Pantoum of Great Depression

Watching the different interpretations of the play was interesting especially to be able to see how people interpreted the meaning of the poem differently. Our group had violin music playing in the background and read the poem with a rhythm (or we tried to at least). The violin music was very morose and somber and captured the essence of the Great Depression very well. We tried to give a rhythm to it which really helped bring out the repetition that is ever-present in a Pantoum. If you just read a Pantoum you might not realize the repetitive nature of the poem. But with the rhythm we had (we read each repeated line together as opposed to alone) it accentuated the nature of the poem. Each first line is the previous quatrain's second line and each third line is the previous quatrain's fourth line.

It would be really hard to write a pantoum I think because there is so much structure involved. You have to constantly remember the right and wrong way to structure the poem and how to still make sense with the amount of repeated lines. I think this particular pantoum did a really good job of embodying what the author was trying to say. While it was still slightly abstract, the repetition of key lines helped embed in the audience's brain how painful a situation it was for whoever experienced the Great Depression. There was also some use of figurative language "And time went by, drawn by slow horses" but the author was also quite blunt. "We gathered on our porches; the moon rose; we were poor." He didn't skirt the issue, he faced the poverty full on which kind of catches the audience off guard. He doesn't try to sugar coat the situation at all, he wants people to understand the brutality and awfulness of living in the times. It's kind of paradoxical that he wrote about such a harsh issue in such a beautiful medium as poetry. Usually this topic would be reserved for newspaper articles or novels but the fact that he kind of showed the ugliness in a beautiful form is very unique.