RESPONSE TO THE STATEMENT:

*Poetry is the vehicle for melancholy.*

Poetry as a medium is made for self-reflection; Through the action of writing, we imprint something of ourselves onto the paper - that often being unhappiness, or melancholy. However poetry, as the medium of many, can become a vehicle for stories that elicits a variety of emotions, whether that be explicit or implicitly expressed.

Joanna Cho’s *The Magic Sock,* through its whimsical, child-like nature elicits a dream-like nostalgia emotion on the reader - the poem creates a nostalgic lens through which we can understand the contents of the poem through the safety of time. Written in past-tense, the seemingly random tangents - skipping from retelling a memory to defining ‘칼발’ - leave the poem feeling uncontrolled, as if we are being swept up by the authors memory, merely becoming a passenger along for the ride. The poems vague ‘magic’ element - “the sock is tiny, yet fits everyone, so we decided it must be magic” - furthers the surreal, dream-like nature of the poem. Finally, the poems allusion to it being a memory - the narrator referring to how they “used to sake turns slurping the sweet water” - makes the whole poem feel unreal.

However, *The Magic Sock,* through allusion highlights a melancholic tone over the whole poem. The narrators wish in the poem - to “[become] loved by everyone” - emphasises subtle adversities present in the narrators perspective - a melancholic tone looming in the background of this dream-like poem. The idea presented in the poem, the idea of ‘putting on a sock to get your wish’ reflects the narrators want to change herself to become liked by her family - only explicitly going so far as putting on a sock, but the connotation of which being much larger. The soon-after transformation of the narrator into a vague, inexplicit food, sliced up by her mother even further highlights the extent to which she was willing to change herself - happily being prepared out on a plate and sliced, if it meant her family was happy. Ultimately, *The Magic Sock*, though explicitly being able to be read as a poem of a happy, child-like dream, implicitly acts as a vehicle for the author to express, without distaste, a melancholic period of their childhood.

Rebecca Hawkes’ *Is it cruelty,* explicitly expresses it’s ideas of regret, mercy, a visceral melancholy that grip the poem. Hawkes’ purpose is clear - written for the “Meat Lovers” poetry collection, the poem is meant to express connections to the darker, more ‘taboo’ aspects of the agriculture sector and the idea of mercy within that. The poems repeated use of questions - “if they agree on what mercy means?”, “if it takes two girls to lift the stone?” - without a specific entity being questioned highlights the poems memory-like quality - the narrator is second-guessing whether every decision was the correct one. The narrators growing, uncontrolled sentences - “if they had expected it to take one cinematic blow, maybe two, but now they don’t know what to do” - expresses the regretful, accidental-nature of the poem. The amalgamation of the poems questions and the narrators regret to form the repetition of the question “that is barely a crack?” - highlights the grave mistake the narrator has taken - and the regret that comes with it. Finally, the poems final sentence utilizing the motif of question - “can they still go swimming?” - highlights the depressed nature of the poem - the narrator doesn’t even explicitly recognise the weight of their actions, yet is still tinged with melancholy.

The poems *The Magic Sock* and *Is it cruelty* express vastly different ideas in their plots - from a whimsical childhood story, to a visceral, regret-filled story. However, despite their vastly different plots, they all serve to achieve the same goal - become a vehicle to house the narrators melancholy.