“The Goblin Market,” Christina Rossetti.
I thought it was about goblins.
“Fire and Ice,” Robert Frost.
I thought it was about fire and ice!
“Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening,” Robert Frost.
Some sad guy is looking at snow. Nothing else to see here!! Then someone said ‘What if this was, like, Santa?’ and that blew my mind, so that’s what I think it is about now.
“After Apple-Picking, Robert Frost.
I still think it’s about picking apples!
“The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost.
Someone explained it to me that it’s about how the roads are actually the same, so he hasn’t actually made the right choices, or something? I just don’t understand Robert Frost, is what I’m coming to realize. That, or I have very middlebrow taste in poetry, which is also extremely possible.
So, what are they about?
(goes off to Google)
::very quietly:: is fire and ice not actually about desire and hate though?
I am of the school of thought that the meaning of any work of art is a collaboration between the artist and the audience, so they are about whatever you think they are about.
Once in high school (AP english) there was a test where we all had to write a poem explication (is this even a real word) in an hour on some poem that involved blackberry picking (or possibly blueberries). The entire class, every single one of us, wrote about how it was about nostalgia for childhood and remembering pleasant times, etc. The teacher was so, so mad at us the next day: she actually yelled, something I’d never seen her do. Apparently the poem was about the exact opposite: the fruit rotting even as they picked it, and the rat-grey fungus that creeps into everything, eating, eating destroying….We all completely missed it.
I guess what I’m saying is, you are for sure not the only one who’s Misunderstood Poetry on occasion 🙂
oh my god I remember this poem and the exact same thing happened with us, everyone completely misunderstood it. Thankfully we were just discussing it in class so our teacher explained it before we had to write anything, and I think she was mostly just amused.
Right up there on my list of AP Lit Misunderstandings with the time we all wrote one of our practice essays talking about this woman character named Vivian but it was from some 1800s book and it turned out Vivian was actually a man.
I feel like the problem with a lot of Literature classes for HS (and even college) kids is that a lot of classic literature is about stuff that your average teenager cannot relate & doesn’t necessarily consider as an experience that people have, so they don’t pick up on it. Like, when you’re young and carefree, you don’t necessarily pick up on metaphors for lost innocence because you don’t have that nostalgia for your adolescence. You haven’t necessarily experienced loss, or romantic love, or sex (desire, sure, but not necessarily sex and not necessarily enough sex to pick up on all the references). Sure, part of the point of reading is to expand your horizons and vicariously experience things that you won’t ever really experience, but if you’re a teenage boy you aren’t necessarily going to pick up on Sylvia Plath’s “Metaphors” being about pregnancy. And Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” hit me right in the Feels when I read it in my 20s; I don’t know that it would have if I had read it 10 years prior.
wise thesis adviser in college said: “reread the classics when you’re 25.”
to add, as a person who, in the face of conventional wisdom and contemporary literati who dismiss poetry on the reg, pursued a degree in poetry because KEATS: “when in doubt it’s about death” is also pretty good for “when in doubt it’s about sex.”
Yes! And then they try to correct for this by assigning literature about “young” characters the kids will relate to, but they’re all “young” as seen through the eyes of old men, so they leave actual young people mostly going “WTF is wrong with these people? Why do I have to read about them? OMG Holden is mentally ill and Hamlet just needs to make a fucking decision and DEAL and Jeezis Gatsby just get off her lawn.”
(At this point I cut off the growing list of rants about things they made me read at the completely wrong age.)
Yeah, there’s a Seamus Heaney poem like that (Blackberries)!
Explication I’m not sure about…once in my ap English class we had a sub who gave us a timed writing where we had to “explicate” something; at the end, a few people wrote a poem on the board for when our teacher got back:
An Explication of Our Lives
by AP Lit
Second hour
Surprise timed writing
LOVE
Ooh, that’s Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney! (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181384) I love that poem!
There’s a shitload of blackberry-picking poems for some reason. Are you talking Plath’s depression berries or Komunyakaa’s racism berries or Heaney’s?
Depression berries! Perfect description (these are the ones described as “dumb as eyes”, right?).
“We were picking berries, at old Aunt Mary’s, /when I met my blushing bride” — Berry Picking Time
Folk lyrics about berry picking is actually about the nostalgia. No deeper moments there.
This is the poem
tho
I remember our ninth grade English teacher livid with us because we didn’t recognize that the spilled apples in the short story we were reading represented the loss of youth and innocence/the pointlessness of war.
my tenth grade English teacher was so angry that none of us got what Gatsby’s shirts are supposed to symbolize
I’m still not entirely sure
They symbolize having too many shirts.
I don’t know either but talking about shirts would have been way better than talking about that green light. I think we spent a week on it… ugh.
I think what weirds me out about the way Gatsby was taught is that it focused so much on the symbols and the romantic longing that the teachers downplayed that it is a story about class warfare rather than just class differences.
I was so mad about all the symbolism talk about Gatsby, I’d probably support it now, but in High School I thought it was over reading (nothing like the arrogance of a 17-year-old to believe that things I don’t perceive can’t be intentional). I don’t know what the shirts symbolize either.
English classes like that are probably why my public high school teachers would practically glow with joy at my overuse of high-ticket vocab words and classical doom-and-gloom themes learned in my prior private schooling. “Ephemeral” gets you laughably far with jaded, hungry English teachers up to their necks in bored jocks.
(Not that I’m saying y’all were bored jocks! Just that my private schools were apparently alllll about the grimdark.)
My ninth grade English teacher actually marked points off our papers if we used big words because she assumed we couldn’t possibly know what they meant and were just using thesauri to make ourselves look better.
I still hate that woman. Violently.
That is detestable! Flagrant misuse of the crimson pen!
Just, wow. I detest her on your behalf.
Something similar happened in a college Intro to Lit class where I was assigned to read “Metaphors” by Sylvia Plath. Which in retrospect is kind of obvious but my general approach to poetry is “I dunno, this appears to be imagery… possibly some kind of mood?”
… Was this in Elmeer’s class? At Bishop Verot? Because I think I was in that class.
we did that a couple weeks ago!! I thought it was about the futility of virgin sacrifice. Lots of my friends thought it was about the disappointing loss of virginity.
Just here to check if anyone else loves Auden’s poem ‘Under Which Lyre’ as much as I do, partially because I enjoy the academia-as-war message, partially because Auden usually says what he means.
Yes, and pretty much all Auden when you come right down to it. “Journey to Iceland” is one of my favorites. “The promise is only a promise, the fabulous / Country impartially far.”
There’s also the immortal “On Bullshit”, with its splendid chorus of “For Christ’s sake, stick it up your ass.”
(At least, I think/hope it’s Auden. I’m disinclined to search at work.)
T.S. Eliot. 🙂
DAMMIT.
(Thanks! 🙂 )
I feel like I should add Wallace Stevens saying “The pears are not viols, nudes, or bottles. They resemble nothing else.” Although it didn’t stop him from being annoyingly inscrutable all the time.
I love Auden so much I nearly named my daughter after him. A line of As I Walked Out One Evening is engraved in my wedding ring.
Oooo which line? I love As I Walked Out One Evening
Robert Frost has a better-than-average sense of irony and a well-developed sarcasm gland.
This leads to many misunderstandings.
He is a great poet! And I think is sometimes glossed over because he was writing RHYMING POETRY when that was sort of falling out of favor? Anyhow, I’m slightly too dumb for him.
I really like Frost, but I think to like him you have to like poetry by a self-deprecating neighbor who considers himself a student of human nature even though he sorta hates people and stays mostly alone and quiet, up until the moment he decides what people REALLY need is several paragraphs of unfashionable, slightly bitter but still detectably sentimental plain talk.
Basically, I think of him as Wilson from Home Improvement.
So he is, basically, everybody’s picture of New England.
Favorite past time: Taking random lines out of Dickens and line breaking it like it’s Robert Frost. It works! I think Frost gets a bad bag for being “The Billy Collins of his day” only because he was popular.
Fun facts: Frost was the oldest & Plath the youngest in the generation of “Boston Poets” (Robert Lowell between), and then died less than 2 weeks apart. I think it’s helpful to read the generation in context, their particular delve into the mind and madness but ACADEMY in mind, which Frost does well. He was also of the school that ladies writers were lightweights. Ted Hughes & Plath went to his house for dinner, but Frost only talked to Ted. (FADING SMILE is a super gossipy wonderful book that I have a lot of feelings about, but might not actually be good if you’re not a Robert Lowell fangirl?)
ohh, but I am a Robert Lowell fangirl! I love all of those poets, and had never considered them before as part of the same “school.” This is what i get for reading but not studying poetry. I will definitely be looking up Fading Smile
Of course “Goblin Market” is about goblins.
They’re just extremely sexy goblins.
….Goblin market isn’t about goblins?
I first read Eliot’s “Prufrock” just after finishing Alan Moore’s graphic novel “From Hell,” which shaded my view of the poem 4EVA. Nothing you could ever say will convince me that J. Alfred isn’t a Victorian-age misanthropic serial killer whose collection of body parts haunts him in his dreams.
now that you’ve mentioned it, I can’t not see it.
I always thought of Prufrock as the original hipster. I said this in my English lit class and the prof almost died laughing. And I’m not the only one who thinks this. Atlantic had a piece about it back in January.
I hate Robert Frost with the passion only a New Hampshire school child can understand.
I reached my Frost lifetime quota after the FOURTH school field trip. I don’t mind the poetry, but NH’s educational system really needs to slow its roll regarding “treasured local sons.” (On a related note, I can’t walk out my door without hitting my head on something labeled “Daniel Webster…”) Still love it here though.
I seriously feel like they started trying to have us analyze “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” in 1st grade… and Daniel Webster. When my out-of-state boyfriend asks “Who is this guy and why is everything named after him?” I just yell “LIVE FREE OR DIE”
Was it just my school or does every NH public school basically devote the entire third(? maybe fourth?) grade curriculum to, “NH IS THE BEST THING EVAR. Now go trace a map of Lake Winnepesaukee.”?
Also, still can’t believe the Old Man in the Mountain is a thing that only exists on license plates anymore.
I grew up in the vicinity of the Old Man (my high school’s seal was the Old Man) and it was so weird when it fell down. My mom and my brother like to blame some guys from our town for accelerating its demise by sticking a flag in its forehead after September 11th. There might be some truth to that, but really, it was being held up by ropes for years and it was only a matter of time, sadly.
That was 4th grade for me! I had to make a toilet paper tube puppet of Mary Baker Eddy, and create an alphabet book of all the “wonderful” things NH has to offer. Like zinc.
I did think it was fourth… I did a posterboard animation thingy of the facelift that the Old Man got with heavy equipment and cement back in the 50’s. His forehead would go doooownnn… then you could pull it back up. It was 1979 or so – very high tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_of_the_Moun…
I don’t think this is just a NH thing, my 4th grade curriculum in NYS was about the history of New York (and how we contributed the most soldiers to basically every war up until WWI or WWII).
I don’t remember 4th grade. I do remember that 7th grade was all NY history again. Corn-beans-squash! SCOOM!
I grew up in Connecticut, and 4th grade was definitely All About Connecticut, so it’s not limited to New Hampshire!
My fourth grade was New Jersey history, so I think that’s just when people try to inculcate state history pride. It did not stick at all for me!
There are three distinct things I remember from NJ history in elementary school:
– Washington crossing the Delaware
– a story about a family who hid secret documents from the British in a bath tub full of broken porcelain
– Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte saw the Jersey Devil
that third thing sounds like definitely the most interesting of the three things.
Fourth grade was Ohio history. On the plus side, that year was the year that spent the most time, percentage-wise, dealing with Native Americans as actual people with their own history, rather than interesting accessories that came with the North American continent.
How strange! I grew up practically next door to the Frost farm (Londonderry) and barely read any Frost in school until college. (I still have never been to the farm, even!) Perhaps my teachers all avoided him due to overexposure from their own upbringings… or perhaps it was out of anti-Derry school pride. It’s probably the latter.
Same! And there is the Robert Frost museum in the next town over from my hometown. We didn’t read any Frost at all. I do recall reading some Nathaniel Hawthorne, and that was pretty damn traumatizing.
I am now starting to think I have virtually met more people from New Hampshire on The Toast than I did for the 20 or so years I actually lived there. Is there some sort of Toast/Granite State nexus?
What the happy twee quote-embroidering folks fail to realize about Frost is that he is NOT a pastoral New England Wordsworth. He was frequently frustrated by people, and farming, and people who farm; the subtext in most of his poems is this person/crop/season/situation FUCKING SUCKS. So with “The Road Not Taken.” The narrator is being one of those self-help-book, my-life-choices-are-transformative assholes who fails to realize that it doesn’t fucking matter which road you take because they’re identical. He’s too busy trumpeting.his pointless decision to start walking and see where the road leads.
[high fives you]
I’m so tired of arguing with people about that damn poem! ITS NOT HAPPY, MAN. THE ROADS DONT MATTER WE’LL ALL BE DEAD SOON.
*mutters about how much Wordsworth is the worst*
Seriously, what’d he do to make “lonely as a cloud” be so iconic??
Come sit by me.
oh god, i had an english teacher who just wouldn’t shut up about the golden daffodils in that poem. it made me decide never to ever pick up Wordsworth again.
WHAT DID HE DO TO MERIT BECOMING POET LAUREATE
He’s the most boring of all the Romantics, the only tolerable shit he made was in his first and last efforts, AND HE DIDN’T WRITE ONE POEM AFTER HE GOT THE JOB.
But, being the emotional theologian that I am, I really, really love Tintern Abbey.
“I think the world NEEDS an epic poem on the growth of my own mind” — Wordsworth
First post ever, and it’s to leap in and defend Wordsworth, who is always, ALWAYS mistaught as some dude who faffed about in flowerfields looking dreamily at the sky. Guys: Wordsworth wrote an epic poem about how the failure of the French Revolution shattered his radical dreams and how he had to claw his way back out of the existential abyss that only happens when, well, your favorite wanna-be republic starts lopping off heads* (said epic poem also included a wacky dream vision in which the world ends in a giant flood). He wrote poems that about crazy people, war-torn refugees, magic vengeful peasant curses, and moms who hung out atop hilltops where they had buried their dead kids. He is so much more than that goddamn daffodils poem, and I swear to god every time it gets taught as representative of his oeuvre a part of me dies inside.
*Domestic carnage now filled all the year
With feastdays: the old man from the chimney-nook,
The maiden from the bosom of her love,
The mother from the cradle of her babe,
The warrior from the field — all perished, all —
Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,
Head after head, and never heads enough
For those who bade them fall.
Domestic carnage and rollin’ heads. THAT’S Wordsworth.
(ok gonna peace out now before I get hit with too many tomatoes)
Okay, I do have a love/hate relationship with Wordsworth … but still, he *is* the guy who wrote the epic poem about the growth of his own mind. Can you imagine if he ever even finished The Recluse?
He’s just so deliciously easy to mock
He’s just so deliciously easy to mock
I’ve long felt that way about all/most of the Romantics. I love them because I laugh at them. I mean, some of it is quite good, but at the same time….i always kind of feel like they’re the stoners of the 19th C. (I mean, obv Coleridge and Lord Byron, but not limited to them)
(I have a love-hate for them because Mary Shelley and co are part of the cohort, and actually I rather like some of Browning’s less-taught stuff, and they were doing some interesting commentaries on world affairs (where “world” = “france” i guess), but it’s their fault that art is more about the creator than the skill shown, and that “uniqueness” and “authenticity” are some of the most valuable things, because of Romantic ideals, which has ultimately resulted in Banksy trying to subvert it, and dammit, it’s Wordsworth’s fault we have to deal with Banksy’s shit and fuck Wordsworth for it.)
* meekly * The view from Westminster Bridge at dawn is worth a million stupid daffodils.
The best thing about Wordsworth is the time Anastasia Krupnik read him in her father’s poetry class
wordsworth and whitman can both take a walk. i don’t need them or their poetry.
although if they did take a walk, or even go jump in a lake, we’d end up hearing all about it, so maybe not.
When I am on a particularly grueling hike in the backwoods, knee deep in spruce bog, being eaten alive by blackflies and mosquitoes, I picture Wordsworth in my place any everything seems much better
ok so is Two Tramps in Mud Time sarcastic too? Or just really fucking tragic?
I used to assign Hemingway’s short story, “Cat in the Rain,” to my Intro to Lit students as their first paper assignment. I quit doing that, because every single one of them wrote me five paragraphs about how this short story was about a cat in the rain.
I have nothing against Hemingway’s writing but the 3rd time I read “Hills like White Elephants’ and the professor said “ok so obviously this is about abortion” I was flabbergasted
I was just about to write a comment saying exactly this! Hills like White Elephants made me feel really dumb during my first-ever undergraduate English course (but then I went on to get a Master’s in English so SUCK IT ERNEST).
also I will be the first to admit that my dislike of Hemingway stems from the shame surrounding that particular incident.
my english 11th grade class read this story, and basically everyone read it, was like “I feel like…there’s a reference that would’ve been clear back in the day that I’m missing…I’m going to google this” and we all showed up the next day like “wow I can’t believe that was about abortion!” even the english teacher was like “realtalk I had not read that story before, googled it because I was obviously missing something, and was surprised! Let’s talk.”
I think it’s the “let the air in”. The type of reference people back then would have gotten, but is just not something people in the 21st century would know. Like how in 100 years (fingers crossed) people will be confused by references to “Aunt Jen and Shirley, her roommate of 15 years” and be really confused to find out that “roommate” meant “lesbian”.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE
http://the-toast.net/2014/05/14/everything-like-w… http://the-toast.net/2014/01/15/songs-i-never-rea…
Then only reason I caught that one was because I had recently read Cider House Rules, which has a passage about how some illegal abortions back in the day were done by a doctor doing only the dilation part of a D&C and then letting nature take its course. “Letting the air in.” I was accused of plagiarism though, because my professor didn’t think any freshmen in East Texas could possibly get it on their own.
I had a student that thought the woman was being pressured into getting a lobotomy.
To be fair, the famous phrase would be a somewhat more accurate description of that procedure than of an abortion …
I knew a professor who admitted he had thought it was about a boob job.
That was the first short story my 12th grade AP Comp teacher assigned us. None of us got it.
When in doubt, it’s probably about abortion. When in doubt about Hemingway, a solid second guess is it’s about dying (usually in the rain).
But not a cat in the rain.
I was just about to come down here to vent about doing Hills Like White Elephants in school –it was a lit program for adult students at a pretty swish private liberal arts university– and this dude being like LOLWUT and steadfastly refusing to believe it was about abortion and I just goggled at him. Like, that was the hill he was going to die on and my crazy hormone-addled girl brain was reading too much into it. It was just two people in the south of Spain drinking anis del toro and waiting for the train AND NOTHING ELSE.
I had an English Teacher, who upon assigning a paper on Twelfth Night said, “If you write about gender or duplicity, I will fail you. If you make a compelling argument about Buffy and Shakespeare, I’ll at least hear you out. Don’t worry about being wrong, just don’t be boring.” <<BEST ADVICE.
Also I would like Stopping by Woods better if it were about Santa.
it sort of is…he’s broke, looking at home, can’t buy his kids presents, see above: “this sucks”.
*sighs heavily* Okay, internet people who are smarter than me, what’s the deeper meaning about eating the plums in the icebox?
To this day, that’s the only poem I can’t read any subtext from.
1. Imagism was totally literal and it’s just about plums
2. He cheated on his wife like all the damn time and that is the subtext, forbidden fruit, apologies, etc
3. ????
Are you supposed to just *know* that by reading the poem, though? Like, without knowing anything about the poet? I’m just gonna pretend it was a weirdly formatted post-it note he stuck to the fridge and leave it at that.
Also, he never actually says “sorry,” he just orders the person to “forgive [him].” So, my takeaway is that he’s a bit of a jerk.
This is the takeaway for the entirety of WCW’s oeuvre.
I have loved that poem for like fifteen years and had literally no idea it could be about anything other than eating your housemate’s food and not being sorry. Damnit. I am bad at poetry too.
The deeper meaning is that William Carlos Williams is an endlessly horrible roommate who should be defenestrated out a window and buried in cat litter.
And “The Red Wheelbarrow”? I remember my high school teacher very definitively telling us it was about the death of a child. …how did you get that from a red wheelbarrow in the rain with chickens?!
Hell no.
It’s Imagist, and the whole point of that movement is that there’s zero subtext. No deeper meanings, just a moment illustrated with words.
Huh. My high school teacher told us it was about subsistence farming and humanity’s connection and dependence on the land. So the only conclusion I can draw here is that high school English teachers talk out of their ass, 100 per cent of the time.
My AP Lit teacher (who had chosen to become an English teacher b/c it was his worst subject in school and he blamed that on poor teaching) would routinely refer to his college notes on works that we were reading, and then when we said “where is the evidence for that interpretation in the text” would say “just trust me” (I remember this most when we were doing Moby Dick, a book I have still yet to finish)
the worssssst
My American Lit teacher made us all read All Quiet on the Western Front but refused to discuss it in class because Hemingway was not lovely enough for her. We spent the class time for that book hearing about how her kid was the most gifted creature in the universe ever.
So, some percentage of my hatred for Hemingway has to be attributed to having received no help with him.
He was a physician in Northern New Jersey; we were given one of his shadblow trees by his son. A few months ago there was a news story about the actual owner of the barrow and the chickens….
In high school we had to analyze that poem in groups and mine decided it was about the blood of Christ (??) which in our defense was a reasonable conclusion based on all the other poetry analysis we’d done in class. This fueled my immediate embrace of ‘the author is dead’ in a college lit class.
I HATED “The Red Wheelbarrow” in AP Lit. I remember basically saying that it meant nothing, and someone else was like “but it meant something to the author” and I was like “look, it also has to mean something to the audience, if you’re just writing for yourself you don’t have to fucking publish it”
My art teacher used “The Red Wheelbarrow” as text for a graphics exercise (use typography and spacing to make it whisper, shout, sing and stumble – GO!) because she said it was as close to nonsense as she could find.
I couldn’t cope with the nonsense part, so I used Hamlet’s “to be or not to be….” soliloquy instead, also because I liked the rhythm when it repeated.
And while you’re at it, internet people, why DOES so much depend on a red wheelbarrow?
I just figure it’s part of the classic cultural training in “if a dude does something selfish and annoying but makes some kind of gesture indicating he knows it was wrong and sort of apologizes but the apology indirectly makes it clear that he totally thinks it was worth it and would probably do it again and awww, dontcha just love that roguish charm,” to prepare us for the world of work and relationships and watching movies.
It’s about how if you become a poet you will never be able to afford your own house and so you will have to live with roommates and their bullshit forever. So don’t become a poet. You know, the road not taken and all that.
I really do think that one is all about the precision of the image and the emotions attached (remembering enjoying the plums, exhibiting awareness it was bad to eat them, not actually feeling regret). No ideas but in things.
Seconded.
The real reason that poem was created was so that people on Making Light could riff upon it endlessly. See, e.g. (there are multiple times this has happened), http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/014…
I was always told it was about the difficulties of communication between parents and children. I can … sort of see it? Like, he’s trying to convey that the pleasure of them was so poignant to his teen-boy self that it overcame his knowledge that he’d need to beg forgiveness later? But it doesn’t quite come across?
If your explanation of what the poem explores includes the line “it doesn’t quite come across,” maybe the poet needed to use third person.
all Robert Frost poems are, in fact, about Santa
I just think Santa would know for certain whose woods these are.
Whose woods these are, I know for sure. They belong to Arnold, who is a very naughty boy.
“The White Man’s Burden”, Rudyard Kipling. I was convinced it was sarcastic.
Oh god, so was I. My history teacher spent ten minutes one day basically going NO GUYS, HE’S BEING SERIOUS, and my life was never the same.
Yes, probably mark it as the start of the steep drop in my “estimation of humanity” graph
Me too!! That was an interesting day or two in class.
Yeah that was, um, a revelation.
I’m still not entirely convinced it’s NOT. I read “Tommy” years before WMB, and it’s one of my favorite poems: http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/tom… (much better if you’re in a place where you can read it aloud to yourself, by the way)
It’s really hard for me to intellectually grasp that someone with such a powerful ability to evoke the rage that responds to systemic prejudice could write “The White Man’s Burden,” too.
I know right? See also: the loving descriptions of India in Kim, juxtaposed with his straightfaced assertions that folks in India just looooove being governed by the English.
Seriously. And Kim may be pro-imperialism – and really, I can’t blame Kipling all that much for that attitude, given that India was his home and without British imperialism he wouldn’t have been there in the first place – but it’s also very explicitly anti the kind of casual racism that you find in The White Man’s Burden. You read lines like, “Bennett looked at him with the triple-ringed uninterest of the creed that lumps nine-tenths of the world under the title of ‘heathen’,” and “There is no sin so great as ignorance,” and that scene where Kim tells the lama,” I am not a Sahib. I am thy chela,” and then you read The White Man’s Burden which was published in the SAME DAMN YEAR and your brain explodes.
Kipling was just waaaay too addicted to commenting on current events. I give thanks daily that they didn’t have Twitter when he was alive, because can you imagine?
It was a really horrifying moment in my life when I found out about that poem. I was fifteen and Kim was my favorite book – it still is – and I just could not wrap my head around the idea that someone could have two totally contradictory sides to him, one that was so broad-minded and compassionate and tolerant of other cultures and religions, and the other that was so blinkered and conservative. But that is why, now that I’m over the shock, I find Kipling to be the most fascinating writer ever — because there is no end to the contradictions and the balance never quite comes down on one side or the other.
Yeah, I was upset when a teacher commented on my paper to tell me that nope, he meant every word. I was unprepared for this paradigm shift.
oh my GOSH. At my school there’s this really pretentious kid who is precisely the kind of person who learns just enough about topical issues to sound informed about them but actually just bullshits through everything
So one day, we’re supposed to be choosing a poem to recite in class and he says that as an Indian, he feels a “deep connection to Rudyard Kipling,” or something like that–NOT IN THE “I H8 COLONIALISM” connection–but in the sense where he believes Kipling is ethnically Indian
The teacher just looks at him and goes “…you know he was a racist, right?”
Q: What do, Mallory, Anthony Soprano Jr, and I all have in common? A: None of us understand Robert Frost.
Have you read ‘the Ax Helve’ by Frost?
It’s um, graphic.
Oh my. My goodness.
”
But now he brushed the shavings from his knee
And stood the ax there on its horse’s hoof,
Erect, but not without its waves, as when
The snake stood up for evil in the Garden,—
Top-heavy with a heaviness his short,
Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down
And in a little—a French touch in that.
Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased;
“See how she’s cock her head!” “
I have a feeling Frost would’ve gotten along great with Goya.
Have you read “Out, Out–“? I had to analyze it for a test, I think, and I read through it and went “holy fuck, did-okay, that kid just had his hand cut off by a dang CHAINSAW. And now he’s dead? Great.”
I LOVE THAT ONE (because I knew what it was about from the first time I read it and it was presented to us as “see kids, not all Frost poems are about you thinking it’s Santa, he was legit!” and then promptly buried)
say what you want about Frost, but he really knew how to write about kids getting fatally maimed by heavy farming equipment!
I remember having to close-read “Home Burial”, another of Frost’s cheery odes to dead children.
“He chafed its long white body
From end to end with his rough hand shut round it.
He tried it at the eye-hole in the ax-head.
“Hahn, hahn,” he mused, “don’t need much taking down.”
Baptiste knew how to make a short job long
For love of it, and yet not waste time either.
HOW IS THAT NOT ABOUT WANGS
It’s totally about wangs. Has to be.
Poetry is so fun. Deliberately ambiguous poems are the funnest.
My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
Is this poem about child abuse, or is it just a roughneck kind of dad horsing around with his kid? Is it ominous, or joyful? I really feel like both interpretations have merit.
As a child of an alcoholic, can’t it be both ominous and joyful? My father used to dance and sing with me when he was drunk. And because I was little, it was great and I didn’t know that he was drunk. And now I am grown-up and I know that the only times he ever danced and sang with me, it was because he was drunk.
Oh, absolutely! My initial approach was two separate readings, but you’re right that they can very easily be bound together and experienced simultaneously. A more literal interpretation of this poem is generally positive (waltzing/dancing is fun, positive connotations of the word “romped,” etc.), where, sure, the dad may be drunk, but it’s a happy drunk. In a more figurative reading, the speaker is using “waltz” as a metaphor for fighting; the poem’s action is much darker (this reading is supported by stuff like the frowning mother and words/phrases like “like death,” “scraped,” “beat,” etc.).
Like you say, even if the speaker experienced it in the first, happier sense as a child, they may very well be more somber about things when reflecting back on them as an adult.
This is exactly what I got about that poem. It is one of my favorites ever for that desperate, willful balancing act between joy and unease.
I wrote a blue book essay about this is 10th grade English class! I took the case that the cadence of the poem (mostly 6 syllable lines with a few 7 syllable lines) lent itself to an ominous tone that wanted to settle into a waltz, but couldn’t.
Ooh, what a neat argument!
I don’t want to oversimplify — but I will say that when I’ve taught this poem to chiefly upper-class, mostly whitish college students, they largely read it as a pretty simple, positive and sweet verse, with a few people pointing out problematic elements. When I taught it to at-risk, lower-class, mostly-of-color high schoolers, they super-impressed me with the complexity of the dark, DARK interpretations they offered of various lines. (One girl, for example, suggested that the mother and child are attempting to protect each other from beatings in a weird sort of reverse tontine, as a way of coping with the mercurial rages of the father; she gave me a SUPERB line-by-line argument for it.)
I think there’s something about its complexity/ambiguity that gives students who are used to being silenced in the classroom a weird sort of permission to explore the harshness of the scenario described.
I recently gave up on a course about British Literature from the Romantic period mostly because I could not read another Wordsworth/Coleridge/etc poem for the life of me. I remember none of them. I’d read one line and forget it the moment I moved to the next. It’s just endless, endless really really long poems about nature and women and flowery language and ugh. So boring.
Studying Wordsworth in AP Lit made me allergic to naturalist poetry. Nobody cares about the dumb daffodils, Wordsworth!
but did you
get the one
about the plums
in the icebox?
this is just to say
i hope william carlos williams got herpes
this is just to say
i have eaten the poem
which was on your desk
and which you were probably going to publish
forgive me
it was delicious
so self-absorbed
and so smug
this is just to say
I stole your shit
because I wanted to
and I was honestly pretty sure
you weren’t going to do anything about it
sorry not sorry
they were so cold
so fucking cold
I think they were fucking frozen
or something
who the fuck
freezes their plums
There is an Australian poet called John Forbes who we did in year 12. A year after that I read all his other poems, and a year after that we were given some William Carlos Williams at university. And it was just…: I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE JOHN FORBES! 100 AWESOME-POINTS FOR YOU! I reproduce it here in full:
A Bad Day
1
‘Everything depends on the context’
I consoled the revolutionary
dying behind
the red wheelbarrow section
of our barricade.
2
I’m sorry
you ate the full-
colour photo
of peaches
in our refrigerator.
Glue & paper taste horrible
& no doubt
you’ll be very sick.
Let’s be honest. All Frost poems are about being overrated as a poet.
“About Goblins” is more on-point than my freshman comp student who wrote a 6-page paper which kept referring to Chriftina Roffetti’s imagery… because the packet I’d photocopied included a reproduction of the title page from the original, what with its Gothic script and all.
That student is a trusting angel. I love her.
I love long esses more than is reasonable. I mean, ſure, it’s confuſing, but also DELIGHTFUL.
I cling to ß as well, spelling revisions be damned.
This looks like a good time for the best long s ever.
Oh, that’s awesome! Is there any chance Donne would have been doing it on purpose? *doesn’t know shit about typography*
I really have no idea, but I want to believe…
That dude? TOTALLY on purpose.
My undergrad English TA said that that poem was usually baffling to her classes, except the one year when she gave out a version with that old-school typography. mmhmm.
Oh oh. My AP class did this poem. It is soooo dirtbag.
I think it was Natalie Goldberg who wrote something about how WCW was a doctor by day and poet on the side, and that his poems were often “prescription-pad-sized.” I loved that observation, that your tools affect the shape and form of your art, and as a community college dork mentioned it at a Real College Party, whereupon a male friend of the friends I had come with immediately shot the theory down with no evidence whatsoever. Just, nope, not true, moving on. It was a rude awakening, and I’ve been a little squeamish about him and his plums ever since.
Not just a theory! In the description of Williams’s manuscript archives held at the University at Buffalo (about 20,000 individual items, covering over 30 years of his output), it is pointed out that “often poems originally written on Williams’s prescription pads precede the typed versions.” So :
1. you (and Natalie Goldberg) were correct!
2. that dude knew not whereof he spoke, and was a jerk to boot.
Here is the requisite citation, blah blah. http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/poetry/detail.asp?I…
Wow, and you showed your work! It’s unfortunate how many stories end badly because of that plot twist where the dude becomes a jerk, yet is still wrong.
Full disclosure : I am a terrible jerk all the time.
I fucking hate Robert Frost. the ONLY reason I don’t hate the santy claus poem is because it’s about santy claus. none of his other works have that virtue.
hey remember when Joyce Carol Oates wrote that completely amazing Robert Frost libel in Harper’s that had, as far as I know, no foundation in reality or rumor, and everybody was shocked and offended and confused
can’t say I really understood that but it was an amazing time
No, but I will Google furiously until I find it!
I feel like Joyce Carol Oates ought to be sued for libel for the horrible things she inflicts on fictionalized versions of Marilyn Monroe.
I’m not allowed to have real opinions about Joyce Carol Oates until I can remember whether it’s her or Joan Didion who does the Twitter rampages every so often. Also until I read a whole book of hers I guess? But I still say nobody gets punished for high crimes against Marilyn Monroe until we start re-animating and convicting Norman Mailer’s mortal shell every year until her ghost is satisfied. you ask me, everybody else is a petty criminal next to him.
Oates gives Mailer a run for his money in the sleaze dept., IMO, if you judge by desire to exploit and/or humiliate MM for her own gain. She has a short piece called Centerfold that’s narrated by her “Marilyn,” that drove me bonkers when I read it. You can read most of it on Google books: https://books.google.com/books?id=gp-vmVg7bVMC&am…
Apparently, her full-length book has all these scenes of Marilyn being assaulted by specific people (with no basis in fact) and I thought, “Dear God, that’s how sick Joyce Carol Oates is–she wants this to be truth.”
Which is so typical of how people use Monroe’s life as a template. There’s a fantastic book called The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Sarah Churchwell that focuses on how various people have written about Monroe and how much it reflects on them and their preoccupations, rather than the facts of Marilyn’s life and how her friends described her.
Well if it makes you feel better I can confirm that “Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend Called Felicity” is 100% literally about that. My grandpa was best friends with the poet, he had a neighbor named Felicity, I actually have her watermelon pickle recipe.
OH MY GOD PLEASE POST IT
Okay, here you go. I’m pretty sure my grandma (not Felicity) typed it and I’ve never seen the cherries actually used:
You are seriously the very best — thank you! (The images came through in the comment-reply email but are not showing here in-page for me? I will drop in the tinypic links here if you like.)
I am absolutely going to be making these for my English-teacher mom for Christmas if the long Southern autumn can yield me just one more watermelon this year …
Hmm, it doesn’t like my links. Let’s try that again:
Front of card
http://i58.tinypic.com/245g32q.jpg
Back of card
http://i58.tinypic.com/a23l8l.jpg
I have a brain wiring problem when it comes to this sort of thing. Every time someone tells me, “Oh, that poem/song is about _____” my reaction is either “huh!” or “no way!”
Best not to list here the songs I’ve had soured for me because I found out what they’re “about”…
Not a poem but I read The Princess Bride when I was younger and it wasn’t until my freshman year of college that it dawned on me that “unabridged” version did not exist and was a joke. I still beat myself up about this tbh
Yes! I knew it was all fiction but I thought there was a super long older version out there
I read the book in college, the newer version with the letter he used to mail out to people asking for the deleted scene *printed in the text*, and I still went to the author’s website and filled out the email form that now serves that purpose.
It wasn’t until I got the same text in my inbox that I realized what was up. I have never felt so dumb.
When I first read the book in the mid-90s, I sent away by mail to the address Goldman specified in the 1970s library edition I was reading. When I reread a newer edition a few years later, I sent an e-mail to the address he specifies in that version.
DIDN’T OCCUR TO ME FOR YEARS THAT IT WAS A JOKE.
You are not alone in this.
THANK GOURD
EVERY TIME I WAS TAKEN TO TOUR UNIVERSITIES AS A WEE TEENAGER I WOULD SEARCH FOR S. MORGENSTERN IN THE LIBRARY CATALOG AND I WAS ALWAYS DISAPPOINTED
I totally believed in this book and wanted it *so bad*.
I also spent years checking every library for The Horn of Joy mentioned in A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I was so very disappointed about that one.
Me too!
I had a coworker who insisted that not only was the “unabridged” version real, it was genuinely based on the history of two countries called Florin and Guilder that had really existed. I was like, “That is not remotely true and those countries are named after coins,” and she insisted that she had found a genuine history book that confirmed the story and had a map showing where Florin and Guilder used to be. Sadly, the book was out of print and she couldn’t remember the title, but it was all true!
I read Life of Pi in middle school and even though it said “A Novel” on the cover, I guess it didn’t occur to me that that meant it was fiction? I think I just thought that meant it was told in a story-like form, or something. Anyway I thought it was nonfiction, and years later (sometime in high school) I read an interview with the author, and I kept waiting for him to talk about the true story that inspired the book, but instead he just kept talking about how he was inspired by another novel, and eventually it dawned on me that Life of Pi was fictional. Broke my heart.
I have an aversion to assigning singular, essential meanings and metaphors to poetry because it causes unnecessary headaches about authorial intent, historical context. Hence, poems are always changing depending on the reader/readings and I think that open ended absorption is a wonderful thing.
There was a kid’s mystery book that I read when I was a kid, and one of the clues was a pair of red mittens/gloves with the first line from “The Road Not Taken” embroidered on the back. It might have been a Ghostwriter book. I can’t remember! It haunts me to this day!
Oh my god I’ve also read that book and I have no idea who it is or what it’s about. CURSES.
That sounds vaguely John Bellairs, except 249% less Catholic.
There was a Trixie Belden book where someone disappeared from a cliff path, leaving behind a book of poetry open to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Trixie reads the words “and miles to go before I sleep,” and fear tightens its fingers around her heart. Still my main association with that poem.
It was TOTALLY a Ghostwriter book, although I don’t remember which one. It was my introduction to that poem, actually!
hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Is this now how we identify other Toast readers
I am HERE for the Wombat Goblin.
But yes I am also terrible at the imagery thing and that is why I do not study literature any more. Although for some reason I’m fine with visual metaphors and major in art history. What.
I didn’t realize the one about the goblins wasn’t about goblins until I saw the David Suchet-as-Poirot version of Cat Amongst the Pigeons.
Also can “she visits the goblin market” be a thing
I bloody well hate Emily Dickinson. I can’t even think of reading any of her poetry without becoming enraged.
I remember reading this poem in my AP Lit class about a guy who finds a dead deer on the side of the road. There’s a line in it about him touching the deer’s belly and feeling her fawn still alive inside which prompted someone in my class to say “Maybe it’s about abortion and how all life is sacred because the fawn never got to be born” to which the teacher and I were just like -_-
I remember I had to take some exam in 8th grade where we had to analyze a poem. And it was all about some girl who climbed a tree and was pretending it was a horse she was riding. And my brain went “….heyyyyyy” but didn’t write anything about it. After the test was over, teacher confirmed “wow, that was an incredibly dirty poem” and I kicked myself for being weak-willed and too shy to go there.
I want to go back in time and write “MASTURBATION FUN TIMES” all over that paper.
Is this where I can admit I don’t get stressed/unstressed syllables? I don’t get the difference, I just guessed every time. (I also have terrible pronunciation for words I haven’t heard before, and frequently miss up accented syllables.)
I too have the terrible pronunciation problem, but it’s actually mitigated by the fact that I can scan for stressed/unstressed in my head. I became a much better teacher when I realized not everyone can do this! But consequently, I can tell you that you’re not alone — it’s actually very uncommon to be able to tell automatically — very few of my students can, and my wife eventually snapped and yelled at me for assuming she could, and she studies poetry all the damn time.
Did I sound really snotty there? Sorry, I just get the enthusiasms about things that different brains can just do. My dad, for instance, can detect the number of objects in a group without counting, up to five objects. I can only do three. Apparently the average is exactly four.
Oh, man, I had no idea! I was a linguistics major and in one class we had to interview a speaker of an unfamiliar language and then do phonetic and phonological analyses of the recorded speech, and my friend in the class asked me how to tell how stress was realized in the language (like, with loudness or pitch or duration), and I kept trying to tell him, “A starting point could be to pick out the syllables you perceive as stressed and then look at them in [speech analysis software we all used],” and he kept trying to tell me that he could not perceive which syllables were stressed and which weren’t, and that just didn’t compute in my mind, I could not understand how he could have no sense of that, and we had a fight about that too.
this took me YEARS to figure out, I assumed everyone had an intuitive grasp of stressed/unstressed. It is helpful i have a partner with whom i can have “your brain works that way? huh, my brain works this way” conversations.
Other people’s brains. We rarely get the opportunity to compare and contrast.
Not-entirely-native English speaker here (it’s complicated)! Could you explain what you mean by “I can scan for stressed/unstressed in my head”? Does it mean you can tell what syllables are stressed in a word without saying them out loud?
Goblin Market is excellent if you want to write undergraduate essays about the perceived evils of female sexuality. (Which I did. It gives you so much material!)
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is so bleak and despairing, and I love it. Everything is cold and dark and awful, and you just have to keep trudging on for ages before you can hope for the sweet release of death. It’s oddly comforting.
I had to read Goblin Market for a course in Thing Theory, and the short-analysis titles that week were amazing. “The Invisible Hand of the Goblin Market,” “Goblin Marketing through Banner Ads,” it was so great.
This has nothing to do with that at all, except suddenly I’m now imagining clickbait titles for classic poems and it’s making me giggle.
“New Hampshire man stopped suddnely on his way home, but what he realized will make you cling to your loved ones for dear life!”
“Notorious shut in cannot visit a friend, but when He kindly stops for her you’ll never guess what happens!”
Oh, jeez, these are hard to come up with! I was going to reply with one but the best I can come up with is “Shocking video shows my mistress’ eyes, and they’re NOTHING LIKE you expected!”
“April is in my mistress’s face! Doctors HATE her!”
“What These Women Talk Of As They Come And Go Will Defy Your Expectations.”
“He Didn’t Tell His Foe Of His Wrath. What Happens Next Will Shock You.”
The only good poems are the ones in Icelandic sagas. Heavy metal imagery, no symbolism: just vikings telling kings to be generous, specifically, generous to them, before going off to vomit in more ungenerous vikings’ faces.
Also, women telling men to fuck off.
Also, Egil telling the gods to fuck off for letting his sons die.
Of course “After Apple-Picking” is about picking apples. And you know what happens after you pick the apple.
The uber-conservative poetry/literature guy Harold Bloom wrote a *wonderful* introduction to the poem “Goblin Market” and Christina Rossetti’s life in his big anthology (“Best Poems of the English Language?”) He writes all about how Christina eschewed marriage but had lots of really close female friends, but let’s NOT use the word “lesbian” or even THINK the word “lesbian” because this poem is SO CLEARLY about goblins and not the crazy passionate kiss between these two ladies (which is clearly actually a life-saving poison-sucking operation).
My high school freshman self was not having any of this.
This whole thing (other than Goblin Market) is an artifact of the New Criticism and the idea that a perfect poem is this kind of self-contained artifact holding a secret. What a poem directly expresses is of very little interest, worthwhile literature is “layered” and “allusive” and “minimal” and a reading “unpacks” it. It works great on Modernism and Emily Dickinson and the Romantics and leads directly to dismissing anything else as popular or sentimental or something.
I came to like reading poems this way after high school, but it leads directly to the “secret decoder ring” theory of reading which causes students to disengage from any kind of interesting investigation of the text in favor of the idea that there is some kind of secret right answer in there ready to leap out if you only know that white=innocence or something. Also the most boring papers imaginable.
Has anybody heard Goblin Market read aloud? Totally sexy fruit, y’all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmDeJJIRSxM
“The Walloping Window-Blind” was supposed to be a “nonsense” poem, but it’s really all about sticking it to The Man.
The Goblin Market isn’t about Goblins?!? MY WEE BRAIN. I’ve heard the whole thing read aloud and did a reading of it myself and I still think it’s about goblins?
When I am on a particularly grueling hike in the backwoods, knee deep in spruce bog, being eaten alive by blackflies and mosquitoes, I picture Wordsworth in my place any everything seems much better
I taught Ulysses when I was a postgrad student, and I told my class not to worry about following it all and working out the meaning, but just to keep going, skip the bits you're really struggling with if necessary, and hopefully a bit further along you'll find a bit that is more fun and that you can really engage, and to come to the sminar ready to talk about your favourite chapter and why. All dozen students came back excited about the book and how great it was! It was SO gratifying.
i guess, with me and frost, i took to heart that “It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling /
To get adapted to my kind of fooling”. but then, i have ‘dust of snow’ tattooed on my arm so there’s that.