Essay Comparison: Just to Say vs The Panther

This is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams and The Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke. These two poems are very contrasted poems each other but still have slightly similarity content of the reality. Both content can happen I real life and it is more modernized poems compare to the old myth poems.

Williams seems like wrote a poem about one day in speakers life; the speaker left an apologizing note to the person who saved his/her plum for breakfast.

On the other hand, Rilke wrote the life of a panther; one day, the speaker went to the zoo and saw a panther in a cage with no happiness in its face.

However, there was a part Williams used the voice of the person who read the note, which start from fifth line, "and which you were probably saving for breakfast" this part may related to Rilke's poem, because of using third person narrative.

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The major contrast between these two poems is the feeling after read each poem. Williams's poem left me a warm fuzzy feeling inside; I could see a smile on the person who read that note. The person knows he's not really apologizing but it's still a humoristic note. That way the speaker knows he/she will forgive him. Besides, Rilke's poem left me sadness, madness and bitterness. No happiness or blessing emotions. At the last two lines when he said, " rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone." it could interpreted as that power is overcome by the desperation of being on the wrong side of the bars, the panther knows he won't be able to be free.

Although Williams and Rilke's poems don't seem to have not much in common, in actuality, they both have little bit of hope in speaker's mind; one is guaranteed hope but not the other one.

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