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The Day Lady Died, a poem by Frank O'Hara, is a tribute to the singer and actress Billie Holiday, who passed away on July 17, 1959. The poem captures O'Hara's own emotions and thoughts on the day of Holiday's death, as well as his admiration for her talent and cultural significance.
The poem is written in free verse, with no fixed rhyme or meter. This form allows O'Hara to convey his thoughts and feelings in a more natural and spontaneous way, reflecting the personal and intimate nature of the poem. The structure of the poem also mirrors the chaotic and unpredictable nature of life and death, with lines that vary in length and structure.
One of the most striking features of The Day Lady Died is its strong sense of place. The poem is set in New York City, and O'Hara evokes the city's energy and vibrancy through his descriptions of the people, buildings, and activities he encounters as he walks around the city. The city is a bustling, vibrant place, full of life and movement, but it is also a place of loss and sadness, as O'Hara reflects on Holiday's death.
Throughout the poem, O'Hara pays tribute to Holiday's talent and cultural significance. He describes her as a "great singer," and notes that "the day Billie Holiday died was a hot one." This line captures the intense emotional and physical impact of Holiday's death on O'Hara, and suggests the enduring influence of her music and art.
In addition to celebrating Holiday's talent and cultural significance, The Day Lady Died also explores themes of loss and mortality. O'Hara writes about his own sense of loss and sadness at Holiday's death, and reflects on the impermanence of life and the fleeting nature of fame and success. He writes, "I think of my love of you, and I begin to think maybe death isn't so bad if I can die with you," suggesting that his love for Holiday is so strong that he would be willing to die alongside her.
Overall, The Day Lady Died is a powerful and poignant tribute to Billie Holiday, capturing the emotion, complexity, and vibrancy of life and death in the city. It is a celebration of Holiday's talent and cultural significance, as well as a reflection on loss, mortality, and the enduring power of love and art.
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This choice is typical of O'Hara's verse: to maintain the impression of an experience just-lived, the news of Holiday's death occupies a precise temporal place in the poem. He orders the same thing in other poems as well. One of the main purposes of an elegy is to remember and celebrate the life of the individual that has passed on. Much of the poem's action occurs in everyday tasks. By reminding the reader of it, though, he is at least pointing in a particular direction.
She made enough of an impact on the speaker that he does not simply note her death and go on with the rest of his day. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon o r Les Nègres of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing For those who may not be aware, he's referencing when Billie Holiday died; she was known as Lady Day. This popular saying shows a warm and comforting light on a home, giving it personality and feeling, the main factors that distinguish it from a house. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. Jung-80-83 Jennings exceeds it by daring a lyric persona that blends and speaks for everyman and every woman. Rather, he connects himself to her, not only by focusing on the day itself and by remembering her singing, but also by depicting a moment of epiphany.
The "Voice" of the poem is that of the poet. Frank O'Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1926 and grew up in Massachusetts. In that larger one, all are connected, and the knowledge of that eternal present may be a first necessary step. As far as elegies go, this poem is unusual because O'Hara writes in media res, and does not mention Holiday's death until the end. Home is a place we come back to after a long day's work, the place where we go to seek shelter and protection. That world is one of extraordinary beauty and, ultimately, freedom from the constraints of ordinary life and all the rules and regulations both perceptual and social that maintain it.
Nor is every detail pointedly un-literary. The last date is today's date — the date you are citing the material. They know that he is never alone at the cemetery, never laying in the field filled with cold graves. To live their lives with happiness and the joy that comes with living life each day. His final four lines bear out this notion by his spontaneous recollection, so vivid, of when he heard her sing.
She wrote and performed the song "God Bless the Child", which was later recorded by the band Blood, Sweat and Tears. At least for Holiday fans like O'Hara—but the power of his poem is that it's enacted that preservation for all of us. In that moment, Holiday herself is an instrument of transcendence, able to take people beyond the ordinary. It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don't know the people who will feed me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon first name Linda I once heard doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. .
For the most part, the reader follows O'Hara's speaker throughout his afternoon in New York City until the jarring news of Holiday's death transforms the poem from a simple series of actions to a complex meditation on loss and memory. I've always loved Billie Holiday's music and, at one time, had every recording she'd made in the U. Her voice was her instrument. Further Jung in his animus and anima says that every man carries with him the eternal image of woman; the woman too has her inborn image of man. Both describe a place where someone lives, but with a deeper look at the words, we find that a house is simply just a building.
Kennedy's assassination - they remember exactly where they were when it happened and how they found out, and the memory lingers many years later. The majority …show more content… The ending of the poem shows the speaker ruminating on what the death of Holiday personally means to him. His teachers doubted his aspirations to be a musician, but in this small window of time he embarked on a journey to prove himself, thus the mixtape 10 Day was born. Sadly, he died only 7 years after Lady Day; we lost these iconic figures, so full of life and art, all too soon. Only in this mundane world are people isolated entities. He is only there because they are there with him, and whenever they leave he is with them, going with them as the good things that come. It is filled with objects and memories, which grow and change along with the family inside of it.
It's a very effective poem, written by a well-known poet - both of his time and of ours. I have some quotations that are out in there in cyberspace - someone got them from my Goodreads page and turned them into jpg pictures. The poem becomes a poem about how disparate things, people, and events are all interconnected, even when they apparently have no connection whatsoever. In order to pull off such decorative flourishes, a poem needs an absolutely sound foundation—a heart. Chance the Rapper would go on to dilute the stagnant pool of rap and hip-hop to reflect important issues and emit a sound that uplifts and inspires. Instead, it is used to show the nature of mortality in regard to how the world continues on normally even after the death of a celebrity.
In the poem, however, he does not leave himself and Holiday as separate entities the way one normally would do. When the world outside is constantly changing the home remains constant. See eNotes Ad-Free Start your 48-hour free trial to get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts. This does not mean that what is considered to be the world does not exist, but that there is something behind it, something greater than it, some larger form of knowledge or being that brings everyone together. Her death signifies the inevitable tragedy of modern life, and the shock that results when something awful happens and stamps each detail upon one's mind. In every article, each individual had one thing in common they all had a heartache that dealt with death. He was very active in the art scene, most notably with the abstract expressionist painters.
People reacted to her death much in the same way that others reacted to John F. He was on staff at that Museum of Modern Art from 1952 until his death in 1966 he was run over by a dune buggy on Fire Island. Legions of subsequent imitators have turned his signature techniques—disarming chattiness, absurdly specific autobiographical detail , whimsical inclusion of trivialities in even the most somber poems—into bad habits. We have the impression that no detail is omitted, because no detail is too small; the momentous fact of Lady's death freezes this day in time, preserving even its most inconsequential event. In Philip Larkin's poem "Home Is So Sad", the narrator describes 10 Day Poem Analysis 228 Words 1 Pages Who would think a 10-day suspension from high school would ignite the hunger within Chancelor Bennett, or Chance the Rapper, to become the artist he is today? The second is the date of publication online or last modification online. Billie Holiday, the Jazz singer died of liver disease at a hospital in New York, early morning on July 17, 1959. Rather, he stops in his tracks and suddenly remembers a place usually associated undesirable connotations as something special, because that is where he first heard Holiday sing.
