Keys To Reading Poetry

To increase your understanding and appreciation of a poem, use the following six-step process.

1. Read the poem through entirely without stopping.

As your read through the poem you may feel that you are not understanding it while you read. Such feelings are natural in this case. Do not worry about what you are not understanding. Try to get through the entire poem once in a single reading. Let the punctuation in the lines of the poem guide you in your reading. Do not think because the first word of each line of a poem may be, and usually is, capitalized that each line of the poem is a new thought. If you reach the end of a line and there is no mark of punctuation, keep on reading, beginning the next line as a continuation of the previous line.

2. Read the poem again.
 

3. Look up all unknown words and figurative language.

Use your dictionary, your English book (which will have an index of literary terms in the back of the book), a thesaurus.

4. Read the poem again. (Try reading the poem aloud.)

5. Answer the following questions about the poem:

- Who is the speaker in the poem? The speaker is the voice the reader hears in the poem.

- Who is the speaker addressing? The speaker can address an audience or another being in the poem itself.

- What is the subject of the poem? The subject of a poem is the person, place, or thing about which the speaker is speaking.

- What is the theme of the poem? The theme of the poem is what the poet is asking the reader to think about the subject.

- What is the tone of the poem? The tone of a poem is the attitude of the speaker towards his subject.

6. Read the poem again.

Right! There is no mystery in the method for increasing one's understanding and appreciation of poetry. Read the poem again and again and...

1 - First, read the poem through without stopping.

To An Athlete Dying Young by  A. E. Housman

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder high.

Today, the road all runners come,                           5
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where the glory does not stay,        10
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers         15
After earth has stopped the ears;

Now you will not see the rout
Of lads who wore their honors out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.                    20

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laureled head                   25
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

As a reminder, try to get through the entire poem once in a single reading. Let the punctuation in the lines of the poem guide you in your reading. Do not think because the first word of each line of a poem may be, and usually is, capitalized that each line of the poem is a new thought. If you reach the end of a line and there is no mark of punctuation, keep on reading, beginning the next line as a continuation of the previous line. Look again at the first stanza:

The time you won your town the race           1
We chaired you through the market place;     2
Man and boy stood cheering by,                3
And home we brought you shoulder high.      4

Line two above is a continuation of the thought begun in line one, and the end of line one wraps itself around to the beginning of line two to complete the thought. Lines three and line four work in a similar fashion, with the comma at the end of line three asking the reader to pause slightly before continuing on to finish line four. The semi-colon at the end of line two asks the reader to stop, but it also suggests that the thought of lines one/two are closely related to the thoughts of lines three/four.

2 - Read the poem again.

3 - Look up all unknown words and figurative language.

In red underlined type are words and phrases that you may need to look up or wrestle with to more fully understand them and the poem as a whole. For example, in line two above, the phrase We chaired you could be understood as "We put you in a chair" (raised you up to our shoulders, and paraded you through the center of town (market place) to show everyone that you were victorious in a running race.) The phrase stiller town is a reference to cemetery. The verb stopped means, in this case, filled or closed. As a reader of poetry you should know the language of a poem, both single words, phrase, and figurative language (which would include literary terms). Can you identify or explain the other red underlined words and phrases above?

4 - Read the poem again. (Reading aloud is a way to try to capture the tone of the poem.)

5 - Answer these questions:

Who is the speaker of the poem?
The speaker of this particular poem is a person who knows the athlete and is reflecting on his death. The speaker is not A. E. Housman. Housman is the poet who creates the voice in the poem, much like a writer of fiction creates a narrator for a story. The speaker in Housman's poem could either be a man or a woman, and he or she uses a recurring metaphor or theme of doorway/passage (Note: threshold, sill, shade, lintel) to represent the passage from life into death. The speaker seems to be or to have been intimate with the athlete, perhaps as a parent or friend.

Who is the speaker addressing?
The speaker is addressing the athlete (the "you" of line one), although only in a figurative sense as the boy/man athlete is dead. The reader has a sense that a larger audience, the people of the town, are also being addressed indirectly, listening to the speaker's eulogy of the athlete.

What is the subject of the poem?
The subject of the poem is, in general, death, or the death of a young boy/man and the speaker's eulogy for him. (A eulogy is a tribute to a person, usually one who has died.) We know the dead athlete to be a male because of the speaker's reference to him as lad in line nine.

What is the theme of the poem?
What is the poet trying to ask us about the death of this young athlete? Is the poet suggesting that the athlete is "a smart lad" because life or living is perhaps a worse fate than death? Or, is the poet asking us to think about how fleeting are the victories in life? That the poem can entertain numerous questions suggests the levels of ambiguity present in the poem itself. However, the thematic questions of any poem are always based in the subject and language of the poem itself; in other words, will the language of the poem support your interpretation of it?

What is the tone of the poem?
The speaker's attitude towards the young athlete's death is mournful, as one might suspect in the situation presented in this poem. However, the speaker's tone is also ironic. For example, the speaker calls the athlete smart for having died young to escape the fate of older athletes who can no longer win races. The speaker's use of irony is a way of trying to make sense of "why" an athlete should die young or why anyone, perhaps, should die before having lived a full life. Perhaps the irony conceals bitterness in the speaker for having lost the young athlete.

6 - Read the poem again.
Are you noting new elements of the poem? Structure, rhythm, rhyme scheme, inverted word order, literary elements, and/or punctuation?

Read the poem . . .Let the poem be and come back to it later.