Something understood. How to read poetry.

"We are as much as we see."

I want to be the sort of person who reads poetry, but I don’t always understand it.

That was the first thing I heard at a conference session I ran about poetry recently. The rest of the conference was not about poetry, at all, and so this session was a respite. No agenda, no rules, nothing official: just poetry. Some people read aloud (including an outstanding recitation by one of my colleagues of Kipling’s ‘The Last of the Light Brigade’), others spoke about their experiences as readers. And one very common experience was summed up in that sentence.

I want to be the sort of person who reads poetry, but I don’t always understand it.

How many people leave school feeling like their education has killed their love of poetry? This was never how I felt. But we must remember to enter the dream of the poem, before we try to analyse it. How many critics have “understood” a poem by stepping out of the dream and reducing art to analysis?

What I said to the lady who struggled to understand poems (and she was by no means the only one who felt that way) was: perhaps that is how you are supposed to feel.

The first time I read ‘Filling Station’ by Elizabeth Bishop—a poem I now have by heart—I almost didn’t understand what was happening, quite literally. I found the poem disorienting, despite its simplicity. Partly, I did not know about taborets, or daisy stitch and marguerites. Partly, I was struggling against the literal meaning—the station is not literally oil-soaked, oil-permeated, like the men’s rags and overalls, is it? The ground is not soaked in oil, nor the pumps. The words “a disturbing, over-all/black translucency” bring some clarity to this, but obliquely. The effect was that of opening a window onto a bright day: I had to read the poem several times just to understand the literal events.

There is humour in the poem, and it took me a few reads to understand that Bishop was writing, to begin with, with something like contempt. In the first two stanzas, “dirty” is repeated three times, and so is “oil”. The filling station is “little” and “disturbing” and the sons are “quick and saucy and greasy”. The poem’s first impression is snobbish. And the humour—Be careful with that match!, (it’s a family filling station)—is also snobbish.

Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Disorientation begins in the opening line. Oh, but it is dirty! Someone is complaining about having to stop at this place. This is the in medias res approach Robert Browning sometimes uses in his dramatic monologues. In ‘The Moose’, Bishop takes four stanzas of description before she tells us what is happening—a bus journeys west. In ‘Filling Station’, we have to infer what is happening.

Who speaks? Is there someone with them, someone lighting a cigarette perhaps? (Be careful with the match! can be heard in the same anxious tone as Oh, but it is dirty! both lines suitably punctuated with an exclamation mark.) With these exclamations, Bishop sets-up a sense of disgust, away from which the poem now moves, towards a greater and greater sympathy. The more she sees of the station, the more she understands that these are people with feelings, loved by someone who has provided furniture, a plant, reading material.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Now she questions things, sees behind the pumps, and finds it incongruent. The dog on the sofa is a simple, immediate image of domesticity, in some ways out of place. The filling station is seen strangely. As she travels, she must learn to know the world, not to see only what she already understands. Thoreau: “That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another’s. We see so much only as we possess.” And: “We are as much as we see.”

The poem closes with more questions, which are answered by explaining that someone loves these people—and that the cars racing past are “high-strung”, just as she was when she arrived. She jokes that the plant she spots behind the filling station might be oiled instead of watered. Humour has become affectionate, but she keeps some observational distance.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.

Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
esso—so—so—so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

In this poem, the speaker doesn’t understand what she sees. What she does understand, she doesn’t like. To begin with, she is almost going to retreat from the place which is “all quite thoroughly dirty” without ever really seeing it. But then the sofa and cement porch catch her eye. She looks again. Gradually, she comes to terms with where she is.

This is what it is like to read a poem. As Thoreau said, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” We must let the poem teach us how to read it.

In Prayer (I), George Herbert creates a sonnet out of a series of metaphors for prayer. No explanation is given. The images emerge, disorientingly.

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

I especially like the line The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, as I think it expresses a common feeling of reading poetry—a half-way feeling between experience and understanding. The soul can only be paraphrased. There are no words that fully express the human soul. The heart in prayer is on a journey to God, it cannot be said to have arrived. Poetry is the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage. It is a common cliché that life is a journey—but it is a cliché because it is true, it has been said for as long as there has been commentary on human life.

As Thoreau said, being a traveller is the history of every one of us.

A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us.

Poetry is about that traveling. Whether in literal journeys in which we learn to see strangely, as in Bishop, or about spiritual journeys, as in Herbert, travels in our heads and souls, poetry captures the sense of being unsure about the world, but knowing that something is understood. Before we can begin to talk about the specific understanding, we have to be able to enter the dream, and to begin to see the poem as it wishes to be seen. We must read like travelers, coming into a new place, looking for what they can see.

If you don’t understand the poetry you read, you are at the start of the journey. There is nowhere else to begin. As we read, we learn that “No definition of poetry is adequate,” as Thoreau said, “unless it be poetry itself.”

Photo by Geronimo Giqueaux on Unsplash