Feeling Sorry for Myself While I Write My Homework Assignment

Our assignment was that we had to find a poem we enjoyed on Poetry Daily and write a little about it.  My post is not organized like an essay, nor is it organized like a journal entry.  It is safe to say that it is not very organized at all.  But, here goes...

Feeling Sorry for Myself While Standing Before the
Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum in London

Oh yes my friend, I've been there: the insects battering at
the armored lids of your yellowish eyes

the moment you pecked your way out of that rotten shell
and dug out from your sandpit nest ...

And I've experienced the thud thud thud of your days,
the indigestible monotony 

of everything's spiny orangy-green husk. How the sun
gets daily whiter and hotter and just

a little bit closer. The week spent gobbling down your


own weight's worth of whatever. One stumpy
footprint after another, tracking the trackless, squelching

across last night's marsh into a volcano-spattered today
hip-deep in ash and yawning

a muzzleful of sulfur. Swishing through stiff fronds,

we drag an unbearable load of tombstones on our back
and a fat lugubrious tail, shit-smutched and

spiked. The flattening of the razor grass. The forgotten
clutch of eggs. Our shrill yaps

and groans. That tiny gray walnut
for a brain and the fat black tongue tough as a bootsole ...

They've explained us away a dozen times: some passing
meteorite or another, the rat-like mammals

eating our pitiful young, all kinds
of new weather. Issueless, but far too stupid to be forlorn,

we trundle along the pink quartz shore
to sip at the lukewarm edge of yet another evaporating sea.

Michael Derrick Hudson

        Living in D.C. has its advantages.  The government gives you in-state tuition to all state schools, you can support the Capitals, and there are a lot of free museums.  As a child, “Smithsonian” was a word with which I was very familiar.  My father was a huge fan of the institution and regularly took both my sister and I downtown on the D6 bus to visit the portrait gallery or the Natural History museum.  I loved these expeditions because they meant not only visiting my favorites, but also meant spending time with my father.  My father would never rush us if my sister and I were entranced by an exhibit or an attraction, but let us dissect with our eyes, piece by piece.  He would wait and let us stand there, creating a universe in our mind for the thing, writing its life story or analyzing its personality.  These reveries were definitely the best part of our museum adventures.

            While reading this poem, I was struck by the memories of those strange, long-ago daydreams.  Daydreams that, I am sad to say, I had almost forgotten.  Of course, this poem is a thousand times more lyrically structured and certainly more moving than my own six-year-old musings.  But that is not to say they are not similar.  I like how the first line is an apostrophe, as if the author is visiting the grave of some well-remembered friend.  It made me think back to the imaginary conversations I would have with the stuffed manatee in the Hall of Mammals.  The writer goes on to tell the stegosaurus that he’s felt the same way, felt slow and bored, useless and sad.  He begins to describe the dinosaur’s last few days, remembering for him the feeling of sun getting hotter and closer, the monotony of a dumb trundle to the next meal, or the next pool of water.  He then offers up the scientific explanation for the stegosaurus’s premature demise, but even the author sounds like he doesn’t believe it.  The author writes as if the answer is too easy or convenient to be real.  But, instead of letting the readers in on what he thinks happened, he goes back to describing the dreary life of the dinasour.  It seems as if he is almost avoiding the analysis of the question at hand; “how did this happen?”

            So far, I have not addressed a main element of this poem, the involvement of the author himself.  After all, the title of the poem does say, “Feeling sorry for Myself.”  At first, I was puzzled by small, yet important appearance.  I really had no idea why he was there, or what a stegosaurus had to do with feeling sorry for yourself.  However, after reading the poem a few more times, I started to realize that the speaker was making the dinosaur a metaphor for his own life.  He describes himself as obliviously moving through a slightly squalid, filthy life, never stopping to think about his own existence or equally confusing topics.  Though all the signs of his own demise are apparent, he ignores them, his tiny mind concerned with more mundane topics.  When disaster finally comes, he continues on, searching for another resource that will also be destroyed. 

This is a pretty depressing analysis.  Despite its doomsday sentiment, I really liked this poem.  Not just because I could relate to the experience of the museum, but also because the author uses such great terms that seem to reverberate in your ears and nuzzle against your right cranial lobe.  “Shit-smutched and spiked” was a particularly effective couple of words that seemed to continuously pop into my head this morning every time my calculus teacher asked a question. There were so many good examples of alliteration and detailed description.  When I read it, I could hear the poem in my head, which doesn’t happen with some poems.  Some poems, when read, just seem to shallowly bounce and echo in my closed mouth and never really reach my head.  This poem was in my head. 

I know that this post may not be the best organized, but it shows exactly how I feel about this poem.  After all, passion isn’t always neat and tidy.