How to Read a Poem

Seriously.  How to Read a Poem.

Step 1 – Giving it the once over.

The first thing to do is give the poem a slow, steady reading from beginning to end.  (You can stop a little bit to try to figure things out, but not too much.)  Read it out loud, if you can.  (If the poet has an accent, use an accent.)              All you want to do at this point is to get a general idea of “what the poem is about”.

Step 2 – Figuring it out.

Now that you have a general idea of where the poet is going, you can begin to unlock the diction and imagery of the poem.  This needs to be done slowly.  You may have to read the same phrase, line, or stanza a few times.  At this point, you’ll want to interact with the poem.  Underline.  Make notes.  Ask questions.  Talk back.  (It’s called “marginalia”.)             Once that stanza comes into focus, you may want to go back to an earlier stanza, unravel that one, then proceed again.  Slowly, more and more of the poem will come into focus.

Diction: how the words are strung together.  The diction of a poem tends to be a little more confusing than the diction of prose.  You have to figure out what goes where – what phrase refers to what noun, what that pronoun is modifying.  Work at it.              Sometimes words are used in unusual ways.  “Because their words had forked no lightning. . .” says Dylan Thomas.  Here “fork” is used as a verb.  (Try identifying exactly what part of speech a word is being used as.)  A road can fork.  Conceivably you could fork a pork chop from a platter.  Here it’s being used a little differently – in a new way particular to this poem.

Imagery: Natasha Trethewey says “let the image do the work”.              Dylan Thomas doesn’t explain what he means by “their words had forked no lightning”.  As far as he’s concerned, he already has – why beat a dead horse?  There’s no hidden meaning here: there’s no symbolism.  The image is one of sudden illumination, which in the context of the poem indicates blinding insight.

Remember Occum’s Razor.  This principle is “often incorrectly summarized as ‘the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one,” (according to Wikipedia), but for our purposes, that definition will do.  I find that very often students try to look too deeply into a poem.  When Dylan Thomas says “Father”, he’d not referring to God, or the Church, or the patriarchal society that he lives in.  He means his dad.  (His dad might be a godlike figure to him, but in the first context, he’s still Dad.)

Step 3 – Putting it all together.

Once you gone through it slowly, untangling the syntax and grasping the imagery, go back and give it a start-to-finish read.  Go slowly but steadily.  (Out loud is always a good idea.)  By now you should have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

Step 4 – A close reading in class.

The first three steps have been done on your own.  Now we’ll bring it back to class and give it a “close reading”.  We’ll see how you’ve done so far on figuring it all out.  At this point you may get new information – on the poet, or the times, or the language – that may fill in some blanks or cause you to adjust your previous interpretation.

Step 5 – All together now.

After we’re done with it in class, and before it’s time to take the unit test or the timed essay, go over it one more time yourself, blending your reading with our in-class reading.  It will all be a lot clearer and you should have a good appreciation for what made the poem important enough to make our curriculum.