How To Understand Poetry

A first critical step in understanding poetry is to support the idea
that the words on the page that form the poem are words that
have come alive as a living entity. Though a poem is not a full
expression of something the writer thinks or feels it is a journey,
through itself in a sense to an ending or a climax.

A poem is about a starting out, a commencement of a journey,
and although the writer may have a theme that he starts out on
this journey with. Generally the poet doesnt know where they
are going and are finding a way to get there.
This is one of the key pleasures of writing and, hopefully, that
pleasure is in someway felt by the reader or listener.

The ending of the poem is unforseeable and in fact the ending
of the poem is something the poem is busy creating. Its almost
as if the journey through the poem is the only way to access
the ending. One of the jobs of the poem is to bring its own ending
into being.

Lets look at some examples and as you read them you can
see that they have a life of their own and how it develops
and grows as it goes along on it journey
and how it evolves as a living entity.

If

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Kipling is very gender specific here in his ending and doesnt
let on what happens to women but you can see through
out the poem how its on this journey always asking the
question 'if'? at times the poem gives some opinions
along the way. You can see how the poem is searching
or seeking its own ending and how it actually finds its
destination in the last two lines.

Lets look at another:

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye

We see here how the poem steadily evolves and grows
until it finds its own ending in the last stanza. With each
line we can see how the author is being drawn to the
ending and how the ending is finding itself as it draws
nearer to the climax.