Norman Prinsky

Assoc. Professor of English

Department of English and Foreign Languages

Augusta State University

How To Read a Poem: A Session of the Augusta State University Life of the Mind Series, 19 February 2009

Prosody -- the components of rhythm, meter, and sound effects in poetry (and sometimes prose) -- matters greatly to poets, who often speak of revising a poem until, as they say, “it sounds right.” Indeed, poets imagine or think in terms of lines and sometimes stanzas, whereas for prose writers key compositional units are the sentence and the paragraph. Many modern poets, ranging from Walt Whitman to Billy Collins (particularly Billy Collins’ poem “Schoolsville”), write in what is referred to as “free verse” or “open form” poetry, rejecting any regular meter or rhyme, though still incorporating rhythmical and sound effects that help convey a poem’s meanings. Thus, consciousness of prosody is part of the topic of “How to Read a Poem,” both in a reader’s accurate hearing or reciting of a poem, as well as awareness of what themes or ideas are conveyed by a poem.

However, for literary analysis, other issues usually precede prosody. A thorough interpretation of all the poem’s components is another possible sense of what can be meant by the phrase “How to Read a Poem.”

 

some contemporary textbook authors

and teachers), I.A. Richards wrote a book

about the subject, Practical Criticism,

which is still in print. In the book, Richards

demonstrated that intelligent students at

England’s prestigious Cambridge University

made serious errors in reading a variety of

poems by not paying enough attention to

preliminaries and all a poem’s components.

The central preliminaries are perhaps

best emphasized and explained by

two textbooks, among the many I have

used and examined over the years.

One is Wayne Shumaker’s

An Approach to Poetry (Prentice-Hall, 1965)

And the other is Seymour Chatman’s

An Introduction to the Language of Poetry

(Houghton Mifflin, 1968).

Seymour Chatman’s article “Reading Literature

as Problem-Solving” in the English Journal (1963), included in some anthologies on literature and language, such as Language: An Introductory

Reader, edited by J. Burl Hogins and Robert

Yarber (Harper and Row, 1969), also remains

valuable for teachers and students.

The primary preliminaries (alliteratively speaking), central to reading comprehension of not only poems but also all print materials generally, are as follows:

1. Ascertaining the meanings of words and allusions (references to people, places, and things in culture or history that an author expects readers to recognize)

2. Recognizing and solving any problems of grammatical structure (what is the subject, verb, and direct object of the sentence that underlies a line or group of lines in a poem? what words necessary for grammatical completeness may have been omitted but implied in a poem? what is the antecedent of a pronoun in a poem?)

3. Elucidating of figurative language (determining what are the two parts of any figure -- its tenor [the subject referred to] and vehicle [what is the subject being compared to] and then pondering what are the several implications of the comparison]

Now let’s all go to Billy Collins’ poem “Schoolsville”:

"Schoolsville" (1985) by Billy Collins (b. 1941)

Glancing over my shoulder at the past,

I realize the number of students I have taught

is enough to populate a small town.

I can see it nestled in a paper landscape,

chalk dust flurrying down in winter,

nights dark as a blackboard.

The population ages but never graduates.

On hot afternoons they sweat the final in the park

and when it's cold they shiver around stoves

reading disorganized essays out loud.

A bell rings on the hour and everybody zigzags

in the streets with their books.

I forgot all their last names first and their

first names last in alphabetical order.

But the boy who always had his hand up

is an alderman and owns the haberdashery.

The girl who signed her papers in lipstick

leans against the drugstore, smoking,

brushing her hair like a machine.

Their grades are sewn into their clothes

like references to Hawthorne.

The A's stroll along with other A's.

The D's honk whenever they pass another D.

All the creative writing students recline

on the courthouse lawn and play the lute.

Wherever they go, they form a big circle.

Needless to say, I am the mayor.

I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main.

I rarely leave the house. The car deflates

in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porchswing.

Once in a while a student knocks on the door

with a term paper fifteen years late

or a question about Yeats or double-spacing.

And sometimes one will appear in a window pane

to watch me lecturing the wall paper,

quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air.

[Problem 1: Word-meaning and Allusion Questions]

For example, as Professor Kisting would tell his students and a good annotated text would state, word meaning (lexical) problems occur in Milton’s sonnet “On Blindness” in the words “talent,” “fondly,” “prevent,” and “state.”

On His Blindness (When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide,

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide;

"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"

I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need

Either man's work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o'er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait."
 

As Professor Kisting has already indicated, the word “talent” alludes (a figure of speech) to the Parable of the Talents; readers need to be clear that the word has two meanings (akin to the figure of speech pun) -- first, an amount of money (measured by weight), and second, a special ability. Next, in English of the Renaissance era, the first or primary meaning of the word “fondly” is “foolishly,” not the word’s modern sense of “affectionately.” Further, Milton, with his tremendous knowledge of languages -- Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, etc. -- uses the word “prevent” in its literal or etymological sense from the Latin roots “pre” = “before” and “vent” from “venio, venire,” “to come”; that is, “prevent” means “come before.” In Renaissance English poetry, the word “state” usually has simultaneous multiple meanings; in the Selected Glossary of the Riverside Shakespeare, all of the following meanings of the word are given: “body politic, commonwealth; governing body, government; estate, property; rank, status, grandeur, dignity; royalty, kingship; throne.”

In X.J. Kennedy’s poem “Nothing in Heaven Functions as It Ought,” some readers will need to look up "the Venerable Bede":

Gangs of the slaughtered innocents keep huffing

Some readers will have to puzzle out the meaning of a word that has two possible very different meanings in the sonnet’s sestet:

But Hell, sleek Hell hath no freewheeling part:

None takes his own sweet time, none quickens pace.

Ask anyone, How come you here, poor heart?—

And he will slot a quarter through his face,

You'll hear an instant click, a tear will start

Imprinted with an abstract of his case.

Some thought will have to be given about whether the word designates an evidence of weeping, or designates an evidence of rending.

In the Billy Collins poem “Schoolsville,” in the following stanza, a reader’s understanding will be somewhat clouded without knowing the exact meanings of the words “alderman” and “haberdashery”:

I forgot all their last names first and their

first names last in alphabetical order.

But the boy who always had his hand up

is an alderman and owns the haberdashery.

The girl who signed her papers in lipstick

leans against the drugstore, smoking,

brushing her hair like a machine.

Recourse to the collegiate dictionary -- which is one of the required textbooks of English 1101, and a vital reference book for any literate person -- will be necessary for most readers.

A collegiate dictionary is a good place to start for trying to understand allusions, as well. What can the poem’s speaker mean in the reference to Hawthorne in the following stanza?

Their grades are sewn into their clothes

like references to Hawthorne.

The A's stroll along with other A's.

The D's honk whenever they pass another D.

After checking a collegiate dictionary, the next step in figuring out the allusion -- why Hawthorne is referred to -- would be to check a general encyclopedia (such as the Encyclopedia Britannica), a specialized one-volume literary encyclopedia (such as The Oxford Companion to American Literature), or the Internet, where references to Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter would occur, and where following up on a plot summary or synopsis of Hawthorne’s novel would help explain the allusion.

The same process would apply in the following passage from the Collins poem to the reference to Yeats (including the disclosure of how the poet’s surname is to be pronounced, which has nothing to do with a what makes bread rise or women seek medical attention):

Once in a while a student knocks on the door

with a term paper fifteen years late

or a question about Yeats or double-spacing.

Not all of the poems of William Butler Yeats are of extreme difficulty, but some, as in the following (as printed in Edgar Roberts’ Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing), require footnotes as long as the poem itself:

[Problem 2: Grammatical Questions] How grammatical problems, as well word-meaning (lexical) problems, can impede successful reading of a poem or any other printed material may be illustrated by the very famous, very short, very early (perhaps fifteenth-century) anonymous poem “Western Wind” --

     the poem is so famous, indeed, that it

     is the basis of a fine textbook-anthology

     (Random House,1974) by the important

      modern American poet and academic

     John Frederick Nims
 

“Western Wind[, When Will Thou Blow?]”

Western wind, when will thou blow?

The small rain down can rain?

Christ, if my love were in my arms,

And I in my bed again.

A lexical problem occurs in the adjective “small,” for a reference to “small rain” is puzzling or unlikely in modern English. A “small amount” of rain would be more usual English; the most likely interpretation here is “gentle” or “light,” meaning that the speaker is appealing for a gentle or light rain, in contrast to what he is experiencing (probably a heavy downpour). Even more puzzling is the grammar or connection between the first two lines (which the alert reader, knowing that problems can occur from words, allusions, or grammar would recognize):

Western wind, when will thou blow?

The small rain down can rain?

What seems to be elliptically omitted (implied, but not stated) is the conjunction that indicates the logical connection between lines 1 and 2:

Western wind, when will thou blow, [so]

The small rain down can rain?

Now the ideas are more clearly understood that the speaker wishes for a western wind to escape from the harsh outdoor conditions being experienced.

[Problem 3: Figurative Language Questions]

Professor Heckman gave us all a break by making her translation especially leading of one of the kennings (a special, highly condensed form of metaphor in Old English poetry, as she informed us) in Exeter Book Riddle 26 “Mec feonda sum” (sometimes the riddle is numbered differently in different editions). The speaker -- the book (sometimes interpreted as the holiest of books, either the Bible or a codex of one of the Gospels) -- refers to the “fugles wyn” (line 7) as one of the clues. As Professor Heckman would inform her class, the literal meaning of the phrase is “bird’s delight” or “bird’s joy”; how the meaning of a feather or a quill (used as a pen) derives from “bird’s delight” or “bird’s joy” shows how the compression of metaphor must be unfolded (the etymological root of the term “explicate”) to fully appreciate and understand it.

In the sestet of X.J. Kennedy’s “Nothing in Heaven Functions as It Ought,” a secondary metaphor is stated, with the primary metaphor implied:

Ask anyone, How come you here, poor heart?—

And he will slot a quarter through his face,

You'll hear an instant click, a tear will start

Imprinted with an abstract of his case.

A certain kind of machine is implied but not stated in the metaphor, the concept of a machine helping to convey the idea, as explained by Professor Evans, of the machine-like regimentation of hell, as opposed to heaven’s comic but happy disorderliness.

An additional question about figurative language in the above lines is how a "tear" can be "imprinted with an abstract of [a] case."

Many figures of speech occur in Billy Collins’ poem “Schoolsville” (the whole poem itself being a kind of extended metaphor), as well as in most other poems. The implications of one such figure are particularly revealing:

The girl who signed her papers in lipstick

leans against the drugstore, smoking,

brushing her hair like a machine.

The simile of the lipstick-signing girl brushing her hair “like a machine,” suggests that she is not at leisure and happy, but purposeful and emotionless -- that she is at work, leaning against the drugstore. She has followed a very different path from the eager, animated hand-raising young man who has become an alderman and haberdashery owner. The reference to lipstick and the machine simile connect to the allusion to Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter -- which is about a sexually “fallen” woman -- all with the implication that the young woman has now become what, in our era of politically correct terminology, would be called “a worker in the sex industry.”

The girl who signed her papers in lipstick

leans against the drugstore, smoking,

brushing her hair like a machine.

Their grades are sewn into their clothes

like references to Hawthorne.

After these initial problems are solved, the reader is then ready to proceed to more general questions of who the speaker is, and what the structure is, of the poem. The speaker in Professor Heckman’s Exeter Book Riddle “Mec feonda sum” is unusually problematic, while the speaker of Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness” is much more straightforwardly autobiographical. The speaker of the poem, of course, should not automatically be assumed to be the poet; devoted husband Robert Browning, famous Victorian poet, is definitely not the arrogant and insanely jealous wife-murdering Renaissance Italian Duke of Ferrara in Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess.”

Several clues indicate that the speaker of Billy Collins’ “Schoolsville” is a retired, elderly teacher:

Glancing over my shoulder at the past,

I realize the number of students I have taught

is enough to populate a small town.

I can see it nestled in a paper landscape,

chalk dust flurrying down in winter,

nights dark as a blackboard.

The mathematics of a teaching career may be surprising to some students. A teacher who instructs 80 students (in, say, four classes) per semester, would, in thirty years accumulate quite a sum:

160 students per year X 30 years = 4800 students

4800 persons is surely enough to “populate a small town” -- Appling, Wrens, Harlem, and Keysville naturally come to mind to us-all Southerners from the area of Augusta, Georgia .

Further, the metaphors of the paper (= white) landscape and chalk dust (= snow) and the simile of “nights dark as a blackboard” (appropriate to old style teaching equipment and the longer, darker nights of winter) -- all these help convey the idea of the speaker being in the winter of his life. And the last two stanzas of the poem, returning to an emphasis on the teacher, also suggest in their imagery (car deflating in the driveway, vines twirling around the porch swing) retirement and encroaching old age:

Needless to say, I am the mayor.

I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main.

I rarely leave the house. The car deflates

in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porchswing.

Once in a while a student knocks on the door

with a term paper fifteen years late

or a question about Yeats or double-spacing.

And sometimes one will appear in a window pane

to watch me lecturing the wall paper,

quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air.

Further, several details indicate that the speaker is a retired college professor of English: the speaker’s interest in good or poor organization of students’ essays (stanza 3), literary authors like Hawthorne (stanza 4), advanced classes like Creative Writing (stanza 5), authors -- like Yeats -- whose writing may be very difficult (stanza 8), and English composition handbook questions like double spacing (stanza 8).

Many apprentice readers do not bother to look for the structure or organization of a poem, unknowingly following the lead of ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who with his concept of “poetic fury,” implied that neither poets nor their works should be expected to have logic  -- that poets and poems have a “muse

of fire” (to use the title of the textbook by Richardson and Shroyer):

     However, all good writing, ranging

     from an English 1101 essay to a

     Shakespearean sonnet, should be

     well organized -- as suggested

     by the title of the textbook by

     Richard Monaco and John Briggs,

    The Logic of Poetry (McGraw-Hill,

    1974)

     or by the title of the textbook

     by Anthony Winkler, Poetry As System

     (Scott, Foresman, 1971):

   Professor Heckman, Professor Kisting, and

   Professor Evans have all given us a clear

   explanation of the structure of the poems they

   have given a "close reading" of -- that is,

   analyzed. The co-operation of all the elements

   of a poem -- structure, plot (specific incidents),

   characterization, setting, word choice (diction),

   imagery, figurative language, and symbolism --

   help generate its meaning, as long ago shown

   by the founders of New Criticism in the 1930's,

   Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, in

   their pioneering textbook Understanding Poetry

   (1938)

a tradition extending down to John Ciardi, noted modern American poet, translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and academic author of the textbook whose title was meant to surprise or even shock -- How Does a Poem Mean? (Houghton Mifflin, 1959),

since the expected phrasing would be “what does a poem mean?” rather than “how does a poem mean?”

   The New Criticism (now about eighty years

    old, and sometimes called “close reading,”

   “formal analysis,” or “explication”) is

    incorporated in the English 1102 textbooks

    used at Augusta State University such as

    Barnet, Berman, and Cain’s An Introduction

    to Literature, which since the tenth edition

   has included X.J. Kennedy’s sonnet

   “Nothing in Heaven Functions as It Ought,”

   along with some very perceptive textbook

   questions about the poem’s prosody.

   Another widely-used English 1102

   textbook at Augusta State, also based

   on formal criticism, and very thorough

   and illustrative in its content, is Edgar

   Roberts’ Literature: An Introduction to

   Reading and Writing, which has included

   the Billy Collins poem “Schoolsville”

   since the second edition of the textbook.

Billy Collins’ “Schoolsville” has a cyclical structure, its opening two stanzas (stanzas 1-2) emphasizing the speaker/teacher and its closing two stanzas (stanzas 7-8) returning to this emphasis. The middle stanzas (stanzas 3-7) emphasize students -- the other vital ingredient of a school, teachers and students together making up a sort of community that could be called “schoolsville.”

This cyclical structure includes the organizing principle of alternation throughout the poem  -- alternation between old and young, between teacher and student, between summer heat (sweating finals in the park) and winter cold (shivering around stoves reading disorganized essays), between the two main kinds of school work or college work (finals or essays), between male (the boy with his hand up) and female (the girl at the drugstore), between good students (boy with his hand up, “A” students strolling with other “A” students) and below average students (the girl signing her papers in lipstick, the D students honking whenever they pass other D, a student turning in a term paper fifteen years late), between success in later life -- related to school career (the boy who has become alderman and haberdashery owner) -- and an unhappy later life (the girl leaning against a drugstore, “brushing her hair like a machine”; the retired teacher lecturing the wallpaper), between the sedateness of “A” students who stroll and the boisterousness of “D” students who drive (honking whenever they pass another D), between the complex questions teachers and students deal with (about Yeats) or elementary questions teachers and students deal with (when and how to use double spacing).

The poem also alternates between humor (jokes about teachers and students) and pathos (sad aspects of some students’ later lives or some teachers’ later lives). The speaker’s reference to how “the population ages but never graduates” (stanza 3) humorously suggests how teachers often see most students (excepting English majors) in lower division courses, and thus remember students at this early level in school -- the students remain frozen in memory and in time. A dead metaphor (a figure of speech no longer thought of as such) -- “to sweat” something (that is worry about something) -- is reanimated humorously in the description of the anxiety of students who, on hot afternoons both literally and figuratively “sweat the final in the park” (stanza 3). The speaker’s reference to how “I forgot all their last names first and their / first names last in alphabetical order” (stanza 4) humorously suggests that the teacher, as many of us faculty, calls on students in class by first name, thus remembering student first names longer than last names. The speaker’s reference to how students’ “grades are sewn into their clothes” (stanza 5) jokes about both students (how a few -- few? -- of them are more concerned about course grade than course content) and teachers (how several of them tend to think or talk about students as “so-and-so my A student” or “so-and-so my C student”).

The jokes about creative writing students (stanza 6) involve diction, imagery, and figurative language (specifically, the pun, or play on at least two senses of a word or phrase):

All the creative writing students recline

on the courthouse lawn and play the lute.

Wherever they go, they form a big circle.

In diction or word choice, the word “recline” has a connotation -- in contrast to the shared denotation of such synonyms such as “lie down” or “rest” -- of the high level or register of usage, which, added to the visual image of relaxation, suggests a snobbish laziness of these artsy people (one of whom is poet Billy Collins himself, as he well knows). The image of a lute -- in contrast to the less exalted “guitar” -- also suggests the pretensions of the group. With reference to imagery or setting, naturally this group picks one of the town sites that is most conspicuous and has the highest status -- the courthouse lawn. A pun, in figurative language, occurs in the speaker’s reference to how the members of the group “form a big circle” wherever they go; an “in joke” for English teachers is that creative writing classes often use a circular format for seating (rather than regular classroom rows), so that students can read and respond to each other’s work. But a second sense of “form a big circle” is that this group of students is also cliquish, considering themselves an exalted “in group,” their own exclusive circle.

In terms of an extended metaphor (in stanza 7), naturally the teacher of a class would be the Mayor of the town of his former students (as paper forms the snowy, wintry basis of the setting, while the blackboard forms the nocturnal setting of the winter of the speaker’s life). His residence would be, in imagery and setting, at a prestigious (and alliterative) address of Maple and Main, while his house would be -- at least at first -- a prestigious white colonial. The reference in visual imagery of the house as a “white colonial” (stanza 7) forms connections among details of the poem, which often apprentice analysts of literary works overlook, stopping at the analysis of the implications of each detail separately but not looking for connections.

I can see it nestled in a paper landscape,

chalk dust flurrying down in winter,

nights dark as a blackboard. (stanza 2)

Their grades are sewn into their clothes

like references to Hawthorne. (stanza 5)

I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main. (stanza 7)

In visual imagery, the white colonial dwelling of the retired teacher picks up the white color of the paper landscape and flurrying chalk dust (stanza 2), representing the speaker’s winter of life, while also suggesting the great age of the bygone past -- the colonial period of American history, that also links to the “references to Hawthorne” (the colonial era in which some of Hawthorne’s fiction, like The Scarlet Letter, is set). In the winter of his life, the speaker has become something of a historical relic of American history.

In the poem’s last stanza, humor is combined with the figurative language of hyperbole (or exaggeration) to joke about the lateness of some student work (“Once in a while a student knocks on the door / with a term paper fifteen years late”). Both students and teachers are mildly satirized with a gentle humor about the oppositeness of questions in college -- the difficult questions or the elementary questions that students ask and that teachers answer on a regular basis (“a question about Yeats or double-spacing”).

The pathos or sadness of some lives after leaving school is suggested by the female student who now “leans against the drugstore, smoking, / brushing her hair like a machine” (stanza 4) and the retired or retiring teacher, who now rarely leaves the house, whose car -- in contrast to the active machine of the female student -- “deflates / in the driveway,” and whose property only shows the animation of nature taking back its own (“Vines twirl around the porch swing”) (stanza 8). The ending of the poem cycles back to the somewhat sad opening of the poem which begins in the winter of the paper landscape, flurrying chalk dust, and blackboard darkness (stanza 2) and now concludes by suggesting the sadness of persons -- not only teachers -- who cannot let go of the job and move on to something new (“watch me lecturing the wall paper, / quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air”). In figurative language, a sort of faux or mock personification of the wall paper, chandelier, and air, which -- or whom -- the speaker lectures, quizzes, or reprimands, suggests that the retired teacher needs to replace, but hasn’t, new human contacts with the human contact lost with students.

Even in these last activities, frozen in time by the present participles (“lecturing,” “quizzing,” “reprimanding”) -- an aspect of diction or word choice, through grammar or syntax -- the alternation of the poem continues, cycling from the intellectual or dissemination of knowledge (lecture), through assessment (quiz or test), through discipline (reprimand). This last element, reprimand, is elicited -- or educed -- from college teachers once in a great while by eighteen- or nineteeneen-year-olds in the classroom, who have been known to smirkingly share not-very-surreptitiously passed notes with each other, check their e-mail or facebook page on cell phones or laptops, or look absolutely blank about a question that should be easy if the assigned reading from the textbook had been done. These problems are, happily, non-existent at Augusta State University.

Texts of the Poems in Chronological Order

Works Cited

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren, eds. and comps. Understanding Poetry. 3rd ed. 1938; Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960.

Chatman, Seymour, ed. and comp. An Introduction to the Language of Poetry. Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

Ciardi, John, ed. and comp. How Does a Poem Mean? Houghton Mifflin, 1959.

Monaco, Richard, and John Briggs, eds. and comps. The Logic of Poetry. McGraw-Hill, 1974.

Nims, John Frederick, ed. and comp. Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry. Random House, 1974.

Richards, I.A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. 1929; rpt. Harvest Books - Harcourt, Brace, and World, n.d. [1962].

Richardson, H. Edward, and Frederick Shroyer, eds. and comps. Muse of Fire: Approaches to Poetry. Knopf, 1971.

Roberts, Edgar. Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. 9th ed. Pearson-Longman, 2009.

Shumaker, Wayne, ed. and comp. An Approach to Poetry. Prentice-Hall, 1965.

Winkler, Anthony, ed. and comp. Poetry As System. Scott, Foresman, 1971.