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asterick1
New Member

since 2006-03-05

Posts 3

0 posted 2006-03-05 03:55 PM

Hi,

I'm taking a poetry course in first-year college because I found it pretty fun and interesting in high school but it seems a bit difficult, confusing and frustrating to understand.  Some of the poems just leave a huge question mark in my head.

I was wondering how one analyzes a poem to it's greatest depths and how figurative speech helps that process.  I really want to be prepared for my next class dicussion on the following two poems by Richard Wilbur, but I just don't know where to begin.

Fabrications

As if to prove again
The bright resilience of the frailest form,
A spider has repaired her broken web
Between the palm trunk and the jasmine tree.

Etched into the clear new light
Above the still-imponderable ground,
It is a single and gigantic eye
Whose golden pupil, now, the spider is.

Through it you can see the flash
Of steeples brightened as a cloud slips over,
One loitering star, and off there to the south
Slow vultures kettling in the lofts of air.

Each day men frame and weave
In their own way whatever looms in sight,
Though they must see with human scale and bias,
And though there is much unseen. The Talmud tells

How dusty travellers once
Came to a river where a roc was wading,
And would have hastened then to strip and bathe,
Had not a booming voice from Heaven said,

"Step not in that water:
Seven years since, a joiner dropped his axe
Therein, and it hath not yet reached to bottom."
Whether beneath our senses or beyond them,

The world is bottomless,
A drift of star-specks or the Red King's dream,
And fogs our thought, although it is not true
That we grasp nothing till we grasp it all.

Witness this ancient map
Where so much blank and namelessness surroud
A little mushroom-clump of coastal towers
In which we infer civility,

A harbor-full of spray
And all the loves which hint at love itself,
Imagining too a pillar at whose top
A spider's web upholds the architrave.

Icons

They are one answer to the human need
For a second life, and they exist for us
In the secular heaven of photography
Safe in emulation's cloud

Through which we glimpse them, knowing them as we know
The angels, by report and parched sunrise.
Like Milton's seraphim who veil their gaze
Against the beams of God,

Often we see them handomsely asquint
When captured by a bursting photoflash
Or dazzling and bedazzled on that beach
Where currently they sun;

And yet perhaps they seem most brilliant when,
Putting away all glamour, they appear
In their old clothes at home, with dog and child,
Projecting toward the lens.

From a couch not unlike our own, a smile
Sublimely confident of mattering.
They smile, too, when we spot their avatars
Upon the actual street.

Sharing with us the little joke that we
Have known them in a different dimension;
But since they strike us then as subtly changed -
Pale, short, a triffle older -

It is not hard to yield them back to dream,
From which their images immutably
Bestow a flourish on our muted lives,
Even though death betray them.

Still, there are fewer sightings year by year
Of the trenchcoat carried niftily over the shoulder,
The innocent sultry look, the heaved guitar
The charming pillbox hat.

And fewer of their dreamers left to grieve
As all those glossy selves, transcedent still,
Slip unaccountably into the morgues
And archives of this world.

First poem, Fabrications, I have absolutely no clue what Wilbur is talking about.  For the second poem, Icons, I think Wilbur is talking about celebrities, but what about them?  Is he trying to poke fun at them?  Is he trying to say that they are larger than life?  Or a necessity to humanity?

Ringo

Member Elite

since 2003-02-20

Posts 3684
Saluting with misty eyes

1 posted 2006-03-05 05:37 PM

The idea behind interpreting a poem is to decide what YOU think it means. For us to tell you what a particular poem means would be adding our experiences in life and writing on it, and would completely invalidate your own.

To help you out with doing it yourself, though....

Look at each couple of lines or each stanza and decide what they mean:
As if to prove again
The bright resilience of the frailest form,
A spider has repaired her broken web

What is the mental picture you get from this? (my one gimmee... *I* feel the location is just that... a location and not too involved in the whole scheme of things.) What is the spider doing? What happened that caused the spider to be doing this?

Etched into the clear new light
Above the still-imponderable ground,
It is a single and gigantic eye

What is the "single and gigantic eye"?

Whose golden pupil, now, the spider is.

Does this refer to the first three lines of the stanza? If so, what does it mean? If not, why is it there?

Through it you can see the flash
Of steeples brightened as a cloud slips over
What is the mental picture you get from this? What is happening in these two lines?

One loitering star
What is this?

...and off there to the south
Slow vultures kettling in the lofts of air.
What visuals do you get from this? What does the word "kettling" mean?

Get the idea? If there is a word that you do not understand, look them up in a dictionary, and then replace the meaning with the word and re-read the poem. Once you know what all the words mean, and can understand each line, or each couple of lines, THEN attempt to figure out what the poet is attempting to tell you. Ask yourself:
"Is the poet being literal, or is there a deeper meaning here? Is it possible that the poet is actually only talking about a spider re-building her web? Was he actually trying to get you to understand something else? Only you can answer all of these questions for you. Besides... us telling you the answers would be like us doing your work for you, and that is not what this site is about.

Now that you've come on to the site, how about sharing a couple of your own popems with us? I know I would like to read them, and I can pretty much guess others would as well.

To be merciful to the cruel is to be cruel to the merciful.
www.impressionsintime.net

asterick1
New Member

since 2006-03-05

Posts 3

2 posted 2006-03-05 07:27 PM

Yes I understand what you are saying, I'm not here to get people to do work for me, I just want to know some people's insights and hopefully learn how to think critically. We always discuss poems in class but I find myself listening rather than participating and contributing. Part of the reason is because when I read things (especially poetry), it seems too literal for me and I don't have the ability to, or don't know how to read outside of the lines. Thanks for your advice though.

Sunshine

Administrator

Member Empyrean

since 1999-06-25

Posts 63354
Listening to every heart

3 posted 2006-03-05 07:37 PM

Dear asterick1...

At least you are listening.  Maybe not comprehending, but you are listening.  Have you ever read poetry aloud?  Listen to how your own voice carries over various lines?

April will soon be upon us.  April is known as Poetry Month in many states and localities.  I would like to suggest that you search your local paper, or call your local library, to find out if there are special functions during this time.  Then, if you have access to knowing who might be in your area, look up their poetry, and at the very best, should you attend their function, ask them to read a poem of theirs that they have written.  At that very moment, you will hear their voice on their poem, and get a huge insight as to how poetry is read.

It can be one way in your own mind, and another in how they dissemble the words with their own voice.

This, I know, firsthand.  I write a lot of free verse; a lot of poets that I have come to know write in rhyming verse: it is indeed quite magical as we listen to various poets.

I will give you this link, as an example:
/pip/Forum22/HTML/000869.html

Here is my suggestion:  read the poem first, out loud.  Then click on the link, and listen to the poet firsthand as you continue to read his work.

Poetry in motion can be spelled as another word:  Nuance.  What one means, and tries to spell out, can be shaded by so many things...but I think if you try this exercise, it may help you in your own course.

Welcome to Passions!

asterick1
New Member

since 2006-03-05

Posts 3

4 posted 2006-03-08 08:49 AM

Thanks for the advice, I read the poems out loud (and listened to them out loud) and it does help as you get an idea of where certain words are stressed. But what about for short, complicated poems like this?

the canvas bag by Les Arnold
Some Notes on the Paintings of Francis Bacon (1978)

relax
it's a one
way
mirror
they can't

see
you & you
can'
see

OR.....

Noche by Brent MacKay
The King Bean (1981)

Mescal moon,
pearl button,
saddest light
I've ever seen
on fedora mountain:
Sierra Madre.

3 dead cows
by the highway

A bright blanket
on a breeze.

Tequila:
the mind's limbo
beneath fanpalm.

I mean, these poems are short, and each line contains mostly only 2-3 words which are mainly images....how is one to explain such a poem like this?

Midnitesun

Member Empyrean

since 2001-05-18

Posts 28647
Gaia

5 posted 2006-03-08 01:31 PM

Just think about how those words or images make you FEEL. What emotions do they bring to the surface of your mind? What stored personal memories (if any) do they trigger?
My own experience tells me that even the writer is not always able to 'explain' or interpret the meaning or intent of his/her words. But if you can write or verbalize how something makes you FEEL? well, you can at least offer that as a 'critique' comment.
Good luck!

Ringo

Member Elite

since 2003-02-20

Posts 3684
Saluting with misty eyes

6 posted 2006-03-08 10:54 PM

asterick-
There is a challenge I have with this post that I didn't voice at first. While I applaud you for finding help with an assignment you are having difficulty with, I am not sure about the advisability of putting an entire poem in your post that does not belong to you. Please don't take this as I am picking on you. One of our reasons for being here is to help others appreciate poetry in all its forms. However, one of the guidelines that we all have to agree to when we join is to not post anything that doesn't belong to us. In this thread, there are 4 separate poems that have been posted without the author's permission. To be fair, it has happened with other poets, including myself, yet we have all been reminded about the laws as a result. If these poems can be found online, then a link to them might be acceptable, and would allow us to help each other without any hassles.
I completely invite you to continuye visiting, and I really would like to see some of your own words here as well.
Thanks

To be merciful to the cruel is to be cruel to the merciful.
www.impressionsintime.net

Goldenrose
Member Elite

since 2003-05-30

Posts 3665

7 posted 2006-03-17 07:57 PM

A very interesting thread here, but if i may offer this to you? Try to read some of the great poets, the poets you are reading are quite new. I first became interested by reading the genious that is Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, De lamareohn Masefield, W.B Yeats and Ted Hughes. These poets used the senses, elements, environments and most importantly,their ability to command language and enable them to put it across in a different way, creating new slants on how people thought about things. If you want to see a master at work, read Reynard The Fox by the former english poet Laureate John Masefield, his descriptions are breathtaking. If you master these works and can understand them, the others are easy, dont forget these poets are the cream, the others would never have been without their influence.

I once read that Ted Hughes did not consider his poetry to be ''his'' anymore once he had finnished it and it was in a book, it was the readers from that moment, so what you get out of it, i might not, that is themagic and accesibility of poetry.

Goldenrose.

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