Lesson 3: The Speaker

In this lesson we will learn to recognize the characteristics and qualities of the speaker of the poem.  

Please read Sylvia Plath's “Morning Song” 

 To understand a poem the reader must become acquainted with the speaker. The speaker should be thought of as different from the poet. The poet wrote but the poem but many times the poet will speak through a character other than herself.

 A useful example of a poet speaking through a character is Emily Dickinson's poem about a snake in which she has her character speak the lines, "Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot -- / I more than once at Noon / Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash / Unbraiding in the Sun"; obviously, the poet is creating a character to speak her poem. Dickinson also creates a male character in her poem "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House" when she writes, "They wonder if it died -- on that -- / I used to -- when a Boy."

 Although poems are usually very personal, and the poet is presenting her own experience, she can still create characters to speak her words just as a playwright or novelist might do. So when reading a poem, and especially when writing about a poem, always refer to the experience and events in the poems as belonging to the speaker.

 Let's turn to the Plath poem above: What do we know about the speaker? We know that she is a new mother who is contemplating her relationship with her newborn infant. She describes herself as "cow-heavy" and she is wearing a flannel night-gown. The following lines might be confusing at first:

 I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

 We know she is the infant's mother, because has told the baby in the first line that he is the result of love. She told him that the midwife was present, and all the other descriptions of the event indicate that she is indeed the mother. The comparison of her being the child's mother as a cloud mothers a lake tells us something about the kind of relationship she feels she has with the infant. So ultimately, that line makes it definite that the speaker is indeed the mother.

 If we are not yet sure that the speaker in the mother, then the line, "One cry I stumble from bed," will convince us, because we see her hurrying to the infant to feed him, as in the next lines his mouth opens to accept his feeding.

 What else do we know about the speaker? Here is where interpretation is possible. Is the mother close to infant? Does she feel that motherhood is satisfying? Or does she feel the opposite? Is she burdened by it? These are the interesting questions that each reader can decided for herself. These are the questions that make the poem an exciting experience for each reader.  

Although the poem probably represents the exact feelings and experiences of the poet, and the poet is probably not speaking through a character as Dickinson did when she referred to herself as "boy," it is still better to refer to the poem's speaker as "the speaker" instead of "the poet" or "Plath."

Analysis:  Plath's "Morning Song": Child as Statue

 Lesson 4: What is Poetry?

This lesson focuses on a definition of poetry.

 Defining Poetry

 The definition of poetry is a dynamic one. Some poets offer definitions, and some refuse to define poetry. But for those who work with poetry a working definition usually evolves. My definition goes something like this: "A poem is an artistic representation of what it feels like to experience the emotional life of a human being." I call this my nutshell definition, and I believe it actually covers any artistic medium, such as painting, music, and other literary arts.

Probably the most outstanding characteristic of a poem is its brevity. And although there are booklength poems such as John Milton's Paradise Lost, for the most part we think of poems as shorter than other literary forms, such as novels, short stories, and plays.

 The definition of the poem, however, usually centers on what the poem does. Some questions we might consider are, does the poem do something different from what a short story or play does? If a poem evokes the same feelings as a play, is there really a difference between the two? Can a novel be a poem? Can a short story be a poem?

 We eventually come to recognize that novels, short stories, and plays can certainly be poetic or have poetic sections. And poems can even have narrative or prose-like lines.

 Our reasoning tells us that the literary arts are related and dependent on one another for their fullness. Poetry, because it is more compact than novels and short stories, does depend even more heavily on emotion than those two forms.

 The following are some useful quotations from poets about the nature of poetry, from Poets on Poetry:

 "Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art." —Thomas Hardy The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, Florence Emily Hardy (1930).

 "Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does." —Allen Ginsberg, Ginsberg: A Biography, Barry Miles (1989).

 "Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance." —John Keats, Letters of John Keats, ed. Frederick Page (1954).

 "If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money." —Robert Graves, "Mammon," Mammon and the Black Goddess (1965).

 "Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air." —Carl Sandburg, Atlantic Monthly (March 1923)

 As you read and appreciate more poetry, you will discover your own unique definition of poetry. Musing on the thoughts that the poets have offered will aid you in your study of poetry.

Lesson 5: Reading the Poem

This lesson concentrates on how to give a poem a "special reading."

 Six Steps for Reading the Poem

Using Sylvia Plath's “Morning Song” again, we will look at the steps involved in reading the poem for total meaning:

 As we study this poem, let's keep in mind the following steps:

 1. Words in a poem still retain their meaning: love=love, statue=statue, balloons=balloons.

 2. Words in a poem may also take on additional meaning: "Love set you going like a fat, gold watch."

"Love" here implies "conception of the child," as well as the emotional and sexual attraction that drew the parents together in the act that resulted in the "conception" of the child.

 "Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. "In a drafty museum . . ."

 "Statue" here refers to the baby. According to the mother/speaker the baby is like a new statue in a museum.

 "And now you try Your handful of notes; The clear vowels rise like balloons."

 "Balloons" here refer to the baby's sounds. The sounds seem to move upward, light and airy and colorful.

 3. Let's consider the following nutshell definition of a poem: A poem is an artistic representation of what it feels like to experience the emotional life of a human being. We human beings are not satisfied with prose when it comes to representing our emotions. A prose rendering of the poem "Morning Song" would run something like this: I am supposedly your mother, I conceived you, gave birth to you, but somehow, even as I run to you and care for you, I feel that you are a stranger to me. Notice how bland and unremarkable this rendering is. The artist/poet is moved to explore those basic feelings and share them in a more specific and colorful medium; therefore, instead of the prosaic claim, "I conceived you," the poet dramatizes by saying, "Love set you going like a fat, gold watch." Instead of saying, "I am supposedly your mother," the poet portrays that idea: "I'm no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind's hand." Instead of dully remarking, "I feel you are a stranger to me," the poet compares the baby to a new statue in a museum, and later states, "Your mouth opens clean as a cat's." Statues in museums are not intimate objects, and cats are universally noted to be independent creatures. So the point here is that as we are living this life and experiencing it, we react to it in unique ways; we each have our own attitudes toward experiences. One mother might acknowledge only the closeness she feels for her child, while another stresses the distance she feels. That's where interpretation comes in, and that's also the place where students have been led astray. They ask me every semester, "Are we supposed to give you our own interpretation or the right one?" Again that idea that only the teacher knows the right interpretation, and now, if lucky, this teacher will let me state my own idea whether it is right or not.

 4. This carries us into the difference between right and wrong interpretation. A poem has two levels of meaning, the surface level that includes the subject and event or simply what's going on in the poem; the deep meaning (sometimes inaccurately called "hidden meaning" by beginners) which includes the interpretation. Interpretation results from the reader's discerning the implications of the surface level meaning. Confusing the two levels of meaning, the student settles for the notion that a poem can mean anything. It's one thing not to realize in the poem "Morning Song" that the speaker is a new mother speaking to her newborn baby, and not realizing that the mother seems to feel two ways about her baby. And some students do not discern this elementary level of meaning; I have actually heard students claim that the speaker is a bird speaking to the sun, or a grandmother speaking to a grandchild. Of course, after a closer look, most students come to understand that truly the speaker is a mother speaking to her newborn. But others remain in a vague haze, continuing to believe that "if I want, I can still think it is a bird talking to the sun."  

5. Your own life experience will affect your understanding of a poem. But it will affect the interpretation more than it should affect understanding surface meaning, if you have grasped the suggestions offered in 1-4. Especially that the words still have their same meaning, although they may take on some additional meaning. Obviously, a woman who has given birth and experienced nurturing a newborn will interpret meaning from the Plath poem that an inexperienced woman or man may not. But the inexperienced young woman or man is still able to recognize a mother speaking to an infant. Take the line, "The midwife slapped your footsoles": why would a bird make such a remark to the sun? Would a bird listen to the sun's "moth-breath" all night? Imagine a bird claiming to be "cow-heavy and floral" in a Victorian night gown. Obviously, the recognition of such common images is not denied the inexperienced in childbirth. Only the inexperienced in poetry reading find these words and images baffling.

 6. The purpose of poetry is not primarily to convey information. A poem requires a special reading, different from a newspaper article that you read quickly for the facts. A poem requires repeated readings/listenings. As does your favorite song. You don't listen to your favorite rock group to get the latest news. You listen to be transported by the music, to experience the emotion of the lyric, to be entertained by the drama. It's the same with poems. You read them to get back your emotional experience. Let's look at the following poem by Emily Dickinson, After great pain, a formal feeling comes.

 You have experienced great pain in your life, and deep in your soul you remember what it was like, but you have not dramatized it. You discover the following poem, and you say to yourself, "Yes, that's the way it was. Yes, Emily Dickinson understood pain the same way I did, and she lived over a century ago, look at this, how universal my pain is." And you are suddenly bound up with art and the rest of humanity in ways you did not know existed.

 Lesson 6: Poetry Analysis I

This lesson and the following lesson offer in-depth analyses of two poems.

 “Harlem: A Dream Deferred”

 Please click on the poem title and read Langston Hughes’ “Harlem: A Dream Deferred”

 After reading the poem several times, write your response to the poem, answering the following questions:  Who is the speaker?  To whom is the speaker speaking?  What is the speaker telling the person he is addressing?

 After you have written your response, compare it to the analysis of  Hughes’ “A Dream Deferred” 

How did you do?

 Lesson 7: Poetry Analysis II

This lesson offers an in-depth analysis of Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."

 Please click on the poem title and read Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” 

After reading the poem (you might also want to listen to Thomas reading the poem) several times, write your response to the poem, answering the following questions:  Who is the speaker?  To whom is the speaker speaking?  What is the speaker telling the person he is addressing?

 After you have written your response, compare it to the analysis of Dylan Thomas' “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"

 How did you do?

Lesson 8: Writing about Poems

This lesson offers a writing exercise.

 Writing Exercise: Assignment is to compare two poem 

If you are taking a college class on poetry or even a composition class that focuses on poetry, you will no doubt have to fulfill the assignment of writing a paper on some aspect of poetry. You may know that a good paper features a fine harmony of its parts: a unified, limited thesis, relevant, strong support, clear organization, appropriate diction, clean grammar and mechanics, and appropriate use of sources. But knowing about the features of a good essay does not guarantee that you will write one; the best way to become proficient at essay writing is to write essays. An exercise that is helpful is to look at essays, and study them to determine how well they harmonize thesis, support, organization, diction, grammar/mechanics, and use of sources.

 With this pedagogical purpose in mind, I have constructed this exercise. Please read and consider the following essay. The assignment is to compare two poems in terms of theme, tradition, or event. How does the following essay stack up? Using the six basic essay features--thesis, support, organization, diction, grammar/mechanics, use of sources--determine the quality of this following essay:

Unity in William Butler Yeats'  Poem "Lapis Lazuli"

In his introduction to Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, W. B. Yeats writes, "If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have taste, we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and readers. Four-fifths of our energy is spent in the quarrel with bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others." The flow of warfare eventually erodes creativity, and the artist seeks a way out. Whether the war is fought for love or material gain is irrelevant; the fighting has to cease and unity plus harmony must be restored if the artist is to make order out of chaos.

 When the desire for Unity and Transcendence becomes very strong, the individual poet or artist is offered a path. Yeats was offered the philosophy of the East. His contact with the work of Tagore and his intellectual knowledge of the Bhagavad-Gita served him as a light dispelling the darkness of imbalanced experience, that is, learning gleaned solely from the Western tradition.

 The following poem is Tagore's poem #7 from his Gitanjali:

 My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union; They would come between thee and me; their jingling would drown thy whispers.

 My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O Master Poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let make my life simple and straight like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.

 Yeats, in his constant battle with bad taste, adorns his poems lavishly. He relies on symbolism to add the weight of multiple meanings. In "Lapis Lazuli" Yeats refers to the stage as a symbol of life in the Shakespearean sense. Not every Western peasant is familiar with such a symbol; it seems that nowadays Shakespeare travels only in the learned circles. Tagore's symbol of the flute is familiar to every peasant and every caste, because they all know of Bhagavan Krishna's flute and the effect it has on the Gopis. Such symbols show no "pride of dress," their being as natural as a breeze.

 Through the process of drawing on history, sculpture, and classical literature of the Western tradition, Yeats further adorns his song with allusion to Hamlet and Lear, Ophelia and Cordelia. He skillfully meshes the symbol of the stage with the allusion to the players--"All perform their tragic play." His theme of unity runs through "Lapis Lazuli"--runs through the process of his blending symbol and allusion. He adds historical and geographical baubles when he refers to Callimachus "who handled marble as if it were bronze." And those "Old civilisations put to the sword"--tragic, but "those that build them again are gay." If they could not be built again, if what the "hysterical women" say was accurate, if the soul could die, then the poets (transcenders and near transcenders) would not be gay. They would be like flecks of rusting metal--not eternal sparks from the Unity of Being.

 Yeats uses symbolism and allusion as tools to hammer and sculpt his theme into cathedrals. But when he looks at Tagore and the women out in the fields singing Tagore songs, it takes his breath and he wonders at the simplicity. In his quarrel with the warfare and bad taste, he needs an arsenal full of ammunition--symbol, allusion, rhyme, meter, history. This is the Western tradition. Tagore's hut is celebrated and marveled at by everyone. Yeats' magnificent edifice must be defended by those who know what he knows of Western learned culture.

But just as the only reality is Unity and Holy Indifference, it is a reality to which we all can transcend, regardless of whether our nature is instructed by East or West. The key is balance. When Yeats refers to the Chinamen, he paints a world quite different from the one described in the beginning of "Lapis Lazuli." There is a zeugmatic relationship between the third and fourth stanzas. The poem is a miniature world balancing Eastern and Western philosophy. Western--where the hysterical ones view art as frill: Hamlet and Lear, Callimachus' great work standing only for a day--but for all this "those that build them again are gay." Eastern--Chinamen climbing up a mountain, the scene is meditative like a Sesshu painting but even looking out on the tragic scenes below, "their ancient glittering eyes are gay." This recalls the Taoist symbol where opposites make up the whole: Unity is achieved, and Holy Indifference prevails.  

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Here is an evaluation of the above essay:  

Thesis: The thesis of this essay is not clear, not limited to one claim. The assignment called for a comparison of two poems, but the title of the essay mentions only one poem. The paper does do some comparing of a Yeats' poem and a Tagore poem, but the reader will not know that until he has read at least the first three paragraphs. The essay seems to be addressing several issues: the difference between Yeats' and Tagore's poems, the way their readers respond to the poems, the difference between Eastern and Western philosophy.

 Support: The paper's supporting evidence includes some useful details, but because the thesis lacks a limited focus, the reader becomes confused about what those details are meant to accomplish.

 Organization: The paper lacks a clear organization, again owing to the fact that the thesis is not clearly focused. David Skwire in his textbook Writing with a Thesis, claims that fifty percent of your work is done once you have a good thesis. We can see how this is true. The flabby thesis of this paper is affecting the other features of support and organization. It's difficult to determine how a paper should be organized until you know exactly what the paper is to accomplish.

Diction: For the most part the diction is appropriate for a college level paper. But it does need to define some terms: Unity, Transcendence, Holy Indifference, zeugmatic. Just what the writer means by these terms is not clear. Are we to take them at their dictionary definition? What connotations might be hinted here? We wonder about these terms especially when they appear capitalized. Does this paper also intend to interject some thoughts on spirituality?  

Grammar/Mechanics: No problems here, except for some of the sentence fragments in the conclusion. But again the unclear thesis is responsible for the lack of clarity in use of the fragments. Fragments can be affective as long as the reader is following a close line of reasoning.

 Use of Sources: Because this paper refers to two primary sources, it would be a good idea to append a Works Cited page, offering full bibliographical information. Also it would be helpful if the essay writer had appended the entire text of the Yeats poem. The reader needs to be able to compare the context of the quotations with what the essay writer claims about those quotations.

 This essay is not entirely successful, as the evaluation points out.  Consider how you might revise it for improvement.