Quick Write: Animated Poem-The Country by Billy Collins

I've watched the five animated videos on Billy Collin' poetries. My favorite video was The Country. This poem tells a story of how the writer wonders when someone tells him not to leave matches on the floor or places the mice could reach. He was told that he should keep the matches in a safe place, because some crazy mouse could sneak in and take a match and go into the underworld of mice and starts a fire there. The theme of the poem is telling you that no matter how crazy the consequences seem, there are still possibilities that unfortunate things can happen. So people have to be always careful, not just sometimes cautious, because the unlucky things may be unlikely to happen. However, there is a saying in chinese"不怕一萬, 只怕萬一," this phrase means that things that happened for a million times don't scare us as much as those accidents that come so unpredictable. So we should always be careful so that no 萬一 will happen!

Quick Write: My Ballad Reflection

Allen and Jasper read my ballad about a knight named Cinori. Both of them had very similar feedbacks on my ballad. Both of them complained that I don't have a consistent rhyme scheme, and that some of my stanzas didn't even include rhymes. However, it is because rhymes are very hard to find when talking about a certain topic, I'm not a professional poet, I can't think of rhymes just whenever I want to. I didn't know that a ballad needs a consistent rhyme scheme so I just added rhymes I thought made the poem fluent. Jasper also mentioned that the my ballad was too long. It wasn't that long, Jasper, Mr.Dahl didn't set a limit to it so it was alright. However, I didn't plan on writing so much at the first place, I was thinking about a 20line ballad, and instead I ended up with 88lines. The plot of the story has different stages, and it is indescribable within 20 lines, that's why I had 88lines, and I even thought I could a few more stanzas in there.