2.3–Writing About Poetry

Now that you know all of these terms, what do you write about?

The temptation might be to jump straight to interpretation, to start arguing about meaning, and to start engaging in research. But to engage in research too early can actually be counterproductive. Too often, readers fixate on a theme or idea that means a lot to them, so they see that theme or idea replicated everywhere. Soon, they begin trying to fit poems into predetermined readings or patterns of meaning. However, if we follow closely the poem, consider carefully the words on the page, and allow the form and content to dictate the shape of our research questions, then we are more likely to have an honest engagement with the source poem and the research.

So, with poems, we start by writing an explication. To explicate a poem is to highlight, annotate, and examine its various parts in close detail while refusing to rest on any one particular interpretation. An explication does not focus on specific interpretations but rather allows itself to freely pursue all of the possible interpretations; it explores and explains. After the explication is complete, analytical close reading can begin, an example of which can be found at the end of this chapter. So, in short, an explication breaks a poem down into its constituent parts, and a close reading analyzes the parts through an argument about the whole (the poem) in the form of a thesis statement. Remember, none of the explications below can be said to be exhaustive: What’s missing? What remains left out?

To be as systematic as possible, each explication below will start broadly before moving into particulars. Each will begin with a broad overview of the form of the poem before moving into a paraphrase that illuminates the who, what, when, and where of the poem. Then the explications will move on to how those elements are executed, analyzing what choices the author made regarding words, punctuation, sounds, images, and figures. While analyzing the choices made by the poem, effort will be made to speculate on why the author might have made the choices they did.

First, let us examine the page for any patterns that are immediately apparent. Take a moment to see the poem not as a grouping of words with meaning, but as a collection of marks consciously organized into a pattern on the page. What patterns emerge?

This poem is written in quatrains, or four-line stanzas. A quick glance reveals these quatrains to be rhyming quatrains. The rhymes have a distinct pattern. The first stanza repeats the word “love” at the end of the first and fourth lines, and the second and third lines of each stanza rhyme, establishing a rhyme pattern of ABBA, also called an envelope stanza. However, the stanzas do not all rhyme exactly according to this pattern. When the word “love” is not repeated at the end of the first line of a stanza, that stanza breaks the rhyming pattern, and each stanza actually repeats the exact same fourth line, until the deviation of the ultimate line. Love is a prominent enough concept in this poem that the word is repeated at the end of seven lines; it is also a powerful enough concept to disrupt the patterns of the poem and cause cacophony within the rhyme scheme.

If we start to count syllables, we see that most lines contain ten syllables, though some contain more or fewer. A base of ten syllables suggests a predominance of iambic pentameter, the most common meter in English poetry, and the lines that break that pattern call attention to themselves by deviating from the pattern. A quick glance at the punctuation of this poem reveals there are no caesuras, and that when punctuation does occur, it is end-stopped. All of the above can be discerned without much attention to the meaning of the words within the poem, and such treatment will soon reveal whether you have a closed or fixed form before you. Here we have rhyming quatrains that purposefully employ deviation from the rules of that form. Whatever the case, this process reveals a pattern; whether we have traditional patterns such as sonnet, villanelle, or haiku, or modern patterns that break the rules, pattern recognition is a fundamental skill.

Next, paraphrase the poem, taking care not to add any external information. A paraphrase will cover the subject of the poem or what it is about, it will address who is speaking during the poem, and when and where the poem takes place. How and why a poem is written is, of course, an important question. We will return to that, but let’s address the what, when, who, and where first.

The speaker of this poem is unclear, though it must be the speaker of the title, “I, Lover.” The poem nowhere indicates anything specific about the speaker, not even gender. The clear first-person voice marks this poem as lyric, as expressing the thoughts and emotions of a single-speaker, but the poem appears to be an ode and a lament at the same time. The subject here, love, is portrayed as both terrible and delightful, something one should rush toward but also be wary of. Place and time are not relevant to the poem. Nothing about the poem places it in the world of objects, of the particular; no, love here is abstract and universal.

Next, we consider how the subject of the poem is portrayed. If we observe the word choice and syntax of this poem, we can see that the poem is built upon oxymorons, paradoxes, parallelisms and puns. Word pairings such as “exquisite pain” and “terrible delight” are examples of oxymorons (3). “Exquisite” carries positive connotations—things we enjoy are exquisite; yet most people do not enjoy pain, a word that carries obviously negative meanings. The same applies to “horrible” and “delight”; these words differ in their connotations and denotations. Paradoxes function similarly to oxymorons, but they usually extend to phrases, and paradoxical phrases often exhibit parallelism, which is a way of linking ideas using matching syntax and structures. Consider line 2 from the poem: “nor of its depth nor its uttermost height.” Here there are two clauses, each beginning with the conjunction “nor”; after the “nor” comes the possessive “its,” and both clauses end on features or qualities that love possesses. But how can something possess depths and heights? Aren’t those opposites? This paradox and the parallel structure emphasize the positive and negative attributes of love at the same time, but in this line the heights are emphasized by the modifier “uttermost,” which may imply that the heights make up for the lows somehow. Finally, consider the pun of “moulding touch” in line 18. This is the UK spelling of mold, but to mould is to give shape or form to something, while a mould is a fungus that in some cases causes health issues. Love is everywhere defined in this poem by this dual quality, something foundational and formational, yet devastating and sadistic.

This poem deals primarily in abstractions and emotions, so it offers little in the form of concrete language associated with imagery. Even figurative speech is minimal, although personification plays a central role and there is at least one implied metaphor. In line 7, we learn about love’s “awful kiss”; and in line 18, there is love’s “moulding touch.” Love is more than an abstraction here, and it takes on human characteristics—love caresses, love shapes, love kisses. Continuing with the use of oxymoron, those kisses are awful, the touch mouldy, but it is clear that, literally, love cannot possibly perform these actions. Furthermore, line 6 contains an implied metaphor with “into the fastness of its abyss.” What contains abysses? An abyss is usually a chasm, a geographical feature, though it can be used to describe non-geographical differences. Taken geographically, love is implied to be a land mass; seas contain abysses, so do mountains. Therefore, love is implied to be either a high place with abysses, a mountain, or a low place with further depths, a sea. This dual implication continues the patterns of dual meanings that permeate this poem.

Why, then? Why has the author created this special arrangement of words in such a way that love is permeated by highs and lows? On one hand, this might seem obvious to anyone who has ever loved. Love takes us through highs and lows. But on the other hand, what would research reveal about the theme of this poem? Could we have missed some figure of speech, pun, or other word play that might be revealed by an exploration of the life of the author and her historical milieu? Surely not everyone can experience love as both utmost delight and terrible pain, right? If you knew the author was a lesbian in a time when homosexuality could be punished by law, how would it change your interpretation of this poem? What new puns or other hidden meanings might then emerge? These questions are exactly the sorts of questions one might strive to answer with the thesis statement of the close reading assignment with which this chapter ends.

This poem appears as a series of four stanzas. Each stanza is a tercet. Punctuation is a pronounced feature. There are three exclamation points and one question. There are also several em dashes, some that end-stop lines, but others that are caesuras. A few of the lines even present multiple caesuras, a technique sure to create a lilting, stilted rhythm.

Counting the syllables here begins to reveal the form at work. Five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second, five in the third—these are the features of a haiku. In fact, the title of this piece, “Hokku,” calls attention to the origins of the haiku. A hokku was, traditionally, a sequence of poems that began a longer work called a renga. The hokku became a valued form on its own, over time evolving into, simply, haiku. Haiku exhibit other features beyond the syllable count. They usually contain strong nature imagery, with words that tune the reader to the passing of the seasons. Traditional Japanese-language haiku also employ cutting words, words that signal changes in mood, tone, or subject. Because English does not ordinarily employ specific words to signal tone shifts, this poem uses punctuation in a manner that serves to approximate such specialized Japanese words.

The speaker of the poem identifies themselves through the use of the first-person singular in stanza one and the first person possessive in line 4. In stanza one, the speaker claims to be “a rider of the stream, / lone between the clouds” (2–3). As a metaphor, these lines may tell us many things about the speaker’s mindset, but they do little to concretely identify the speaker. There is also a “you” to which the speaker speaks, and this person is given a snippet of dialogue, “Full of faults” (4). But this is not a conversation; no, the framing of the events seems to indicate strong memories recollected later. But this speaker does not recollect in tranquility and silence. They recollect while in the rain. This seems to be the poem in its entirety: memories, including regrets, in tandem with nature. Though it would rightly be impossible to say with certainty the time of year, certain keywords indicate that this poem takes place in spring, when most notably, “flowers bloom” (9).

The diction of this poem is simple, and most readers could read it without a dictionary. “Repentance” (5) stands out as a keyword, not simply because it is one of the longest words used in a poetic form that limits syllables, but also because it offers some hint of the relationship between the speaker and the “you” they address in the poem. We cannot say for certain what the speaker has done wrong, but they have done something to warrant ‘“tears” (6). “List” (12) also deserves attention, because it is an irregular usage denoting the motion of swaying side-to-side; like ships on the ocean, the song in the narrator’s heart lists. The word “song” also stands out, notably because it is repeated six times. This poem is itself a song, a song of lament and sorrows, but also a song of beginnings and renewals— “break song to sing the new song!” (8).

The imagery of this poem is its most important feature, those images often working in conjunction with implied metaphors. Let us take each stanza one by one. Stanza 1 opens with “bits of song,” a vague aural or auditory image (1). Noguchi then offers this mixture of image and implied metaphor: “I, rider of the stream, / lone between the clouds” (2–3). The first part of this image is abstract and implies a metaphor. The speaker is a rider. Are they horse riders, then? Surely not, because horses are not commonly used to ride streams. However, boats ride streams. But this contradicts the next image of a person, alone, floating through the clouds. Is the speaker lying on their back, floating down a stream, staring at the clouds? Perhaps. Whatever the case, we know how they feel, lonely among the clouds, which might even be an allusion—a reference to a person, place, or thing—to William Wordsworth’s famous poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”^[3] (1807).

Stanza 2, like Stanza 1, begins with auditory imagery. We hear words from someone who is not the speaker, “Full of faults, you say” (4). Then in the final line comes an image coupled with an implied metaphor: “Tears, song—thus life flows!” (6). We can see tears, making this a visual image, and we can even infer the noise that would come with tears. However, we would not usually associate the noise of crying with song, though the two are very consciously juxtaposed in this line. “Thus life flows” (6) has a sense of finality to it, as if the speaker is adrift, alone, singing a lament, a sad song full of tears, and that’s “just the way it is.” Of course, to say life flows is to imply a metaphor. Does life flow like the rapper Biggie Smalls? Or does life flow…like a river? Option 2 seems more likely, and not just for historical reasons. This implied metaphor links back to the implied metaphor of stanza 1, because we might now argue that the stream on which our speaker is a rider is the stream of life.

Stanza 3 presents an auditory rupture: “break song to sing the new song!” (8). This rupture is reflected in the word choice and the final set of images. A word like “break” is obvious enough in its denotation to reflect rupture in this stanza, but the word “march” in line 7 might be less obvious. In this line is an implied metaphor: life marches. What else marches? Armies march, time marches, so do ducks. Whatever the case, to march is to progress with determination toward a specific objective, whereas to flow is to simply go with things, to ride the current, to not direct. How can life at one moment flow, the next march? With “clouds leap” (9), the final set of images reinforce this rupture by disturbing the speaker’s solitude among the clouds, and then finally, “flowers bloom” (9), indicating fecundity and renewal. Has the speaker reached some epiphany or a resolution in the clouds and flowers?

Stanza 4 returns to a similar imagery pattern as stanzas 1 and 2. It opens with a song, with an aural image: “song of sea in rain” (10). It would seem that, if our speaker is riding the stream, that they have arrived, finally, to the sea. If life is the stream, then what is the sea? Death? But the stanza before has just promised new life, new songs, and new seasons. Could it be an afterlife? And who is it that sings this song!? Not our speaker, but the voice of someone—or something—much vaster than a single person, something celestial and universal, something composed of “sky, earth, and men” (11). Finally, the song of the speaker’s heart sways side to side, as if wavering upon the cusp of something large, wavering on the cusp of some great change, a renewal brought about by repentance and reflection.

Around the time this poem was published, there began a movement in poetry called Imagism. Some of the most notable practitioners of Imagistic poetry include major poets such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. As per its name, this movement emphasized the image as the most effective way of transmitting direct feelings through sensory experience. What relationship, if any, exists between Noguchi’s poem and the Imagist movement? Can the Imagist understanding of imagery help us better understand this poem? If images can convey certain emotions, what emotions do you feel as you go through each stanza of this poem? Is it purely coincidence that the first English haiku was written around the same time as the Imagist movement? These questions, and more, are the sorts to ask as you move from explication to analytical close reading.

A cursory glance at this poem reveals two stanzas: the first an octet, the second a sestet. The total number of lines is 14, making this—you guessed it! A sonnet.

In the Introductory section of this chapter, we covered the Shakespearean, or English Sonnet; this sonnet is a Petrarchan, or Italian sonnet. In many ways they are very similar: written in rhyming iambic pentameter, usually about love, and presenting a turn, or shift in the tone of the poem, at a predetermined place. However, the turn comes in different places for each type, respectively, this revealing the major structural differences between the two types of sonnets. If you recall, for the Shakespearean sonnet, the turn comes after the second quatrain or before the final couplet. Here, in the Petrarchan sonnet, the turn comes after the opening octet, just before the final sestet. The opening octet consists of two rhyming quatrains, here with the rhyme scheme: ABBAABBA. The rhyme scheme of the final sestet varies from poem to poem, but here it is: CDCDCD. Nothing about this structure suggests, so far, that the poet is using the sonnet structure in original or inventive ways.

The speaker of the poem is never clearly identified, but the subject of the poem is humanity’s effects on nature, and the ability of God, who is in this poem equated with nature, to refresh nature despite humanity’s poor stewardship. We know that sonnets often present variations on the theme of love, and this poem is no exception; only, rather than focusing on romantic love, or eros, this poem focuses on agape, or the love of God for all of humanity. The opening quatrain begins with a declaration of the power of God as manifested in nature: “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” (1). The word charge has been italicized here because it is very revealing: God here is a potential source of energy contained in all things, waiting to be unleashed, such as when we touch a balloon that has gathered a static charge. After this declaration of the power of God in nature comes a description of humankind’s effects on nature, a species who trods and smears and blears and toils and who, in general, is cut off from nature by his own doing. Within the octet, darkness gives way to dawn, and we are reminded that, despite all of humanity’s efforts, there awaits a renewing force in the Earth, a “freshness deep down things” (10) that is being incubated by the Holy Ghost, with its “warm breasts, and ah! bright wings” (14).

The syntax and punctuation of this poem create variations in rhythm that deviate from the standard iambic pentameter, and as such, call attention to themselves as deviations. The first quatrain reveals the syntax and punctuation that makes the rhythms possible. Stressed syllables are in bold:

The world / is charged / with the gran / deur of God.

It will flame / out, like shin / ing from / shook foil;

It gath / ers to a great / ness, like the ooze / of oil

Crushed. / Why do men / then now / not reck / his rod?^[5]

This scansion, which comes from Rosebury, emphasizes the sprung rhythms, a type of poetic rhythm meant to approximate natural speech. With sprung rhythm, there are usually four stressed syllables per line, and an indeterminate number of unstressed syllables. The metric feet can range from one to four syllables (in traditional rhythms, the longest metric feet are dactyls and anapest, which have three syllables.) There is also a preponderance of spondees, as seen here with oil/crushed or shook/foil. From this ‘spring’ comes the name sprung rhythm. Accordingly, despite most sonnets being written in iambic pentameter, this poem exhibits a different pattern. There are metric feets of iambs, “the world is charged” but in the same line they are mixed with anapests, “with the grandeur of God.” Line 2 contains a trochee, the double emphasized “shook foil” lending emphasis to the overall euphony of this line (“f” and “sh” sounds working together to imitate the image of shook foil—silver-foil, gold-foil, etc.). And there is at least one stressed foot made up of a single syllable: “crushed.’’ This emphasis reveals a menacing edge to God’s power and love: he could crush mankind, too, if he wished. The final question falls back into iambic pentameter, and if you do not know what “reck” means, now would be a good time to look it up.

For a fun experience, try reading this and other poems aloud while experimenting with different meters. You can do this alone, but it is better with friends, or in class. How does this poem change when read with sprung rhythm vs iambic pentameter? Which do you prefer? Why?

Unique word choices and syntactic variations emerge from the use of alliteration, assonance, consonance, and epistrophe, and the sounds of the poems begin to imitate the sense. We have already seen how the repetition of the f and sh sounds serves to imitate the sound of shook foil. In the second quatrain, we learn that “generations have trod, have trod, have trod” (5). An unnecessary repetition in prose, in verse this epistrophe places a thudding emphasis on every step any person has ever trod on earth. Because of humanity, “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared” (6); the assonance of the ea combined with the consonance of the -red sound serves to elongate and drag out those words, like a verbal smearing that matches humanity’s smearing of the earth. Alliteration directs the verse through the sestet—“dearest freshness deep down things” (10)—and builds to the final couplet, which relies heavily on the alliteration of b and w, revealing an interesting pattern: “world broods with warm breasts and with ah! bright wings” (14). In the combination “world broods,” both words have the letter o within, but pronounced differently; the same is true for “warm breasts” and “bright wings.” The word choice is, as we have seen, often driven less by reason and more by sound.

There are many powerful images in this poem. Some of them are couched in similes. For example: “flame out, like shining from shook foil” (2). Not only can we hear the flaming in the f and sh sounds, we are also given a visual representation, the sun gleaming on a bright surface; the two senses taken together achieve synesthesia, the deliberate mixing or confusion of two or more senses within an image. We also get the “ooze of oil / Crushed” (3–4), geological pressure that is compared through simile to the greatness of God. We hear and smell humanity throughout this poem (Hopkins uses the gendered and archaic ‘man’ to refer to all of humankind), but perhaps the most lasting image is that humanity’s feet are shod: the very shoes on our feet become a powerful symbol of our separation from the natural world. The sestet also provides a pair of powerful images: “the last lights off the black West” (11) and morning, that “at the brown brink eastward, springs” (12). Finally, the poem ends on the image of the Holy Ghost, who broods over the world with a warm breast and bright wings. Could this be an implied metaphor? What sort of creature broods over its young, has wings, and is known for their breasts? Chickens? Ducks? Is the author comparing the Holy Ghost to a chicken? Such bathos, or a lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial, is not unheard of in poetry, but perhaps the Holy Ghost as mother hen might suggest too much of a turn from the gravity of this poem, a poem that holds itself in awe of the sublime of God’s grandeur. The implied metaphor is likely a dove, something we maybe could not divine from the poem, but might realize once we researched Hopkins’ religious beliefs.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest. He also wrote this poem in 1877, though it was not published until 1918. Why could he not find an audience for his poetry in his time? What changed about poetry and its reception that made audiences more accepting of the sort of sound-driven verse Hopkins wrote? Another way of asking that question is: what changed in the poetic tastes between the Victorian period and the Modern period, which is associated with the early 20th century? These questions, and many others, are the sort you might consider for a close reading or research essay.