What do you mean?

What do you mean?

A crackle of papers was heard as students hurriedly searched for the prescribed text of the poetry.

“Ok. Let us begin today” the teacher addressed the class and continued,

“Page number 11; Topic - Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. The teacher introduced the poet named Robert Frost.

The teacher started reading,

“Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;”

Watching the students’ reaction the teacher asked, “How many of you understood who is the owner of the woods?”

“May be some villager sir.” A very few voices came out, but an air of thrill and enthusiasm prevailed.

“But I have another idea. The owner is the god.”

“How?”

“This is what we call as problem of interpretation” the teacher explained.

Take the word “rod” and consider what it means to a land surveyor and what it means to a gangster, both presumable speaking English. Words do have a variety of sometimes unrelated meanings, and these are not inherent in the words themselves but in their usage. Usage depends on the experiences associated with the use of words. The various meanings of a word may overlap in spots. But it is no less important to know that other areas of their meanings may be far apart.

The first stanza of the poem is

“Whose woods are these? I think I know

His house is in the village, though

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.”

The surface analysis is that Frost is stopping in some woods that belong to a person, or near a person’s cabin or house, so the woods belong to somebody else. Frost is saying that the person isn’t there and that he’s at his house in the village.

The deeper analysis is that Frost is walking through some woods when they are filled with snow. He really knows that they are God’s woods and that God can see them. However, Frost is not concerned with being in God’s woods other than enjoying them and the house in the village represents God in heaven. (courtesy : Bridget Ilene Delaney from Yahoo Voices)

Problems in interpretation

Let me illustrate by presenting a problem in interpretation. This is an untitled poem by Emily Dickinson:

Where ships of purple gently toss

On seas of daffodil,

Fantastic sailors mingle,

And then-the wharf is still.

When I gave this poem to interpret, almost universally students read the poem as being descriptive of a scene in a garden or meadow. A consensus of their interpretations runs as follows:

Tall purple flowers stand above the daffodils and are tossed in the breeze. Bees and butterflies (“fantastic sailors”) mingle with the flowers. The wind stops, and then the garden is still.

-       Let us call this “garden” reading

Besides this let me place the interpretation which I hope to prove the correct one:

The poem is a description of a sunset. The “ships of purple” are clouds. The “sea of daffodil” are skies coloured golden by the setting sun. The “fantastic sailors” are the shifting colours of the sunset, like old-fashioned seamen dressed in gorgeous garments of many colours brought from exotic lands. The sun sinks and the wharf (the earth where the sun set – the scene of this colourful activity) is still.

-       Let us call this “sunset” reading

How do we demonstrate the “sunset” reading to be correct and the “garden” reading to be incorrect? By some such arguments as this:

v  “Ships of purple” is a more apt metaphor for clouds than for flowers, both as to size and to motion (we often speak of clouds as “sailing).

v  “Daffodil” would normally be in the plural if it referred to flowers rather than to colour: why would not the poet say “On a sea of daffodils?”

v  “Mingle” fits better the intertwining colours of the sunset than it does the behaviour of bees, which mingle with flowers perhaps but not, except in the hive, with each other (and the flowers here are “seas”).

v  The “garden” reading provides no literal meaning for “wharf”. The “garden” reading, to explain why the wharf becomes “still”, demands the additional assumption that the wind stops (why should it? And would the bees and butterflies stop their activity if it did?) ; the disappearance of the sun, in contrast, is inevitable and implicit in the sunset image.

v  Finally, the luxuriance of imagination manifested in the poem is the more natural consequence of looking at clouds and sunset sky than at flowers. We look at clouds and see all sorts of things – ships, castles, animals, landscapes – but it takes some straining to conjure up a scene such as this one from a garden.

The “garden” reading is therefore incorrect because it fails to account for some details in the poem (the wharf) because it is contradicted by some details (the singular use of “daffodil”), because it explains some details less satisfactorily than the “sunset” reading (“ships of purple”, “mingle”), and finally because it rests on assumptions not grounded in the poem itself (the wind stops). The “sunset” reading explains all these details satisfactorily.

At last this is from my side:

According to me a poem is an ink blot in a Rorschach personality test. There are no correct or incorrect readings: there are only readings which differ more or less widely from a statistical norm.

Very importantly no poet, however, likes to be caught in the predicament of having to explain his own poems. He cannot say, “What I really meant was …….” without admitting failure, or without saying something different than what his poem said.

Happy reading.

Be your own boss atleast when you are reading.