Understanding a Poem
A poet is talking to herself about her effort to reach a deeper truth in a poem. The process is painful but she keeps feeling that progress is possible and that the deeper poem is what she needs; therefore she tells herself not to ruin the effort by using some kind of pain-killers or tranquilizers (which may not be pills but psychological strategies). She tells herself not to be so worried about the pain of the poetic effort because, after all, suffering is an inextricable part of ordinary life as well as creative life.
Reach the true poem by improvised maneuvering, she advises herself—“Tease it out”—this won’t be only a matter of exerting properly learned technical skill; there will be an element of unpredictable discovery. The poet feels she should know this by now, though the open-mindedness needed for such discovery is an asset that has to keep being rediscovered. She acknowledges that the moment when she supposed her work could be accomplished via “technique” was a “professional” moment that needed to be followed by a more bravely amateur attitude.
What will help her will be a willingness to find beauty and a kind of joy in the colorful evidence of the inevitable earthly cycle of abundance and loss, like Keats meditating on autumn. The trees of autumn gain a new kind of dignity as they shed their splendidly multi-colored leaves. And so forth! This is an old lesson, a lesson recurring all our lives. We learned it as schoolkids and we have to keep re-learning it.
Meanwhile, though, the poet knows that she persistently cherishes her irrational love of doing something new amid eternal realities, getting somewhere—the “somewhere” will be the deeply true poem. So she derives hope from the freshness of metaphor—like the metaphor of our resemblance (in our writing) to ourselves as kids sensing a deep truth in fallen leaves. The hope brings courage and energy and the poet will want to use language again tomorrow to relocate this hope and try for creative progress.
Yes!
Here is the poem “Don’t Ruin It” by Mary Ann Samyn, from her book Beauty Breaks In (New Issues, 2009):
One day in August 2024 I was in a coffee shop in Columbus, Ohio, with five books of poetry, books that I had selected half-randomly from the many shelves of poetry in my house. I do this at least twice a month, hoping to discover good poems that I’ve overlooked or misunderstood or failed to appreciate. I love doing this—even though many times I’ve read poems in each of the day’s books without finding a poem to love. If I do run into a poem I can love, this is an amazing success for the day. Or if I find a few poems I can really admire and respect, this also is success. Or maybe I come upon an obscure poem and for some reason puzzle over it more open-mindedly and hopefully than I usually do with obscure poems, and I make human sense of it! This is a serious pleasure even if I continue to disapprove of the obscurity of the poem’s style. And sometimes the happiness in having understood the poem induces an affection for the poem, so that I may say—despite my strong temperamental tendency to look skeptically at poetic obscurity or cloudiness—that it is a good poem and even that I like it a lot.
Do I say that Samyn’s “Don’t Ruin It” is a good poem? Maybe! I’m not sure yet; I’m invested in it now that I’ve worked on it, so I’m biased in favor of it. This sort of bias is certainly displayed by most professors of English; having worked hard to understand a poem by Chaucer or Donne or Dryden or Shelley or Hopkins, they are very apt to declare or imply that the poem is great, while their students may sense that this advocacy arises mainly from the hard work rather than from aesthetic delight or appreciation of depth of meaning.
Unless—perhaps difficulty of interpretation is a pathway to—or a frequent element in—aesthetic enjoyment. I’m not willing to say that difficulty is a necessary quality in poetic value. We think of many poems by Wordsworth, or Whitman, or Frost—poems that at least seem immediately clear on first reading, while also seeming profound and beautiful. But all professors who teach poetry have encountered the intelligent student who hears an interpretation of a Frost poem and asks, “Why doesn’t he just say what he means if that’s what he means?” Responding to such a student, a professor is likely to speak of the marvelous beauties in rhyme and meter and diction and syntax—and the skeptical student may be partly convinced . . . Yet she or he is often right to suspect that the poet did not want to be too readily understood. The investment of labor by the reader is (often) crucial to the human interaction sought by the poet. Why doesn’t Dickinson just say what she means? Well, we can argue that what she means in a given poem is inseparable from the tortuous tangledness of the poem; but we should also admit that Dickinson wanted a reader who would at first frown in bewilderment and reread and then catch on in a series of several epiphanies. Success in circuit lies.
That is indeed a pathway to poetic power. I’ve always resisted the idea that it is the pathway, and I’ve resented poets and critics who depend entirely on estranging strangeness of language for alleged poetic power. Yet I’ve had to re-realize, hundreds or thousands of times, that there is meaningful enjoyment in the process of catching on. The enjoyment is meaningful because it evokes and imitates the enjoyment we feel—often—in getting to know a person.
That’s it: when I read a poem I want to feel that I’ve met a believable person; I want to feel that everything about the poem—including lineation and white spaces—is expressive of the interesting person (“the speaker”) who has needed to present these words in this way. I do feel that almost always when I read a Dickinson poem. It comes from a poet profoundly aware of the distances between persons, and she wants our work in interpreting her poem to be a reminder of, a metaphor for, the difficulty in crossing those distances.
And such distance can also come between aspects of a self, between voices in one’s own head. In the first four paragraphs of this essay, I’ve interpreted “Don’t Ruin It” as a poem presenting advice given by one voice in Samyn’s mind—the ambitious idealistic voice—and the responses from a more cautious but finally hopeful voice—the voice of the poet who will have to actually write the desired poem. Now as I reread “Don’t Ruin It” I feel that the meaning I’ve inferred justifies all the choices that seemed too obscure when I first encountered the poem. The white spaces between the poem’s thirteen “stanzas” (as we loosely call sets of lines surrounded by breaks) or sections suggest that we are reading a dialogue; and that this dialogue continues through many minutes, an indefinitely ongoing dialogue in Samyn’s mind. We are called on to figure out which of the two voices speaks each section. In my reading, the advising voice speaks the first four sections and the seventh; and the responding voice speaks all the other sections. But there is some ambiguity in this assigning of lines—a few at least could be construed as spoken by the other voice, without changing the basic meaning of the poem as a whole.
So, there is a catching-on process, and it involves some struggling with ambiguity; but yes, I now declare (as you anticipated!) that “Don’t Ruin It” is a good poem!
Nevertheless! Not every day am I willing to work this hard to appreciate a poem. I teach undergraduate and graduate poetry workshops at Ohio University, and very often I am saying to the students, in effect: “You want readers, don’t you? You want readers who are not your best friend. So, do more for the reader! Help the reader get with you and stay with you.” I’ve been saying versions of this for decades, and will keep on recommending as-much-clarity-as-your-meaning-will-allow. This valuing of clarity—or call it communicativeness—as a high priority is ultimately a matter less of philosophy than of personality.
Meanwhile, I am very happy to have found my way to admire Mary Ann Samyn’s poem; and I hope you don’t feel I’ve “ruined” it. Indeed I feel I’ve done the opposite.
Mark Halliday teaches in the Creative Writing program at Ohio University. His seventh book of poems, Losers Dream On, appeared in 2018 from the University of Chicago Press. A book of essays, Living Name, appeared in 2025 from LSU Press.