poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

No 5 lines have been more beautiful than the last 5 of this poem

Oh God it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much


It's not fair to the rest of us

i agree, the last five lines are amazing.

i am in total agreement. . after reading this poem, so many things around me were decorated with those last five lines. . .if only we all could feel that.

I just read it for the first time. Those last five lines brought tears to my eyes. Thank you Frank, for writing something so simple and so beautiful.

I know that the last five lines are incredible but we can't ignore the beauty in the other images, like the room up there, the dancers, the rib watchers and the man on the box on the sidewalk.

O'Hara commonly ends poems with a flourish. Taken only by itself, the flourish is a bit empty. The poem does not exist to create the great punch line. Rather, the end pulls the poem into a more vivid plane where the entire work had resided to begin with in the poet's imagination.

(i don't think the first half of what i said really posted, so here's the whole thing, revised... viz., disregard my last post.)

mr. koenigsberg's comment above is very astute.

frank was a natural craftsman; even though he loved spontaneity, he had pretty much all of english and french poetry in his head, and at his fingertips. so he can get amazing technical effects without even seeming to try.

as an example, consider the rhetorical progression of "too much" in those last lines... logically, the last one should be "and love you TOO much"; but it is not. it is "love you SO much"

the poet is either very wise about love, or else he is subconsciously thwarting that "too much". this doesn't dissipate the loveliness of the surface statement. if anything, it adds nuance and courage to frank's love.