Fiddlesticks.
Poems aren't bunnies. Poems don't get born, poems don't develop and grow without work, and poems don't gnaw their legs off in traps. Instead poems are like car engines. They were made with careful care and thought by fallible people, using classic techniques and strategies. They were created for a purpose. And they can be taken apart and put back together again.
Unlike a poem, a well-designed car engine does not engender strong emotions for most people. Very few people think of a well designed manifold in times of crisis. No one draws pictures of a slant-six for their high school year book. Men do not read or recite "love carburetors." Poetry arouses and refines vague emotions, therefore many people feel very emotional about poetry. Mrs. Lind was quite fond of "The Road Not Taken" and any criticism of that poem was a criticism not just of her but of her heart.
When you write about poetry, however, you can't entirely forget Mrs. Lind. Poetry is, after all, about emotion, not physics. A poet writes a poem in order to get you to feel a certain way. She is aiming at a certain part of the wordless emotional spectrum, and trying to put words to it. so, when you analyze those words, that poem, you have to acknowledge the emotion she is trying to express and how she is trying to do it.
When you first read a poem, don't worry about what the poem is trying to do. Just read it and see what pops up as interesting. No need to get too analytical on the first time through. If anything, try to read with an open ear and heart. You want the poet to get at your emotions, arouse them, and get the juices flowing. If you finish the poem in a state of befuddlement, worry not.
Now, the next time you are going to start taking it apart. What you will be doing is lifting the hood and watching the engine run underneath, tracing the gas, electricity, or air lines in and out of the engine. Translate each sentence or stanza into normal English. This can be quite a trick, if you are reading Donne or Eliot, but it always yields results. Poets love to hide things in plain sight. Donne, for example, writes "my face in thine eye, thine in my eye appears," he is referring to the old "I-can-see-myself-in-your-eyes" idea. Other poets play games with vague pronoun references, longs list of details, or straight out repetition. If you try to put the poem in your own words, sentence by sentence, you begin to get a pretty good idea at what the poet was driving at.
It is vital that you come up with a guess at what feeling or idea that the poet is driving at; you want to guess at what part of the emotional spectrum the poet is aiming for. The next time through the poem, you look for figurative language. Now, finding similes, metaphors, personification, and all their cousins requires practice and instruction. Basically, you are looking for something described in a way that seems off. For example, Frost writes of a flower as being a "tongue from the ground." Clearly, he is either using figurative language or off his rocker. Flowers look no more like tongues than empty crack vials do. As soon as you have picked up the trick of finding them, they are as plentiful as mushrooms after a hard rain.
Unfortunately, you need to ask the dreaded question; "so what?" That is where your guess at what the poet is aiming at becomes important. You need to be able to account for the major examples by using your "theory" of the poem. For example, Frost might have been using the tongue image to show how the earth and the scythe talk to each other. "The scythe and earth are whispering together and are talking about the fact of work." I have not written much, when I say that they are whispering to each other, but I have explained two bits of figurative language in the poem.
The "so what?" question becomes very tricky when you start looking at the structure of the poem. Figurative language and comprehension deal with what the words mean. Structure deals with what the words sound like and how they are put together. Under the umbrella term, 'structure' are the all-time pains of poetry: rhyme scheme, meter, stanzas, and forms. The only way to really get used to using these is practice. You need to see sonnets and villanelles to know what they are, you need to scan through a poem for its meter before you can really appreciate why it is important. However, structure needs to be accounted for. If every word counts in a short story, every syllable counts in a poem. You frequently can find the ultimate proof of your theory in the actual structure of the poem.
For example, in "The Road Not Taken," Frost ends the poem with the word "difference." According to the way the line goes, he should end the line with a two- syllable word, perhaps "dif'rence." Instead, he makes it fuzzy, with a word that has three syllables, but three murky syllables. Very few people clearly enunciate all three syllables in that word. Further, the second to last line is one syllable shorter than it should be, adding emphasis to that last line. I believe that Frost is accenting the word, because he wishes to use it ironically. There was little difference between the two roads ages and ages ago, but the speaker believes that there is one now.
After you have gone on a poetry safari, figured out what the poem wants and how the poem gets it, then you have to write the essay. After years of doing this in high school, college, grad school, and now, back in high school again, I decided that the "chronological" structure is the best. By "chronological" I don't really mean by time, but "in the order of the poem." So after you have introduced your essay, your organize the paragraphs, stanza by stanza, or section by section. Next, use only those elements in the poem that are either so obvious that you have to deal with them, or are important to your argument. If a poem has a ABBA rhyme scheme, but you don't really want to make anything of it, don't mention it in your essay. Most good poems have so many different elements in them that you can't possibly mention all of them in a short essay. Further, many of those elements are working towards the same end. Therefore, you don't have to mention every one. Along the same lines, always stay focused on your idea. If you believe that "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" is about the triumph of love, make sure that everything you mention supports that idea.
The introduction and the conclusion of this sort of essay are the most vital areas. You cannot use them for bland summaries. Instead, you have to use them to place the poem and its ideas into real life. Indeed, many great introductions don't even mention the poem. Instead, they tell a story that reflects the interpretation of the poem that the essay is about to expound upon. In the conclusion, you want to use the poem more explicitly and connect it to the introduction. In the essay, you have taken the poem apart; in the conclusion you put the engine back together and get it running again. Both the introduction and the conclusion need to implicitly answer this question: "Why is this poem important to my life?"
You need to answer that question. Poetry is important because it captures emotions in words. So when the time comes for you to feel those emotions, often those words of poetry rise to your lips. Anyone who has seen "Three Weddings and a Funeral" can see the awesome power that Auden commands. You can know about allusions and meter and scansion and still feel your chest contract as you look over a casket in the rain of England: "He was my north, south, east, and west...."
Because poetry is more than a bunny or an engine. It is the musical score to our hearts.
Back to the Beach
Copyright © Finestkind publications and Bob Barsanti.