The Girl with the Red Backpack and Mice that Glow: Post for 10/26

My brain hurts. This is why I don't like poetry. There are so many references and many of them hidden. If you don't catch one, chances are you don't understand the entire poem the way the author intended. Don't get me wrong, this poem was very interesting. I just don't think I understood it, even after rereading it. There was just so much to think about. But I did understand some.

I liked how the author talked about the little girl with the red backpack. She had a book in her pack "with a title like Getting to Know Your Planet". This little girl is so impressionable. It is my guess that she will probably believe everything that is in that book like God Himself told her it was true. Kind of like a little kid believes certain things are true because "mommy said so" or "teacher told me". That little girl will absorb everything that book has to offer. If the author had a biased opinion she will probably be influenced by the author's words. Everything about pollution, evolution, and so many other topics being debated are now known by that little girl. And she won't be the only child, equally impressionable, with that book or one like it. This is starting to sound a little like a conspiracy theory. The government has an opinion and they feed it to easily influenced children. I doubt this is what the author had in mind when he wrote the poem. It wasn't even what I had in mind when I started my blog.

Some things I didn't get were some of the references that I actually caught. I even looked up the ones I could and still didn't really get it. Why did the author talk about glowing mice? I don't know what that had to do with the poem other than the fact that it is a new development in science. Why does the author keep talking to Lucretius? I know he was a Roman poet and philosopher who wrote De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which talks about the earth and different phenomena. Information I found also says that it was written to "Memmius" and that Lucretius references Memmius many times. Maybe Robert Hass was trying to mimic this. I don't know. The list of things I don't know just keeps growing.