10 Tips on How to Read (and understand) Poetry


Flashy, fast-paced and noisy TV shows, films, video games and more dominate our daily intake of entertainment. Coupled with that is the quick exchange of ideas on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Reading, by contrast, is a slow pastime; letting the sentences conjure up a vivid picture in your head can seem particularly cumbersome in comparison, making you feel as though you’re living in slow-motion.

Poetry is even worse. Whereas it is possible to skim prose, skip certain words or even paragraphs, the whole meaning of a poem can be distorted or lost completely when skipped over or taken in too quickly. But poetry surrounds us in our daily lives: whether it be at school or university, via nursery rhymes we teach our children, or even on the daily commute during cultural movements such as Poems on the Underground (provided you’re lucky enough to live in a wonderful city which does such things – beside the constant onslaught of smog).

The result of this clash? The problem is not that poetry is particularly difficult – although it can be – or that poetic language is becoming more archaic by the day – there are plenty of contemporary or nigh-contemporary poets – but that we are gradually, unstoppably, moving towards a society which just doesn’t know how to slow down and take its time to read a poem.

This is a great pity; I would argue that poetry can be enlightening, can teach us about ourselves, can help us feel and experience things otherwise inaccessible to us, and, above all, be fun. But for the reasons named above, I think it might be important to give a rough how-to of poem-reading – and to help you understand it, even if it can appear genuinely difficult.

First of all – why should you bother?

If you’re at school or university, quite simply because it is required of you – but that doesn’t mean you can’t make your own life easier and richer by giving it a fresh shot. For those who are already beyond that stage, it’s more difficult to make a convincing case, of course. You might very well do without poetry in your daily lives. But you might also suggest that you can do without music, films or prose. It’s not about requiring it: it’s about having an additional feed of experience, of joy, an additional pastime you can indulge in. And never forget the origin of many modern songs or film scripts – they themselves are rooted in poetry. Poetry, being the source, is often more passionate, well thought-out, well-structured, and basically more enjoyable than other pastimes, once you’ve gotten used to it. It requires patience, yes. But it is a patience worth persevering in for the sake of appreciating an additional form of art– and once you’ve overcome the initial hurdle it’s completely worth it. I promise. So let’s make ourselves slow down, take time to breathe, and enjoy the pleasures of poetry (unless you’re a poetry nerd from the start – then you’re probably good to go anyway)!

Read the poem aloud, and read slowly

While this might seem like an easy step, it’s surprising how many people just ignore it. Poetry is often written with the sound in mind; working with many sonic devices like rhyme or metre, a poem needs to be heard, rather than read. By reading it out aloud you start appreciating the technique of the poem, rather than treating it like any other piece of writing. In this step, don’t bother about meaning. Instead, try to hear the echoes in the sound or the regularities of the poem’s rhythm. Some pieces of poetry do away completely with sense and focus more on the sound of the rhythm; Edward Lear’s nonsense poetry or Gertrude Stein’s work fall into this category. Reading aloud is really an essential step and the first one to take when trying to get to grips with a difficult poem. If you’re as unfortunate as I am and have the voice of a turtle making love, you can also use YouTube to find recordings by actors or use Pennsound which contains a large database of poets reading their own work. The point is: listen!

Read it again, ignoring line endings to get the sense of the sentences

Some people with little experience with poetry tend to treat the line breaks as though they constitute an entire sentence in its own right. That is not the case, however. Rather, they indicate pauses or breaths to be taken in between the individual lines. It also provides an effect of emphasising the last word in the line. But it usually doesn’t indicate the end of a sentence, although, sometimes, the last word of a line coincides with the last line of the sentence. The idea in this step is to ignore entirely the existence of lines, but only to concentrate on the sentences to get the pure prosaic meaning of the poem. In an easy poem this is probably not necessary, but if it’s highly complex in its syntax or rhetoric then this can help understand the poem. Try to understand the gist and don’t pay attention to the way the poem is broken up.

Look up words you don’t understand

This one should also be a given, but many people don’t seem to do it. In an age where most of us have immediate access to computers, smartphones or tablets, it really shouldn’t be much of an effort just to type the word into google and voilà – there you have it. If you get a dictionary app or are at your desktop computer, it shouldn’t take more than 5-10 seconds per word – and, who would’ve thought, it helps you understand the poem. Of course, the more exotic the diction of a given poem, the more annoying it can get; if a poem has dozens of words unknown to you, you might wish to see if you can gather the meaning from the context, while googling the ones which seem essential but aren’t evident from the text. If there aren’t that many, then there’s really no excuse for laziness – or pride, for that matter.

Paraphrase the statements of the sentences in a way you understand

This point really helps to get to grips with the poem. Take each sentence on its own – or, if it’s an uncomfortably long sentence, take sections of it – and put it in other words. Just get to the basic, clear meaning of the sentence in isolation without any reference to the other sentences. Quite straight-forward, nothing much to say, and it works wonders. Of course, it doesn’t explain the purpose of the sentence within the wider poem, especially when it’s a particularly difficult one – such as Eliot’s The Waste Land or Pound’s Cantos. But in such cases, it’s questionable anyway to what extent one is meant to understand the whole thing as a comprehensive unit. This step might not tell you why a sentence is in the poem – but it certainly helps you understand the basic meaning.

Pay attention to recurring sounds

This mouse is listening attentively

This point is assisted by the ‘reading aloud’ of the poem. Quite simply, it involves paying attention to recurring sounds within the poem. The most obvious are end-rhymes, where the last word of a line rhymes with the last word of another. But it can also occur within the lines (‘internal’ rhyme), or even echoes of other sorts – such as ‘assonance’, which is when only the vowels rhyme, or ‘consonance’, where only the consonants rhyme. When you hear the echo of a sound in a poem, it is often (though not always!) because the poet is attempting to draw your attention to the connection between the two words, thus emphasising them and bringing them into proximity of one another. One example would be ‘The Burning Babe’ by Robert Southwell. He rhymes ‘good’ with ‘blood’ in reference to Christ, in a connection which, taken in isolation, can quite simply mean that Christ has good blood, without openly stating it. Subtleties like this enhance your understanding of the poem and require nothing but an attentive ear. And an appetite for cheese. I’m sure there’s a study somewhere which claims that eating cheese improves hearing…

Pay attention to the metre: are there irregularities?

To find out more about metre, please see my beginner’s guide. Simply put, the selection of a common metre – such as the iambic pentameter – helps set the basic mood or tone of a poem. Using more uncommon metres – such as the trochee – can mean that the poet is deliberately complicating the tone to create a certain effect, as you can read in my post. Most important, however, are irregularities within a regular metre, because they draw attention to specifics in the poem. Sometimes they are, of course, just there for the sake of avoiding the poem sounding dull and metronomic, and irregularities make it more interesting. The best poets, however, couple the interestingness (according to Microsoft Office that is a word!) with meaning, e.g., replacing the first iambic foot with a trochaic foot in an otherwise regularly iambic poem can draw attention to the first word, or indicate a stronger start within the poem. These observations are never conclusive due to the uncertain nature of prosody, but they can support a theory you might have developed by completing the points above. And, being a good, though new, student of poetry, you have of course followed my advice to the letter so far.

Note recurring themes

By this time, you have a pretty good grasp of the plain meaning of the sentences, have read aloud, you’ve paid attention to the sonic suggestions in the poem’s rhythms and echoes, and you know the meaning of each word. With that you can get a good sense of what the poem’s themes are – in other words, you can get close to ‘what the poem is actually about’. This might be quite simple and straight-forward, might even be indicated by the title, or it can be more submerged, hidden beneath uncertainties in the rhythm and only implied by the speaker of the poem. One example of such a cryptic theme would be Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’: on the surface, it’s just about the speaker choosing between two paths. But when considered in light of the whole poem, it seems to be about the importance of making choices in general, and that taking the difficult, less-trodden path can make a great difference. So, by determining the theme you decide what to pay attention to when reading it again, and you use the poem itself to see how it explores that theme.

Don’t assume everything is allegorical

A rose is a rose

Many beginners tend to make the mistake of assuming that everything in every poem is allegorical – that is, to say that x in a poem actually means y. It’s tempting to do: it makes you sound as though you’re ‘getting behind’ what the poet was doing, and as though you’re analysing the poem properly. The fact that most poems deal in metaphors, allegories, similes etc. also makes this seem to be the case. But still: don’t assume you can equate x with y, just because it seems convenient to do. Sometimes a rose is just a rose. It can symbolise love, but it doesn’t have to. By reading a poem AS an allegory you’re forced to make assumptions which might just not be true. Always work with what the text, as a self-contained entity, gives you. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t search for internal metaphors and try to find out for yourself what they could mean – but it does mean that you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. You can’t read the mind of a dead poet – or of a living poet, for that matter. Be humble in your assertions and always see if you can prove what you are claiming via the text.

Realise that not all is supposed to have an underlying meaning; some things are there for the pleasure of the exploration

Related to the previous point, sometimes the poet might not have intended to do anything besides providing a vivid description of an object, a person, a landscape etc. In these cases, the allegory-error is particularly egregious. If you’re unsure, the poet may have been trying to write something beautiful, something to be appreciated – in short, art. Poems aren’t riddles; while intentions and more interesting truths can be found in them, they aren’t designed to be untangled, dissected, pulled through the mill, but to be enjoyed. If you’re unsure as to the ‘deeper meaning’ of a poem, why not just enjoy it for its own sake – for the sake of the images, the descriptions, the senses it evokes, the story it tells? There’s no harm in that. Unless you’re writing an essay. Then please, please try to make an argument based on more than the need to find an argument.

Be confident

Some poems are virtually impenetrable, others seem deceptively easy. In either case, you might be tempted to do away with it and just give up. But I’d urge you not to despair: easy poems might truly be easy, and difficult ones, if you follow these steps, can be understood, even if it requires patience or assistance from other sources. It’s perfectly alright to search the internet for background info – it’s not cheating to seek other readings of poems (although you need to be aware that these, too, are just opinions), and it’s certainly helpful to consider the circumstances of the poets you are reading. If you have a theory and you can prove it with the text, there’s no reason to assume you’re not right. And even if you’re wrong and in a discussion, somebody points this out to you (because we all discuss poems with our friends, obviously), this is the best way to learn more about the craft. Just be confident in forming your opinions and testing the waters – certainly a better pastime than shielding yourself from seeking the truth! Also, never forget to have fun with the poems: in most cases, they are meant to be entertaining.

Common complaint: Why don’t poets write clearer?

One common complaint many newbies of poetry have is that poets don’t write clearly. Why don’t they just bloody well say what they mean? This complaint is most common among school students who spend hours (or at least what to them seems like hours) trying to decipher what a poem is about. But it is based on a misconception: poetry isn’t a philosophical/ political essay; its purpose isn’t (at least usually) to convince you of a particular viewpoint or to communicate a proposition, but rather to give you an experience, enable you to feel something, which can be (but need not be) related to a proposition/ viewpoint. A poem is a work of art and should be treated as such; it is not about telling you the idea of a poet who came up with some profound ‘truth’ while sitting on the toilet. If the poet wanted to teach you about something concrete or convince you of his/ her opinion, he/ she would have written an essay or dissertation, not a form which is inescapably and indubitably a form of art.

Closing words

The beauty of these steps is that the more poetry you read and study in this way or otherwise, the quicker you get – and, at some point, you begin instinctively to hear the connections in sound, understand the rhythmical structure, and the way themes might or might not develop. And the better you get at it, the more joy you get out of reading poetry. So just give it a shot – have fun, for heaven’s sake! It won’t hurt too much. I promise. Don’t sue me if it does.

Was something unclear because I sound like an old grump lecturing about a topic nobody cares about? Then please leave a comment so that I can lecture some more and clarify the points; otherwise, if you enjoyed it, please share it on social media by pressing on one of the tender buttons below.

A Beginner’s Guide to Reading (and writing) Metre

Phew! Metre. Or Meter, for the dear readers from the former colony. Such a laden term, which reminds you of hours spent huddled over a god-forsaken poem during rainy school days, trying to determine whether Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’ speech is trochaic or iambic and what on earth the teacher meant by pentameter or tetrameter and…

Yes. I get it. Metre is difficult – or at least, it appears to be difficult at first. But, Greek terminology aside, it is actually one of the most straight-forward aspects which you can learn about poetry, once you understand the way it works. I found, throughout my years at school, that it is generally taught in a very poor fashion. Not to disregard my teachers – they were all wonderful, for sure – but the general approach is often to provide you with the Greek term and what it means, and then to try and make you figure out for yourself what metre a certain poem has… not ideal, if you ask me.

But, if you start from the beginning (a very good place to start!) and look at the simple language blocks which make up the way of how we speak, you can see what the whole fuss is about – hopefully without falling into despair.

I must note, however, that prosody (that’s just a fancy term we use to describe the practice of analysing patterns of rhythm and sound in poetry) is never an exact science. Depending on your regional accent or dialect, some people tend to pronounce things differently, which can lead to a variety of ways of scanning the metre of a poem. Nevertheless, the differences are usually only minute and based on individual cases, and do not detract from the basic simple nature of prosody.

Why should I care?

Why indeed? Of course, everyone is perfectly capable of understanding a poem without understanding metre. You can even write plenty of good (even very good!) essays without a single reference to a poem’s rhythm or metre. But, while you might subconsciously enjoy the metre of a poem, understanding its metrical structure can enable you to become aware of the music behind the craft. It can allow you to feel and hear the work which went into its creation, and thus it allows you to enjoy it more. And, if you are a practising poet, you will find that understanding metre gives you much more room to improve your own writing since you begin to understand how rhythm works in speech. So even without writing in traditional metrical forms, it will let you feel and understand the process, and give you the tools to write better poems. In order to break the rules, after all, you need to know the rules – otherwise, you’re doing the equivalent to a five-year-old drawing a picture of his or her parents…

Syllables, and why they matter

Without wanting to sound patronising, the logical place to start with metre is with individual words. And words are made up of syllables – starting with simple monosyllables (words which have one syllable) such as car, hat, cat, up to insanely long words containing twelve syllables, such as floccinaucinihilipilification (best not to mention that word to anyone – it does exist, however; feel free to google it if you dare).

In natural speech, we emphasise certain syllables in any given word more than others. This act is known as stressing a syllable. In some words, only one syllable contains a stress; in others, multiple ones can be stressed. To give a few examples (the stressed syllables are marked in bold):

Motorcar

Aeroplane

Transferred

Chinese

Europe

Scansion

Prosody

As you can see, certain words of the same length in syllables contain varying degrees of stress. Monosyllabic strong words (nouns, verbs or adjectives) are usually stressed, such as ‘can’, ‘fan’, ‘dumb’, ‘wrong’, ‘strong’. Monosyllabic weak words (articles, pronouns) are usually unstressed, such as ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘the’, ‘a’. However, if you form them in a sentence, they might be stressed.

The only source you require to determine the stress of a word is to speak it – and listen to yourself. There is no magic involved, and it is quite straight-forward, provided you have grown up in an English-speaking country or else received a formal education in English.

Of course, this is not to say that there aren’t ambiguities, and, as mentioned above, there are regional differences. Take the word ‘fire’ for instance – where I am from, it is monosyllabic, but there are many, many regions in the world where it is a disyllabic (two syllables) word, and the ‘fi’ would be stressed, whereas ‘re’ would not be stressed.

At this point you’re probably asking, ‘so what?’ Don’t worry – I was just about to get to that!

What metre essentially is

Metre is nothing more or less than the arrangement of syllables into a pre-defined pattern to create a certain effect. You know which syllable to stress in any given word – and if you order them in a certain pattern, say, stressed-unstressed-stressed-unstressed-stressed-unstressed, you have written a line in a perfect metre.

This can, of course, be immensely difficult since it involves toying with varying ways in which you can order your syllables. Thank goodness, throughout the centuries of English poetry, several specific patterns have established themselves as the most effective ones.

The dominant patterns in English metre

This is where the Greek terminology comes in. You certainly don’t need to use the Greek terms when scanning by yourself, but if you ever write an essay on poetry in which you decide to discuss the metre, it is essential that you use it. There are four main types of metrical patterns (or what we call a metrical foot – yes, you’re allowed to laugh at that term):

Iamb (Eye-am-b)

This is the most commonly used one in English. It is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Iambic lines are the closest we have to a regular metre which sounds like natural speech – hence its popularity. This also gives the metre a wide flexibility; it can be used for comedic, melancholic, contemplative, heroic, dramatic verse and more. The word means ‘one-step’; it’s best to imagine that you’re taking one step ahead, thus going from the unstressed standstill to one stressed step ahead.  Here some examples of words which are, by their very nature, iambic:

Exist

Away

Belong

Cathay

Advance

Trochee (Trou-kee)

The trochee is less common than the iamb, and is the reversal of the latter, i.e. a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. Because of its similarity with the iamb, it is also quite popular, but by starting out on a stress it often sounds more aggressive and strong. For this reason, it is the perfect metre for, say, the Hags’ speeches in Shakespeare.  The word means ‘wheel’, which means you can remember it as a twist or turn on iamb. Words which are by nature trochaic include:

Demon

Heaven

Homely

Footprint

Former

Dactyl (Dac-til)

The dactyl is the first of the three-syllable feet, and it contains a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones. It is a lot less common than the iamb and trochee because it is difficult to find a lot of different words which would be able to sustain a dactyl throughout an entire poem in English; in many cases, it forces the reader to sustain it artificially. It has a very musical quality to it because the two stresses after the stress create a form of motion; in music, therefore, it is more common than in regular poetry. One example (which I’ve nicked from Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled) is the song ‘I want to be in America’ from West Side Story. Note that ‘want’ would ordinarily be stressed, but the music enforces the stress. The word means finger; it is best to remember dactyl by looking at your index finger: the longest part of it is closest to the hand, followed by to shorter parts, so long-short-short or stress-unstress-unstress. Words which are naturally dactylic include:

Formerly

Graciously

Murmuring

Whispering

Longfellow

Anapaest (A-na-pest)

The anapaest is the final of the ‘big-four’ to know about and by far the least common. It contains two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one. By being the reversal of the dactyl, it can feel delayed, maybe even cumbersome. The word means ‘struck back’. It might be helpful to remember it by imagining it as the one where the stress is delayed by the most, hence ‘struck back’. There aren’t many pure anapaests in the English language, although the word anapaest itself is a strong example.

This part can be difficult to understand, of course. If you’re struggling, it might be best to write down the four terms and to look for other examples of words which are naturally of that stress. Feel free to send me a message if you require additional assistance.

Other types of feet

Other types of feet

There are, of course, other variations, but scholars disagree strongly over their use, and whether they are even part of the English language. Two further examples include the Pyrrhus; the pyrrhic metre contains two unstressed syllables. Then there is the spondee, which contains two stressed syllables. In trisyllabic words, there is furthermore the amphibrach, which contains an unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed one, and finally an unstressed one at the end; an example might be ‘placebo’.  Stressed-unstressed-stressed can be called cretic; examples, again, are rare but might include Wetherspoon. Generally, it is probably not necessary to know these metres; certainly not if you are studying poetry on your own, or even at school. The basic knowledge of the other four, however, should be a given if you wish to understand metre.

 

 

How metrical feet form a metrical pattern

So! We now have our metrical feet, and we know that the syllables need to be arranged in a particular pattern to create a certain effect. Thus, we know that

Stress-unstress-stress-unstress-stress-unstress

Follows a trochaic pattern, and we know that

Unstress-stress-unstress-stress-unstress-stress

Follows an iambic pattern. Please note that the words’ positions within the line dictate whether the line is an iamb, trochee, dactyl or anapaest, NOT the ‘internal’ metrical foot of a word. For example, to take a few random words from above, ‘Demon’ and ‘heaven’ are both trochaic. But if I arrange them thus:

There are no demons lingering in Heaven

The line is iambic, even though there are no ‘internally’ iambic words in the line! This is because the line starts out iambic, with taTUM, and continues to do so throughout the line. As such, you hear an iambic pattern, regardless of the individual words which might, by their very nature, contain a different metrical foot.

Now, to complete the use of terminology, the number of metrical feet in any given line dictates the title we give it. Unfortunately, again, we use Greek words for it, consisting of Greek number + meter. Thus, a line with one metrical foot is a monometer, with two, dimeter, with three, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter etc. So, to take my example from above again, it has five iambic feet within the line – and thus it is an iambic pentameter.

Here another few simplistic examples of iambic pentameters:

I couldn’t think of anything to write;

Instead, I jotted down some useless lines.

Or, to write some trochaic tetrameters:

Coming home is always pretty;

Mum would cook while I’d be lazy.

So, as you can see, it is, in essence, quite a simple process, although it might be difficult to wrap your head around it. Coincidently, the best way to learn to read metre is to write it yourself. C’mon – it ain’t that hard. If you stick with it and just write, say, ten lines in iambs of varying lengths, you’ll soon have the process internalised and will be able to spot an iamb from a mile away.

Consistency in metrical patterns

You might be wondering – and rightly so! – why there are plenty of lines by renowned poets which, while conceding to the rules, nevertheless contain several irregularities within their lines. This is because it would both be very stifling if you could never, ever break the rules and because it would just sound dull – like a constant drum-beat without any variation. To solve this problem, poets throughout the centuries have come up with lots of different ways for a line to sound regular still, and yet keep it interesting – such as substituting the first foot in an iambic line with a trochee, making the line start stressed and sound quicker through the following two unstressed syllables. One example might be:

Come to the garden of my dreams

This is meant to be an introductory article, so I won’t go into detail right here; for now, just be aware that a line not adhering strictly to the rules does not mean that the poet is incapable or otherwise breaking the rules, but that he or she is usually using accepted irregularities.

This also means that there is a large difference between rhythm and metre. Metre is the strict outline of the beats, as discussed above, whereas rhythm is the actual stresses you hear when reading a line, which includes the irregularities. In my garden-laden example, the line is clearly an iambic tetrameter, but the rhythm you would hear would be:

TUM ta ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM

So: never confuse rhythm and metre! The rhythm can be in line with the metre, but it doesn’t have to. Lines not written in metre still contain a rhythm – such as the rhythm you have when you use natural speech.

It might also be useful to think in musical terms. There, too, you have a metre and a rhythm. The equivalent to the poetic metre would be the tact, such as 4/4, where, when listening to the metronome, you hear four regular beats. The actual rhythm of the music, on the other hand, works within the tact (or, in poetry, within the metre), but in such a way that you can still hear the beat of the metronome.

Exception: Free Verse

Free verse is the big exception to the use of metre in poetry, of course. Not all poems are written with a strict metre in mind, and free verse, as the name implies, does not adhere to strict metrical rules at all (and usually not to rhyming patterns, either). I’ll write about free verse at another time; but for now, it is important to note that not all poems are written in metre.

Conclusion

As you have seen, the whole issue of prosody is not too difficult to understand. With a bit of perseverance and patience, anyone can understand and hear metre, and thus help you enjoy poetry to a greater extent – and even begin crafting your own lines in iambic pentameter! That is not to say that it is completely easy – it does require taking time to study the craft.

If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to share it on your preferred social media platform using the tender buttons below, and please don’t hesitate to ask a question or provide feedback in the comments. If anything is unclear, I’ll be happy to write another blog post dedicated towards some of the more difficult aspects. Tada!