Interpreting Traditional Poetry

To consider the situation of poetry, I would ask you the question, When do you write a poem? Perhaps it is when someone you love dies. Or, it could be when someone new is born. Maybe it is when someone dumps you, or when you marry someone. In other words, you write a poem when something really important happens, and you think that a higher form of words is called for. Secondly, I would ask you what you are really trying to do when you write a poem. And please allow me to suggest that what you are trying to do is to say this important thing in exactly the right words that express how you feel, and so that whoever reads the poem will know exactly what you meant, and how important it was to you. I would propose that I dont think that historys famous poets are really very different.They are people with something important to say, who are trying to say it the best they can, with the hope that you the reader will really understand how they felt and what they went through. It is often stated that a poem means something different to every different reader. But I would like to inquire about that understanding of poetry. Why would someone who is an expert with words (a poet), and who has something really important to say, and who wants to be understood, why would such a person be vague or unspecific about what they mean? Perhaps it is not variable. Perhaps poetry can be considered not as vague but actually as one of the most specific, perhaps the most specific of all forms of writing. A poet takes a lot of time and labour to compose a poem. As the poet Robert Graves puts it: "Must I drive the pen until blood bursts from my nails / And my breath fails, and I shake with fever." Why is he working so hard unless he has a very specific meaning that he wants to capture in the poem? Why go to all that trouble unless you really want to get something across? Im not saying that poems are easy. I would never make that claim. Poems are very deep, and you can always find more meaning. You should feel free to interpret and always look for more in poetry. But I question if they are supposed to be vague or not.

There is another example of the specific nature of poetry, a poem called "To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence," by James Elroy Flecker. The first stanza shows his desire to connect with you, the reader. A poem is considered to be a message sent across great time and distance. He wants to reach out to us: I who am dead a thousand years, And wrote this sweet archaic song, Send you my words as messengers, The way I shall not pass along. This poet is writing to send us his thoughts and experiences. He therefore wants to express himself as specifically as he can. He tells us what his hopes and dreams are for us, the people of the far away future. First, he tells us what he thinks is not really important: I care not if you bridge the seas, Or ride secure the cruel skies, Or build consummate palacies, Of metal or of masonry. Then, he tells us what he hopes for us, what he hopes that the people of the future will still value and hold dear: But have you wine, and music still? And statues, and a bright-eyed love? And foolish thoughts of Good and Ill? And prayers to Him who sits above? And he reminds us, gently, that we are merely human, and that human life is fleeting, which of course the philosophers have always been telling us. The we and the our refers to humanity, to the human condition: How shall we conquer? Like a wind At eve our fancies blow And old Maeonides the blind Said it, Three thousand years ago Now, this poet actually refers to us his readers as his friend: O Friend! Unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, Read out my words at night, alone, I was a poet, I was young. This really seems to be a case of reaching out, of trying to connect. Who is he talking to? He is talking to us, the people of the future; he is talking to

the person reading the poem. It seems to me that the poem is most specifically addressed to young people of perhaps 18, 19 or 20 years old, to people of university age. He is talking to students, to people who work late at night, and to young people, who are, after all, mostly all poets at one time or another. Finally, Flecker reveals his actual purpose for writing the poem. And that purpose is to connect with us, the readers, in a profound and personal way: Since I can never see your face, And never take you by the hand, I send my words through time and space To greet you. You will understand. The purpose of the poem is to be a greeting. The last three words speak of his goal as a poet. The words of Flecker tell us that a poet does care whether or not people understand him specifically, and that a poem does express one specific idea. It is important to poets to be read and understood. Then why are poems so difficult? Perhaps it is because experiences are so complex and difficult to put into the words. For whatever reason, I am convinced it is not because the poets are playing games with us or trying to trick us. There is a modern poet named Judith Wright who also speaks of the desire to use poetry as a form of true language. Tellingly, she calls this poem "For Precision," and it is referring to the precision of poetic speech. She says that most of our everyday efforts to communicate are inadequate. We feel a slippage between our true experience and the words we find to capture it; inner experience and outer words do not always match. Only poetry can cut "through the confusions of foggy talk" and speak "with a pure voice." A successful poem, she says, "joins all, gives all meaning, makes all whole." These poets contradict the idea that a poem is open to a different interpretation by every different reader. They see poetry as one of the most specific, if not the most specific, of all forms of writing. Now, none of the above explanations deal with how difficult poetry can be, and how vague it often does seem. Poetry is definitely a challenging and difficult thing to understand; but that does not mean that it is ultimately vague. Once you break through the shell, the shell of difficult and unfamiliar language, which surrounds a poem, you may well see that it is in fact very specific. But poems are deep. You can find new meanings in them. But I think that the new meanings will always be things that deepen the main idea, that add

ideas. I dont think that the new meaning will usually be something totally different. The best way to read a poem is to assume that it is a recording of a real person speaking his or her mind in a genuine way to a real listener, you. This is the idea of the genuine voice that Northrop Frye talks about in his book The Well-Tempered Critic. One way to understand a poem is to classify the topic with other poems. Almost every poem, deals with a topic that many poems have dealt with before. It helps the interpretation if you can connect a poem to topics such as: utopias, retrospectives, lovers, a sense of freedom. Most poems, perhaps every poem, fits into a general category of poetry. Hence, there is also a universality to poetry. A poem captures a universal human experience or situation, situations that we all understand. So if you look at poetry as a whole, it is like a mirror of the world as we humans experience it. Far from being vague, the hopes, dreams, fears and desires of humanity are captured in the great book of poetry.