How to Begin
Although there are as many ways to "get into" a poem as there are readers of poetry, here are a few approaches which may prove useful when/if you're at a loss.
1. After a first reading, what overall emotional effect does the poem leave you with? Looking back at the poem, what images, sounds, and concepts in the poem seem tohave helped create that effect? Do other aspects of the poems confirm, complicate, or contradict those effects?
2. What particular images, phrases, or sounds/rhythms in the poem stand out for you? Ask yourself what they might be "doing" in the poem: What ideas and emotions do they suggest? Do they seem to form a pattern with other images/phrases, or sounds/rhythms? Does one aspect of the poem seem to contradict another? Can you fit your answers to these sorts of questions into any kind of overall sense of what the poem might mean?
3. Begin with the "story" the poem tells (of course, some poems tell more of a story than others!). What themes or meanings does this narrative suggest? How do the specific details of the story -- word choice, repetition, rhyme, images, etc. -- contribute to, complicate, or contradict the overall narrative?
NOTE: Remember that the speaker of the poem should not always be equated with the poet. Sometimes poets create speakers quite different from themselves (see Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" for a good example), and the poems ask us (the readers) to form certain opinions about the speakers.
Even when the speaker seems more closely patterned on the poet him/herself, we don't always have to believe everything the speaker says. (See Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," where many readers see the speaker as grief-stricken by the loss of her lover even though her words deny this grief on the surface.) Our realization that speakers are complex and not always completely reliable should play a part in interpreting some poems.
What to Do with Your Initial Interpretation
Once you have a place to begin, a basic idea of something the poem might mean, it's time to go back through the poem and "test" your "hypothesis." (If you balk at such scientific terminology, look at this process as confirming or complicating your initial intuition).
Every image, word choice, and line break of the poem contributes to its overall effect and meaning. Therefore, your final interpretation should be able to account for as many aspects and parts of the poem as possible. See how many of the aspects and parts which you identify fit with your initial sense of what the poem means.
When you find images, ideas, etc., in the poem that seem to contradict your initial idea, don't despair! This is actually a good sign, indicating that you are working toward a more complex and rich reading of the poem. But what do you do when this happens? Usually, one of two things.
Sometimes, this conflicting "evidence" will lead you to question and dramatically change your initial interpretation. You should consider taking this step if too many aspects of the poem seem to contradict your idea too definitively. For example, in Rilke's "The Panther" (see Robert Bly's translation in particular), I would argue that an interpretation that initially sees the panther as dying at the end should be changed in this major way. One reason is that the sentence structure of the last line clearly indicates that it is the "shape," and not the panther, that dies. Another is that the poem doesn't anywhere suggest how or why he dies (unless we surmise that he wastes away from lack of freedom). And finally, the rest of the poem seems to be lamenting the panther's captivity, stressing how confined and limited he is compared to his natural, unimprisoned state. By ending with the image of the panther forgetting his captivity for a split second, only to swiftly remember it and stifle his urge to jump, the poem further emphasizes the pathos of his unnatural, confined state. Interpreting the ending as his death would bring in a new sort of theme -- perhaps even a release from his miserable state.
In other cases, you may decide to adapt your initial interpretation less dramatically, retaining its major points, but changing minor ones so that the conflicting evidence is taken into account. For example, let's say you read William Carlos Williams' poem "Nantucket" as evoking that sense of promise and anticipation which we often feel when entering a hotel room on vacation:
The clean-smelling room, the downturned glass, and the freshly made bed all say they are waiting for you; they invite you to use and enjoy them. The white curtains frame the picture of flowers outside the window into a post-card-like image, making them seem even more beautiful.
But wait! What if you see the key as possibly symbolizing exclusion? Your initial interpretation didn't account for the key, and the idea of exclusion doesn't fit with the rest of your initial impression. However, you can account for the key differently, in a way which supports and even richens your initial interpretation:
This key is to the room the speaker is describing, and it represents temporary possession of that room. By giving the speaker the ability to lock -- and unlock -- the door (and, while excluding others, assure her own privacy), this key is yet another invitation to possess and use the fresh, clean room she sees before her.
How to Handle the Fear that Someone Might Disagree with You
Usually this fear grows out of a lack of confidence in your ability to interpret a poem. In part, you can allay this fear by working through your interpretation carefully, reading the poem a number of times and revising your interpretation to account for the new things you notice each time you read it. You can also get better at interpreting poems -- that is, more adept at reading the "clues" in the poem and more creative at fitting your different ideas about a poem together -- by practicing and discussing your interpretations with others. And, by learning the way people usually talk about poetry, you can learn to present your ideas in a way which will give you credibility with your listeners/readers.
However, there will still always be people who disagree with you! And this is not necessarily a problem. In order to have your interpretation accepted by the community of people who dominate the reading and interpretation of poetry, you will have to conform to certain ways of reading a poem. Nevertheless, most poems allow for a variety of acceptable interpretations. A good example is William Wordsworth's "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal":
A slumber did my spirit seal,
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Most critics agree on some basic points about this poem. For example, they see a basic contrast between the two stanzas: the first expresses the speaker's attitude while his beloved was alive, while the second expresses his attitude after she has died. They see his "slumber" not as a literal sleep, but as his lack of awareness that his beloved was mortal and that she would die (" . . . feel the touch of earthly years"). The second stanza, most critics agree, reveals the speaker's "awakened" perception that, after her death, his beloved is subsumed into the forces of nature. However, critics' interpretation of the speaker's attitude toward his beloved's reintegration into the natural world are sharply conflicting.
In Cleanth Brooks' interpretation of this poem, the speaker first feels his beloved is something immune from "the touch of earthly years," yet in the second stanza, she is touched -- and held -- by earthly time. The speaker is only awakened from his unnatural slumber by another metaphoric slumber -- that which which seals his beloved's spirit in death. Brooks claims that this "pattern of thrust and counterthrust" expresses the speaker's shock at his beloved's utter and horrible lifelessness and inertness. (You can find Brooks' interpretation in "Irony as a Principle of Structure," in Literary Opinion in America, ed. M.D. Sabel, New York: Harper & Row, l951.)
However, other critic disagree that the second stanza expresses the speaker's shock and horror at his beloved's fate. According to F.W. Bateson, this poem -- and especially the last two lines, expresses the speaker's sense of pantheistic magnificence. In other words, he is comforted by the idea that his beloved is now part of the beautiful, even holy, "course" of nature. (Bateson's interpretation is in his book English Poetry: A Critical Introduction, New York: Barnes and Noble, l950.)
Both critics make strong cases for their interpretations, arguing based on the images, ideas, words, and sounds/rhythms in the poem. Because every interpretation is, in some sense, an argument, you, like these critics, should explain/justify all aspects of your interpretation in some way. Still other critics use the context of Wordsworth's other poems to back up their interpretations -- for example, David Ferry, who basically agrees with Bateson about the pantheism of the second stanza, bases his reading on his sense that Wordsworth's other poems depict a constant search for some way to unify humans and nature. If you have this context for a particular poem, it can be a good guide when you're trying to decide between several interpretations which all seem justified based on the poem itself. (XXXXXXXXXX)
And what about basing your interpretation on the poet's life? This is a trickier form of "evidence," and we'll talk more about it later on in the quarter. Certainly, well-respected critics do know and use facts about poets' lives to interpret poetry. However, beware of trying to figure out "what the poet meant." It is a fruitless task, even if you can actually ask the poet him/herself , because no writer consciously intends everything his/her work can be interpreted to mean. Nonetheless, we can use our knowledge of poets' lives as overall guides for interpretation without trying to claim we know what the poet intended by every minute aspect of the poem. For example, in reading "The Dark Night," it helps to know that the author, St. John of the Cross, was a Spanish mystic. This knowledge alerts us to other clues in the poem that the "lover" the speaker encounters is God rather than a human being. Such other clues could include the final lines, " . . . I went free,/ left all my cares behind/ among the lilies falling in and out of mind " (emphasis added). Combined with the knowledge that the poet is a saint and a mystic, these lines suggest that the speaker's encounter with the lover is not a literal, physical encounter, but rather a spiritual one which takes place in the mind or spirit, not the body.