# Interpreting Poetry

Interpreting Poetry
1 Introduction
2 Sound Patterning
3 Images
4 Word Choice
5 Metaphors
6 Themes
7 Tone
8 Structure
9 All together

## Interpreting Poetry
### Introduction
#### To my Wife

If love is like a bridge or maybe like a grudge,
and time is like a river that kills us with a shiver,
then what have all these mornings meant but aging into love?
What now is straight must have been bent; what now is whole must have been rent.
My hand is now your glove.

### He Contemplates His Celibacy

In the gray air I look for a beginning and try not to care whether winter lasts.
Out of the sky the snowflakes whirl, bringing to my ears and eyes their childlike blows.
Children I have known or should father sleep in my bones. I hear their cries.
They would awake not for a night and brief breeding, but to feed on their father.
No crooked leg stirs in the snow. Winter drags. Nothing wishes to grow.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/celibacy.) This one has only two perfect end rhymes, three slant rhymes, and one stanza (group of rhymed lines) that breaks the rhyme scheme altogether. See if you can find them.

### He Contemplates His Celibacy

In the gray air I look for a beginning and try not to care whether winter lasts.
Out of the sky the snowflakes whirl, bringing to my ears and eyes their childlike blows.
Children I have known or should father sleep in my bones. I hear their cries.
They would awake not for a night and brief breeding, but to feed on their father.
No crooked leg stirs in the snow. Winter drags. Nothing wishes to grow.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/celibacy.) This one has only two perfect end rhymes, three slant rhymes, and one stanza (group of rhymed lines) that breaks the rhyme scheme altogether. See if you can find them.
This is perhaps the most common set of modern lyrics:
This is the house that Jack built.
This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the rat that ate the malt That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cat that killed the rat That ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the dog that worried the cat That killed the rat that ate the malt That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cow with the crumpled horn That tossed the dog that worried the cat That killed the rat that ate the malt That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the maiden all forlorn That milked the cow with the crumpled horn . . .
The nursery rhyme and cumulative tale "This Is the House That Jack Built" appeared in an 1887 book of children's stories. The poem does not actually tell the story of Jack building a house, but instead shows how the house is indirectly linked to numerous things and people. It is believed to date back to the mid-sixteenth century, but the first printed edition was in 1755. "Modern?"
Children's poetry is a good place to begin--a life or an exploration of poetry. In the lines above, by the time you get to the "cow with the crumpled horn," I hope you want to find out where this crumpled tale goes. But look at some other things. "Appeared in an 1887 book" says that poetry can lead you into the valuable past and that you may have to find out something you didn't know.
"Does not actually tell the story of Jack building a house" makes you wonder why a poem titled "This Is the House That Jack Built" does NOT tell you about Jack's handiwork. The answer is that poetry is oblique. Emily Dickinson, the great nineteenth-century American poet, says, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant." "Slant" here means "oblique." Why should this be? Partly because the slantedness leads you to "numerous things and people." Poetry works by association.
Let's look at "The House That Jack Built." When you read it aloud you hear the rhythm, an alternation of unstressed and unstressed syllables. this poem is built mainly of one-syllable words so you don't have to worry if you have trouble dividing words into syllables. You hear "THIS is the HOUSE that JACK BUILT." You hear this alternation of one- and two-beat feet as you move along. "THIS is the CAT that KILLED the RAT"--every line beginning and ending with a stress, a beat.
What else do you notice about the sound as you read the poem aloud? Every line as a slight rest in the middle, a "caesura." And every caesura comes before the word "that." That is one reason we read poetry, because we enjoy all kinds of rhythms. We enjoy rapid pace suddenly pausing and then picking up again.
And you hear the vowel-consonant music. Obvious rhymes like "cat" and "rat," but also slant rhymes (remember slantedness?) like "malt" and "rat.