A poem is (not) a toaster

The Guardian's Comment is Free blog has an interesting post today about "hard" vs "easy" poetry. It's a post I think students who complain about poetry in English classes should read to understand that struggling through a difficult poem is rewarding. As the author notes:

A poem can wash over us without requiring much thought and then keep us awake at night wondering about what it really means. And we only understand the full meaning when we can recognise the references and untangle the allusions.

Poems take time. They take time to write and they should take time to read. If they're good, they can be broken up into components (rhyme scheme, meter, figurative language, symbols, allusions, tone, voice, etc.) that can each be appreciated individually, but then (importantly), reassembled to form a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. If a poem can withstand that kind of analysis and scrutiny, if the threads of references can be untangled but then rewoven, if it can reveal new insights on each reading, even if the readings occur months or years apart, then it's worth the work. Much like a tinkerer who takes apart a machine to see how it works, the reader of a poem must take it apart and then try to put it back together again. The light bulb moment, the moment that meaning is created, is worth the difficulty.

Incidentally, the "stop all the clocks" poem referenced in the post was made famous by Four Weddings and a Funeral. Interesting how the film's attempt to class itself up resulted in a sullying of the poem in some critics' eyes.