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1. Listen to a poem first. When you encounter a new poem, try reading it through once without thinking too much about what it means. Try to simply listen to the poem, even if you read silently, and much as you might a song on the radio. Or better yet, read it aloud. Doing so will help you hear the poem’s sound qualities, get a clearer impression of its tone, and start making sense of its syntax, the way words combine into sentences. 2. Articulate your expectations, starting with the title. Poets often try to surprise readers, but you can appreciate such surprises only if you first define your expectations. As you read a poem, take note of what you expect and where, when, and how the poem fulfills, or perhaps frustrates, your expectations. 3. Read the syntax literally. What the sentences literally say is only a starting point, but it is vital. You cannot begin to explore what a poem means unless you first know what it says. Though poets arrange words into lines and stanzas, they usually write in complete sentences, just as writers in other genres do. At the same time and partly in order to create the sort of aural and visual patterns discussed earlier in this chapter, poets make much more frequent use of inversion (a change in normal word order or syntax). To ensure you don’t misread, first “translate” the poem rather than fixing on certain words and free- associating or leaping to conclusions. To translate accurately, especially with poems written before the twentieth century, you may need to break this step down into the following smaller steps: a. Identify sentences. For now, ignore the line breaks and look for sentences or independent clauses (word groups that can function as complete sentences). These will typically be preceded and followed by a period (.), a semicolon (;), a colon (:), or a dash (—). b. Reorder sentences. Identify the main elements— subject(s), verb(s), object(s)— of each sentence or indepe dent clause, and if necessary rearrange them in normative word order. c. Replace each pronoun with the antecedent noun it replaces; if the antecedent is ambiguous, indicate all the possibilities. d. Translate sentences into modern prose. Use a dictionary to define unfamiliar or ambiguous words or words that seem to be used in an unfamiliar or unexpected way. Add any implied words necessary to link the parts of a sentence to each other and one sentence logically to the next. At this stage, don’t move to outright paraphrase; instead, stick closely to the original. e. Note any ambiguities in the original language that you might have ignored in your translation. For example, look for modifiers that might modify more than one thing; verbs that might have multiple subjects or objects; words that have multiple relevant meanings.
4. Consult reference works. In addition to using a dictionary to define unfamiliar or ambiguous words, look up anything else to which the poem refers that you either don’t understand or that you suspect might be ambiguous: a place, a person, a myth, a quotation, an idea, etc. 5. Figure out who, where, when, and what happens. Once you have gotten a sense of the literal meaning of each sentence, ask the following very general factual questions about the whole poem. Remember that not all of the questions will suit every poem. 6. Formulate tentative answers to the questions, Why does it matter? What does it all mean? • Why should the poem matter to anyone other than the poet, or what might the poem show and say to readers? • What problems, issues, questions, or conflicts does the poem explore that might be relevant to people other than the speaker(s) or the poet— to humanity in general, to the poet’s contemporaries, to people of a certain type or in a certain situation, and so forth? • How is each problem or conflict developed and resolved over the course of the poem, or how is each question answered? What conclusions does the poem seem to reach about these, or what are its themes? 7. Consider how the poem’s form contributes to its effect and meaning. • How is the poem or ga nized on the page, into lines and/or stanzas, for example? (What are the lines and stanzas like in terms of length, shape, and so on? Are they all alike, or do they vary? Are lines enjambed or endstopped?) • What are the poem’s other formal features? (Is there rhyme or another form of aural patterning such as alliteration? What is the poem’s base meter, and are there interesting variations? If not, how else might you describe the poem’s rhythm?) • How do the poem’s overall form and its various formal features contribute to its meaning and effect? In other words, what gets lost when you translate the poem into modern prose? 8. Investigate and consider the ways the poem both uses and departs from poetic conventions, especially those related to form and subgenre. Does the poem use a traditional verse form (such as blank verse) or a traditional stanza form (such as ballad stanza)? Is it a specifi c subgenre or kind of poem— a sonnet, an ode, a ballad, for example? If so, how does that affect its meaning? Over time, stanza and verse forms have been used in certain ways and to certain ends, and par tic u lar subgenres have observed certain conventions. As a result, they generate par tic u lar expectations for readers familiar with such traditions, and poems gain additional meaning by both fulfi lling and defying those expectations.
9. Argue. Discussion with others— both out loud and in writing— usually results in clarifi cation and keeps you from being too dependent on personal biases and preoccupations that sometimes mislead even the best readers. Discussing a poem with someone else.
 
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