IOP Journal 3

In an attempt to organize something like an outline that will accompany my IOP...

for the "To the Foot from its Child" half...

In "To the Foot from its Child", which was published with Neruda's collection of poems in Extravagaria (translates to the vagaries, which is defined as erratic or unpredictable manifestations, actions or notions) in 1957-1958. Neruda, I think, expresses the influences that he has that lead him towards communism and against an overly controlling fascist regime.

1. The foot can be used as a metaphor for either children or younger people. By showing the journey of the foot, Neruda shows how the world/society crushed the dreams and imagination of the people, forcing them to live in a physical/emotional prison (the shoe), unable to express their individuality.

2. Motif of fruit can be seen as a way to represent imagination of the child/individual. Which ends up being told by "the paths in the rough earth" that the foot "cannot be a fruit bulging on the branch". Because of the difficult society, the imagination of the individual is restricted so much that he or she does not even know the intent of society "It never knew [...] if they were burying it so that it could fly or so that it could become an apple".

3. Personification of the foot...(cannot overlap with the metaphor point). Once the foot is captured by the shoe, Neruda describes it as "out of touch with its fellow, enclosed, feeling out life like a blind man". Very much like Neruda's own exile where he came back after years to only find his party and the people in Chile in disarray, not knowing the full details of the incoming coup.

4. Progression and change of the foot to become resilient through the motif of hard items and/or adjectives. "These soft nails of quartz, bunched together, grow hard, and change themselves into opaque substance, hard as horn" "Later they grow calloused and are covered with the faint volcanoes of death, a coarsening hard to accept"

5. Use of punctuation in the 3rd stanza to express the long journey of life for the foot, ending with a line that expresses that it's whole life is controlled by the man, not the foot. "it walks, they walk, until the whole man chooses to stop"

6. Motif of falling and going underground....gives the image that the foot is condemned to be buried and maybe not even walk on the earth again? "it descended underground, unaware, for there, everything, everything was dark"

Well that pretty much covers almost all of the poem. A powerpoint is my most likely path to analyze the poem, although I do want to combine that with a class discussion using an overhead transparency... if not i can always use the powerpoint for this poem and put a transparency up for the "And the City Now Has Gone".

IOP Journal 2

I looked up Pablo Neruda's political views today. It turns out that he immersed himself in Communism only around in the mid to late 1930s. He served as a senator for the Communist party in Chile in 1943 but was removed from office and exiled in 1948 due to his criticism of the Chilean president in "I Accuse" (something that we read earlier). His view on Communism carried itself through the Spanish Civil War as he supported the LEFTIST Republicans in Spain and even published "Spain in My Heart" for Republican troops fighting the nationalist spanish government.

IN SUMMARY to this, Neruda was against fascism and hence the many rising dictators of the world preceding World War II (i.e. Hitler). But he did openly praise Stalin and the Soviet Union despite the terrible acts that Stalin committed. Neruda admired the Soviet Union especially because of its role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Much later, Neruda also supported the socialist Salvador Allende and the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity party) in the late 1960s until his death (September 23rd, 1973).

Now to relate this background info to his poetry....

I'm still trying to analyze the poem "To the Foot from its Child", although I am considering to switch from XCVII to "And the City Now Has Gone" (also from the Extravagaria) after researching XCVII. It turns out the number is just another number from one of Neruda's 100 Love sonnets and the number 97 signifies its place in that collection.

To the Foot from its Child seems to express a very lecturing tone and the foot is a metaphor, but I'm still not totally sure whether it is a metaphor for children or adults? Maybe it progresses throughout the poem as the child grows up?
There is also a motif of fruit and apples, representing imagination?
The format is somewhat important to the poem, because it does guide the reader through the progression by separating the stanzas according to the foot's defeat, it's adaptation to the shoe, the growth of the foot, works of the foot, then it's "burial"....

I'll sleep on it and do another journal tomorrow....

IOP Journal 1

Since I have the ACTs tomorrow, I decided today would be a good day to organize and brainstorm for my IOP.

Topic Proposal:
I would like to focus on the works of Pablo Neruda, and analyzing one of his more politically focused poems like I am Accused (the actual title is I Accuse). I want to show the correlation between one or two of his poems with his political views.
I would like to analyze two poems as a comparison, looking for similarities between his focus on symbols in nature and the structure of his poems. I could possibly compose a music piece to go along with the poem(s).

Sidenote - The musical piece now that I have thought about it would be incredibly hard to compose as well as perform in such the short amount of time that I have for this IOP...so i'm going to have to rely on my other idea of doing a class/group analysis of at least one poem.

1. I collected all the poems that I have from IB Junior English that were written by Pablo Neruda.
2. I separated his love poems that would be irrelevant and organized the politically inclined poems...(Dodobird, From the Heights of Macchu Picchu, XCVII...To the Foot from its Child?)
3. Out of these poems, Dodobird has very pronounced political message, From the Heights of Macchu Picchu possess many of Neruda's well-known literary techniques (although it's pretty difficult to fathom the meanings), XCVII could be expressed as a political poem expressing the confinement of the society (although the poem's very short and it would a small chunk of time to analyze it), To the Foot from its Child could also be analyzed as a poem criticising the government (the Foot) from Neruda's view (the Child) with a lot of metaphors as well as length.
4. From what I've seen, both To the Foot from its Child and XCVII both have similar motifs and themes in which i could analyze for my IOP!!!

IDEA: Both use metaphors in order to express wandering and being lost with references to the earth. Lots of feet motifs in both poems as well