http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16430
Here is a poem by Dylan Thomas that I thought was very interesting. I'm putting my comment in a cynical way. I have never been really big into poetry because a lot of the time I'm not really sure what they're talking about. I start to lose myself in the words and before I notice I'm so far into confusion.
My question is this, What is the best way to go around deciphering the more obscure poems?
Hopefully some other students in the class were secretly thinking this theirself and it could help not only me.
6 comments:
I'm glad I am not the only one who got lost in the words. It seemed like the harder I tried to concentrate on the poem the less I understood it.
Hopefully as this class progresses I will become better at interpreting poems.
As far as your question on a good way to decipher these types of poems, I too am interested in others students inputs.
I'm lost also. I read the poem and I honestly couldn't tell you what it was about. I read it several times, including aloud. I think with more obscure poems, I find helpful to know a little bit about who wrote it. Then I could maybe guess if what was going on in their personal life affects what they wrote. I don't know. That's just me.
We all get lost in the words sometimes. As for interpreting poems, there are some people who will say that you have to know what the poet is referring to in his or her poem. However, if I can't figure that out, or even if I can, I just go with what I think of when I read a certain poem. I often concentrate on the flow, and the images often times creating an image of the poem for myself which may or may not be, probably not, what the poet was referring to when he or she wrote it. My advice would be, and this is what I do, if you're not reading a poem for class and asked to look at it for what the poet means, then just take the theme, the meaning, that jumps at you personally, a lot of times that makes reading poetry much more enjoyable, even with the more obscure poems.
The poem was definitely very abstract. I tried not to look too deeply into the meaning or context of the words, but rather how they all fit together as a whole and I found in that way the poem evokes some of the emotions that the author probably intended. Surely the poet is talking about some kind of personal experience, but I did find it hard to grasp to central or overall message of the poem, I was just able to take note of the emotions I think the author was trying to express.
I like the very descriptive view of the body parts and how they are in pain, but I don't understand how they are connected or releated to eachother in this poem.
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