Reading and Interpreting a Poem
Expected Learning Outcomes
1.
Noticing patterns and puzzles in poems
dimensions of structure:
phonology (including meter);
semantics (including metaphor)
2.
Interpretating poems
Poem 1: William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 2
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed of small worth held:
Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use
If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.
Task 1: Literary devices
a.
Here are four devices often found in poetry. Unearth the pattern of each device from
the examples given, and formulate the pattern explicitly.
Alliteration:
Assonance:
Consonance:
Rhyme:
b.
“The whacky witch of the West went her weary way.”
“The slow notes of the morose song.”
“The stick got stuck in a stack of stockholder files.”
“The cows carouse and browse the net as long as the night allows.”
Do you find any of these devices used in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 2?
Task 2: Rhythm
Meter is the cyclic pattern of beats, where each beat is called a ‘foot’. Each foot has one or
more syllables. One syllable is ‘stressed’; the rest are ‘unstressed’.
a.
Here is a poem, a nursery rhyme. How would you say the poem rhythmically?
Three blind mice, three blind mice;
See how they run; see how they run.
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.
Did ever you see such a thing in your life
As three blind mice!
b.
Can you write the poem down indicating the meter? How would you describe the
meter of the poem?
c.
Does Shakespeare’s sonnet have an identifiable meter? If yes, what is the meter of
the poem? Is it regular, or does it have irregularities?
Task 3: Literary Meanings
a.
What sense can you make of the first two lines of the poem? In doing this, keep in
mind two kinds of meaning:
Literal meaning:
direct meaning, given in the dictionary, to inform the reader
Figurative meaning: suggested, implied meaning; culturally, metaphorically rich
meaning instilled into the words to evoke an aesthetic
experience.
b.
Does the relation between the literal meaning and the figurative meaning in the first
two lines shed any light on the meaning of the rest of the poem?
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Exposition
Meter (Task 2b): Three blind mice: the rhythm
Three
Three
See
See
all
cut
ethree
- | blind - | blind - | how
- they
- | how
- they
ran | after the
off their | tails with a
ver you | see such a
- | blind -
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
mice
mice
run
run
farcarthing
mice
| | | | - mer’s | wife
- ving | knife
in your | life
| -
- |
- |
- |
- They |
- Who |
- Did |
- As |
- |
Figurative meaning (Task 3b): Metaphor as a tool for analysis
For a poet who works with the emotive and aesthetic aspects of language, what really
matter are figurative meanings that go beyond the literal.
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field…
The English verb besiege requires a grammatical object that refers to a territory such as
castle, a fort, or a country: the expression besiege thy brow violates that constraint. Likewise,
the grammatical subject of besiege requires a human in a position to lead an army, a
military general or a king. In literal usage, it is odd to say forty winters shall besiege… Winters
are inappropriate as the subject of besiege. Likewise, the words trenches and field suggest a
battle: how does one dig trenches in a woman’s beauty? The words brow and beauty talk about
a woman, and forty winters that he is talking about seasons. What do a battle, a woman,
and seasons have to do with one another in these two lines?
An answer to these questions has to go beyond what we know about the English language.
To make sense of the two lines, we have to draw on (i) the poet’s use of metaphor as a tool
to create meaning, and (ii) the literary critic’s use of metaphor as a tool for interpretation.
Using this mode, we could say that the two lines imply a comparison: the process of forty
years affecting a woman’s beauty is similar to the process of forty army battalions
besieging a castle. The different pieces of this comparison can be broken down like this:
(The words directly from the poem are in bold face.)
forty battalions
besiege
a castle/territory
dig
trenches
in the battlefield
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forty winters/years
affect
a woman’s beauty
cause
wrinkles
on the brow.
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This comparison leads to the idea of Time as the leader of the army of years, and an
enemy of beauty. The layer of meaning hinted at in such a reading is far from that of
purely linguistic meanings: the metaphor of time as an enemy of beauty in the poem is not a
matter of different meanings of a word or phrase; it belongs to a very different world of
literary meanings. Thus, the word “meaning” is not always the same for ordinary users of
language (and linguists) and for literary users of language (and literary critics). The aspects
of meaning that are of interest to one may not be of interest to the other.
Optional Task
Using the perspectives and strategies you have gained from this session, you may wish to
study this poem on your own, and see how much you can appreciate especially the central
images in the poem and the relation between them.
Sorrow
by D H Lawrence
Why does the thin grey strand
Floating up from the forgotten
Cigarette between my fingers,
Why does it trouble me?
Ah, you will understand;
When I carried my mother downstairs,
A few times only, at the beginning
Of her soft-foot malady,
I should find, for a reprimand
To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs
On the breast of my coat; and one by one
I watch them float up the dark chimney.
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