The personal response you are being asked to write based on your experience and knowledge is called reader response criticism. It calls on you to think reflectively about how your experience informs your understanding of these two poems. It asks you to consciously consider your social location: your gender, race, ethnicity, age, geographic location, socio-economic status, and level of education and how they impact you as you interact with the poems.
These are two poems that in juxtaposition invite reader response criticism. Both Chief Dan George and Robert Service lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada. Chief George was a Native American who grew up in the region. Service moved to Vancouver from Great Britain as a young adult.
The social location of each man influenced his response to the landscape. Having lived in western Canada all his life and having strong roots in the area, Chief George responds to the landscape with love. He describes it as filled with sounds, sights, and fragrances that are beautiful to him. He writes of his surroundings:
They speak to me. And my heart soars
On the other hand, coming from Scotland and England, Service responds to the western Canadian landscape as alien, finding it a place that fills him loneliness. He calls it an "outcast" and a "leper" land, characterizing it as wolfish:
A lone wolf howls his ancient rune—The fell arch-spirit of the Wild...Thy heart's abysmal loneliness
For one poet, the land make his heart soar. For another, it fills his heart with loneliness.
You might relate this to an experience you have had when either a friend shared a landscape or place they loved with you and it left you cold or when you shared a beloved place with a friend who couldn't understand your affection for it.
Or you might describe going on a trip and being shown a land that either spoke to your heart or made you feel cold and desolate. You could then relate these feelings back to the poems. It seems clear that the assignment is trying to show that different people respond to the same place differently based on their backgrounds, and it invites you to reflect on that idea in your own life.
I assume you are referring to the poem "My Heart Soars" by Chief Dan George, which begins with the line "The beauty of the trees." Your personal response essay should bring your own personal experiences and knowledge into what you say—and I cannot help you in that area—but I can certainly suggest how the two poems given present ideas about the impact of significant experience.
"My Heart Soars" is very much concerned with the impact of nature upon the speaker. In it, the speaker emphasizes a connection between himself and the natural landscape, describing how elements including "the beauty of the trees," "the summit of the mountain," and "the freshness of the morning" "speak to me." The depiction of nature in this poem could be compared to that often found in Romantic poetry, in which the experience of exposure to Nature's beauty elevates the speaker to an understanding of the sublime.
The construction of this poem is relatively simple, with the use of parallelism and repetition of the line "speaks to me" serving both to emphasize the endlessness of nature's store of beauty and the fact that the way it calls to the speaker is the key focus of the poem. The language used is vivid but not figurative: phrases such as "the thunder of the sky" and "the trail of the sun" are evocative but literal. Nature does not need to be compared to anything else in order to describe its beauty and its impact. At the end of the poem, the speaker connects all the preceding elements to "the life that never goes away," suggesting that nature, and the impact of nature, is absolutely crucial to the understanding of the speaker.
Service's poem is rather different. To begin with, it does not feature a speaker as such: there is no key figure in the poem who is interacting with nature. Rather, the poem addresses the "lonely" landscape itself: "O outcast land! O leper land!" In this poem, then, we are arguably witnessing the aftermath of significant experience upon nature itself. Here, it is the elements of the landscape itself which stand witness to its desolate beauty: the "deadly desolate" valleys are witnesses of the "forlorn," "lonely sunsets" and "lordly mountains." The words "lone" and "lonely" recur in the poem, emphasizing that the chief impact of whatever significant experience has led to this land becoming "outcast" has been to isolate it. We might infer from the title that this experience was God "forgetting" the land, although this is likely to be figurative.
The only genuinely living thing depicted in this lonely landscape is the wolf. He is described as "lone" and as the sole animate being. It is left to this "fell arch-spirit" then, to express all that the lonely land cannot: "thy heart's abysmal loneliness." The wolf, we might argue, represents the sole survivor of some kind of natural disaster, and the fact that whoever can remember terrible things must carry them. The "monster mountains" and "lonely sunsets" have been attributed human feelings of desolation, but only the wolf can express these feelings.
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