How to Read a Poem

I am not the best person to write about this. I have little to no formal training; I do not read poetry as regularly as I would like, and certainly not enough to write about its reading. But I was asked a few times in the past (though most who asked certainly forgot they did), and I put it off like I put off most things that require effort beyond the commonplace. I was on a flight recently and, miser that I am, refused to purchase internet access, and so I found myself drifting towards those verses from Shelley:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I memorized this poem more than a decade ago, and the memory has survived the intervening years. I thought how little poetry I remember of the store I had memorized. There comes a time in life when we look back and begin to measure; the things that are lost forever come to outweigh those to come, and hope turns to melancholy. To measure life teaspoon by teaspoon is poetic action, and, when the time comes, it profits us to know something about poetry.

We are a few paragraphs deep, and I have yet to tell you anything meaningful about poetry. Let us amend. What is poetry? This is a question we think we ought to know the answer to. Some of our first encounters with language are nursery rhymes:

Rock a bye baby on the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

An aside: Early versions of this nursery rhyme came with the moral: “This may serve as a warning to the proud and ambitious, who climb so high that they generally fall at last”. But the image of a baby so upset with her mother’s ministrations that she takes the cradle in her own hands and climbs a tree tall enough that the wind will rock the cradle is a bit absurd.

However absurd it is, the moral reveals something about the nature of poetry. It is at least a somewhat plausible explanation of the rhyme, but nowhere in the poem are the “proud and ambitious” mentioned explicitly. Poetry is figurative language: language that says one thing, but may hint at a multitude of other things.

Nursery rhymes are well enough, but what of poetry where the figuration is less obvious:

I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.

— Edna St Vincent Millay, Ebb

Most of us can understand something like this. A poem is effective if the figurations tell you something of the world you had not yet discovered. St Vincent Millay’s simile of lost love as a tepid pool slowly shrinking makes me feel in a way that a more cliche description of heartbreak would not. The beauty of poetry is that there is no limit to how one can say a thing, and no judge to tell the reader what they ought to find poignant. I have a penchant for the abstruse, and so I find these lines from Hart Crane’s At Melville’s Tomb powerful:

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

but if you find them non-sensical, you are in good company: Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine in 1926 when Crane submitted the poem for publication, also was confused and asked for help deciphering: “Take me for a hard-boiled unimaginative unpoetic reader, and tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy (or anything else)”. Crane’s response is among the best guides to understanding difficult poetry, of which I quote an excerpt:

as a poet I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perceptions involved in the poem.

What I getting at in this rambling preamble is that the meaning of a poem is not the point. If you read one and struggle to find any meaning, or your heart does not beat a little faster at the end, the poem was not for you and you should move on. To dissect meaning is to kill the thing. We want to feel the shake us, and only then, and only if we need to understand, do we tease out the method by which the poem affects us. Here are excerpts from two poems about autumn:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
      For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

— John Keats, To Autumn

and

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

Do they feel different? Or is your emotional reaction to them the same? I confess a preference for Keats and his soft and mellow poem over the flurry of emotion that Shelley brings, but my preference is neither here nor there. If you have a preference, why do you have it? What is it about the choice and quality of the words in Keats' ode that makes one feel a sense of peace? what about its rhymes or rhythms? does it refer to something that we know of and does this reference turn our emotions towards those felt in the past?

This sounds complicated, and, in a sense, it is. We treat words, whether fiction, non-fiction, or poetry, as entertainment, and we expect entertainment to demand from us no great deal of effort. There is nothing wrong with reading this way. This is how people approach most of what they read, but poetry suffers from a surplus of analysis. We encounter poems in a classroom; we read them through; we dissect them and talk of meaning. As adults, we assume that if a poem does not say something to us, it is because we haven’t gone through the motions of the classroom. But that requires effort, and effort is hard. So we stop.

If you feel this way, perhaps ease yourself into it by reading epic or dramatic poetry. There is narrative in these lines from Paradise Lost:

Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.

There is both comedy and melancholy in this exchange from Henry IV, Part 1:

FALSTAFF
I would your grace would take me with you: whom
means your grace?

PRINCE HENRY
That villanous abominable misleader of youth,
Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan.

FALSTAFF
My lord, the man I know.

PRINCE HENRY
I know thou dost.

FALSTAFF
But to say I know more harm in him than in myself,
were to say more than I know. That he is old, the
more the pity, his white hairs do witness it; but
that he is, saving your reverence, a whoremaster,
that I utterly deny. If sack and sugar be a fault,
God help the wicked! if to be old and merry be a
sin, then many an old host that I know is damned: if
to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine
are to be loved. No, my good lord; banish Peto,
banish Bardolph, banish Poins: but for sweet Jack
Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff,
valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant,
being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him
thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s
company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.

PRINCE HENRY
I do, I will.

But this all is merely a suggestion. Poetry has become something of a bad word; an art-form that the average person may not actively dislike, for fear of being perceived as dumb or uncultured, but a thing that few actively seek. It has accrued a reputation for obscurity and intellectual pretentiousness (merited), and it is hard for one who enjoys it to slough off those same adjectives. I will not try to convince you otherwise, and, in lieu of a conclusion, I leave you this poetic guide to poetry:

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.
      Hands that can grasp, eyes
      that can dilate, hair that can rise
         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
   useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
   same thing may be said for all of us—that we
      do not admire what
      we cannot understand. The bat,
         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
   ball fan, the statistician—case after case
      could be cited did
      one wish it; nor is it valid
         to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
   nor till the autocrats among us can be
     “literalists of
      the imagination”—above
         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
   the raw material of poetry in
      all its rawness, and
      that which is on the other hand,
         genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

— Marianne Moore, Poetry