How to Read a Poem 2: Speaker and Situation

[KillerMuffin]

Once you've read through a poem and you've decided to pick it apart, the first thing you look for is the speaker and the situation. It's usually best to identify who is talking to you through the poem because that person colors everything in the poem. In Robert Browning's My Last Duchess the speaker is the most important element to figure out first because everything going on in the poem is tied to this man's--Duke Ferrara--identity. Sylvia Plath's Daddy it's not quite so important, but it's still intrinsic to the situation. We don't know exactly who is speaking as it's not identified like the speaker in My Last Duchess, but we can hazard a pretty good guess that it's Plath herself. This part is actually rather easy since most poems are directly from the poet or the speaker is identified.

Some poems have a clearly defined situation. That is, they have a setting and time for and/or someone they're distinctly speaking to. Plath is an older woman looking back through time to a man she hates. The Duke in My Last Duchess is speaking directly to a representative of some count whose daughter he wishes to marry.

Why are these things important? Because they have heavy bearing on meaning. It's difficult to decipher the meaning of the poem and its parts unless you know where the poem is coming from. While it sounds like a lot of work because I gave it its own thread here, it's usually not.

Some questions to ask yourself when you read a poem for the purpose of dissecting it are:

Who is speaking in the poem? What kind of person is it? Is there a reason to believe either that the speaker is or is not the poet? Who is being spoken to? If it's a specifc person, how is that person important to meaning? What kind of person is it? What is the situation in the poem? How is that important to meaning?

Good poets never put anything in a poem that does not have a purpose, a stanza, a line, a word, a letter, a space, a punctuation mark. Anything.

 

[Angeline]

Robert Browning and Unnecessary Stuff in Poems

KM, first off thanks for posting these "how to" threads: it's very helpful to think about poetic elements to understand why a poem does or doesn't appeal. It's fairly easy for me to say why I love a poem--the images are striking, the metaphor is apt, whatever. It is hard for me to say, specifically, why I don't like a poem. Oh, I know I think it's "bad, stinks" and so on, but the absence of voice or coherent imagery, lack of consistency in form (if there is one), shifts in tone--these are the things that make poems not good. If I know what they are, I can try to avoid them when I write and edit my own!

Also thanks for the Browning example. He has been one of my favorite poets since college because I love the sly, clever way the dramatic monologue form that he popularized reveals the foibles of the narrator. Have you ever written a dramatic monologue? I've always wanted to try one.

Browning is the master of this form; it lends his poems a modern feel, even though I believe he is technically considered a Victorian poet (I think). Two others he wrote in this genre that I just love are "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church," (in which the dying bishop's refrain "O God, I know not!" becomes the emblem of his lack of godliness), and "Andrea del Sarto," which is just a beautiful, albeit sad, tale about being true to one's art and oneself.

Finally, as to your last point about good writers not having any scrap in their work--I agree, but I think they get there by reading, rereading, and editing. Great poetry, I have come to believe, is almost never first draft.

 

[OT]

Good poets never put anything in a poem that does not have a purpose, a stanza, a line, a word, a letter, a space, a punctuation mark. Anything.

Oddly enough, it helps to keep this in mind even when reading bad poetry.

The writer had something to say, and said it like so; So you stand a much better chance of understanding if you resist the impulse to "edit as you read" and simply read what has been written.

O.T.
portal to prose

 

[KillerMuffin]

Good poets write bad poetry, too.

 

[JUDO]

Good poets write bad poetry, too.

Good artists make bad art.
Expert marksmen miss.
Gene Kelly missed a step.
Lips sometimes don't kiss.

Hearts miss a beat
Musicians hesitate
Judges hang the wrong man
Tennyson didn't always punctuate.

But someone's soul is meant for mine
Out in the howling wild.
I've know this truth was truer still,
Back when I was a child.

 

[OT]

Good poets write bad poetry, too.

very true -- just as bad poets occasionally produce prose profound.

As a regular reader of the this site, I find it fun to force myself to read first, then look at the author.

It is very difficult to objectively read a poem when you are familiar with other works by the same poet.

Knowing the author (or his/her works) significantly aids in understanding. Too often I think we confuse understanding with good poetry.

O.T.
my things

 

[Jim_Henson]

Good poets write bad poetry, too.

Some people who cant write, ALWAYS produce bad poetry...

http://www.literotica.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=2920405#post2920405

Probably unfortunate

 

[Floater]

Introduction to poetry


I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.



Billy Collins

 

[Angeline]

Her Muses Refuses

Who knows what my poem means?

Sometimes not even me.
I start out in one place
expecting it to flow so
lyrically: a line that rides
in style straight from A to Z

A clarity of words to coexist
in sweet thematic harmony
supported by such imagery
such simile with metaphors
so right and rhythm dancing
tight along the lines.

Who couldn't see
that I'm the genius queen
of poesy?

("Her hair was dark as night,"
no wait that stinks it's a cliche.)

O' if the modern world so filled
with trivia and foibles would
but go away and take this folly
of trite thought out of my head,
you would all see how poetry
is not yet dead in me!

Alas I have lost face again!

Do poet giants walk the earth
today in modern iconography?
And if they do why is there not
a way for me to find the words
that say with pith or verve
what otherwise lays flat in
voices gray and without wit?

Perhaps the modern lexicon
is falling in an arc of shame
born of "it's like, you know"
and other slang and modern
poetry can only feel the pang
of loss and we are ever
further tossed through time
in spirals tearing us from
greatness from the Bard.

Or maybe sometimes I
just try too hard.

 

[Guest]

go away and take this folly of trite thought . . .

Of course, it's
The corsets
Keep me so stiff;

Mama's whalebone,
Papa's stays
Stay with me still -

Maybe they will
Until
The dark spills
Fills my soul,
Starbursts of mercury
On the sky's workshop floor.

Then back to before
Again and again.

I'm a slow burner
Slow learner.

Floater