Reading poetry

Do you think that studying poetry is difficult or boring? Read on as University of St. Andrews student Aisha Farr explains why it really isn't!

People sometimes think poetry is ‘difficult’ because they are worried that they won’t understand it. . However, if you give poetry a chance, and accept that a poem asks for a different kind of attention than a magazine article or a novel does, and that it isn’t necessarily trickier, then you also give yourself a chance to enjoy it.

There is more than one way of understanding something, and sometimes there is no right or wrong way of reading and interpreting it.

A great example of this is The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. It is a nonsense poem that is full of made-up words, so in a sense you can’t ‘understand’ it, but the way the words sound and the rhyme and the rhythm are enough to produce an effect. The fact that Lewis Carroll uses made-up words actually encourages you to ‘understand’ it – in a new way - for yourself. The reader or listener naturally uses their imagination, because they are forced to make links to words similar to the ones he has made up.

Try reading through this excerpt and see if any ideas or pictures come to mind:

'And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.'

So, for example, the word frabjous could be a blend of fair, fabulous, and joyous. Your brain makes those links subconsciously, so that when you read the poem the ideas that those words conjure up will inform what you understand from frabjous, but they combine together to make a new meaning in addition to these existing ones. The sound of words cannot be separated from their sense.

Poets do this all the time, even without making up words, by using things like its structure (line-breaks, line-lengths and breaks between verses) and sound (rhyme, rhythm, alliteration and lots of other sound-patterns). A poet deliberately, and sometimes accidentally, uses these devices to put words together in a way that makes us see and think about things differently.

Related links

• Read some famous poems
• My job explained: Artistic director
• Become a more active reader
• Five things you might not know about your local library

Your shout!

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