How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (30 page)

How to Read Lyric Poetry

The simplest definition of poetry (in the somewhat limited sense implied by the title of this section) is that it is what poets write. That seems obvious enough, and yet there are those who would dispute the definition. Poetry, they hold, is a kind of spontaneous overflowing of the personality, which may be expressed in written words but may also take the form of physical action, or more or less musical sound, or even just feeling.

There is something to this, of course, and poets have always recognized it. It is a very old notion that the poet reaches down deep into himself to produce his poems, that their place of origin is a mysterious "well of creation" within the mind or soul. In this sense of the term, poetry can be made by anyone at any time, in a kind of solitary sensitivity session. But although we admit that there is a kernel of truth in this definition, the meaning of the term that we will be employing in what follows is much narrower. Whatever may be the origin of the poetic impulse, poetry, for us, consists of words, and what is more, of words that are arranged in a more or less orderly and disciplined way.

Other definitions of the term that similarly contain a kernel of truth are that poetry (again, primarily lyric poetry) is not truly poetry unless it praises, or unless it rouses to action (usually revolutionary), or unless it is written in rhyme, or unless it employs a specialized language that is called "poetic diction." In that sentence we have intentionally mixed together some very modern and some very antiquated notions.

Our point is that all of these definitions, and a dozen more that we might mention, are too narrow, just as the definition discussed in the last paragraph was too broad (for us) .

Between such very broad and such very narrow definitions lies a central core that most people, if they were feeling reasonable about the matter, would admit was poetry. If we tried to state precisely what the central core consisted in, we would probably get into trouble, and so we will not try. Nevertheless, we are certain that you know what we mean. We are certain that nine times out of ten, or perhaps even ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you would agree with us that X was a poem and Y was not. And that is fully sufficient for our purposes in the following pages.

Many people believe that they cannot read lyric poetry -especially modern poetry. They think that it is often difficult, obscure, complex, and that it demands so much attention, so much work on their part, that it is not worthwhile. We would say two things. First, lyric poetry, even modern poetry, does not always demand as much work as you may think if you go about reading it in the right way. Second, it is often worth whatever effort you are willing to spend.

We do not mean that you should not work on a poem. A good poem can be worked at, re-read, and thought about over and over for the rest of your life. You will never stop finding new things in it, new pleasures and delights, and also new ideas about yourself and the world. We mean that the initial task of bringing a poem close enough to you to work on it is not as hard as you may have believed.

The first rule to follow in reading a lyric is to read it through without stopping, whether you think you understand it or not. This is the same rule that we have suggested for many different kinds of books, but it is more important for a poem than it is for a philosophical or scientific treatise, and even for a novel or play.

In fact, the trouble so many people seem to have in reading poems, especially the difficult modern ones, stems from their unawareness of this first rule of reading them. When faced by a poem of T. S. Eliot or Dylan Thomas or some other "obscure" modern, they plunge in with a will, but are brought up short by the first line or stanza. They do not understand it immediately and in its entirety, and they think they should.

They puzzle over the words, try to unwind the complicated skein of the syntax, and soon give up, concluding that, as they suspected, modern poetry is just too difficult for them.

It is not only modern lyrics that are difficult. Many of the best poems in the language are complicated and involved in their language and thought. Besides, many apparently simple poems have immense complexity under the surface.

But any good lyric poem has a unity. Unless we read all of it, and all at once, we cannot comprehend its unity. We cannot discover, except possibly by accident, the basic feeling or experience that underlies it. In particular, the essence of a poem is almost never to be found in its first line, or even in its first stanza. It is to be found only in the whole, and not conclusively in any part.

The second rule for reading lyrics is this: Read the poem through again-but read it out loud. We have suggested this before, in the case of poetic dramas like Shakespeare's. There it was helpful; here it is essential. You will find, as you read the poem out loud, that the very act of speaking the words forces you to understand them better. You cannot glide over a misunderstood phrase or line quite so easily if you are speaking it.

Your ear is offended by a misplaced emphasis that your eyes might miss. And the rhythm of the poem, and its rhymes, if it has them, will help you to understand by making you place the emphasis where it belongs. Finally, you will be able to open yourself to the poem, and let it work on you, as it should.

In the reading of lyrics, these first two suggestions are more important than anything else. We think that if readers who believe they cannot read poems would obey these rules first, they would have little difficulty afterwards. For once you have apprehended a poem in its unity, even if this apprehension is vague, you can begin to ask it questions. And as with expository works, that is the secret of understanding.

The questions you ask of an expository work are grammatical and logical. The questions you ask of a lyric are usually rhetorical, though they may also be syntactical. You do not come to terms with a poem; but you must discover the key words. You discover them not primarily by an act of grammatical discernment, however, but by an act of rhetorical discernment. Why do certain words pop out of the poem and stare you in the face? Is it because the rhythm marks them? Or the rhyme? Or are the words repeated? Do several stanzas seem to be about the same ideas; if so, do these ideas form any kind of sequence? Anything of this sort that you can discover will help your understanding.

In most good lyrics there is some kind of conflict. Sometimes two antagonists-either individual people, or images, or ideas-are named, and then the conflict between them is described. If so, this is easy to discover. But often the conflict is only implied and not stated. For example, a large number of great lyric poems-perhaps even the majority of them-are about the conflict between love and time, between life and death, between the beauty of transient things and the triumph of eternity. But these words may not be mentioned in the poem itself.

It has been said that almost all of Shakespeare's sonnets are about the ravages of what he calls "Devouring time." It is clear that some of them are, for he explicitly says so again and again.

"When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced

The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age"

he writes in the 64th sonnet and lists other victories that time gains over all that man wishes were proof against it. Then he says :

"Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That Time will come and take my love away."

There is no question what that sonnet is about. Similarly with the famous 116th sonnet, which contains these lines:

"Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom."

But the almost equally famous 138th sonnet, which begins with the lines :

"When my love swears that she is made of truth

I do believe her, though I know she lies,"

is also about the conflict between love and time, although the word "time" appears nowhere in the poem.

That you will see without much difficulty. Nor is there any difficulty in seeing that Marvell's celebrated lyric "To His Coy Mistress" is about the same subject, for he makes this clear right at the beginning:

"Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime."

We do not have all the time in the world, Marvell says-for

". . . at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity."

Therefore, he adjures his mistress,

"Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run."

It is perhaps a bit harder to see that the subject of "You, Andrew Marvell," by Archibald MacLeish, is exactly the same.

The poem begins :

"And here face down beneath the sun

And here upon earth's noon ward height

To feel the always coming on

The always rising of the night"

Thus MacLeish asks us to imagine someone (the poet? the speaker? the reader?) as lying in the noonday sun-but all the same, in the midst of that brightness and warmth, aware of "the earthly chill of dusk." He imagines the line of the shadow of the setting sun-of all the cumulative successive setting suns of history-moving across the world, across Persia, and Baghdad , . , he feels "Lebanon fade out and Crete," "And Spain go under and the shore / Of Africa the gilded sand," and . . . "now the long light on the sea" vanishes, too. And he concludes:

"And here face downward in the sun

To feel how swift, how secretly,

The shadow of the night comes on . . . "

The word "time" is not used in the poem, nor is there any mention of a lover. Nevertheless, the title reminds us of Marvell's lyric with its theme of "Had we but world enough and time," and thus the combination of the poem itself and its title invokes the same conflict, between love (or life) and time, that was the subject of the other poems we have considered here.

One final piece of advice about reading lyric poems. In general, readers of such works feel that they must know more about the authors and their times than they really have to. We put much faith in commentaries, criticism, biographies-but this may be only because we doubt our own ability to read.

Almost everyone can read any poem, if he will go to work on it. Anything you discover about an author's life or times is valid and may be helpful. But a vast knowledge of the context of a poem is no guarantee that the poem itself will be understood. To be understood it must be read-over and over. Reading any great lyric poem is a lifetime job-not, of course, in the sense that it should go on and on throughout a lifetime, but rather that as a great poem, it deserves many return visits. And during vacations from a given poem, we may learn more about it than we realize.

16. HOW TO READ HISTORY

"History," like "poetry," is a word of many meanings. In order for this chapter to be useful to you, we must come to terms with you about the word-that is, explain how we will be using it.

First of all, there is the difference between history as fact and history as a written record of the facts. We are obviously, here, employing the term in the latter sense, since in our sense of "read" you cannot read facts. But there are many kinds of written record that are called historical A collection of documents pertaining to a certain event or period could be called a history of it. A transcription of an oral interview with a participant, or a collection of such transcriptions, could similarly be called a history of the event in which he or they participated.

A work having quite a different intention, such as a personal diary or collection of letters, could be construed as being a history of the time. The word could be applied, and indeed has been applied, to almost every kind of writing that originated in a time period, or in the context of an event, in which the reader was interested.

The sense in which we use the word "history" in what follows is both narrower and broader than any of those. It is narrower because we want to restrict ourselves to essentially narrative accounts, presented in a more or less formal manner, of a period or event or series of events in the past. This is a traditional use of the term, and we do not apologize for it.

Again, as with our definition of lyric poetry, we think you will agree with us that this is the ordinary meaning of the term, and we want to stick to the ordinary here.

But our meaning is also broader than many of the definitions of the term that are current today. We think, although not all historians agree with us, that the essence of history is narration, that the last five letters of the word-"story"-help us to understand the basic meaning. Even a collection of documents, as a collection, tells a story. That story may not be explicit , that is, the historian may try not to arrange the documents in any "meaningful" order. But it is implicit in them, whether they are ordered or not. Otherwise, we think, the collection would not be called a history of its time.

It is not important, however, whether all historians agree with us in our notion of what history is. There is a great deal of history of the kind we are discussing, and you will want to or have to read at least some of it. We will try to aid you in that task.

The Elusiveness of Historical Facts

Probably you have been a member of a jury, listening to the testimony about a simple matter of fact, such as an automobile accident. Or you may have been on a blue ribbon jury, and have had to decide whether one person killed another or not. If you have done either, you know how difficult it is to reconstruct the past, even a single event in the past, from the memories of persons who actually saw it happen.

A court concerns itself with events that have happened fairly recently and in the presence of living witnesses. In addition, there are stringent rules of evidence. A witness cannot suppose anything, he cannot guess or hypothecate or estimate (except under very carefully controlled conditions) . And of course he is not supposed to lie.