How to Read a Poem: division, allegory, ambiguity, irony

Housman and Dickinson

Let’s start with A.E. Housman’s short lyric, ‘Into my heart’:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

In the first line, we find one of the core principles of reading poetry—ambiguity. An air can be either the air Housman breathes or a song, music he has heard from a distance. The plain statement, that each breath we take is one breath closer to death, is made gentler by this double meaning. If the air is a song, then kills has a different meaning, as defined by the OED as “destroying vitality, neutralizing”; in this sense, Housman is killed the way an engine or a light get killed. The song has stalled him.

The second line explains his startlement: even when Housman was writing, in the 1890s, “yon” was falling out of use. It has a nostalgic tone. Housman, we begin to realise, is looking towards the past. Hence “blue remembered hills”, blue because light scatters and sends the blue spectrum furthest away, hence its use in landscape painting for the most distant hills. Blue denotes physical distance, and blue remembered becomes metaphorical of lost time in our minds.

This all becomes more overt in the second stanza, when he uses the allegorical, fairy-tale like “land of lost content”. This is not a real place: there is no village sign that says The Land of Lost Content: it represents lost youth. The paradox of seeing something “shining plain” expresses the state of nostalgia, where we see things in simple terms, even though that’s not how they really were. Is it so plain, this distant place whose spires he cannot make out? Things that shine in the distance have an elusive quality, too bright to be seen clearly.

The ending recalls Heraclitus—you can never step into the same river twice, or walk the same road again. The air is always blowing, time always moving on. We are time’s subjects, as Shakespeare wrote, and time bids be gone.

The duality of Housman’s poem—past and present, age and youth, reality and imagination—shows us another core principle of poetry: division or antithesis. Two modes or ideas (or more) often jostle together inside great writing. They are resolved with surprise, contradiction, synthesis, or ambiguity. In this way, poets don’t moralise or dictate, but evoke a mood or emotional state, to make you feel a particular mood. This is the aim of poetry: to posses you, temporarily, and to make you feel particular sensations.

In Sleep and Poetry, John Keats wrote that the great end of poetry is that

… it should be a friend
To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts…

Paraphrasing and responding to Keats, Harold Bloom wrote about this passage: “The nature of poetry is to be disinterested, but its function is consolatory and enlightening.” For Keats, poetry is not supposed to dogmatise, it has no ideology. Instead, “she governs with the mildest sway.” A poem grows out of consciousness, says Bloom, as naturally as leaves come to a tree.

Sometimes the sway is not so mild. Samuel Johnson wrote about Macbeth, “He that peruses Shakespeare looks around, and starts to find himself alone.” (Starts means jumps because startled.) Note that nothing had happened; quite the opposite. What startles Johnson while reading Shakespeare is not that someone else has interrupted him, but that he suddenly woke up from the dream of reading, not quite aware that everyone around him had faded away.

In Henry IV part II, Falstaff says of himself , “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.” Poetry is similar: it expresses certain thoughts and feelings, but in a way that holds us in a mild sway, and causes those feelings to be really felt in our minds, so that when we realise we have been lost in imagination, we startle to see we are back in reality. As George Eliot wrote about the poet Heinrich Heine, poets utter our feelings for us.

We’ve seen three core principles of poetry so far: division, allegory, ambiguity. And we’ve seen that poetry aims not to argue with us, but to hold us in a mild sway. Let us look at a more difficult poem by Emily Dickinson, not just to see division and ambiguity at work, and to see the mild sway of poetry, but to think about how to find our way into a difficult piece of writing.