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I was gratified by the response to last week’s reading poetry installment; very much appreciated the comments & the direct link on Kat's Poetikat’s Invisible Keepsakes blog. This week’s installment will look at poems by Emily Dickinson & Elizabeth Bishop, two poets I admire a great deal, & will examine the idea of “symbolism” in poetic language.
A while back a friend was talking to me about my own poetic endeavors & asked me about the symbolism in my poems. She was quite surprised when I explained to her that I don’t write “symbolically” in the sense that I don’t name a thing intending it to “stand in” for something unnamed—certainly not in any direct one-to-one relationship. & unless we’re talking about mediaeval poetry, which is often explicitly allegorical, I just don’t read poems in this way myself. Some critics (e.g., Veena Rani Prasad) have found a consistent color symbolism in Wallace Stevens’ poetry—for instance, according to Prasad:
blue=imagination;
green=the physical
red=reality
gold=sun
purple=delight in the imagination
I’d agree with critic Helen Vendler, however, who characterized such “decoding” of symbols as “banal.” The most basic question about this is: “Can we enjoy the poems, & even internalize imaginatively valid readings of the poems without any 'decoding' apparatus?” My answer would be an unqualified “yes.” It’s a poor poem (in my opinion) that relies on some structure completely external to its own language to give it meaning.
I do believe—even know from my own experience—that a poet may have some underlying structures in mind as he/she composes a poem. For example, a number of the poems I wrote in San Francisco contained narrative elements that spun off from events in my own life, either in the past or the present. Does this mean that these poems are “autobiographical?” Not in any sense that I understand the term, since no one could construct a timeline or chronological narrative of my life from these poems, nor were they intended to be read in that sense. I can even believe that a poet may have in mind some sort of underlying symbolic system, tho more as a spur to creation—more as a sort of shorthand for him/herself to work from. If that underlying symbology becomes necessary to an appreciation of the poem, then (again, unless the poem is explicitly allegorical, which these days frankly would make it anachronistic) then the poem is considerably weakened by that. One must be able to read the poem on its own terms. I believe this is one concept behind Marianne Moore’s “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” You can read Ms Moore's wonderful poem "Poetry" (from which this line was tekn) here.
Let’s look at a well-known Emily Dickinson poem: “I taste a liquor never brewed.” One might be tempted to give this an allegorical reading: “the liquor never brewed”=x; the “Tankards scooped in Pearl”=y; the “Landlords” & “drunken bees”=z. To me, there’s no real internal evidence for such a reading; second, & most importantly, such a reading, even if one could construct it in a way that made some imaginative sense, would constrain the poem. The glory of this lyric would be the multiplicities it contains; it’s not that the “liquor never brewed” is only religion, or poetry, or love, or some more universal spiritual elation: it contains all these elements & invites the reader into a landscape where she/he can meditate on any or all of these questions. Here’s the poem in its entirety
I taste a liquor never brewed—
From Tankards scooped in Pearl—
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!
Inebriate of Air—am I—
And Debauchee of Dew—
Reeling -- thro endless summer days—
From inns of Molten Blue—
When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door—
When Butterflies— renounce their "drams"—
I shall but drink the more!
Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats—
And Saints— to windows run—
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the— Sun—
Let’s look at another wonderful poem, this time by 20th century U.S. poet Elizabeth Bishop. Before proceeding, I probably should note that this poem is written in a specific form, called the sestina. Sestinas are (in my opinion) great fun to write: you take 6 words to use as “end words” & these words are repeated in each stanza in a specified pattern. Sometimes, as in this poem, the sestina ends with a three-line coda that again repeats the end words in a specific order, this time using two per line. That information isn’t entirely crucial to this discussion, but I enjoy questions of form & structure, & so I assume (not always correctly) that others do as well.
Here’s the poem:
A Miracle for Breakfast
At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony
—like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.
The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee
would be very hot, seeing that the sun
was not going to warm us; and that the crumb
would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.
He stood for a minute alone on the balcony
looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,
consisting of one lone cup of coffee
and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,
his head, so to speak, in the clouds—along with the sun.
Was the man crazy? What under the sun
was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb,
which some flicked scornfully into the river,
and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.
I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
A beautiful villa stood in the sun
and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
added by birds, who nest along the river,
—I saw it with one eye close to the crumb—
and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.
We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun
as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.
Elizabeth Bishop
1946
The poem, which describes the poor & hungry waiting in a line to receive their “crumb” of bread & “drop” of coffee while an oblivious rich man eats on his balcony, could invite a strict religious reading: a sort of Dives & Lazarus morality tale, in which the imagined villa is “heaven” for the poor, while the rich Dives feasts on in a sinful lack of awareness. But I’d argue that this reading is limited. For instance, is the poem’s narrator also in some sort of oblivion, gazing on a dream world beyond the harsh reality of crumbs & cold? Is the “miracle” an “actual” event or a “fictive” one (even within the fictive framework of a poem)? Is the title “A Miracle for Breakfast” a sincere, straightforward statement or an ironic one (Bishop is certainly known for wry humor). These are all questions raised by the poem itself, & in my opinion any “key” in the form of “x=y” would do the poem a disservice.
In many ways, the argument her is similar to the arguments in the earlier posts in this series—again, it goes back to the “spreading of a fan of meanings”—poems raise questions, they point in various directions, they are kaleidoscopic. There is more “meaning” in a poem than allows for easy summary; the meaning of the poem is created in a circular fashion between the poet (poem) & the reader. Again, this is not to say a poem can “mean anything I want it to mean”—that’s the opposite of saying “the poem can only mean a very specific & concrete thing the poet intended”—to me, neither of these positions can be correct. The meanings develop along the circumference of this readerly/writerly circle, drawn from or by both.
Finally, does this sort of reading preclude external data? Is it important to know about a poet’s beliefs & social circumstances? A collection of folks called the New Critics tended to say, “no, we must read the poem as a text, isolated within itself.” Some people have said that more contemporary & ostensibly radical forms of criticism like Deconstruction also tended to view the text as a hermetically-sealed construct. Other schools of criticism, such as Marxist & Feminist & Historical criticism tend to contextualize a literary work in terms of outside forces & events; & ok, I’ll give you all the chance to say, “That Hayes is a wishy washy son-of-a-gun” by saying I can see value in both methods. As a poet, I tend to read poems based on the text itself; as a general reader, context is interesting & informative. I don't think context necessarily intrudes on the poem's imaginative world unless it's used to create meanings that fall completely beyond the poem's internal logic.
I hope this three-part series has given you some things to think about in terms of reading poetry—& be assured there’s plenty more poetry to come here on Robert Frost’s Banjo.
A good friend & faithful Robert Frost’s Banjo reader expressed a bit of frustration to me about poetry recently. She asked me, in a nutshell, if poets “mean” something, why don’t they just say it? There’s a glib answer to this, which would be that then the writing would no longer be poetry, but would be something else all together; but the question is actually important. Some of you may have the catch phrase, “how does a poem mean” in your minds—this was the title of a 1959 textbook by poet John Ciardi. Of course, Ciardi wrote from a mid 20th century perspective that was involved in certain movements of the time—while this has historical interest, it’s a bit beside the point of today’s topic. But the title is helpful because it gives a clue that poets are aiming at something other than a “what” of meaning. A very different writer, Anna Balakian, makes the statement that poetry is “a spreading of a fan of meanings” (as quoted on the blog Memo from the Fringes. There’s also the following from poet Ada Limón, from an essay called “Mystery & Birds: 5 Ways to Practice Poetry,” posted recently at Harriet.org—I’m quoting this at length because it’s a clear statement about poetic “meaning”:
So, I've come to think that one of the first things to learn about poetry is to simply relax in its mystery. We need to learn that a poem can have many meanings and that it can be enjoyed without a complete understanding of the poet's intent. On a good day a poem might bring you great joy, on a tough day, the same poem might reveal great agony, but the poem hasn't changed—it's what you have brought to the poem that has changed. The more you read a poem, the more time you spend with it, read it out loud to yourself or to others, the more it will open to you—start to wink and flirt and let you in. A poem is a complex living thing, its multiple edges and many colors are what makes this singular art form so difficult to define. There is an ancient Chinese Proverb that says, "A bird sings not because he has an answer, but because he has a song." That is how I have come to think about poetry—that a poem isn't a problem to solve, but rather it's a singular animal call that contains multiple layers of both mystery and joy.
From Limón’s perspective, then (which is similar to mine) poetry defies summarization, just a living entity defies summarization….”But wait,” you say, what about a poem that makes a clear statement in an aphoristic manner, like “Ode to a Grecian Urn”? For those of you who haven’t been reading your Keats lately, the aphoristic statement is “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Is the poem “in a nutshell,” as ‘twere? Putting aside the fact that in the poem’s context the statement is made by the Grecian Urn (apparently quoting Sir Joshua Reynolds—see this link for an interesting discussion of the quotation marks in the section spoken by the Grecian Urn), one could make the point that making these two lines a “summation” somehow suggests that they encapsulate—or even render unnecessary—the 48 lines of verse that precede them. For that matter, a person can publish aphorisms as such; a number of philosophers have done this, from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche & beyond; & without even looking far afield, a British poet who was roughly contemporary with Keats did so—William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell. So if “all” Keats meant by the poem is contained in these two lines, why write the first 48? Why insert a phrase such as “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter”? In some ways that phrase recalls my earlier thoughts about a poem offering gaps for the imagination to inhabit—the “heard” melody gives less scope to the imagination because to some degree the listener receives it passively. The “unheard melody” is that created by the “listener,” who is simultaneously a “maker.” Why write about the static & mute nature of the urn (“foster-child of silence & slow time”) or how art can render love eternal (cf. the end of stanza two)? Does the statement “Beauty is truth” render the “real people” who are depicted on the urn “unreal” in a sort of Platonic sense: shadows cast by some eternal reality—what’s the point of considering “the folk” who are going to the sacrifice, or the “actual” lovers who modeled those depicted on the urn?
Here’s the poem in its entirety:
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thou express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:What leaf-fring'd legend haunt about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
I’m not enforcing any “interpretation”—I’ve simply posed the questions above (& other questions could be posed as well) to suggest that even in this poem, taken from an era when poetry may have had more of an “expository” element than it does in 20th & 21st century English verse, that the poem is still in Balakian’s words, “spreading… a fan of meanings.” Of course, Balakian specifically was writing about surrealist poetry when she made this remark. Let’s look at a poem by the Godfather of the Surrealist movement, André Breton. In French the poem is titled “Non-lieu,” which is a legal term referring to not having “grounds” to hold an arrestee. The poem moves thru a dream-like state: “Dream’s wheels charming the splendid ruts” (“Les roues du rêve charment les splendides ornières”); a disconnected set of images, with the refrain “Art of days art of nights” (“Art des jours art des nuits) “laced” thru the poem—the ibis, the roses in the well of mirrors, the seashells, the enigmatic acrobats. Does all this lead to the final aphoristic statement: “Never freedom only freedom” (“Jamais la liberté que pour la liberté”)? Do we read the poem in reverse to trace the course of “Art of days art of nights” to “Never freedom only freedom”? Or are these images on a “scale chronically frenzied”—a scale that doesn’t weigh objects in the conventionally accepted manner, but by some frenetic system? Are there indeed “no grounds” on which to build “a case” (existentially speaking)—no “proofs”—no “empirical evidence?” Is this the only freedom? Here’s the poem in a translation done by yours truly back in the 90s:
No Grounds
Art of days art of nights
The scale of injuries known as Forgive
Red scale sensitive to a birdflight's weight
When the horsewomen whose collars are snow their hands empty
Urge their steam chariots over the meadows
This scale chronically frenzied I see it
I see the ibis with beautiful manners
Returning from the pond laced into my heart
Dream's wheels charming the splendid ruts
Rising so high along the seashells their gowns
And astonishment springing helter skelter on the sea
Move on dear dawn forget nothing about my life
Take these roses that creep up the well of mirrors
Take the fluttering of every lash
Take everything down to the thread supporting the steps of the rope-and-waterdrop dancers
Art of days art of nights
I'm at the window far off in a city bursting with horror
Outside the men wearing opera hats are following each other at regular intervals
Like the rains I used to love
When the weather was fine
"The Wrath of God" was the name of a cabaret I went to yesterday
It was written on the white facade in even paler letters
But the sailor-women who glide behind the window-panes
Are too cheerful to be fearful
Here never a body always murder without proof
Never the sky always silence
Never freedom only freedom
André Breton, 1932
translation: John Hayes © 1993-2008
The question of “meaning” in poetry is large indeed—a post, even a longish one at that, can at best scratch the surface. My argument wouldn’t be that “poetry means whatever we want it to mean,” but that poetry by its very nature can’t produce meanings that allow encapsulation—by its nature it wishes to expand. The static scene on the Grecian Urn expands; there is “Never freedom only freedom….”
The top pic is John Keat’s tracing of an engraving of the Sosbios Vase; bottom pic shows the cover of Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism
NEXT WEEK: DRINKING WITH EMILY DICKINSON, BREAKFASTING WITH ELIZABETH BISHOP!
Some Robert Frost's Banjo readers have confessed to me that they just don’t know what to make of the poems posted on this blog. That’s ok: as I’ve mentioned in the past, folks don’t read poetry so much nowadays. The days of sitting around the parlor & reading a bit of Browning (Robert or Elizabeth B.) or Shelley or Tennyson out loud have disappeared from the rearview mirror; & as my better half would point out, such parlor pastimes were by & large the disports of the privileged classes.
So one “issue” we’re up against here is familiarity, but the larger issue may be cultural relevance. What art forms are culturally relevant these days in the U.S.? Film, certainly; popular music, including jazz (which has attained a highbrow status, but thankfully still appeals to a whole lot of folks), television, of course, & by extension, the internet, since that’s probably TV’s future. & books—both fiction & non—are still hanging in there.
Now there are a few ways to look at cultural responses to art. Marshall McLuhan wrote about “hot” media vs. “cool” media. A “hot” medium tends to fill in the imaginative gaps, while a “cool” medium leaves a lot of gaps open for the imagination to roam thru. Among other things, a cool medium would tend to be concerned with process. In this way, McLuhan contrasted film with television, pointing out that (in terms of his analysis), the TV set was not a mini movie theater brought into the living room, but an entirely different entity—McLuhan read film as a hot medium & TV as a cool medium. By McLuhan’s definition, poetry is one of the ultimate cool media, since it should be, by definition, filled with imaginative gaps. So why is poetry so neglected in the TV age?
By the by, this isn’t an anti-TV diatribe: I actually love a lot of TV shows, ranging from the original Perry Mason to Star Trek: Deep Space 9.
& here’s another take on cultural response to art: consumerist vs. participatory—& this moves along an entirely different axis than McLuhan’s model. In McLuhan’s analysis, everything is predicated on an audience—this makes sense, because McLuhan was particularly (but far from exclusively) interested in the impact of advertising, the whole premise of which depends upon a passive audience. Beyond the realm of advertising, an audience may be more or less “passive” depending on the medium involved. It could be argued, however, that participation mitigates some parts of the media bombardment McLuhan writes about. Does this mean we all must be poets in able to really “get” or enjoy poetry?
OK, I’ll admit I’m one of those guys who tends to says, “yes & no” in response to lots of similar questions, & I’ll say it again. Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while knows that I’m all for making art as opposed to passive consumption. Now this doesn’t mean no one should watch a film or listen to a cd, etc. But there are ways of being overpowered by art, of feeling alienated by it, & I would say that these have to do with a “passive” response. What could be an active response? Well, just to take a few examples near at hand, I could point to the writing Citizen K does about music—check out, e.g., his response to a Hank Williams box set here—or the writing done by Ginger Ingenue & Raquelle & Jacqueline T Lynch about films; ditto for Laura’s writing about books, film & painting over at Beau Monde Library. Look at GX9901 at Ukulele Ghetto, whose response to seeing a video by uke legend Jake Shimabukuro isn’t to be intimidated by the professional player's chops, but instead to figure out a way of playing this tune that’s captured his imagination. & there are countless other examples, both in the real & virtual worlds.
“But wait a minute,” you say, “what does this have to do with poetry? Do I need to start a blog to respond to every poem I read?” No, tho one could, & it might make for an intriguing read itself. There’s a way of looking at reading that equates the reader & the writer—each is engaged in a process of making—& here we remember that the word “poetry” ultimately derives from the Greek word poiein, "to make or create." As Borges wrote, “Are the enthusiasts who devote a lifetime to a line by Shakespeare not literally Shakespeare.”
How can this be? Does the reader have an equal standing in the act of creation? You might ask—basing your question on the premise of “skill,” or “technique”—isn’t the art of making a poem somehow greater than the art of reading a poem? I have two responses. The first may sound dismissive, but it’s not: that would be that I find arguments based on the premise of “difficulty” to be specious. This premise, for instance, might value a difficult poem like “Mœurs Contemporaines” more than an apparently simple poem like Apollinaire’s “La Blanche Neige.” I actually respond to “La Blanche Neige” more deeply because of its emotional content, but in general I find comparisons odious. My second response is—just based on the response of this blog’s readership—it seems that reading poetry is not such a simple art after all.
So what could Borges & others who have written about reading as a creative act mean? One paradigm of poetic creation is that of the poet imparting beauty or truth. This paradigm supposes that the reader is a student seeking instruction from a master. One could describe this in terms of the student being a passive vessel to be filled with knowledge, & this would be one extreme of the readerly activity, & an extreme that seems fraught simply by putting the reader in such a passive (powerless) position; to some extent, this might be comparable to TV watching, as that is commonly practiced. A less extreme position, but one that’s still related, puts the reader in the position of an exegete. Here the reader is active in the sense of an investigator seeking the truth. The truth imparted by the poet is there to be discovered if one has the proper critical tools to do so. In this paradigm the reader isn’t powerless, tho his/her power is limited because it must follow a straight & narrow path. & here again, the reader is placed in a subordinate position.
Eberle & I were talking about this essay after she read a draft version, & she pointed out that a person confronted by a poem may be assailed by feelings of unworthiness—the reader feels powerless because he/she isn’t capable of getting the poem. She pointed out that no one hesitates to turn on the TV because they feel incapable of understanding it. This is a valid point, because it means that TV doesn’t typically exist in an exigetical realm—watchers don't believe there's necessarily anything to get (in the sense of getting a joke or understanding a poem).
There is of course a third path in which the reader is neither passive nor straitened in his/her response. That’s the path suggested by Borges, or the path Wallace Stevens writes about in the following poem from his 1947 work, Transport to Summer:
The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Wallace Stevens
© Wallace Stevens, 1947
Note that Stevens says, “The scholar to whom the book is true,” not, e.g., “The scholar who finds the truth in the book.” From this perspective, no two people read exactly the same poem; your “Ode to a Grecian Urn” isn’t my “Ode to a Grecian Urn” (a lot more on that poem next week in the second installment). Now, let’s look at a very short poem by the poet Bill Knott whose work I admire as good deal:
Goodbye
If you are still alive when you read this,
close your eyes. I am
under their lids, growing black.
Bill Knott
© Bill Knott, 1989
This poem might be termed “enigmatic” in the sense that it would be hard to summarize—suggestions of absence or displacement, an absence or displacement that may almost feel like a death, or a vanishing—what does this add up to? For me the poem presents a concentrated image & a complex emotional state; & this poem has personal “meaning” for me in the sense that I understand something particular about love & absence when I read it. Some perceptions concerning “Goodbye”:
The painful disconnection of absence—I don’t know about your life anymore—don’t even know if you’re dead or alive; the impossibility of making any request of you, which I can only now face by making a request—the intimacy of “I’ beneath your lids—somehow seeing the lid itself, the lashes, the exterior world even as “I” am enclosed in this fold of flesh—& dying to you, which means reciprocally you are dying to me—I am your eye—in my wish, seeing your world, which I can no longer see; nor see myself as you see me, as we understand ourselves in the eyes (I's) of others & particularly in the eyes of our “other”; a negative image now—a photographic negative, a fade to black—a fade—“growing”—nothing resolved in the “now” of this poem, a “growing black,” not “I” have already become black; a sense of drifting into oblivion—the “I” fading to black as the “eye” sinks into sleep’s oblivion, or at least the oblivion of not seeing.
A poem is a world, small or large. It isn’t exclusively the poet’s world, nor is it exclusively any one reader’s world. It’s a world constantly created in a circle between the words (i.e., the poet) & the reader. The world exists between them as they each create it, bringing their separate experiences of language, which are ultimately their separate experiences of life. The reader isn’t passively entertained, nor is he/she walking the straight & narrow path of an ultimate truth. There’s an old Scottish ballad called “Thomas Rhymer” that describes the 14th century poet Thomas of Erceldoune being carried away by “the Queen of fair Elfland.” I’ve always read this as a story about the path of “true poetry,” & in the context of this essay that includes the path of readerly creation. The Queen of Elfland shows Thomas three paths:
‘O see not ye yon narrow road,
So thick beset wi’ thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness,
Thou after it but few enquires.
‘And see not ye yon braid braid road,
That lies across yon lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Tho some call it the road to heaven.
‘And see not ye that bonny road,
Which winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where you and I this night maun gae.’
In “my” “Thomas Rhymer” I can see these paths describing various modes of being, including not only the poetic endeavor in terms of producing poems on a page (or a computer monitor), but also creating the poem as a reader. For those of a musical bent, you can find a lovely setting for this ballad in Oak Publications’ A Bonnie Bunch of Roses, a book I’d highly recommend to any folk song enthusiasts.
Next week: Can a poem be summarized? Can we read “Ode to a Grecian Urn”? Can we read Breton's "Non-lieu"?
By the by, as a late addition: I stumbled across a fantastic poetry blog this morning: Memo from the Fringes. Having read several recent entries, I'd most assuredly recommend this blog. Folks interested in topics poetical should certainly read this post. The notion of poetry being an "activity" that's "a spreading of a fan of meanings" seems germane to the discussion in this post.
The photo at the top of the post is a public domain image from Wiki Commons. The title is "Henny Porten in her house in Berlin-Dahlem, 1922"; photo by Waldemar Titzenthaler
