Author: Eric Leng

Moonlight

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Moonlight

You said you like to look at the moonlight

Never thought that we would say goodbye

Until the day you really said goodbye.

You said I made your whole life bright.

In this dark and lonely night,

You leave my life without telling me why.

Walking on the endless road, I start to cry.

The pale moonlight is still as bright.

 

I won’t forget the day you went away,

Tried to beg you to stay,

But you just said, “No.”

Put on my headphones, rock and roll,

Nothing can ease my aching soul.

Sometimes you’ve got to let it go.

 

About this poem:

I basically wrote this poem because I want to compose a sonnet myself. I am trying to follow the Petrarchan form, which follows the a b b a a b b a format.

The fact I am taking this class is actually my passion toward poets’ exquisite description of simple objects, and give them more profound meaning. In Chinese culture, moon and moonlight normally represent nostalgia, reminiscence and similar sentiment toward an object, a place or a person. This is why I name my sonnet “Moonlight,” and I decided to write about a heartbroken boy’s thinking about the girl who left him. I am trying to put “moonlight” in my poem as a sign that makes the narrator reminiscent the saddest moment in his life.

In the process of composing, I tried my best to put in the right word to follow the rhyme. However, I think the hardest part is what kind of story I want to tell and how am I supposed to start and end the story. This become extremely challenging for me at the beginning since I have to do everything in fourteen line, but ultimately I decided to give the poem a relatively open-ended ending to leave some imagination for the readers.

Irish Proudness in W.B. Yeats’ writings—Eric Leng

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The lecture took place on November 6, 2017, held by Dan Mulhall in the topic “To Sweeten Ireland’s Wrong: W.B. Yeats in the 1890s.”

 

Being a great Irish poet, W. B. Yeats has been hailed for his great works. In this event, the topic has been centered on Yeats being a patriotic writer, who is “Irish in spirit, English in literature.” Yeats has intended to make criticism and literature as national as possible. However, the speaker, Dan Mulhall, Ireland’s ambassador to the U.S., has attacked that the national spirit, which Yeats tend to glorify in his poems are merely a combination of nationalism and narcissism, as he claimed that “Irish could be the whole of idealism,” and is “lofty” in its national spirit. Indeed, he believes that Yeats’ movement to accentuate “Ireland” in literature contributes to the wider transformation of Irish attitude, yet this cultural nationalism is based on Yeats’ version of Ireland. One of Yeats’ poems that we have read in class, “the Second Coming,” perfectly represents the Irish Literary Revival. The entire poem talks about the upcoming revelation, Yeats shows that the Europe continent is coming to an end, and the world is going into a new era.

Mulhall mentions, that in April 1900, Yeats publicly rebuke the queen. Since then, he has been energetically involving with Irish nationalism. He even attacks writers who do not write literature with the topic “Ireland.” Yeats attack the original romantic and poetical nationalism, because he believes that in ancient Ireland there is some kind of spirit that is powerful and should be rediscovered. Although Yeats aims to “recreate the glory,” no one would disagree that his ambition is actually a manifestation of Irish idealism.

The rebellious generation–Eric Leng

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The Beats Exhibit on the third floor of the Robert Woodruff Library shows the Emory Community the influence of the Beats Generation, which is a literary movement that greatly influenced the post-WWII US society. Three of the most significant examples of The Beat Generation are Allen Ginsberg, William S. Buroughs and Jack Korouac. The exhibit displays many objects, such as photographs, letters, books, and magazines, that represent the special movement and era.

 

There are three screens, on the left-hand side of the exhibit, playing the videos and playing the audio recording of Allen Ginsberg’s well-known poem, “Howl”, which perfectly represent the recalcitrant sentiment of the Beat Generation. The middle screen is playing the text of Howl that is being read, and the two screens on the sides are playing the videos of the 50s and 60s. Such combination with textual, visual, auditory influence gives the audience a well-rounded perception of this marginalized minority group who were both not respected and accepted in the United States in 1950.

 

The other part of the exhibit that interests me the most is “The San Francisco Renaissance” and the “Protest in Print.” After the Second World War, the younger generation of the poets gathered together at the Bay area, and ultimately became the San Francisco Renaissance. It is obvious that California has become the emblem of the liberal movement since then. The displayed poems all have creative sketch as their covers, which quickly draw my attention. These young poets obviously have a more creative mind and like to express their feelings in the more unrestrictive way. Such modern movement led the anti-mainstream culture of the group of poets in the new era and, in some ways, established the foundation of the later anti-Vietnam war sentiment. The Anti-Vietnam War movement is displayed in the “Protest in Print” section of the exhibit. The displayed works, such as Viet Nam Poems, War Poems, and Where is Vietnam?, along with the big pictures of anti-war protest photos on the wall, give the visitor a vivid impression of the intensity of the movement in the 1960s.