HOW DOES A POEM MEAN?

What follows rests on the premise that poems are communicative utterances -- that they work to convey meaning and even message. This is by no means an unchallenged view; in fact, it's a little old-fashioned. But it has at least held sway -- among readers and poets -- for some time. And it might have an alternative title: "Why summary is not the point." If nothing else, I hope to convince you that "translating" a poem into your own series of prose declarations is just not a necessary or useful enterprise. And, besides that, it misconstrues the fundamental language and method of poetry itself.

Of course, you have noticed that poems are not essays, or sermons, or lab reports, or even short stories -- although some poems will pretend to be any or all of these, for their own devious purposes. Poems do not, in other words, simply and directly offer moral wisdom or information or even plot and character. They do not "mean" in the same way that most other linguistic utterances do. But this does not mean that they forego meaning altogether.

There are two questions that are frequently worth asking about a poem you are reading for the first time. First of all, what is it about? What human issue or human question or human dilemma or human distress does it raise or (apparently) arise from? Don't be fooled into looking for a biographical answer to this: "The distinguished poet Joe Schmoe suffered through a difficult marriage, which ended in an acrimonious divorce. As a result of this, many of his poems are about the stresses and pains of broken or betrayed love." Who cares? And how can a poet presume his/her readers will be willing to consult some thick biography, or even an encyclopedia, in order to understand his/her sonnet? There may well be a (supposed) biographical point of origin for a poem, and it may be (for your own reasons) interesting to you to try to find out what that point of origin is. But the primary source of information by and about a poem is the poem itself. So the question really is, "What does the poem say (or suggest) it is about?"

"Say (or suggest)" -- because poems are particularly driven by the multiplicity and ambiguity of language; its ability to say many things (even many contradictory) things, at one and the same time. If you are looking for straightforward, unequivocal, even "algorithmic" statements, poems are most definitely not the place to look. The only way to begin to get to the soul of a poem is to weigh each word, to ponder the meanings of that word, and especially to consider the connotations of the word -- the colloquial, idiomatic meanings that (alas) often don't make it into the dictionary. For any poem written more than about 100 years ago, there is a place to look -- the so-called OED, or Oxford English Dictionary. This is a massive work (I think it takes up some twelve or more thick volumes) which you should be able to find in any decent library. The Book-of-the-Month club used to offer a two-volume (miniscule print) edition as an enrollment come-on, so some pedants and word-freaks actually have it on their own personal shelves. What this is, is a dictionary that tracks the meanings of words historically. You can find out what meanings, and often what connotations, of a word were current at a particular point in time. When Wordsworth uses the word "compute," what might he mean? The modern definitions, especially those having to do with computers, would of course be irrelevant to the poem as it was written. But the OED could tell you where and how the word had been used, up to Wordsworth's time.

One small digression: we sometimes, mostly for convenience, dabble in what is known as the "intentional fallacy." "What did Wordsworth mean, in this line?" [I don't know why I keep picking on Wordsworth; that's not the point]. We'll never know, and have no way to uncover, what was going through Wordsworth's mind as he wrote a particular line. We can sometimes try to deduce this, but it's mostly a hopeless swamp. What we can pursue is what the line means to an intelligent, informed reader; and what the poem in which the line occurs seems to mean or discuss or propose. And we pursue that by looking, with scrupulous care, at particular words and arrangements of words on the page. Not by consulting some biographical source, or even some other critic or scholar, who may be happy to offer up what she thinks the poem says -- a pure opinion, no matter how well-supported. If we want to be readers of poetry, it will help if we are also just a little bit arrogant, when it comes to the value of opinions: our opinions, if they derive from the poem and not from some random outside event or source, are just as valuable and just as valid as some famous scholar's.

I've let myself get away from my own question: what question does the poem propose or confront? "Question" is a good way to put it, because it will not tempt us to try to boil down the poem into some one-sentence proverb or maxim. It won't even insist that the poem answers the question. Which is fair enough, if the question is complex enough. Most of Shakespeare's sonnets seem to be battles with the question, "What is the relationship between time and love?" Which is not likely to produce any satisfying quick answer. But that does not make it any the less pressing or worth considering. Again, poets are not engineers; they are more interested in probing and even mapping problems than they are in solving them.

But poems, as Robert Frost says, end (or hope to end) in "wisdom." As I've been trying to say, however, that wisdom comes to us in a peculiar fashion. Some poems -- even some of Frost's -- do in fact make explicit declarations, as if the poet was endeavoring to offer one last version of the "truth" he has in mind. If there is such a "message" or "moral" in a poem (as, for instance, in the couplet of many of Shakespeare's Sonnets) it needs careful assessing. Not philosophical assessment, but poetic assessment and analysis. Which is to say, we must look hard and in detail at the way the particulars of a poem [its words, images, syntactical and poetic forms and patterns, its establishment of -- and its variation from -- regularities of sound and rhythm] support or verify or enact or perhaps undercut the explicit statement(s) the poem makes. Poets are not alone, of course, in being of two minds, especially about large and even dominant human questions and issues (love, death, the meaning of human action, etc.). But they are especially prone to finding ways to say several things, even several contradictory things, at the same moment.

To "make her case" persuasively, the poet must arrange the particulars of her poem so as to be congruent with, and thus supportive of, the explicit "point" of the poem. To find and trace this congruence is the goal of analysis -- not the cracking of some "secret code," not the dismantling (and thus ruining) of some carefully-constructed artwork, not clever intellectual game-playing, but the probing of the meanings which a poem implicitly offers, and an assessment of how -- if at all -- these meanings can be fit together.

And we must remember that -- again, unlike an essayist or preacher or novelist -- a poet works fundamentally in images, not propositions. A poem can be taken as a kind of map of a state of mind. Sometimes the parallel to a map (or its close cousin, the guidebook) is direct -- for instance in one of my favorite Frost poems, "Directive;" or much of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (who provided a clue by titling one of her books Geography III) or of the contemporary poet Pamela Alexander. So, like a map or guidebook , a poem must be carefully followed or investigated from point A to point B to point C, and so on. Which is no more than to say that the order in which words, images, and sounds are being offered to us is always important; so too (especially with Modernist poetry, which is highly distrustful of conviction) the sequence of bafflements, disorientations, and surprises it offers. That will, we hope, bring us to the end of the poem. And there we will probably not find some tidy, paraphrasable-into-prose proposition (sorry for all the p's).

Instead, it is important to ask ourselves, what characterizes the images of this poem? What elements or dynamics do they have in common? And does the final image confirm this, or respond to it?

One specific instance that has long puzzled me is Yeats' "Among School Children," which is loaded (perhaps overloaded) with obscurities and references to books we are unlikely ever to want to read. Without signing on to a year or so of study of obscure mystical works, we can still, however, find in the images of the poem (Yeats would call them symbols), if not a clear pattern and progress, then at least some shared element or attitude or shape. But the images in "Among School Children" do, almost invariably, involve conflict, disappointment, and disconnection.

But not the final image. I started thinking about this a year or so ago when I realized I really didn't "understand" the poem at all (if understand means to achieve an ability to summarize either the contents or the message of it), but somehow I always felt better when I finished it. "Among School Children" ends with one of Yeats' most famous questions (and he is famous for questions, which usually have a certain Zen quality): "How can you tell the dancer from the dance?" Looked at coldly and logically, it's almost a silly question -- why on earth would we want to separate dancer and dance, even if we could? It is inescapably Yeatsian, again, in evoking the dance, one of his favorite images for the good, even the ideal. Dance is art, grace, regularity (in a world, in which, according to Yeats, "things fall apart" and "the center cannot hold"). You can, I suspect, tell a bad dancer from the dance he/she is attempting; and be very tempted to laugh out loud. But not Nureyev or Fonteyn or Alvin Ailey or Twyla Tharp.

I've gotten us far into Yeats, which is not my intention, since the point I'm trying to make applies equally well (I hope!) to any other poet. The process which this particular poem maps eventuates in an image not of conflict, age, and disconnection, but of beauty, inextricable connection, and timelessness. And that's what the poem "means," in a sense. The conflict earlier in the poem doesn't "fit" the end in any direct way, as a set of equations or a geometrical proof. Rather, the image takes on its power, its ideal force, by its opposition to, or if you will its reply to, what has preceded it. There are, to be sure, elements of beauty and grace and the conquest of time earlier in the poem, which also prepare the ground for the ending. But the overall gesture of the poem seems to be, "Since A is true (repeatedly), then the answer, the hope, is B." Which is exactly what a decent analysis of a poem oughtn't ever to do -- reduce a poem to a set of equations. Having reached that low point, I will have the good sense (for once) to stop.

So, remember this: a poem works, perhaps most fundamentally by images. If it proposes issues or puzzles, it does so by images. If it maps process or progress or decline it does so by a sequence of images. And if it offers (to circle back once more to Frost) "wisdom," it does so in images rather than propositions. I wrote in an essay once that poems are thoroughly subversive documents, which intend no less than the utter alteration of the way we "look at" (visually and conceptually) the world, and the establishment of new, unexpected, and often thoroughly baffling frames of reference and patterns of understanding, which for want of a better word we call "images." But one more thing, in closing: they are very demanding documents, which can be fully and richly understood only if we take the time to develop, to "see," and to measure the significances and puzzlements, of every image they offer, along the way.

-- John Hildebidle