Strategies for Dealing with meaning

So that we may comprehend the total meaning of a poem, we consider its ideas together with its intellectual and emotional impact. In effect, meaning involves us in a transfer of experience from the poet’s mind to our own. It is no exaggeration to claim that the structure and development of a poem also produces a corresponding development of thoughts, reactions, considerations, and emotions in readers, meaning, then, is to get at all the ways in which poetry brings these effects about.

We have noted that the theme of a poem is established partly by what the poem says and partly by the way the poem says it. An initial understanding of meaning can be gained by a close, sentence-by sentence reading, but for most poems our initial reading is affected by many of the poet's devices beyond straightforward statement. As often as not the poem's theme is implied as well as stated, and many elements shape the message and meaning. These include speaker, character, setting and action, diction and sound, imagery, metaphor and simile, tone, meter, rhyme, symbol, allusion, and others.

SPEAKER The identity and circumstances of the speaker can significantly affect a poem's meaning. The attitudes and ironies so essential to the meanings of a poem can not be clear if we do not know who the speaker is and what he is doing at the "time" of the poem. Similarly, it is important nine whether a speaker is trustworthy. In short, each poem produces its own unique speaker, whose circumstances have a vital bearing on the content and meaning of the poem.

CHARACTERS, SETTING, ACTION. The characters, settings, and actions in a poem do much to shape the meaning. A poem that is set in a graveyard and that refers to gunnery practice at sea conveys a different meaning from one that tells about a walk through the woodland in spring.

DICTIONand SOUND. The words of a poem—denotation, connotation, diction and syntax—all shape the poem's total meaning and emotional impact.

IMAGERYAND R HETORICAL FIGURES. Imagery, metaphor, simile, and other devices of language make abstract ideas and situations concrete and immediate. A poet may use imagery and metaphorical language to reinforce or to negate what appears to the speaker's major thrust.

Clichéd images may produce a negative effect.

TONE. The tone of a poem has a significant effect on theme. Most often, it reinforces a poem's total meaning. Tone may sometimes create ambiguity, however, or it may even work against the stated purpose of the speaker. Irony is one of the forms of the tone.

RHYME, STRUCTURE, AND FORM. Rhyme may be employed to clinch ideas, regulate the tone, and thus shape meaning.

SYMBOL AND ALLUSION. Poets employ symbol and allusion as a kind of shorthand to convey very complex ideas and a great deal of information as quickly and economically as possible. The symbols carry much of the poem's impact and message. Geographic and biblical allusions are crucial in shaping the meaning of a poem.

These seven areas may seem like a large number of variables to consider in working toward an understanding of a poem's central idea and total meaning; at first, the process may seem quite difficult. Keep in mind, that all seven are seldom equally relevant to a given poem. As you study more poetry, you will learn how to focus your attention on two or three significant aspects of a poem and to give others only secondary consideration. Indeed, experienced readers of poetry do much of this step-by-step analysis almost unconsciously and simultaneously as they read a poem.

Let us now turn to a specific poem and see how we might arrive at an understanding of its theme and meaning. The poem, "Ars Poetica," which means "the art of poetry," should help us understand the nature of meaning since it is "about" that very thing.

ARCHIBALD MacLEISH (1892-1982)

1926

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,

Memory by memory the mind -

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs

A poem should be equal to:

Not true

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

A poem should not mean

But be.

" ARS POETICA” by ARCHIBALD MacLEISH: analysis

The subject of "Ars Poetica" is the art of poetry and the nature of poems. The elevated diction of the Latin title connotes philosophical seriousness and: great scholarship. Indeed, the title is borrowed from a treatise r. written by the Roman poet Horace (65—8 b.c). The title is partly ironic. Although the poem treats the nature of poetry quite seriously, it is certainly not a scholarly essay.

"Ars Poetica" represents an attempt to define and describe poetry.It does so in two ways: it tells us and it shows us what a poem should be. The poem’s central idea is found in the third section, where the speaker asserts that " A poem should be equal to: / Not true " and that " A poem should not mean / But be. " In other words, a poem should embody an experience that is parallel to reality rather than simply convey a specific idea or truth. Does this mean that a poem should have no theme? Not really althoughthis may appear to be the point of "Ars Poetica" at first. Rather, the poem asserts that the total experience of a poem is more important and valuable than any single stated idea it might relate.

The first section of "Ars Poetica" tells us that a poem should be “mute”(line 1), "dumb" (line 3), "silent" (line 5), and "wordless" (line 7). This appears to be a paradox; poems are obviously made of words. The poem goeson, however, in this section to show us exactly what "wordless" means. Thus, each two-line stanza contains a simile that makes both the meaning and the experience of wordless or silent existence clear. The four comparisons—to "globed fruit," "old medallions," "sleeve-worn stone”, and " flights of birds"—present images of silence that we can recreate and experience in our minds.

A closer look at one of these similes shows how it evokes the state of “wordless” silence with words. Lines 5 and 6 assert that a poem should be “ silent as the sleeve-worn stone / Of casement ledges where the moss has grown". The image begins as a cliche: "as quiet or as still as a stone." But the poet breathes new life into the cliche by particularizing the stone, is "sleeve-worn," worn down by the friction of many people's arms over hundreds of years. It is also the stone of a "casement ledge" or windowsill “where the moss has grown." This focusing of the image of the stone expands our sense of silence by adding overtones of elapsed time, slow erosion, and quiet natural growth. The image embodies not only and the feeling and idea of silence, but also a state of being that we can experience. This brings us back to perhaps the most important word in the first section of the poem: palpable (line 1), which means easily seen, heard, perceived, or felt. This section of the poem suggests that a poem cannot simply be words; it must be a process that unites reader and in an emotional, sensual, and intellectual experience.

The second section of the poem (lines 9—16) also defines an aspect of poetry and begins with what appears to be a paradox: " A poem shouldbe motionless in time / As the moon climbs. " How can something be "motionless" and "climb" (or move) at the same time? The answer lies in the way we experience the moon and poetry. The moon becomes both the central image and symbol here. The moon appears to be motionless; yet over the course of an entire night it does move, rising in the east, crossing the heavens, and setting in the west. "Motionless," like "wordless," has more to do with the way we perceive and experience things than it does with actuality. The image thus emphasizes the parallel between poetry and our experience of time, motion, and the moon.

Here, as in the first section, the poem offers two similes that clarifythe way we experience motionless movement in time and in poetry. The two middle stanzas compare the effect of moonlight on the landscape to the effect of poetry on the reader; just as moonlight "releases" the shadows of the trees "twig by twig," so the poem should leave the mind "memory by memory," evoking timeless responses and experiences in us. This process of timeless and motionless experience in poetry is also illustrated in structure of this middle section. The lines that open the section also close it. Thus, the beginning and the end are identical; we end up where we started. MacLeish employs repetition to make concrete the experience of motionless and timeless processes in poetry.

The poem offers two more sets of symbols as examples of the way poetry creates experience. The first example suggests that "all the history of grief" may be symbolized by "An empty doorway and a maple leaf” (lines 19-20). The second symbolizes "love" by "The leaning grasses two lights above the sea" (line 22). The "empty doorway" suggests that someone is gone, missing, dead; "doorway" presupposes presence movement, but "empty" conveys absence. In a like manner, the "maple leaf" implies seasonal change and death. The symbols create experience parallel to grief and love. More important, however, they illustrate the importance of symbolism as a vehicle for meaning.

These symbols embody a key concept for poetry: provide the concrete. detail to evoke the experience of the abstract whole. This is one of the processes of poetry; this is the way imagery, simile, and symbol work in the poem and in the reader. "Ars Poetica" is not "mute." It asserts that poems should create a "palpable" experience that parallels (but is not the same as) life. And as this poem illustrates, that experience is created through imagery, comparison, and symbolism. The poem also makes it clear that the experience is more important than either the words that crate it or the words evoked in the reader by it. In that sense, a poem is "mute" and “wordless”; its experience and value derive from the experience it offers us.

IDEAS TO CLARIFY THE MEANING OF THE POEM ARS POETICA

ü MacLeish says that the poem should express its meaning implicitly rather than putting it in explicit sentences. The essence of the poem lies in the imagery it uses. For instance, he says, "grief" can be depicted by images of 'empty doorway' or 'maple leaf'.

ü Also the essence should not fade away with the passage of time i.e. the central idea of the poem should be relevant forever.

ü The beauty of the poem is that all what is described as 'the art of poetry' is very effectively implemented in the poem itself.

ü Ars poetica contains many similes and images that contribute to its essence.

ü Poetry is a simple way of expression because it is motionless and it leaves all description in memory. A poem does not need to be true bit it can be about anything need to be and that poetry is a work of art.

ü MacLeish is being paradoxical

http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/m_r/macleish/ars.htm

ON "ARS POETICA"

Signi Lenea Falk

"Ars Poetica" has been called MacLeish's ultimate expression of the art-for-art's-sake tenet. Taken as one statement of his theory, the poem does defy the "hair splitting analysis of modern criticism." Written in three units of double-line stanzas and in rhyme, it makes the point that a poem is an intimation rather than a full statement, that it should "be motionless in time"; that it has no relation to generalities of truth, historical fact, or love-variations, perhaps, of truth, beauty, and goodness.

From Archibald MacLeish. New York: Twayne, 1965.

Copyright © 1965 by Twayne Publishers, Inc.

Victor H. Jones

The poem, as "Ars Poetica" makes clear, captures a human experience, an experience of grief, or of love, or of loneliness, or of memory. Thus a poem becomes a way of knowing, of seeing, albeit through the senses, the emotions, and the imagination. MacLeish often said that the function of a poem is to trap "Heaven and Earth in the cage of form."

From Dictionary of Literary Biography, Copyright © 1986 by the Gale Group.

William Pratt

Archibald MacLeish, who like Cummings arrived on the poetic scene after the first imagists had created the new movement, nevertheless can be credited with the poetic summing up of imagism in his "Ars Poetica" in 1926, written well after the imagist decade had ended. It is inconceivable that such a poem could have been written without imagism, because the technique as well as the philosophy of MacLeish's most famous poem is imagist. It consists of a sequence of images that are discrete but that at the same time express and exemplify the imagist principles and practice of poetry.

The Latin title is borrowed from Horace, who wrote a prose treatise in the first century A.D., the Silver Age of Rome, called "Art of Poetry," advising poets among other things to be brief and to make their poems lasting. MacLeish wanted to link the classical with the modern in his poetic "treatise" as a way of implying that the standards of good poetry are timeless, that they do not change in essence though actual poems change from age to age and language to language. His succession of opening images are all about the enduring of poetry through time, as concrete as "globed fruit" or ancient coins or stone ledges, and as inspiring to see as a flight of birds or the moon rising in the sky. The statements are not only concrete but paradoxical, for it is impossible that poems should be "mute" or "Dumb" or "Silent" or "wordless," which would mean that there was no communication in them at all; rather, what MacLeish is stating in his succession of paradoxical images is that the substance of poetry may be physical but the meaning of poetry is metaphysical: poems are not about the world of sensible objects as much as they are about invisible realities, and so the universal emotions of grief and love can be expressed in words that convey the experience in all its concreteness, yet the words reach into the visionary realm beyond experience, toward which all true images point. The final paradox, that "A poem should not mean but be," is pure impossibility, but the poet insists it is nevertheless valid, because beyond the meaning of any poem is the being that it points to, which is ageless and permanent, a divine essence or spiritual reality behind all appearances. MacLeish's modern "Art of Poetry" is a fulfillment of the three rules of imagism (be direct, be brief, and use free verse), of Pound's definition of the image, and at the same time of Horace's Latin statement on poetry, that good poetry is one proof that there is a permanence in human experience that does not change but endures through time.

From Singing the Chaos: Madness and Wisdom in Modern Poetry.

Copyright © 1996 by the Curators of the University of Missouri

John Haislip

There he [MacLeish] found Fenellosa's observation that "metaphor was the very essence of poetry," but not as exegesis or demonstration. Metaphor itself was "experience." In his notebooks, too, was his reworking of Eliot's doctrine of the "objective correlative," a concrete representation that would convey emotion without involving the abstract slither of the merely personal. It would not do to gush on the page. The object of a poem was "not to recreate" the poet's emotion in someone else.... The poem itself is finality, an end, a creation." (150)

Outlined here are four important aspects of the modernist aesthetic. Donaldson' s astute statement of the importance of metaphor identifies this trope not as exegesis or demonstration, but experience itself. Second, he isolates the concrete as a representation of the emotion, that is, the objective correlative. Third, he insists upon the avoidance of the merely personal, the escape into the impersonal. And fourth, he understands the poem as a creation that is an end to itself. Perhaps what was buried in "Ars Poetica" in 1925, but uncovered by MacLeish himself in the letter of 1937 is what has drawn us to the poem all these years: metaphor, concretion, non-intervention, the concept of impersonality, and autotelism.

In a discussion of Williams's theory of "no ideas but in things" and MacLeish's "Ars Poetica,"

Howard Nemerov observed that

"Ars Poetica" does not do what it says should be done in the composition of a poem—largely because it is impossible to write a poem that is and only is an object to behold as a static object without meaning, without message. This is the central paradox of "Ars Poetica."

from "Archibald MacLeish: 'Ars Poetica' and other Observations." In Poetries in the Poem. Ed. Dorothy Z. Baker. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1997.

http://www.echeat.com/essay.php

"ARS POETICA" CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Every person has his or her own opinion about poetry. Some analyze and go into deep thought about poetry and others just look at the superficial appearance presented by the author. Either way, interpretations are created and opinions are based. The poem “Ars Poetica”, by Archibald MacLeish is a very simple and blunt poem. His feelings about poetry are presented in a very simple way, so that no one can get the wrong idea.

The first stanza summarizes the whole poem. He starts out by stating how quiet and simple a poem should be. He compares all of his ideas with examples and similes. In this case, it is a piece of fruit. He goes on to say that poems are dumb and that they should be wordless and effortless. From this stanza, we can tell that he is a man with a very simple mind and very straightforward thoughts. He gives no indication of symbolism or hidden meanings, he just wants the reader to know his feelings on what a poem should be. He wants the reader to realize the non-complicity of this poem. “A poem should be wordless, as the flight of birds” means that it takes no thinking to observe birds, their actions are sight only. As you can see, he is a very comparative writer with shallow thoughts and simplistic verses.

The second stanza follows the exact same organization and flow as the first. It seems as if the moon rises and falls without us even knowing. We just look and its there. That is what MacLeish believes a poem should be like. He continues on with the comparison to the moon and the way it falls in the third line. As the moon passes through the trees there are times at which it is visible and other times when its not. As he compares it to the falling moon, I think that he feels as if the reader should not always understand the poem, and that its okay to not understand parts of poetry because that is just the natural and normal thing. He goes on to say that poems should be just a memory and that they will all fade away soon. In the last line, he repeats the first. Once again, he wishes to emphasize that fact that there should be no fast moving poetry and that it should not immediately stir something up in your mind. In this stanza, he used a repeating line to convey an idea. This means that he must really wish that the reader register that particular idea.

The last stanza relays the true feelings of the poem to the reader. He starts out by saying what a poem should be equal to and replies “not true.” This is the only point in the poem that the reader is unclear in what he is reading. MacLeish may mean that a poem should be equal to nothing and that it is whatever the reader wishes it to be. He goes on to say that for all of the grief and hardship that we have endured throughout our lives, all that is left to show it is an empty doorway and a leaf, representing just a hole in the wall and no one there. Next, love is discussed. As the grass leans, all of the attentions goes to it and it is given a romantic theme. Just like two people alone on the beach. Finally, he says “a poem should not mean, but be.” This means that the context should relate to people and cause a reaction, rather than just have people hear it. All in all, the poem should be a meaningful and heartly issue that just goes straight to the point clearly.

This poem has some very straight points and some vague parts at the end. In the beginning, he clearly states his criteria for a poem and what a poems means to him. What he wishes is or all to see poetry the way he does. The first stanza is about how simplistic a poem needs to be. It doesn’t even need “words”, just needs to mean something to the reader. The second paragraph is all about emotion. The way a person reacts may be different, however, it will mean something to everyone. We also know that this is an important thought, otherwise the author would not have added the same line twice. The third and final stanza is based on emotional and how each individual chooses to react to it. It is not easily understood, yet I believe the author is trying to convey that either a person can be left empty with nothing to show, or that someone could be touched by it and display great emotion. This poem has many meanings and show’s the personal feeling about someone in particular.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)

Sonnet 130: My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun

My mistress'¹ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked,² red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

¹Woman friend

²Set in elaborate bouquet

Poetry analysis: 'My Mistress' Eyes are nothing like the Sun,'

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