A6

The Heart or the Mind?

Oh fearsome beast of free emotion.

Oh soft human, of rationale thought,

The choice is yours but you may find

It not so clear: To the heart or to the mind?

Oh fearsome hunter, free and wild beast,

How easy to cast away your worries. Are your next feast

And instinct of survival, Natures calling,

The few specters that plague your dreaming?

Oh soft creature, societies slave.

Calculating and contemplating, rationale’s slave.

Do you run the course, a course of your own making,

Heedless of the toll that you may be taking?

Spontaneous, vivid, guided by emotion

Bounding, joyful for naught but of your creation,

Rationale was cast to the side whenever you could,

Pure emotion ruled as with you it should.

Planned, thought out, in control,

Cold and perhaps heedless of a possible toll,

To that which all posses but all most lose,

Is this the way to spend yours, the correct choice to choose?

Reason and logic, the foundations of your world,

To them you are taught, until unfurled

Are their leaves, and their deep roots have hold.

Pure rationale rules, as with you it should?

Oh fearsome beast of free emotion.

Oh soft human, of rationale thought,

The choice is yours but you may find

It not so clear: To the heart or to the mind?

People use both emotion and logic to shape out lives and so they are similar while at the same time being opposites. We have encountered Romanticism and Enlightenment ideas and paradoxes in our readings so I thought I would expand upon those. The main techniques I use are rhetorical questions and the setting up parallels, then breaking them in key places to show significance. This is also emphasized by the constant rhyme scheme that is present in all the stanzas. In my poem I use a repetition of syntax to illustrate a parallel between the symbols of a human and a beast in order to get at the question of how people do/should make decisions...through logic or emotion? I also get at what has separated our race from all of the other species on the plant. The human represents logic and reason and the beast free flowing emotion. The stanzas alternate between the human and the beast (excluding the first and last) until the last stanza, which breaks the pattern, adding significance to that stanza. That stanza is the second in a row about the human. The last line of the stanza is the only place where the rhyme scheme is broken adding a great deal of importance to the rhetorical question at the end of the line. That rhetorical question is parallel, through similar diction, to the last line of the fourth stanza, which is the last stanza about the beast. That line also is a break in a pattern, the pattern of rhetorical questions ending each stanza. That break is of great importance because for the first time I am not asking a question, it is a statement. The first and last stanzas are the same. They are microcosms for the poem. They set up the greater parallel and dichotomy of the poem, logic and emotion, by the parallel syntax of the first two lines of the stanza while the two lines are about completely opposing things.