Do not ask me to analyse poetry

I was sitting in an English class once and we were analysing Poetry, as you do in a class of English. I was humbled with the notable importance of Poetry. But you see I do not know how to analyse the techniques in Poetry? And I’m not quite sure the Poets do either? Poetry is anything but words; anything but a string of metaphors, similes, personification, assonance; perfectly concocted to appeal to the aesthetics, easily digestible, pleasing to the ears, a low hum of “ooos” and “aahs.”

I believe Poetry is a living, breathing entity, a bleeding heart, a pulsing vein, a whimper yearning to be heard, a voice screaming in your face,

>>DO NOT READ ME<<

FEEL ME!

I just used a metaphor but I am too far down the rabbit hole to articulate why. And I suppose the reflection that follows this discussion on the absurdity of analysing poetry will come to be rather ironic, or disingenuous. Let me try to explain:

My blotchy black BIC pen bleeds black blood. I could take the ink from my veins and spread the red ink on the page and it would be much the same.

You think I am the one writing the words in my poems? I don’t think so, when silence entraps my every solemn thought, when melanchole flies interstate and settles in the space of my body, the poems get out their notebooks and pens and begin to write themselves.

You see, everything in life has a formula, a set of rules, a range of ins-and-outs with manual instructions to achieve a particular result. Like Mathematics, while I still don’t get it, I know there is an answer for everything. Everything can be solved, straight forward, eh?

I suppose it is not as black-or-white...

Poetry, however, is an expression of the unknown. It is a slow unravelling of everything in our spirits we are too afraid to face. It is burnt coffee trickling down the railings of treehouses in secluded islands. Death and death before dying.

It does not make sense? It does not make sense. I hear this statement from my brother, who does not write nor care for poetry. Of course it doesn’t make sense! That is the point. Humans are a product of entangled synapses and vibrations evolving from primitive animals to beings with a deep unknown essence buried within them. What better way to express all in life we do not understand than with poetry?

This article is not to discredit the analysis of poetry, but rather a suggestion to approach it more with our hearts than heads, being mindful of our innate emotional responses to a poem before shoving it under a microscope. Analysis provides intellectual insight,

But it cannot be used as a formular, a set of rules, a range of ins-and-outs with manual instructions to achieve this insight spiritually.