Reading a Poem: What’s Happening in the Poem

One of the most common mistakes readers make when they consider a poem is jumping to a final, reductivist (that means reducing the poem to a sound bite) conclusion. They identify what a poem is about before they identify what’s happening. They say what it means before they consider what it is saying. They want simplification where they should find possibility.

If you want to demystify poetry, then be a bit more patient as a reader. You don’t have to decode, interpret, analyze and assess in the same breath; that’s like eating the appetizer, entrée and dessert in the same shovelful while simultaneously chugging your iced tea.

Let me attempt to illustrate with a poem I really like, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost. It goes a little something like this:

Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief.
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

The first four lines are pretty simple, a statement of truth that we may or may not pay attention to in our daily lives. The opening statement, “Nature’s first green is gold” isn’t exactly true; nature’s first green is green, with perhaps a yellowish tint. But given that gold is universally valuable, we get that he means it’s really, really pretty. We know that it is her hardest hue to hold because spring turns quickly into summer, and we who have watched a fruit tree or rhododendron in bloom know that the flowering phase is too brief, until leaf subsides to leaf, and the beauty of the blossom is gone.

Following that transition, Frost makes a comparison that allows us to make our leaps of meaning: the change from paradise to grief, the sadness that accompanies loss, is similar to the change from nature’s first green to the unromantic blare of the leaf blower (my suburban image, not Frost’s). Another comparison follows, with the accepted comparison of the birth/death cycle to sunrise and sunset, and then the final sentence, a lamentation on the fleeting nature of beauty or vivacity.

These are the objective facts of the poem. You don’t have to believe in the Garden of Eden to know that it has value as a symbol of paradise. You don’t have to quibble about the value of gold. If I look at what is happening in the poem, I can bring more of my subjective experience into the making of meaning than if I try to oversimplify the darn thing.

Here’s why my experience matters, why I must have thought of this poem for this exercise on this hot August morning. I was listening to my iPod while doing my humble little version of running, and the song “Wishlist” came on. There’s a great image among all the images: I wish I were “the full moon shining off a Camaro’s hood.” Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Anyway, there’s a scene in the movie, The Outsiders, when Ralph Macchio’s and C. Thomas Howell’s characters are in hiding after doing something really bad, and they’re sitting on something, maybe a car, maybe a bench, with the best sunset in cinematic history in the background. And one of them recites that poem to the other as they lament the loss of their childhood, the end of innocence in the face of serious consequences for the accidental step they’d taken in their class war against the Soches ( I have no idea how to spell that, as I’ve seen the movie without reading the book).

The image is meaning enough for me; I don’t have to verbalize it, because it defies verbalization. But I can make the connection, and if you get it, you get it.

Well, I went a little farther than I thought I would, but whatev. At some point, I hope to get at how a failure to read what’s happening in the poem, “The Road Not Taken,” has morphed the poem into something it’s not in the minds of millions of middle schoolers.