How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [109]
In the reading of lyrics, these first two suggestions are more important than anything else. We think that if readers who believe they cannot read poems would obey these rules first, they would have little difficulty afterwards. For once you have apprehended a poem in its unity, even if this apprehension is vague, you can begin to ask it questions. And as with expository works, that is the secret of understanding.
The questions you ask of an expository work are grammatical and logical. The questions you ask of a lyric are usually rhetorical, though they may also be syntactical. You do not come to terms with a poem; but you must discover the key words. You discover them not primarily by an act of grammatical discernment, however, but by an act of rhetorical discernment. Why do certain words pop out of the poem and stare you in the face? Is it because the rhythm marks them? Or the rhyme? Or are the words repeated? Do several stanzas seem to be about the same ideas; if so, do these ideas form any kind of sequence? Anything of this sort that you can discover will help your understanding.
In most good lyrics there is some kind of conflict. Some-Suggestions for Reading Stories, Plays, and Poems 231
times two antagonists-either individual people, or images, or ideas-are named, and then the conflict between them is described. If so, this is easy to discover. But often the conflict is only implied and not stated. For example, a large number of great lyric poems-perhaps even the majority of them-are about the conflict between love and time, between life and death, between the beauty of transient things and the triumph of eternity. But these words may not be mentioned in the poem itself.
It has been said that almost all of Shakespeare's sonnets are about the ravages of what he calls "Devouring time." It is clear that some of them are, for he explicitly says so again and again.
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age he writes in the 64th sonnet and lists other victories that time gains over all that man wishes were proof against it. Then he says :
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away.
There is no question what that sonnet is about. Similarly with the famous 116th sonnet, which contains these lines: Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
But the almost equally famous 138th sonnet, which begins with the lines :
When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her, though I know she lies, 232 HOW TO READ A BOOK
is also about the conflict between love and time, although the word "time" appears nowhere in the poem.
That you will see without much difficulty. Nor is there any difficulty in seeing that Marvell's celebrated lyric "To His Coy Mistress" is about the same subject, for he makes this clear right at the beginning:
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We do not have all the time in the world, Marvell says-for
. . . at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Therefore, he adjures his mistress,
Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand stiU, yet we wiU make him run.
It is perhaps a bit harder to see that the subject of "You, Andrew Marvell," by Archibald MacLeish, is exactly the same.
The poem begins :
And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noon ward height To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night
Thus MacLeish asks us to imagine someone ( the poet? the speaker? the reader? ) as lying in the noonday