Monday Musings: Hearts as seen by Seasons

This week I am discussing my poem Hearts as seen by Seasons. To begin with I want to note that this poem was heavily inspired by Edna St. Vincent Millay, particularly her poems The Spring and The Fall and The Song of Second April. As a poet, it is always hard for me to pick a favorite poet because I have many I adore, but I would say Edna St. Vincent Millay has definitely been one of my biggest inspirations. If you haven't ever heard of her I recommend not only reading her poetry but reading some biographies on her too (in particular Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford) because she was a very influential and fascinating woman.

Edna St. Vincent Millay uses a lot of nature imagery in her poetry, and the more I read it, the more I used nature imagery in my poems. As for my poem Hearts as seen by Season I wanted it to be a kind of intentional tribute to Millay. I know this isn't a poetry blog and I could go on about Millay for awhile, but I just wanted to provide a little background information.

Hearts as seen by Seasons is broken up into four distinct stanza's to reflect the four distinct seasons we experience each year. One day I was thinking about all the seasons I have experienced in my life, and all the different stages of health I experienced them in. This is where the idea for the entire poem came from. The seasons of the poem are not necessarily literal seasons, though they could certainly be interpreted this way, but they are supposed to be the stages someone with a chronic illness goes through, the "hearts" are the ones that live inside of everyone with a chronic illness, the seasons are the emotions we go through.

The first stanza is Spring, when everything is brand new. Spring is birth, when there is still everything in life left to experience and nothing seems out of reach.

The second stanza is Summer, when you have experienced all the good things in life. Life is still good and you still feel carefree. Hope for the future is at its highest.

The third stanza is Fall, when you are still experiencing good things in life but they are slowly being taken over by all the bad things. Hope begins to decline slowly but steadily.

The fourth and last stanza is Winter where everything seems to be cold, life seems to have given up on you. Hope is nearly non existent. There is "one heart" becoming two again. Living with a chronic illness means living with a heart that is in constant struggle. There is the side of yourself that is still carefree and joyful, and there is side of you that is in agony and despair. These are two very distinct ways as someone who deals with pain and chronic illness, I feel everyday. Everyday one heart fights these two very distinct sides of each other, I note that in the cold winter of the year that "one heart once again becomes two", the two sides have decided to separate and no matter which you choose one side is dead and the other is not far behind.

I want to note one last thing about my poem. In the first three stanzas I being with the words "I remember", while in the last stanza I begin "Now I live in". This was a very deliberate choice of words. I remember the other "seasons" of my life. I remember being a completely carefree little girl who had a whole world left to discover. I remember when I first began to have big dreams about my future and nothing was off limits. I remember when chronic illness first hit me hard, learning that the whole world wasn't all good and that bad thing happened to good people. I remember when the hope of my youth began to fade away. Now I live in a constant battle between joy and despair and while I do still have hope, it is not as easy as it once was. I am only 25 but I have experienced every season of my life fully. Most people my age are still in the early seasons of their life, I would say most are still in that summer phase. Their seasons get to last longer because they don't have pain and other debilitating symptoms wearing them down and burning up their daylight. People with chronic illness have to grow up faster than their peers and can not enjoy bouncy spring and lazy days of summer. People with chronic illness almost immediately skip to the fall of the year. Like Millay I am using the word "Fall" instead of Autumn because it isn't just the season I am referring to, it is the decline of hope, the decline of the good days.

I hope you enjoyed reading what inspired Hearts as seen by Seasons and finding out why I wrote this poem. Please read past "Monday Musing" post to learn about my other poems, and check out my book The Bright Side of Dark (which can be purchased through www.amazon.com by searching for the book title or my name "Heather Danielle Ashley". or by contacting me).

#mondaymusings #heartsasseenbyseasons #TheBrightSideofDark