Do first impressions count?

When reading a poem, do first impressions count? Did you like your favorite poems the first time you read them, or did they grow on you through repeated efforts at interpretation?

The reason I ask is that many of the books I have read about poetry appreciation suggest that close study is the way to get the most out of the poem; yet it seems hard to do that if you didn't find anything to appreciate in the poem in the first place.

What are your experiences?

I think one great favorite "The Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner" grew on me. I didnʻt dislike it
at first reading, but I donʻt remember saying
"Wow!" either.
By the time we took it up in high school,
(junior year), I was very familiar with it. We got to
it so near the end of the year, that there wasnʻt
time to hear it discussed and interpreted, A big
disappointment.

Trying to put my thoughts in writing on this I found myself arguing round in circles and I had to scrap this post and start again (twice, now). This is the best I can work it out:

I know that apparently bland poems have yielded unexpected quality to me upon close reading.

I had to ask myself why I would give close attention to such a poem in the first place. The major answer to that is that I'd have read and appreciated poems by the same poet, so I'm slowly working my way through the rest.

That begged the question of how I got to that poet in the first place. The answer to that is pretty much random chance - someone's recommended them or one of their poems online or in print, or my interest has been piqued by some reference to one or the other. How did that translate into actually reading the stuff? I can't avoid saying it - I superficially read a small handful of their poems and one or two 'grabbed' me.

So, for me at any rate, first impressions of a poem count very much - when it comes to finding new poets to read. It seems a rather unsatisfactory process, but how else am I to find new poets? I mean, personal taste comes into it as much as the quality of the poetry so only a small percentage of what I find is going to interest me - the rest is going to be divided between what I think bad and good stuff that has no personal interest for me. Bearing that in mind, I really couldn't be doing with investing the time for a close study of handfuls of poems by each name on a lengthy list (and, of course, there are millions of poets out there).

I'd like to think that once I'd got a 'Collected ...' by a particular poet the importance of first impressions would cease to be, but I know in my heart that isn't true - how many times do I skim through a collection and let myself be grabbed by a poem at random - by the sound of a few opening lines?

At the risk of stating the obvious, it's like everything else in life: you decide how much effort you're going to put in based on your estimate of what you're likely to get out of it. If a poem grabs your attention at first glance, then you're in the ideal situation of a small investment and an almost certain return; if it doesn't, then you probably leave it aside unless you have some other strong indication that it will be worth your while - that might be a recommendation from someone you trust, prior knowledge of the poet's work, the knowledge that you're going to have to write an essay about it, a hint in the title or the words used in the poem that it's addressing a subject you're especially interested in, or whatever...

I don't know what specifically a poem has to have to grab me on a first impression. Something unexpected, probably. An image that stops me in my tracks and makes me look again at the line and wonder what it could mean.

Thanks for the replies; they were thoughtful and very much appreciated. It helps to understand how other people thin about this. It seems to work in a similar way to other art, (movies, music, paintings, etc). You start with something you found you liked and then move on to others by the same artist, and others related to the artist in some way, or recommended as similar by friend (or machine these days).

But that process doesn't work if you don't have an 'on ramp'. Finding an 'on ramp' can be hard. Some people I know won't drive on freeways. Some experience in the past put them off, and now no amount of extolling the virtues of freeway driving will make them change their minds. I think the way schools taught (and maybe teach) poetry has a similar effect. The same things happens with reading any fiction. I wonder what differentiates those who manage to perserve from those who can't.

>5 rrp: Further thoughts:
- Small children usually enjoy verse enormously without needing to be taught "poetry appreciation" - why do we get so scared of verse we suspect of harbouring grown-up ideas? Could it be something to do with the transition from oral to written transmission? (I'm sure that there are piles of books about this topic...)
- I think you might get a lot further with bicycle metaphors than with cars... ("poetry is like riding a bicycle: great fun until you get a puncture...)

"poetry is like riding a bicycle: it makes you invisible to 95% of other road users"
"poetry is like riding a bicycle: the people with the snazziest gear never get any further than the nearest tea-shop"
"poetry is like riding a bicycle: the more effort you put in, the more quickly you get tired"

>3 alaudacorax: I know that apparently bland poems have yielded unexpected quality to me upon close reading.

There is also the fact that poetry, like any literature, is always meant to be a conversation with the reader. It's not like a traffic sign, telling you when to stop and when not to turn right, and nothing else. It wants to make an impression on you. And if it does, then it follows it has changed you in some way, made you see the world a little differently. And you might therefore see that poem a little differently the next time you read it.

Books may never change their text, but their readers are constantly evolving. We're never the exact same person each time we pick up a book. So that first impression is the ice breaker, the opening salvo in the conversation. And if we never get anything new from a poem, it is possibly not a very good poem.

>6 thorold:

Small children do like poetry, and adults who read poetry to them like those poems too.

I am struck by the contrast with fiction. Many children progress through levels of fiction to be enthusiastic readers of fiction when they are adults. There seems to be a smooth transition of suitable books which can lead them along that path. But, unless I missed it, there doesn't seem to be a similar transition in poetry. Very few adults are enthusiastic readers of poetry.

Perhaps the distinction is that the only poetry that gets attention is off one sort, the "high brow" literary sort. Not many reader of fiction are enthusiastic readers of "high brow" fiction either. How many have read Ulysses all the way to the end? Modern poetry seems to be too like Ulysses, the "low brow" guilty pleasure stuff is missing.1

ETA. 1 Well not entirely

http://pamayres.com/index.php/category/poems/

>9 rrp:

If you look, there's plenty of good, funny, approachable verse around. For every Pam Ayres there's also a Ben Zephania or a Wendy Cope. Or a Betjeman or a Larkin, if you want to go a decade or four back to when Pam Ayres was really popular...
But there doesn't seem to be the same market for comfort-reading in poetry as there is in prose, apart from books aimed at kids.

>10 thorold:

Plenty? I am not so sure. I looked up some stuff by Wendy Cope; ne'er a smirk let alone a chuckle.

But that wasn't my main point really. If first impressions count, then it's not really surprising that so few people enjoy adult poetry despite the fact they all did as children. There isn't a continuity of poems that children can like at first impression as they grow from children to adults. There seems to be a large gap.

I think most people who like to read as adults do so despite the fact they were taught literature at school, not because. They read now because they read when they were children and enjoyed it. And they found enjoyable things to read at every age. Not so with poetry is my hypothesis.

>11 rrp:
Perhaps, but I think there's more to it than finding enjoyable things to read. People tend to react very positively when you bring poems into their lives (e.g. the famous and much-copied Poems on the Underground project, also things like poets in the workplace, or stray poems that appear in the gaps of newspapers or radio shows), and a surprising number of people are prepared to have a go at writing poems themselves, but they don't often take the further step of going out to look for new poetry to consume. (I can never remember if it's Eating people is wrong or Lucky Jim, but in one of the two there's a splendid comic account of a poetry-group meeting where the visiting poet is asked what he thinks is the biggest problem with English poetry - he replies "There are more people writing it than reading it".)

One hurdle is obviously the oral/written divide we mentioned earlier, but if it were just that then you would expect poetry audiobooks to be popular, which doesn't seem to be the case. There must be some kind of cultural (or marketing?) hurdle that makes it difficult for us to visualise ourselves relaxing in an armchair with a poetry book.

>11 rrp: I think most people who like to read as adults do so despite the fact they were taught literature at school, not because.

It's fashionable to say so, but is there really any evidence of this?

>13 southernbooklady:

Only anecdotal. It was certainly true for me. I hated English literature at school; and it wasn't because the teachers were bad. They were excellent, and I liked them. I just couldn't get what it was they wanted me to do. It was my worst subject by far.

But I read a lot of books, fiction and non-fiction, then and do now. I had friends that studied English at college who would give me books from their courses that I read and enjoyed (e.g. Tristam Shandy). It was just the formal teaching part of it that put me off.

I ask because working in the book industry, my anecdotal evidence would be that the people who love to read learn it from their parents, first, or failing that, from some beloved and influential teacher, second. Indeed, if their homelife was such that they needed an escape, then the person who ushered them into the world of literature was usually a teacher or a librarian.

Good point. My mother read to me as a child. My father always had his head in a book (when he wasn't listening to the story). I had one elementary school teacher who would read good books to us, a bit each day, at age 10. I was fortunate.

But then we got to High School and they took all the fun out of it.

>11 rrp: people who like to read as adults do so despite the fact they were taught literature at school, not because
>13 southernbooklady: is there really any evidence of this?

Drifting off-topic, but this is said so often that it really would be interesting to dig a bit deeper into it. Why does the teaching of literature get so much stick? You never hear people saying that they don't practice chemistry, woodwork, cookery, sport, safe sex or foreign languages because school put them off it (religion might be an exception - you do sometimes hear things like "I used to be believe in God but the nuns beat it out of me...").

Normally we seem to be able to accept that we had to endure some tedious hours in the classroom in order to learn skills that later might or might not turn out to be useful (I still encounter French irregular verbs every day, but it's a long time since I've had to integrate a trig function), but somehow the skill set we use for analysing literary texts isn't appreciated...

>17 thorold:

I think it's a temperamental thing. At school we are taught "know what" things and "know how" things. Most subjects are a mix of both. History is mostly "know what" (no one is really taught how to do history). Foreign languages lean towards "know how". English language education leans the same way, to know how to express yourself well in the English language, which is clearly useful in an English speaking world.

English literature, as in analysing literary texts, seems to be know how too, but unlike woodwork, cookery, sport, safe sex or foreign languages, seems to have no practical application outside of school unless you are going to be a teacher of English literature analysis. Maybe what I am missing is an appreciation of the usefulness of literature analysis in anyone's daily life.

>17 thorold:
Drifting off-topic, but this is said so often that it really would be interesting to dig a bit deeper into it. Why does the teaching of literature get so much stick?

History, too. Also, "I'm never going to use this in real life" is a common trope in math classes. But I have a feeling that part of the problem with literature is a conflict of expectations -- to appreciate it you have to learn to think critically about it. But to get a good grade on a test, school systems usually demand some kind of regurgitation of the material, since that is easier to test for.

>18 rrp: Maybe what I am missing is an appreciation of the usefulness of literature analysis in anyone's daily life.

...when what you are doing at this very moment is reading a text critically!

>11 rrp:, >13 southernbooklady:, >17 thorold:

I am one of those people who like to read despite the fact they were taught literature at school, not because. I absolutely hated every single English/Lit class I have ever had. I was only in those classes because they were required. In fact, in high school the head of the English department tried to recruit me for an Advanced Placement literature course because I got a perfect score on the verbal portion of the SAT. I refused and I told her point blank she could sign me up over my dead body.

For me, the main problem was the books that were assigned. Literature classes are not about learning to find joy in reading. I did value the critical reading skills I learned, even when I was young, and would use them when discussing the books my friends were reading. (If I had a free period I would crash my friends' literature classes if they were reading something that seemed interesting.) However, I was assigned an endless stream of depressing books. It began in 3rd grade with My Brother Sam is Dead and Black Beauty particularly, which were both traumatizing to me, followed by The Pearl and Of Mice and Men in 4th grade (the latter of which I was assigned no fewer than 4 times over the course of my school years.) I ended up staying away from fiction for years.

My second problem was writing about the books we read. "Life sucks and then you die," was never considered an appropriate topic for a paper, no matter how many times I tried to convince my teachers otherwise. And I would get repeatedly get told off for putting too many mathematical graphs in my essays. Eventually I just stopped reading the books and made up stuff that I thought they'd want to hear which worked out much better for me than actually reading the assigned books and saying what I thought.

But circling back to what >17 thorold: said, about how this doesn't seem to happen in the other subjects, it did for me with earth science. When I was very young I had a strong interest in earth science and mineralogy and wanted to be a geologist. I would examine the diagrams of the physical structures and the chemical compounds in my books and in the encyclopedia trying to correlate and make connections. The American Museum of Natural History had a great exhibit and I looked forward to the day I would learn enough to understand it all. I didn't understand the physics and chemistry yet, but that was part of why it was so interesting! I was very excited all throughout my childhood until I was actually in an Earth Science class in 7th grade.

The class was utterly awful, and it was taught by the worst teacher I've ever had (who I was stuck with for 2 years and several other subjects too). It killed every bit of passion I ever had for it. It's hard to even articulate how it happened, but "the nun beat it out of me" is pretty apt here. To this day she and that class are the only things I can think of when I see a rock, or a crystal structure, or a mountain. I feel my education moved retrograde that year and ended with me knowing less than when I began. Ugh.

>21 macsbrains: The class was utterly awful, and it was taught by the worst teacher I've ever had

There is probably a high correlation between the terribleness of the teacher and and the awfulness of the class. In high school the best teacher I had was Ms. Tepas, who taught math. The two worst were English and Art - both taught by men that now with the benefit of hindsight I can see were working their own personal problems out on their students. I still went on to love art and english and literature, but I also learned to see the beauty in math, and that was down to Ms. Tepas.

It's worth noting, though, that school system -- the structure of the classes, what was taught and when and how -- the curriculum itself, was also a victim of those terrible teachers. In the hands of a great or even just a good teacher, it was fine. Even fun.

Varied, but first impressions count a great deal. I once hear Yvegny Yvshentko (sp?!) recite a poem about being alone in Central Park at night and it's been one of my favorite poems ever since.

>20 thorold:

I am not entirely clear on what is the definition of "reading a text critically", but I am fairly sure that this thread isn't literature.

I think "reading a text critically" is the same thing as what we used to call "comprehension", but maybe I'm wrong. There seems to me two bits to this.

1. Do I understand what the author meant or has the author succeeded in conveying the intended meaning to me?

2. If the author was trying to persuade me of something, do I find the argument sound? If the author was telling a story, do I find the story coherent?

Maybe 2 is the "critically" bit? Please could anyone correct me if I have this all wrong.

>21 macsbrains:

I my case, I had very good English teachers and I liked them. I just didn't like being taught English literature. I enjoyed the books, I didn't like having to analyze and write about them.

>19 southernbooklady:

Along the same lines, you said "But I have a feeling that part of the problem with literature is a conflict of expectations -- to appreciate it you have to learn to think critically about it." I strongly disagree that to appreciate literature you have to learn to think critically about it. For me, thinking critically about it ruins the enjoyment of reading it.

>25 rrp: I strongly disagree that to appreciate literature you have to learn to think critically about it. For me, thinking critically about it ruins the enjoyment of reading it.

Well, "appreciate" is a qualitatively different experience from "enjoy." I enjoy meals that my mother cooks because they taste good -- she is an excellent cook. I appreciate them, though, because having learned to cook myself, I now understand better what goes in to making them so good.

>26 southernbooklady:

That I know how sausages are made only detracts from my appreciation of them.

OK. There are nuanced differences between "enjoy" and "appreciate"; I find pleasure in something I enjoy, I am grateful for and value something I appreciate. But when I did a Venn diagram in my head I found it hard to populate the "enjoy but not appreciate" category (things I am insufficiently grateful for?) and the "appreciate but not enjoy" category (trash cans?).

I can accept that, for some people, thinking critically about literature enhances their appreciation, but that is not true of all people and certainly not me. For me, thinking critically about literature ruins my appreciation of it. Just like sausages.

>27 rrp: But when I did a Venn diagram in my head I found it hard to populate the "enjoy but not appreciate" category (things I am insufficiently grateful for?

Junk food.

and the "appreciate but not enjoy" category (trash cans?).

Indoor plumbing.

>27 rrp: >28 southernbooklady: Hmm. Paul Valéry obviously missed a trick when he said poetry was like dancing: if he'd thought of the sausage analogy, it would have made undergraduate essays so much more fun to write...

How about this? - Knowing how sausages are made might discourage you from eating them, but in that case it will most likely direct you towards eating something else that will give you pleasure in more interesting, complicated ways than the sausage does.

>29 thorold:

Well this sort of gets back to what I was asking in the OP. First impressions count. When you are young, you snack on a sausage and it's an enjoyable experience. As you get older and wiser, you learn how sausages are made, which may, or may not, put you off eating sausages. Never mind, you have gradually been weaned off food suitable for children and now appreciate food that's more interesting and complicated (neglecting the infrequent lapses into snacking on junk food.)

But a child will pull a face if she has to eat gourmet food. And an adult too perhaps, if they have not been brought to it in slow occasional steps. Those first impressions count; they will be put off gourmet food.

What's the program of slow incremental steps that will take the unappreciative adult to an appreciation of poetry?

>30 rrp: What's the program of slow incremental steps that will take the unappreciative adult to an appreciation of poetry?


Step 1. The cultivation of a habit of curiosity.
Step 2. The willingness to keep an open mind.
Step 3. The realization that "different" does not mean "bad."

>31 southernbooklady:

Let's be charitable and assume that everyone here has taken those steps (here as in this thread; some other active threads not so much.) What next?

What's the progression in small easy steps that will take one from Dr Seuss to Sylvia Plath?

>32 rrp: Well, I suppose I think "appreciation" is an active process, not a static one. Likewise, "an open mind" is not really a stationary vessel waiting for something to fill it, but me being in the active pursuit of filling it. When I come across something I'm unfamiliar with, be it music, poetry, art, (and other things -- languages, cultures, sciences, cuisines etc, etc) then whatever my immediate visceral response, I have to remind myself that I have an uninformed opinion. My opinion is of limited value because I might, probably don't, know what I'm talking about. It's the kind of thing most obvious in art that we react to emotionally -- like music -- or in our concept of "beauty" which is largely culturally defined.

So "understanding" something is key for me to appreciate it and thus to like it. Of course, it is possible that understanding will reinforce my initial feeling that I don't like something. But at least I will know why I do or don't like it.

How does someone with an open mind learn to appreciate poetry? By reading poetry, I guess. And reading what others say about poetry. And then reading even more poetry. It's always going to be on us to expand our own understanding of something. No one else can do it for us.

>33 rrp: You could go from Dr. Seuss to Li Qingzhao, or Dr. Seuss to Mourid Barghouti.

>30 rrp:, >31 southernbooklady:

I think hearing has to come in there somewhere. When I read a poem, in my mind I'm 'speaking' the words - quite different to when I'm reading, say, a newspaper. Somehow or other, the 'unappreciative adult' must first be got to hear poetry with pleasure - or, at least, to appreciate it's an aural not visual thing.

Edited to add: Going back to >6 thorold:, small children enjoying verse are almost certainly hearing it - being read to by parents or whoever - then, somewhere along the line, they have to learn to make the leap of imagination to hear it in the mind if there's going to be pleasure in the reading of it. I can't remember any teacher ever making that point in my schooldays (of course, I have to bear in mind my fallibility of memory).

>35 alaudacorax:

My mind just flicked back to John Hannah in Four Weddings and a Funeral - 'Stop all the Clocks'(?) - I bet hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who never read poetry enjoyed his reading, but that's very much an isolated incident. Poetry generally doesn't seem to be much of a part of mainstream media, so the general population rarely hears it (apart from rap, which is labelled as something else).

Yes, I agree with everything in >31 southernbooklady: and >34 southernbooklady: - you learn to appreciate by exploring, it helps if you have other people exploring with you and challenging your opinions, and it also helps if you have someone around to nudge you towards new things to explore and help you with the dull mechanical stuff you sometimes need to know to deal with texts from different cultures or times.

I don't think there's a golden road from nursery rhymes to grown-up poetry. Everyone has to find their own path through the things that appeal to them. Things that grabbed me when I was young were mostly 19th century narrative verse (I had an aunt who liked Longfellow, but Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll played a role too...), but I also got plenty of exposure to 17th century English through church, and to Goethe, Schiller and Wilhelm Busch from the German side of the family. Then I suppose I went on to discovering Yeats, Auden, Eliot with schoolfriends in my teens, so I didn't really start reading contemporary poets much until I'd gone through big (if rather random) chunks of what came before. If I'd had a plan, I'm sure I wouldn't have picked the historical approach, but that was how it worked out for me.

>35 alaudacorax: I think hearing has to come in there somewhere. When I read a poem, in my mind I'm 'speaking' the words - quite different to when I'm reading, say, a newspaper.

For some poetry, absolutely. I think I mentioned on these fora here somewhere that as a teenager, my appreciation for Poe's "The Bells" was wholly founded on seeing a performance of it, and actually hearing the ringing intonations of the repetitive words and sounds. Poetry has never really removed itself from its sing song beginnings.

But in a print era it is also visual, in deed some poets seem to push the possibilities of print. "White space" becomes as solid and integral an element as the words it surrounds. It isn't easily converted to sound, to a "silence" between words.

>34 southernbooklady:

I am not sure of the distinction between an "active" and "static" process in this sense. I agree that something unfamiliar that others value is worth some effort. But one has to find a way to get from where one currently is, having an uniformed opinion, to a level of understanding. That is difficult to if you can't find a way in, a place to get some initial traction.

I looked up Li Qingzhao and Mourid Barghouti. They are many years apart, but both translated into English. They both seem a long way from Dr. Seuss. Why did you suggest them?

>37 thorold: and >36 alaudacorax:

I had thought of starting, not at Dr Seuss but at Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. But again there seems to be a large gap between Carroll and Auden, let alone Eliot. Although there are some poems of Auden's that are approachable, including "Stop all the Clocks". I have long appreciated (am I allowed to say that) "The Night Mail". (For those in the US, I discovered that the movie airs on TCM tonight at 11:15pm. Now how to work out how to record it as I am remote from home.)

But some of Auden's other poems seem less approachable. "September 1st, 1939" for example. It got a lot of play around 9-11, but it's harder to appreciate.

So where does one go next from "Stop all the Clocks" and "The Night Mail"?

>39 rrp: I looked up Li Qingzhao and Mourid Barghouti. They are many years apart, but both translated into English. They both seem a long way from Dr. Seuss. Why did you suggest them?

Because they come from different cultures, different times, and write in different languages. And yet, it is perfectly possible to walk a path in the pursuit of the enjoyment of poetry that leads to either of them.

>41 southernbooklady:

Sure, I can seem them both as a destination. But as the next step?

They weren't offered as a next step. They were posited as an alternative destination to Sylvia Plath. The point is the "destination" depends on the steps a journey takes. And it is rarely actually a destination. It's usually just one encounter among many.

>43 southernbooklady:

Fair enough. There are many possible destinations. Every journey starts with a single step. But, it seems, due to the dearth of suggestions, there are few possible directions in which that single step could be taken. In each direction a chasm lies with no bridge to cross it.

>44 rrp: But, it seems, due to the dearth of suggestions, there are few possible directions in which that single step could be taken. In each direction a chasm lies with no bridge to cross it.

Just the opposite. Any step, in any direction, can lead to any destination. Depends on your own inclinations.

Consider Li Qingzhao. I did not wake up one morning and say to myself, "I am going to learn about women classical Chinese poets." I had never heard of her until last year. What did happen, instead, was that I was reading a collection of short stories called Hall of Small Mammals written by Thomas Pierce. I loved the book, so when an interview with the author showed up on one of my social media sites, I clicked and read it. Pierce was asked, as authors often are, about the books that were most important/influential for him. One of the books he listed sounded interesting to me -- Straw for the Fire -- a collection of scattered musings and thoughts and poem fragments from Theodore Roethke. It's the kind of book that you can open to any page and something will catch your eye:

Walkers at evening pause
Before the exhaling garden,
Giving the flowers their due,
In the oncoming darkness.

or...

Shaken loose, like milkweed on the wind,
Sure of its crevice,
Or the root of a blackened stem, still linked with life.

So then I started looking for Roethke, whose work, as you can imagine, is often anthologized. And thus, in one of those anthologies -- best nature poems? great american poems?, I found not only Roethke, but in the pages right next to him, the poet Kenneth Rexroth -- whom he knew. People who know about these things find many parallels in the works between the two. Rexroth also writes lovely nature poetry, and erotic love poetry, and he happens to be a well known translator of classic Japanese and Chinese poetry. And thus, I found in my hands a copy of Complete Poems of Li Ch’ing-Chao -- whose work he was determined to bring to an English speaking audience. It is beautiful poetry by the sequestered wife of a mid-level bureaucrat in the Song dynasty who misses her husband when he is sent abroad on government business, and mourns him when he dies.

Most of my reading progresses in this fashion. Books lead me to other books. Writers to other writers. So that first step towards Li Qingzhao? Shall I suggest you read Thomas Pierce's Hall of Small Mammals?

>1 rrp: Yes, I think first impressions do count. Although I have found that if you re-read a poem often it can take on a deeper meaning, or sometimes quite the reverse. Most poetry is much better read aloud and shared in a group setting.

>45 southernbooklady:

Thank you for the book recommendation. I'll give it a go, although it doesn't look my sort of thing. (Some reviewers commented on it's lack of plot structure and that the endings were ambiguous.)

But reading your post caused me to remember one problem I have with poems. If I ever come across poem in normal text, like your post, my first inclination is to skip over them as I know they won't make much sense. I did that with your post, then slapped myself and went back and read them slowly and carefully, twice. Unfortunately that didn't help much as my appreciation was un-enhanced. I know you said they were fragments, but was there any other context to help comprehension?

>47 rrp: I know you said they were fragments, but was there any other context to help comprehension?

You know, that Venus di Milo statue would be gorgeous if it wasn't missing the arms. :-)

>48 southernbooklady:

Did someone remove the arms deliberately? I am shocked!

>40 rrp:
Possibly you already know about this, but just in case you don't, you might be interested in http://www.poetryarchive.org where you can see the text together with the audio of the poet's own reading. They usually have links to related poems on their pages as well, so you can be sucked in for hours...
Try Auden's "One evening" - more love and clocks!

>49 rrp:
It wasn't so long ago that we were all talking about arms limitation...

>50 thorold:

Thanks for the link. I have found a number of other sites that are similar.

As to "One evening", I am afraid that if first impressions count, I am not optimistic. It's depressing. The rhythm and rhyme seemed clunky. It's full of wacky concepts (singing fish, folded oceans, divers with bows). It has obscure cultural references (who are the Flower of Ages and the Lily White Boy? What is a Roarer?) It doesn't make much sense at all.

>51 rrp: "One evening" - I suppose Auden is being a little bit disingenuous when he says in his spoken introduction that it needs no explanation...

I was drawn into this one on a first reading, intrigued by the way he sets up the two songs which express incredibly overfamiliar but contradictory ideas - "love is eternal" vs. "you can't stop time" - and then undermines both of them by using excessive numbers of over-the-top images that are all somehow comically wrong. And, as you mention, there's another disturbing disjoint between the nursery-rhyme stanza-form and rhyme-scheme that you see on paper and the unpredictable, rather elastic metre that you hear.
That made me start digging in a bit more, to see if I could make sense of the images and work out what Auden was trying to do. (Obviously you got that far as well, but then hit a wall.)

It's not a crossword puzzle, and I'm not offering any solutions, but to me it looked as though Auden was using all the folk-song/nursery-rhyme echoes to explore the slippery nature of familiar idioms that don't quite mean what we think they do.

The Flower of the Ages is the sort of expression that slips by you when you aren't paying attention - you dismiss it as a traditional poetic formula for (e.g.) the Virgin Mary - but then you realise that a flower is notoriously impermanent. What does that mean in an image that's supposed to represent eternal love? Could it even be "flower" in the Times-crossword-clue sense of thing-that-flows, i.e. river...?

Similar things happen with most of the other images. Either we can't work out what they mean, or they undermine themselves. Is the diver's bow a movement, a weapon, or an item of clothing? Is the diver an athlete, an underwater worker, or a bird, for that matter? - it occurred to me that divers (=loons in N. America) have a bow-tie like throat-marking... The further you get into the poem, the less stable it is. The Lily-White Boys seem to be some sort of expression of purity in the folksong "Green grow the rushes-o" (but that's a famously obscure song, and it's also where "the seven stars in the sky" come from) - here they are party-animals (this line is cited in the OED as a rare modern use of roarer in that sense). For that matter, Jill doesn't quite seem to be the innocent little girl she was when she went up the hill...

>52 thorold: then you realise that a flower is notoriously impermanent. What does that mean in an image that's supposed to represent eternal love?

permanence and impermanence rub shoulders throughout that poem. Even the first stanza tells you what to expect:

As I walked out one evening
Walking down Bristol Street
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat

So not only is the poem starting as the day is ending, but people here are nothing but masses soon to be harvested. One starts to think about scythes.

I like the poem. I wonder if it was ever set to music?

>53 southernbooklady: "fields of harvest wheat" - I suspect Auden of having the sort of sense of humour that would enjoy thinking of that as a corny image.

I bet there's a folk tune it would (almost but not quite) fit. Did you listen to the reading, though? Auden does his best to make it sound flat and unmusical all the way through.

>52 thorold: I suppose Auden is being a little bit disingenuous when he says in his spoken introduction that it needs no explanation

Thanks a lot for your explanations. I am not sure it moves me much further forward with the poem, but I do appreciate the effort.

It's not a crossword puzzle

The poem sure seems like a puzzle to me. Going back to the OP, this one definitely left me with a negative impression on when I first read it, and to be honest, it still seems too much of a puzzle to bother with. (I don't enjoy crossword puzzles that much either to be honest. Maybe it's my mild dyslexia and attroshious spelling (it must be so, a teacher once wrote on a paper that "my spelling was attroshious" )) To me, there seem insufficient good things about it to apply more effort to solving the puzzles.
Maybe this is a temperament thing. But that doesn't seem right somehow. Auden is a well known and widely valued poet. I wonder, do most people find this poem intriguing? Do only people who like word puzzles like poetry?