to Shakespeare, what they consider to be a higher art form. I like the humor of that comes of misguided idea when you know of the emo content in Shakespeare. Great post.

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  6. Yeah, perhaps I interpreted the shirt wrong, but that would be too much meaning. I think I agree with the idea that someone thought it would be smart to say emo poetry is inferior to Shakespeare. However, in saying this the person displays just how ignorant and uneducated they really are.

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