A Weapon

(The Look)

This blog requirement is a tough one. This is because I’m not that food in interpreting poems. Anyway, as what I’ve learned in our poetry class, a poem would have a different approach on different readers because of the different experiences of the readers on poetry. We have various outlooks in life and so this would affect how we look on things like on poetry.
The look is the most powerful weapon one could have that would make cupid work and strike an arrow to someone. This is what I have understood in the two 4-line stanza poem. The persona here have many admirers here, I believe—Strephon, Robin and Colin. If I could make a story out of this poem, this would go like this:
Strephon was in love with the persona only during the springtime. Maybe she liked him too; maybe she didn’t like him at all. But as the poem says, “Strephon kissed me in the spring”, this may imply that she had allowed him to kiss her which may also mean that she liked him too. Maybe they were together for some time only, specifically during the spring. I think that the “in the” could make the line mean something else; I just don’t know what it is.
Here comes Robin who made his move on the persona during the fall. They were together only for the whole duration of fall. A kiss would be quite a great move to touch someone’s heart, not for me, but for someone like the persona in the poem. The persona may have fallen for Robin for quite some time too.
Maybe there was somebody who loved the girl during the summer only and winter too. The days have past, the seasons have changed but I think there was this somebody who has always been there waiting for her through those times even though the girl has changed boyfriends through the four seasons of loneliness. And Colin is now on the scene. He may be her friend ever since. But, he never expressed his feelings for the girl. On the other side of the story, even though Colin never did anything or he just didn’t fall for her, but she is just struck every time he would look at her, may it be with something or not. Even though she has a boyfriend, she was unconscious that she liked him more than who she is with. Confusing, huh? Maybe this was the time when she wrote this poem, when she was in a confusing stage.
On the second stanza, she is evaluating and weighing things. With this, she realized that she liked Strephon and Robin because of their caresses, we could just imagine the touch which could come with the kisses. Only Colin’s look is what it takes to move the persona.
On the more negative side of things, I could say that Colin is a stalker when she said, “but the kiss in Colin’s eyes haunts me day and night.” This may terrify the girl because of the malicious look of Colin on her. Even though she has a boyfriend, Colin would never give up on her which totally disturbs her. It reminds me of the song “Hunger” by Faspitch.
A powerful weapon of love and hate—the look.