Poem #2

Pass/Fail - Linda Pastan

You will never graduate from this dream of blue books. No matter how you succeed awake, asleep there is a test waiting to be failed. The dream beckons with two dull pencils, but you haven't even taken the course; when you reach for a book - it closes its door in your face; when you conjugate a verb - it is in the wrong language. Now the pillow becomes a blank page. Turn it to the cool side; you will still smother in all of the feathers that have to be learned by heart.

      I think about dreams all the time. There was a point in my life where I actually bought some books that offered analysis of dreams just so I could try to make more sense of my own. Since then I’ve given up on trying to understand what my subconscious is trying to tell me. I know it will still control my decisions even if I am not conscious of what my mind is processing behind the scenes. Anyway, I think this poem makes an interesting point about how we are one way awake and another asleep. Even Disney can be quoted in saying that, “A dream is a wish the heart makes.” Though I think he was meaning more of conscious, daydreams; dreams or hopes for the future. How I am now applying this to the poem is sort o how I was first saying, our subconscious mind makes or decisions for us. In dreams we are the realist parts of ourselves. All of our deepest desires, no matter how shameful to our awake selves, all exist and thrive in our subconscious. When we are awake we project what we believe is expected of us, meaning correct behavior, appearance and what not. We may advance through life in our awake state, but we never really stray from our basic, innermost desires and urges found in our subscious. This poem makes me feel really hopeless, actually. It seems to be implying that dreams are only dreams, and they are nearly impossible to achieve even with any amount of hard work (now this is sounding like the daydreams, or more like the “American Dream”). Bottom line, our dreams we have when we are asleep can get crazy because our subconscious is trying to push us in specific directions, and our dreams we follow by day may want to take us in a different direction, which can cause conflict. That's what I got.