Poetry Blog

Write a blog entry about the person you sent your poem and how they reacted to it. 


I decided to sent a poem about a dangerous vampire who is on a hunt to my 14 year old sister, Allison.  She is currently in the cultural phase where vampires is consider 'cool'; and how vampires are not evil like the traditional image of the past. Her first obsession came from the Twilight series when she was about 11 years old. Since then, the only novels that she reads is about 'nice' vampires who comes to the recuse of saving innocent mortals humans.

The poem, "The Vampire" written by Conrad Aiken, is about a group of people who is running away from vampire who is trying to kill them. The people describe this vampire who as "basilisk eyes so ominous,/ With mouth so sweet, so poisonous."With this description, these people were afraid for their lives, but did not survive.  Aiken wrote how the "innocent souls turned carrion birds/ To perch upon the dead./ Sweet daisy fields were drenched with death,/ The air became a charnel breath,/ Pale stones were splashed with red".  This poem really portrays how vampires were first portrayed as when Dracula first came out, compared to vampires today, where  vampires shines in the sunlight.

Allison really enjoyed this poem because not only the poem incorporated her favorite themes, vampires, into a style of writing that she does not like to read. She told me how she thinks how the theme of the poem is about how people is constantly fighting with one another and how in the end, the result usually ends in violent.  But on the other hand, she liked how the poem flowed. There is a lot of rhyme that made the flow of the poem really fluid.  This poem reminded her how these fictional characters were like when they first came out.