Original:
My Erasure Poem:
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“Too Much Love” is a perfect erasure poem that provides another dimension to the original piece “To Earthward” by Robert Frost. The original poem surround the theme of changing love. The first four stanzas describe the sweet, giddy feelings of happiness that the narrator feels when he is in love for the first time. He compares it to the liveliness of the natural world, such as the flow of musk from honeysuckle and the petals of roses. However, there is a dramatic shift in the narrator’s feelings after the fourth stanza. The remaining stanzas reflect the narrator’s feelings of falling out of love, and the poem ends with the narrator’s wish for death.
The erasure poem “Too Much Love” furthers the poem’s meaning and highlights the possible motives of the narrator’s changed feelings. It gives the reader a sense of transition, especially with the lines “sweet things/stung.” This shows that even though the narrator acknowledges that certain things in his relationship are sweet, they still cause him pain, which leads him to undergo this shift in feelings. Also, the idea of “too much love” was easily overlooked in the original, but since many things have been deleted in the erasure poem, the reader can easily deduce that it was too much love that scarred the narrator, since he was so emotionally invested in his relationship but ended up hurt. Furthermore, the last part of the erasure poem, “The hurt is enough” shows yet another change in the narrator’s feelings. The entire erasure poem depicts his hurt from too much love that he was given or that he gave, but this last sentence implies that he has suffered enough from the hurt and it is time for him to move on. This is a great way to end the poem because the reader can use his or her own imagination to decide where the narrator will go from here. Lastly, the completely blacked out method of erasing worked well and connected to this last line of the poem. It suggests that the narrator is erasing this experience from his memory and officially moving on without letting it affect him and his life in the future.