This document discusses the meaning and ideas in poems. It distinguishes between the total meaning of a poem, which is the full experience it communicates, and the prose meaning, which can be summarized but does not capture the entire experience. Poems can convey stories, descriptions, emotions, or accounts of human character rather than direct ideas. The value of a poem comes from the total experience it communicates rather than any single idea. Readers should consider the full meaning and imaginatively engage with ideas they may disagree with.

1. MEANING AND IDEA

2. Little Jack Horner
Sat in a corner
Eating a Christmas pie.
He stuck in his thumb
And pulled out a plum
And said, “What a good boy I am!”
Anonymous

3.  The meaning of a poem is the experience it
expresses– nothing less.
 Distinguish :
 The total meaning of a poem ( the experience it
communicates which can be communicated in
no other way)
 The prose meaning: the ingredient that can be
separated out in the form of a prose paraphrase.
 The prose meaning will not necessarily or even
usually be an idea.

4. Prose meaning
Story
description
Emotion
Account of
human character
idea

5. “O what is that sound” (p 28): tells a story;
“The Eagle”: descriptive
“A Red, Red Rose” (page 97): an expression
of emotion.
“My Last Duchess” (page 112): an account
of human character.
None of those poems is directly concerned
with ideas.

6.  The idea in a poem is only part of the total
experience it communicates.
 The value and worth of the poem are
determined by the value of the total experience
 Not by the truth or the nobility of the idea.
 A good idea will not make a good poem, nor
need an idea with which the reader does not
agree ruin one.
 The reader of poetry should be willing to enter
imaginatively into ideas he objectively regards
as untrue.

7.  BARTER
 Life has loveliness to sell,
 All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children’s faces looking up,
Holding wonder like a cup.
Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,

8.  Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit’s still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.
Spend all you have loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.
Sara Teasdale ( 1884-1933)

9. STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY
EVENING
 Whose woods these are 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.
 My little horse must think it queer
 To stop without a farmhouse near
 Between the woods and frozen lake
 The darkest evening of the year.

10.  He gives his harness bells a shake
 To ask if there is some mistake.
 The only other sound’s the sweep
 Of easy wind and downy flake.
 The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
 But I have promises to keep,
 And miles to go before I sleep,
 And miles to go before I sleep.
 Robert Frost (1874-1963)

11.  Both poems present ideas.
 The first more or less explicitly.
 The second symbolically.
 Two questions for the second poem:
 Why does the speaker stop?
 He stops to watch the woods fill up with snow,
to observe a scene of natural beauty.
 Why does he go on?
 He goes on because he has ‘promises’ to keep:
he has obligations to fulfill.

12.  He is momentarily torn between his love of
beauty and these other various an complex
claims that life has upon him.
 The small conflict is symbolical of a larger
conflict in life.
 The sensitive thinking person would like to
give up his life to the enjoyment of beauty and
art.
 Another is aware of larger duties and
responsibilities.
 The speaker would like to satisfy both
impulses.

13. End of Chapter IX