A Mystery That Should Remain

 

    Poetry. I love how this is the one unit that all English teachers preface with “Poetry should be fun and appreciated for its beauty and bla bla bla” before spending a solid month on dissecting every single sentence because obviously the speaker closing their front door is a symbol of being trapped and isolated from the rest of the world (or they could just be closing their front door because they just got home and it's natural to close your front door when you get home?). 

    Put simply, I don’t have anything against poetry - in fact, I find poetry fascinating. The ability to convey so many emotions and meanings through such a simple format is something that rightly deserves appreciation, but that’s where it stops. I believe that half of my awe of poetry is gone as soon as I'm forced to analyze it and the rest leaves when we have to do a Harkness on it. 

    Take my group's poem “On Beauty” as an example. The first time I read it, it was almost ethereal the way the speaker described beauty. I truly found the poem to be interesting, but as I dissected it for its meaning through my annotations, it became dull and boring. The beauty of poetry, I think, lies in its ability to remain a mystery. So, call me lazy but I would rather enjoy a poem on a surface level than have to analyze it for a meaning that we don't even know if the author intended.




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