Anyone want to give a shot at a line by line analysis of this one!

Here from the start, from our first of days, look:
I have carved our lives in secret on this stick
of mountain mahogany the length of your arms
outstretched, the wood clear red, so hard and rare.
It is time to touch and handle what we know we share.

Near the butt, this intricate notch where the grains
converge and join: it is our wedding.
I can read it through with a thumb and tell you now
who danced, who made up the songs, who meant us joy.
These little arrowheads along the grain,
they are the births of our children. See,
they make a kind of design with these heavy crosses,
the deaths of our parents, the loss of friends.

Over it all, as it goes, of course, I
have chiseled Events, History--random
hashmarks cut against the swirling grain.
See, here is the Year the World Went Wrong,
we thought, and here the days the Great Men fell.
The lengthening runes of our lives run through it all.

See, our tally stick is whittled nearly end to end;
delicate as scrimshaw, it would not bear you up.
Regrets have polished it, hand over hand.
Yet, let us take it up, and as our fingers
like children leading on a trail cry back
our unforgotten wonders, sign after sign,
we will talk softly as of ordinary matters,
and in one another's blameless eyes go blind.

Found this when looking back at a few posts from before I got back into Emule. Not surprised you got no response at the time.

Gomer, I hope by now you have progressed to higher and better ways of appreciating poetry than "line by line analysis". Except where the text is so difficult that each line needs translating (e.g. some of Chaucer), it's a dumb task designed, I suspect, by brain-dead educational bureaucrats who hate poetry and hate students. Particularly inappropriate for a poem with so much enjambment as "The Tally Stick". Akin to being assessed for your grades by surgical dissection.

Poetry assessment requires a more holistic approach. Start off with general questions. What's the poem about? How easy or difficult is it to understand? What do you particularly like or dislike about it? On your scale of enjoyability, how do you rate it from 1 to 10? What is there special or unusual about it? What feelings, or ideas, or mental pictures does it evoke? Does it seem poetic enough to justify being written as a poem, or do you think the author could just as well have written the words as prose?

Don't worry about the answers being 'right' or 'wrong'. You are really assessing how the poem impacts you. You are the only one who can give the right answers to that.

Then you may go on to identify the presence or absence of particular features or techniques that help make that impact. For instance, title choice, rhyme, rhythm, symbols, metaphor, stanza shape, line lengths, word choice, alliteration, onomatopoeia. Maybe in your poetry analysis class you have been given a list of such features to check. Treat that as just a check list. It may include something significant you would otherwise have overlooked. By all means, for general knowledge, learn the jargon and what every listed item means. But don't assume that they are all of equal importance for every poem. Out of respect for the poem and the poet, be discriminating.

Another necessity to show such respect is to take care over spelling. Spelling does matter with poetry, because part of what gives words their poetic impact is their shape. If the typo gremlin leaves his droppings in your text, clean them up when discovered.

This particular poem has been mentioned before in Emule, as can be found by entering the correctly spelled title in the search function, but without much comment.

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If you are still around, Gomer, how about having a go at analysing it using the approach I have suggested above?

Ian

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 03/03/2008 06:32PM by IanAKB.