University of Strathclyde

Department of
English Studies
Glasgow G1 1XH
0141-552 4400

Week 5: Introduction to Poetry

NB Mistake in class handbook, p.10: the tutorial on 'Leda no Swan' will take place in week 9, not week 8; we will also be returning essays in this tutorial.

1. Class materials: Tom Furniss and Michael Bath, Reading Poetry (Prentice Hall, 1996); Eleanor Brown, Maiden Speech (Bloodaxe, 1996); M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (recommended).

2. Reading a poem (by Edwin Muir, 1925)

Childhood

Long time he lay upon the sunny hill,
To his father's house below securely bound.
Far off the silent, changing sound was still,
With the black islands lying thick around.

He saw each separate height, each vaguer hue,             5
Where the massed islands rolled in mist away,
And though all ran together in his view
He knew that unseen straits between them lay.

Often he wondered what new shores were there.
In thought he saw the still light on the sand,                  10
The shallow water clear in tranquil air,
And walked through it in joy from strand to strand.

Over the sound a ship so slow would pass
That in the black hill's gloom it seemed to lie.
The evening sound was smooth like sunken glass,        15
And time seemed finished ere the ship passed by.

Grey tiny rocks slept round him where he lay,
Moveless as they, more still as evening came,
The grasses threw straight shadows far away,
And from the house his mother called his name.           20

2.1 Spend a few minutes reading this poem: what is it about and what it is saying?
2.2 What kinds of things do you think it would be important to say about this poem?
2.3 What kinds of questions are important to ask about the poem?

3. At university level attention is primarily focussed on the poetic text itself.
3.1 You should discuss not only what the poem says (content) but also how it says it (form).
3.2 It is best to begin by working out the speech situation -- asking who the 'poetic speaker' is, where he or she is, and who (if anyone) is being spoken to. (This is analogous to focussing on the 'narrator' or narrative technique in narrative fiction.)
3.3 Then work out what is being said and what its implications are.
3.4 Then work out how the poem says what it says. This could involve examining the poem's use of form (i.e., metre, etc) and language (e.g., metaphors and similes) and asking how these features contribute to the poem's overall meaning and effect.

4. Let's try this out with Muir's poem.
4.1 What is the 'speech situation'? Who is the 'poetic speaker'? Is the poem 'spoken' in the first person or the third person? Is there a process of 'focalisation'? Is there an addressee? (NB distinction between addressee and reader.)
4.2 Where is the poem set? What is happening in the poem?
4.3 What is the poem saying or revealing about the boy's situation in life and/or his inner life?
4.4 What is the poem's form? Does it have any effect on or implications for what it says?
4.5 How does the poem use language? Does it use any interesting or suggestive metaphors and similes? How do these features contribute to the poem's overall meaning and effect?

Muir's poem uses conventional symbolic associations (of childhood, nature, 'new shores', ships), together with metaphors (the rocks 'slept') and similes ('smooth like sunken glass'), and so on. The interesting thing is to analyse how it uses and combines these elements to produce unique effects.

We are told, e.g., that the young boy lying on the hill is 'To his father's house securely bound' (2). It is unlikely that this is literally true, so we need to understand it as a metaphor. What implications? (Positive connotations of home and security? or is the child a 'captive' who yearns to escape?)

How we interpret this metaphor has to fit with the rest of the poem. When the boy wonders about 'new shores' (9), which of our possible interpretations of line two does that support? And how can we interpret the last line: 'And from the house his mother called his name'?

Perhaps part of the poem's power derives from a tension between the security of home and the need to explore 'new shores'. This might be embodied in the poem's ambiguities of meaning and connotation and could perhaps be said to indicate the boy's ambivalent feelings.

5. The dangers of misreading and over-reading.
5.1 One of the crucial lessons that comes out of our class discussion of Muir's 'Childhood' is the need to restrain our interpretive imagination and keep our feet on the ground.
5.2 You need to guard against the desire to read 'clever' things into a poem (even if you were taught to do this at school). This is a poem about a boy who goes up a hill near his parents' home and looks out at the seas and islands. We have to establish this basic point before we go on to more subtle interpretations (and we should never lose sight of this basic point). Language in poetry works in more or less the same way as it does outside poetry: you can't make it mean what you want it to mean.
5.3 This does not mean that there is no room for subtle analysis. Language in poetry is highly organised and selected for its implications and effects. An attentive reading of the language of Muir's poem suggests that the boy has reached a moment when the pull of the outside world is balanced against the security of his home on the island. Through focalisation, we are able to see that the boy's response to the landscape reveals his emotional dilemma. When 'he wondered what new shores were there' (9) those new shores connote the new places and experiences he is beginning to long for. Yet the idea that he is 'securely bound' to his father's house (2) is a metaphor whose ambiguity (he is both securely connected to and restricted by his home) dramatises the whole meaning of the poem.
5.4 A close and careful reading of the poem's language reveals a poem deeply interesting in its own right without imposing startling (but unsustainable) interpretations upon it.

6. Some don'ts:
(a) Don't treat the poem as a vehicle for your own associations - 'when I read this poem I remember my own childhood ...'.
(b) Don't write about what you 'feel' - 'I can feel the sense of stillness which the poem describes ...'. Don't disguise this by saying that 'the reader can feel ....'
(c) Don't assume that interpretation is completely 'personal' or 'subjective': poems use language - a shared, social medium - and conventional poetic devices.
(d) Don't speculate about the author's life or feelings at the time of writing: as T.S. Eliot puts it, 'Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry' ('Tradition and the Individual Talent', 1919).
(e) Don't search for the poet's 'message': 'If you want messages, go to Safeway' (Norman MacCaig in TV interview).

7. A written analysis of a poem should employ an appropriate critical vocabulary (I have used terms like metaphor, connotations, ambiguity, symbolic, stanza, etc). One of the aims of this class is to help you to develop your critical vocabulary, especially through the prescribed chapters in Reading Poetry. You can also do this through using a good dictionary and Abrams's Glossary of Literary Terms.

Reading for next lecture:

Furniss and Bath, Reading Poetry, chapter one.

Top of document