A poem, as a manifestation of
language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out
in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could
wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense are under way: they
are making toward something.
~Paul Celan
Understanding and Explicating
Poetry
Perhaps the most challenging
material you will have to read in college is poetry. While the message of some poems may be fairly
simple—”Enjoy your youth while it lasts,” for instance—the way poets put words
together often makes this message elusive.
Writers don’t write this way just to annoy you; rather, their
sophisticated vocabulary and complex syntax help them to write with precision,
to tease out the subtleties of nature and the human mind, and to create certain
effects. When you read a poem, you
should begin by trying to figure what the poet is saying on the surface: the
content of the poem. When you can
summarize this content in a few sentences, examine the way the poet conveys
this content; in other words, analyze the poem’s form. Finally, determine how the content and form
work together to create the poem’s meaning.
Think of a poem as an equation: form + content = meaning. The term for analyzing a poem in this way is
“explication.” Here is a step-by-step method you might find useful when you
explicate, or interpret, a poem:
1. Find a quiet place, such as a study room at
the library, where you will not be distracted or interrupted. Put the following items on the table in front
of you: your text book, your class notebook opened to a blank page, a pencil or
pen, a hardback dictionary, and a subject encyclopedia such as Benet’s Readers’ Encyclopedia. Anything else on
the table might distract you. Remove it.
2. Take a deep breath and relax. Read the poem once slowly aloud without
writing or marking anything. Don’t stop
until you finish the poem, even if you don’t know the meaning or pronunciation
of a word. When you have finished,
reflect for a moment on any words, images, and characters that caught your
attention. Jot down these items in your
notebook, along with one sentence in which you try to summarize the poem.
3. Now read the poem again silently. When you come to a word you don’t know, look
it up in the dictionary. In your notes,
write the word, its pronunciation, the meaning or meanings of it in this poem,
and a clue to help you remember it.
Often information in the word’s etymology, or history, will give you a
clue to remembering it. Write a synonym
for the word right above it in your textbook.
When you come to a proper noun, such as the name of a person or event,
look it up in the literary reference work and record key details in your
notebook, just as you did when you looked up unfamiliar words. Concentrate on learning these words and
allusions because many of them will appear again and again in literature, and
you want to be ready for them next time.
4. Rephrase sentences you don’t understand. Almost every poem you will find in your text
books is made up of complete sentences with subjects and verbs and, in many
cases, objects, prepositional phrases, subordinate clauses, and other
syntactical elements. Even if you don’t
know what a prepositional phrase or appositive is, you know how to read and
understand them. In fact, you do it all
the time when you read ordinary sentences in newspapers, magazines, and
textbooks. The problem is that most
poets don’t write the way reporters and textbook authors do. Even though they write complete sentences,
they change the order of words—placing, for example, the object, the thing
receiving the action, before the verb instead after it, where we ordinarily put
it in speech and prose. This change in
word order is called an “inversion,” and it is common in poetry, especially
poetry written before 1900. In the
following passage, which comes from John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising,” the
word “season” is an object of the verb, even though it comes before the verb:
“Love, all alike, no season knows.” We would say: “Love, all alike, knows no
season.” Rephrasing sentences so that
they sound more like speech or at least prose will help you figure what the
poet is saying.
5. Identify the literal meaning of figurative
language. The other practice that
distinguishes poets from writers of nonliterary prose is their heavy use of
metaphors, personification, symbols, hyperboles, apostrophes, and many other
forms of figurative language. Figurative
language does not mean exactly what it says; rather, it suggests meanings. In the phrase quoted above, Donne does not
literally mean that love is unfamiliar with spring, summer, fall, and
winter. As a thing, love cannot know
anything at all; only people can know something—that is, be conscious of
it. Thus, Donne is personifying love,
giving it human qualities. The figurative language in poetry helps us to
understand new or complex concepts.
Thinking of love as a person who treats all seasons in the same way
helps us to appreciate the universality of love. Once you have completed the steps above, you
may not understand every word or even every sentence, but you should have a
fairly good idea of the poet’s overall message, or the content of the poem. Now
you are ready to begin interpreting and analyzing it.
6. Analyze the poet’s use of language. You already have looked closely at the poet’s
use of language as you were trying to understand the poem’s content. Now you want to ask yourself what this use of
language—the inversions, symbols, and so on--contribute to the poem’s
meaning. Why, for example, did the poet
choose to compare his love to a “red, red rose” instead of tree or a bird? One trick that will help you in this step is
thinking about associations: we tend to associate roses with beauty,
tenderness, passion, and love, but we also know that a rose bush has thorns
that can be painful. Not all of these
associations may be appropriate for a particular poem, but many of them
probably will. Make a note of these
associations in your notebook and jot down some ideas about what they
contribute to the poem’s meaning.
7. Scan the poem. Scanning poetry is different from skimming
it. To scan a poem means to identify the
rhythm, which in English poetry comes from the alteration of stressed and
unstressed syllables.
i). Begin by looking at the polysyllabic
words—the words of more than one syllable. Say each word aloud and try to
determine which syllable you stress. If
you are unsure, look up the word in the dictionary, where you will see an
accent mark either before or after the stressed syllable. In The
American Heritage College Dictionary, for example, the accent appears
before the stressed syllable. If you are
using another dictionary, look up “pronunciation” in the dictionary’s guide to
reading entries. In your textbook, place
an accent mark (/) over each stressed syllable and a horizontal line over the
unstressed syllables (-).
ii). Now look for all the one-syllable structure
words—words that have little or no meaning, but rather serve to connect other
words and show their relationships.
Structure words
include articles (a, an, the),
conjunctions (and, or, but), prepositions (of, in, on, to, etc.), and
auxiliaries (have, may, do, will, etc.).
Mark these words as unstressed.
iii). Mark one-syllable nouns and
verbs as stressed.
iv). Read the poem aloud, using your marks as a
guide to which syllables to stress. Look for one of the following patterns:
iambic (- /), trochaic (/ -), anapestic (- - /), and dactyllic (/ --). Most English poetry that has a regular rhythm
is iambic. If you don’t see one of these
patterns, try to change a few of the marks on the one-syllable words. If you see a pattern now, write the name of
the rhythm in your notebook. You
probably still will notice a few anomalies, places where the rhythm changes
from the regular pattern, but ignore these anomalies for now. If you still don’t see a pattern, count the
number of stressed syllables in three consecutive lines. If these lines do not have the same number of
stressed syllables, the poem probably does not have a regular rhythm; in other
words, it probably is written in free verse.
v). Draw vertical lines around
each instance of a pattern. Each one of
these units is called a “metrical foot” or simply a “foot.” For example, if the line you scanned has the
markings - / - / - / - / - /, you would recognize the iambic pattern and mark
the line this way: - / | - / | - / | - / | - /.
Count the number of units in each line.
In most cases, this number will be the same for every line of the
poem. In the previous example, you would
count five units, or five feet. Use the following terms to identify the number
of feet in the lines: dimeter (2 feet), trimeter (3 feet), tetrameter (4 feet),
pentameter (5 feet), and hexameter (6 feet).
You now have identified the overall pattern of rhythm in the poem. In
our example, the rhythm is iambic pentameter.
vi). Now look back at the anomalies, the places
where the rhythm changes. A unit with
two stresses is called a spondee, and a unit with two unstressed syllables is
called a pyrrhic foot.
Try to determine what role these anomalies
play. For example, many times spondees
call attention to important words, images, or ideas. Jot down your ideas in
your notebook.
8. Look for rhyme. Look at the final words in the first and
second lines. Do they rhyme with each
other or any other final words? If so,
the poem probably has a rhyme scheme, a pattern of rhyme. To label the rhyme scheme, place the letter
“a” at the end of the first line. If the
final word in the next line rhymes with this word, label it “a” also;
otherwise, label it “b.” Continue this
process, identifying rhyming words with the same letter. Now look at the words that rhyme. Are they similar in meaning, or are they
contrasting words? In your notebook,
note any places where the rhyme is significant and suggest a way this rhyme
contributes to the poem’s meaning.
9. Finally, read the poem one more time
aloud. Practice using pauses and stress
to make the poem’s meaning come alive in your recitation. In your notebook,
make any final comments on the way the poem’s content and form work together to
create meaning.
And
to my great Professor: Prof. Desmond Harding for this great lecture.
