I think it might be helpful to consider how to begin the process of reading a poem.  Once it’s begun, I find it to be a much easier thing than most people think.  Using W. H. Auden’s poem “Spain” as an example, here’s how I would begin:

The basic building blocks of any written text are words, and so I would begin at that level with this poem.  Looking at the poem, I notice that there are certain words repeated in the poem:  “yesterday,” “to-day,” and “to-morrow.”  The placement of these words at the beginnings and ends of several of the poem’s stanzas, as well as their relation to one another, calls attention to them as a structuring principle to the whole poem.  With the repeated use of “yesterday” as the first word of several lines in the opening stanzas, we are quickly alerted that this is a poem concerned with the past.  The repeated refrain “but to-day the struggle” highlights a contrast between a current condition and a past one.  And the use of “to-morrow” as the first line of several stanzas in the later part of the poem (replacing “yesterday”) further calls our attention to a possible future condition.

Noticing this structuring principle of the contrast between “yesterday” “to-day,” and “to-morrow,” I cannot help but notice the other words in the poem that are related to time.  In the the opening line, we have the word “past,” and as the poem continues, we stumble across “clocks,” “History,” “Time,” “hours,” “night,” “future,” “sudden,” “weeks,” and “day.”  Several of these words are repeated over and over in the poem, and draw our attention to the movements of time in the text.

One important part of how the poem builds up the feeling of the movement of time is by invoking the names of various places, calling to mind their importance at certain times in the past.  In the first stanza, we are taken to “China” and places with “sunny climates.”  As the poem progresses, we move along with the “navigators” and “the sailor” to Greece, Spain/Madrid, Africa, and Europe, along with rather vaguer references to places, such as “the nations,” “the city state,” “the shops and squares of the city,” “remote peninsulas,” “sleepy plains,” “islands,” “the heart of the city,” “oceans,” “passes,” “tableland,” “rivers,” “the lake,” and “the suburbs.”  The attention to place, and how a specific place can make a significant difference in the shaping of history, is certainly significant in a poem that wears a place name as its title.

Even without an awareness of the historical events surrounding the poem, it becomes obvious through careful attention to the words that Spain is here being considered as a focal point for military conflict.  The poem considers the conflict in Spain to be a potential watershed type of event, possibly a history-shaping place, with a significance akin to Greece’s stature in Western culture, or the importance of China’s trade routes in world history.  “To-day” is the time when that struggle is happening, and the poem pictures it as an important juncture, a sort of crossroads, between “yesterday” and “to-morrow.”

The imagery used to depict “yesterday” and the possible “to-morrow” then becomes very important.  There is something of an idyllic picture presented of “yesterday,” couched in terms that are sometimes theological/religious, and sometimes more focused on economic and technological development.  The idealized picture of the past, however, seems to overlook “the poor in their fireless lodgings.”   In this we find the need for the “struggle” of “to-day.”  This call by “the poor” leads to people coming from everywhere (many of them those places more vaguely expressed, as noted above) to join the struggle in which “Madrid is the heart.”  (It is interesting to note here the contrast between city images and pastoral images in the places named throughout the poem.)

The hopes for “to-morrow” expressed in the poem are nothing short of utopian.  To-morrow is expressed in terms of greater progress through “research” alongside “the enlargement of consciousness through diet and breathing.”  Enlightenment in all its forms, it seems.  There will be fun, there will be a return to Nature, there will be pageants, there will be Liberty, and there will be love all around.  But in order to move from “yesterday” to “to-morrow,” we must pass through the struggle “to-day.”

In approaching a text on the page, it is important to go through a process like this that takes careful note of the words the text uses, and how they work together (i.e., their structure).  This must come first in any reading of the text.

This is the point where attention to externals can come in.  If I want to read this poem as a part of Auden’s move away from political poetry toward poetry that “makes nothing happen,” it is certainly legitimate to do so.  I might want to draw on the fact that Auden himself later renounced the poem, wanting to distance himself from this sort of “committed” poetry.  That is one very valid use of the poem, and can provide for a very interesting literary study.  Similarly, I might like to look at the text from a postcolonial perspective, considering the representations of the various places and peoples mentioned in the text.  A reading such as this might hone in on the notion of “hot Africa” as opposed to “inventive Europe” and how the two are “soldered so crudely” together.  There is certainly plenty of space in the text for investigation along these lines.

The thing is, these sorts of investigations shouldn’t take place before careful attention to the words and structure of the text has been given.  Rather, whatever conclusions we might want to draw should grow out of due diligence given to an investigation of how the text works on its own terms.  When it is understood according to what is going on within it, then is the time to look at it in connection with all the things going on around it (whether in its own time or ours).

What I have offered here, then, is simply a set of working notes.  I have taken apart the words and considered briefly how they interact with each other.  This should not be mistaken as something I would want to present as a reading of the text (nor in a paper submitted to my teacher).  This is the nuts and bolts of looking at a text.  In putting together my reading of it, I have to dismantle the text itself and see how it operates on the inside.  But what I present as a final reading would probably not display these nuts and bolts too much, and certainly not in such a crude form as this, where I simply list related words and concepts.  Rather, I would continue working on the text from my chosen perspective, wrestling with it and trying to understand it better from that angle.  Eventually, in writing a paper on the poem, I would have to take a stand, and my paper would begin and end with that stand.  (In the case of my students, their stand would largely be determined by the question set for them, in that it should express their response to that question.)  Everything presented in the paper should merely be evidence to support the stand I have taken.

There is nothing particularly intimidating about poetry.  Like any other text, it is simply an assembly of words, put together in a way to create an image or an effect.  The only real way to understand the poem is to read it, taking it apart if necessary, and not get distracted by all the peripheral issues that can come up.  These external issues might eventually need to be addressed, but that can only come after having given careful attention to the text itself.

© 2008 Shelly Bryant