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The objects the imitator represents are actions. — Aristotle
The most common complaint about poetry in these times (when anyone talks about poetry at all,) and almost the most common comment of any type about poetry, is that it is hard to understand. Why can’t poets just say what they mean? Why should I spend time trying to figure out what the message of the poem is?
These complaints are based on a misunderstanding of what poetry is and does. Poetry in fact is no harder, or easier, to understand than music, or painting, or dance, or theater. The misunderstanding that understanding poetry is fundamentally different from understanding these other art forms is what leads many people to make complaints that poetry is harder to understand than these other art forms.
This misunderstanding is reflected in the question, “Why can’t poets just say what they mean?” Consider the assumption behind this question: it is that a poem has two parts, an inner part, the “meaning,” which is, you might say, clothed or decorated, and too often concealed, by the outer part, the “words.” And this leads to the assumption that the process of understanding the poem is to get behind the surface words to the real meaning, by trying to derive from the surface words a straightforward statement of what the words are just a decoration of. In practice, this means that you understand a poem if you can write a paragraph of plain prose which is the “meaning” of it, set it next to the poem’s “words,” and draw an equals sign between the two. And there you have it: poem understood!
These assumptions are so widespread that many people may believe they are just common sense. But the truth is they are nonsense.
Yet common sense is right in its assumptions about how to understand a other art forms. For example, common sense tells us that we shouldn’t try to understand a piece of music by writing a paragraph of plain prose, or by composing another piece of music, putting that next to the piece of music we are trying to understand, and drawing an equals sign between them. The very description is obviously absurd, and it would be equally absurd for painting, dance, or drama. To understand poetry, it’s necessary to understand that such a process is an equally absurd way to try to understand a poem.
So if we shouldn’t try to understand a poem by extracting a paragraph of prose from it, how should we try to understand it? One way of looking at it is to realize that a successful poem (or any other successful work of art) does not say something, it does something. It is not a statement, it is an action, essentially a piece of theater, and to understand the poem as an action, we need to consider 1) what the poem does, and 2) how it does it, and 3) why it does it.
The argument so far has been rather abstract, so let’s try to illustrate it with an actual poem:
Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
If we try to extract a plain prose “meaning” from this poem, we are likely write something like this:
My beloved is even more beautiful than a summer day, since a summer day can get too hot or overcast, just like other beautiful things may not always be beautiful. But my beloved’s beauty is always the same, and in fact will stay the same as long as my poem in praise of it survives.
Well whoop-ee big deal. If that collection of clichés is what the poem means, it doesn’t mean much.
So let’s implement the method outlined above: consider the poem not as a statement, but as an action, and ask, what does this poem do? The answer can be complicated and will only be considered here much less fully than it could be.
A key point is that the meaning of a poem is to be found, not in the meaning of its images, but in the relationship between the images. The action of this poem is on the surface a meditation — an action of thinking and imagining, a series of thoughts and images, each one not only leading to the next but also looking back at the last one, that we see the poet moving through. The poet asks, “What creates my love?”, and responds to this question by answering “Beauty.” But this leads the poet to consider another question: what is beauty? It occurs to the poet that, for instance, a summer day is beautiful. So, the thought continues, do I love a summer day as much as I love my beloved? No! Why not? For one thing, a summer day is not always beautiful, but my beloved’s beauty doesn’t change. And now a grim objection suddenly arises: every beauty declines and dies.
And that grim thought leads to another question, unspoken but clear: what shall I do when my beloved’s beauty is gone, destroyed either by age or by death? And here Death intrudes and issues a challenge: if all things die, the beloved’s beauty must die, and therefore the poet’s love, which is love of that beauty, must die. The poet wrestles with Death and wins: No! My love will not die because the beauty that inspires it will not die, since it will survive as the living emotion embodied in this poem. So the poet ends by triumphantly boasting over defeated Death that his love, and his poem, and his art, are stronger than Death.
I would argue that the action of thought process I’ve described is not merely an expansion of the trivial “meaning” which I began by somewhat satirically expressing. By seeing the poem as an action, it becomes a dynamic performance which embodies an emotional arc: we imagine the poet encountering the poet’s own initial thoughts and images and responding to other thoughts and images which those lead to. The meaning is not in the individual thoughts and images as expressed in individual phrases, but in the connections between the thoughts and images, and in the way these thoughts and images proceed, just as the meaning of a piece of music is not in the notes but in the connections between the notes and in the way the notes proceed, and a prose paraphrase of a poem can’t reveal those connections. We might say that the poem’s meaning, or part of its meaning, is to be found not what it says, but in how each thing it says relates to all the other things it says, and in how the emotions thus generated form an action which tells a story. If we insist on a prose paraphrase, the best we can do is to say that the meaning of this poem is the arc of action from wonder to terror to consolation.
But the poem’s action is not just embodied in words presenting thoughts or images, but is also supported by words presenting sound. Virtually every syllable of this poem incarnates and supports the poem’s action, but I will give only a couple examples here:
Rough winds do shake
This reads to my ear as four stressed syllables, which imitate the up and down shaking of branches; the natural puffs of air we make when pronouncing the words rough winds, and the sounds of rough and shake imitates the rustling of branches in the wind. The sounds of the words reinforce the idea that even flowers in their first glorious bloom will be subject to the inevitable natural process of decay.
Again:
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
This, I think, is one of the most spectacular uses of sound in all poetry: spoken naturally almost every syllable is long and stressed, conveying an attitude of swaggering arrogance so exaggerated that is seems sarcastic, as if you might ridicule a conceited person by saying, “OH! YES! I! AM! A! BIG! SHOT!” The sounds in effect portray the poet as actually mocking Death’s arrogance.
Here I should perhaps anticipate the objection of some readers that these sounds are coincidental, since they are the sounds anyone might make in ordinary discourse to describe what is being described. That the sounds are natural is evidence in favor of, not against, the idea that they are being used for poetic effect. It’s called artless art. This using of ordinary, almost casual, diction for special effect to support a poem’s action is a hallmark of successful poetry, and you’ll find it everywhere you look in successful poems. An example from another well known poem may clarify the point. Consider Blake’s famous lines:
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Perfectly ordinary words? But at the same time an extraordinarily effective sound patterning. The stanza consists of basically trochaic (stressed followed by unstressed syllable, though allowed to modulate sometimes into two stressed syllables) lines, so 16 feet, and 11 of them include a tiger-like growling syllable consisting of a strong consonant followed usually by an open vowel and ending usually with an r-sound:
TyGER TyGER BURning BRight,
In the FORests of the night:
What imMORtal hanD OReye,
DARE FRame thy FEARful symmetRY
This is no accident: the description of the Tyger growls.
Much more could be said about sound values in poetry, but these examples may give an idea of what to look for.
Finally, returning now to Shakespeare's sonnet,18, an understanding of the poetic tradition behind this poem gives insight into its meaning. I suppose many readers will be able to tell that this poem is, you might say by implication, a seduction poem, but this interpretation is clarified and verified when we know that the poem is part of a very old and important tradition in Western poetry of the “carpe diem” poem, urging us to take our pleasures, especially erotic pleasures, while we can, because we are all going to wither and die. If we had any suspicion that the ultimate purpose of this poem, though somewhat veiled, is to persuade its addressee to make love, a knowledge of the tradition the poem is a part of removes all doubt.
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Copyright 2025 by Jon Corelis
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