I'm not sure if you wanted title suggestions for your poem, but I'll go out on a limb and offer

"She's Wild"

The poem has a strong femaleness to it and a pervasive sense of wild, wild as in wilderness and wild as in uncontrollable.

I think the rhyming pattern and the stanza structure are creative and together they give the poem an out-of-kilter feel that you may or may not have intended but I think it creates some tension or angst that contributes to the poem.

realiz wrote:I wonder how much real feelings come out in poetry. . . . Not sure what the title should be.

A great deal. I'll follow giselle and suggest "The Divine Feminine."

Tom

realiz,

my clipboard isn't working to cut and paste quotes, but you said you weren't sure about the feelings that were apparent in the final poem as opposed to the feelings you set out to represent at first. As a reader I'm always curious about the lived or felt experience from which a poem is created. You could give the readers a hint about this from your title, whatever you choose, either by naming or evoking the mood of the occasion for writing, or by naming the/a goddess or other known kind of "she" whose name would point to her origins or their "natural emotional habitat" inside you.

This is great. I had orginally thougth to write a poem about happiness, that intense happiness that you feel from time to time, sometimes daily, sometimes not so much. But it did come through with more angst in it than I intended, also the sense that this emotion (or other part of personality?) is harder to find and harder to hold onto than maybe it is.
'She's Wild' reminds me of 'Girls Gone Wild', so brings pictures of drunk young girls acting like idiots. So, don't think I like that one. The Divine Feminine not sure if that represents that inner intense joy or pleasure at being alive that I wanted. I'll think on it. The original name of the poem was going to be simply Happiness.

I can understand your negative association with Girls Gone Wild, which is quite funny ... Your poem refers to 'joy' as the "she"which is reclusive at times hence I thought of the "she joy" as "wild", in that it can't be easily controlled .. fits with the rest of the natural wild imagery, but i guess it could fit with Girls Gone Wild too.

Realiz, you introduced yourself as an empty nester, so I suppose you are missing your daughter. "The Divine Feminine" came to mind because, in conjunction with The Secret Garden, I had been reading about a book of that title on how Theosophy supported the rise of the feminist movement in England.

I wonder how much real feelings come out in poetry.

I am rather obsessed with the question, How is feeling found in a poem? Or in art? Or in any text or expression? In philosophical terms, What is the relation between subjective and objective? How can the inner be uttered? It is, I'm sure, but I've yet to find a communicable method of interpreting expression.

Tom

Okay, this is not a poem by me, but I think it is very on topic and I have wanted to post it on the string where people were discussing winter poems as well.

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The last stanza ending with the line "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." is my favorite. The romantic tradition of using nature to explore our feelings, especially through nature poetry, is a point of departure. Then he goes beyond that to look at that space beyond what I feel to a clarity and stability outside the little self. You would have to be "cold" for so long not to project, perhaps cold literally in meditating outdoors in the winter, or perhaps cold emotionally in weathering life, but in waiting and in listening, he has discovered "a mind of winter," free of any projections. I love Wallace Stevens for precisely this kind of poem: the clarity and stillness of water crystalized into snow in daylight, just as it is.

realiz said:

'She's Wild' reminds me of 'Girls Gone Wild', so brings pictures of drunk young girls acting like idiots.

I had responded above to this but I want to clarify that I meant that your association with Girls Gone Wild is funny, not that this ridiculous show is funny. How easy it is to write something you don't mean.

"The Divine Feminine not sure if that represents that inner intense joy or pleasure at being alive that I wanted."

Reading "Secret Garden" I came across the term "enraptured" referring to Mary's feelings as the children were in the garden and they had begun to work the Magic by chanting - the happiness they feel when in the garden seems more complex than simple happiness, it seems to be linked to love and spirituality .... similarly then, I wonder if "inner intense joy" is a spiritual experience connected to love and so could be considered a state of "rapture"?

Putting together GR's reference to a goddess, giselles to rapture, and TH's to the feminitity...I could call it My Goddess of Rapture.

GentleReader9 wrote:One must have a mind of winter . . .

Isn't Wallace seeing himself as a snow man with a cold inner life?

Tom