The Mystery of Poetry
Tags: Poetry, Writing, Meaning, Purpose

In Billy Collins “Introduction to Poetry”, it almost leaves the readers confused, and it leaves them wanting to investigate more about this poem and what the significance is behind it. As a reader, I want to know more about what he means by all of this? What is he entailing when he says he wants us to “hold it up to a light” or “feel its walls”? I want to explore this meaning farther. I want to do this with poems I read, but I’m not sure how to, what is the difference between torturing the meaning out of the text and feeling its walls and waterskiing across it? I want to know what the feeling of watching a mouse probe through his way out, I want to experience that feeling, only if I knew how.

When Collins says to “drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out”, I believe that he is referring to a poem as a maze, a very complicated and complex set of words that has many different meanings. A maze of endless

The only way to find the true meaning of a poem is to go through the whole maze.

possibilities is what he is trying to portray, and watching this “mouse” go through this maze is really just your brain flipping through all the different meanings of this poem. Or when he refers to finding the meaning of the poem as “walking inside the poem’s walls and feel the walls for a light switch”, he wants the readers to blindly search for the significance of the poem, even if it seems impossible to find. He wants us to keep walking around the room and touching every square inch of each wall until we find what we are looking for, the light switch. Expect here, the light switch means the purpose, the meaning.

Collins makes it very clear to the readers that he does not approve of people “torturing” the meaning out of a poem. It means that he does not want people forcing the wrong meaning out of it, he doesn’t want the readers to think that they are being held against their will to look for the purpose. He wants us to want to do this, to feel the need and desire to find the real meaning behind all these sets of words. He does not want us to “torture a confession out of it”, he simply wants the readers to enjoy finding the meaning by using the correct ways. To take the time and energy and probe their way through the words and find the correct passage out of that maze. Some might say it is ironic that I am writing this essay on a poem explaining the meaning of it, when the meaning of the poem is to want to find the purpose of it all. I wasn’t forced to pick this poem, I wanted to write my essay of it because I wanted to take the time and energy (as you can see from this essay) to portray the true meaning of the “Introduction to Poetry” to the readers.

Now as to what to get out of this writing is Collins simply wants us readers to enjoy poetry and reading it, finding the meaning of it all. I think this poem is directed kind of towards lots of students, like myself, because we are normally forced to read and analysis poetry in our English classes. Most students hate reading poetry because they know that they are going to have to analysis the meaning and deep dive into all those words and try to force a meaning out of it, but what he really wants us to do and understand is that, that is not what the author wants us to do. He doesn’t want us to think that our teachers are forcing us to pick through a meaning and forcing us to read poetry as an assignment. Even though this might be true, he wants the readers of the poetry to understand how to find the correct meaning of a poem, and not torturing an incorrect, half-hearted meaning out of that poem.