The HyperTexts

"Poetry" Analysis
by the author Michael R. Burch

Topics: Form, Theme, Meaning, Tone, Diction and Literary Devices



Poetry
by Michael R. Burch

Poetry, I found you
where at last they chained and bound you;
with devices all around you
to torture and confound you,
I found you—shivering, bare.

They had shorn your raven hair
and taken both your eyes
which, once cerulean as Gogh's skies,
had leapt at dawn to wild surmise
of what was waiting there.

Your back was bent with untold care;
there savage whips had left cruel scars
as though the wounds of countless wars;
your bones were broken with the force
with which they'd lashed your flesh so fair.

You once were loveliest of all.
So many nights you held in thrall
a scrawny lad who heard your call
from where dawn’s milling showers fall—
pale meteors through sapphire air.

I learned the eagerness of youth
to temper for a lover’s touch;
I felt you, tremulant, reprove
each time I fumbled over-much.
Your merest word became my prayer.

You took me gently by the hand
and led my steps from child to man;
now I look back, remember when
you shone, and cannot understand
why now, tonight, you bear their brand.

                       ***

I will take and cradle you in my arms,
remindful of the gentle charms
you showed me once, of yore;
and I will lead you from your cell tonight
back into that incandescent light
which flows out of the core
of a sun whose robes you wore.
And I will wash your feet with tears
for all those blissful years . . .
my love, whom I adore.

Originally published by The Lyric

I consider "Poetry" to be my Ars Poetica along with "In the Whispering Night," "Finally to Burn" and "These Hallowed Halls." However, the poem has been misinterpreted to mean that the poet is claiming to be the "savior" of Poetry. The poem never claims that the poet is a savior or hero. The poem only says that when Poetry is finally freed, in some unspecified way, the poet will be there to take her hand and watch her glory be revealed once again to the world. The poet expresses love for Poetry, and gratitude, but never claims to have done anything himself. This is a poem of love, compassion and reverence. Poetry is the Messiah, not the poet. The poet washes her feet with his tears, as Mary Magdalene did the feet of her Messiah.

Form: "Poetry" is a rhymed metrical poem with an unusual or "nonce" rhyme scheme: AAAAB BCCCB BDDDB EEEEB FFFFB GGGGG HHIJJKKLLK. Some of the rhymes are slant or near rhymes, such as: scars/wars/force.

Theme: "Poetry" is a love poem, albeit a love poem for the Muse. But "Poetry" is also a prophetic poem, because it prophesies that Poetry will be restored to her former prominence and glory

Meaning: I wrote the first version of "Poetry" in my teens. I believe I started the poem in high school and worked on it my freshman year of college. The original poem was much longer. The main idea of the poem was that Erato, the goddess of lyric poetry and (in my opinion) the fairest of the nine Muses, was being abused by her jailers. Those jailers being the editors and publishers of poetry books and journals who had robbed her of the things that had made her so attractive to readers: rhythm, rhyme, clarity, accessible stories, etc.

Tone: The poem's tone can be described as somber, regretful, lamentatious, grieving, mournful, sad, concerned, compassionate, empathetic.

Poetic Diction: The poem's language is similar to that of an elegy or eulogy: formal, reserved, reverential.

Literary Devices: The poem's primary literary device is an extended metaphor in which the plight of Poetry is compared to that of a prison inmate who has been chained, bound and tortured. The poem also employs personification, imagery, meter and rhyme. The sounds of the words help convey feelings of sadness, despondency and despair.

Title: The longer version was originally titled "Poetry" and the shorter version was titled "Excerpts from 'Poetry'" but I eventually decided to go with the shorter title for the shorter poem as well.

Genres: The poem is an elegy, a eulogy, and a lamentation. It is also my Ars Poetica.

Publication History: "Poetry" was originally published by The Lyric, then subsequently by Amerikai költok a második (in a Hungarian translation by István Bagi), La Luce Che Non Muore (Italy), The Eclectic Muse (Canada), Shabestaneh (Iran), Kritya (India), Sailing in the Mist of Time (an Anthology of Fifty Award-Winning Poems), Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Captivating Poetry (Anthology), Formal Verse, Tucumcari Literary Review, The Chained Muse, New Lyre, Poet’s Haven, Poet’s Corner, Famous Poets & Poems and Inspirational Stories.

Analysis: I will analyze the poem stanza by stanza...

Poetry, I found you
where at last they chained and bound you;
with devices all around you
to torture and confound you,
I found you—shivering, bare.

"Poetry" begins with the image of a prisoner who has been chained, bound, beaten and tortured. The strong rhymes — found, bound, around, confound — are meant to suggest blows falling. The lighter rhymes — bare, hair, there, care, fair, air, prayer — that will be woven through the first five stanzas are meant to contrast the fragility and vulnerability of the victim to her abusers. The lighter rhymes also provide continuity and keep the other rhymes from "stacking up" and becoming too monotonous.

They had shorn your raven hair
and taken both your eyes
which, once cerulean as Gogh's skies,
had leapt at dawn to wild surmise
of what was waiting there.

Erato, the goddess of lyric poetry, has been blinded and robbed of her power, like the biblical Samson. And like Samson, who was betrayed by someone who professed to love him, Erato has been betrayed by people who claim to love poetry. Vincent van Gogh was a troubled artist who is most famous for his Starry Night painting.

Your back was bent with untold care;
there savage whips had left cruel scars
as though the wounds of countless wars;
your bones were broken with the force
with which they'd lashed your flesh so fair.

Erato looks like someone scarred by warfare, or a slave savagely whipped by cruel masters. But the last line informs us that she has not always looked like this...

You once were loveliest of all.
So many nights you held in thrall
a scrawny lad who heard your call
from where dawn’s milling showers fall—
pale meteors through sapphire air.

Here we see Erato in better days, when she was the fairest of the fair, the loveliest of all, the most beautiful of the nine Muses. We also begin to see the relationship of the speaker to Erato: he knew her when was a "scrawny lad." When I started writing poetry in my teens, I was 6'2" and weighed around 155 pounds. I was rail-thin and couldn't put on weight no matter how much I ate.

I learned the eagerness of youth
to temper for a lover’s touch;
I felt you, tremulant, reprove
each time I fumbled over-much.
Your merest word became my prayer.

Here, the speaker professes his love for Erato. There have been a few readers who have questioned the first two lines. While "to temper to a lover's touch" might be easier to understand, I like the ambiguity of "to temper for a lover's touch" because with "for" the speaker could be tempering the eagerness of his own touch, or he could be tempering his eagerness in order to allow the more experienced lover to touch him, or both. When I wrote the poem, what I meant is that the less experienced lover needed to temper his eagerness in order for the more experienced lover to show him "how it's done." But there is no "wrong" interpretation here.

You took me gently by the hand
and led my steps from child to man;
now I look back, remember when
you shone, and cannot understand
why now, tonight, you bear their brand.

Here "brand" is a play on words. Erato's jailers have their brands: the names of their journals and publishing houses. Slaves are branded. If the poem ended here, it would be a sad poem indeed. And at the time I wrote the poem, many lovers of traditional poetry felt that what had happened to Poetry could not be reversed. I did not agree, hence the closing stanza...

I will take and cradle you in my arms,
remindful of the gentle charms
you showed me once, of yore;

The young poet does not claim to be Poetry's savior. He does not claim to be a heroic figure. He does not claim to know how Poetry will be freed. He only says that when it is possible, at some unspecified time in the future, he will be there when Poetry is finally freed, to comfort her.

and I will lead you from your cell tonight
back into that incandescent light
which flows out of the core
of a sun whose robes you wore.

The young poet has stepped into the future ("tonight") and sees Poetry rising like the sun at dawn, in new ascendance.

And I will wash your feet with tears
for all those blissful years . . .
my love, whom I adore.

Here, the poet promises to wash Erato's feet with his tears, as Mary Magdalene once washed the feet of Jesus with hers. It is clear here that Erato is the Messiah and the poet is her disciple. Interpretations that the poet is claiming to be a "savior" or "Messiah" are incorrect. The poet sees his role as a loyal sympathizer, as more of a nurse than a Lancelot or Galahad.

How did I come to write "Poetry" as a young poet? ...



The Making of a Poet
by Michael R. Burch

While I don’t consider “Poetry” to be one of my best poems—I wrote the first version in my teens—it’s a poem that holds special meaning for me. I consider it my Ars Poetica. Here’s how it came about ...

When I was eleven years old, my father, a staff sergeant in the US Air Force, was stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany. Our family was forced to live off-base for two years, in a tiny German village where there were no other American boys to play with, and no English radio or TV stations. To avoid complete boredom, I began going to the base library, checking out eight books at a time (the limit), reading them in a few days, then continually repeating the process. I quickly exhausted the children’s books and began devouring adult fiction and nonfiction.

In the fifth grade, I tested at the reading level of a college sophomore and was put in a reading group of one. I was a very fast reader: I flew through books like crazy. I was reading Austen, Dickens, Hardy, et al, while my classmates were reading whatever one normally reads in grade school. My grades shot through the roof and from that day forward I was always the top scholar in my age group, wherever I went.

But being bright and well-read does not invariably lead to happiness. I was tall, scrawny, introverted and socially awkward. I had trouble making friends. I began to dabble in poetry around age thirteen, but then we were finally granted base housing and for two years I was able to focus on things like marbles, quarters, comic books, baseball, basketball and football. And, from an incomprehensible distance, girls.

When I was fifteen my father retired from the Air Force and we moved back to his hometown of Nashville. While my parents were looking for a house, we lived with my grandfather and his third wife. They didn’t have air-conditioning and didn’t seem to believe in hot food—even the peas and beans were served cold!—so I was sweaty, hungry, lonely, friendless and miserable. It was at this point that I began to write poetry seriously. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because my options were so limited and the world seemed so impossibly grim and unfair.

Writing poetry helped me cope with my loneliness, boredom and depression. I had feelings of deep alienation and inadequacy, but suddenly I had found something I could do better than anyone around me. (Perhaps because no one else was doing it at all?)

However, I was a perfectionist and poetry can be very tough on perfectionists. I remember becoming incredibly frustrated and angry with myself. Why wasn’t I writing poetry like Shelley and Keats at age fifteen? I destroyed all my poems in a fit of pique. Fortunately, I was able to reproduce most of the better poems from memory, but two in particular were lost forever and still haunt me. I had learned a valuable lesson: Don't destroy things in haste.

In the tenth grade, at age sixteen, I had a major breakthrough. My English teacher gave us a poetry assignment. We were instructed to create a poetry booklet with five themes of our choosing. I still have my booklet, a treasured memento, banged out on a Corona typewriter with cursive script, which gave it a sort of elegance, a cachet. My chosen chapters were: Rock Songs, English Poems, Animal Poems, Biblical Poems, and ta-da, My Poems! Audaciously, alongside the poems of Shakespeare, Burns and Tennyson, I would self-publish my fledgling work! (Well, after all, it had worked for Blake and Whitman, on a somewhat larger scale.)

My teacher wrote “This poem is beautiful” beside one my earliest compositions, “Playmates.” Her comment was like rocket fuel to my stellar aspirations. Surely I was the next Keats, the next Shelley! Surely success was now fait accompli, guaranteed!

Of course I had no idea what I was getting into. How many teenage poets can compete with the immortal bards? I was in for some tough sledding because I had good taste in poetry and could tell the difference between merely adequate verse and the real thing. I continued to find poetry vexing. Why the hell wouldn’t it cooperate and anoint me its next Shakespeare, pronto?

Then I had another breakthrough. I remember it vividly. I working at a McDonald’s at age seventeen, salting away money for college because my parents had informed me they couldn’t afford my tuition. Fortunately, I was able to earn a full academic scholarship, but I still needed to make money for clothes, dating (ha!), etc. I was sitting in the McDonald’s break room when I wrote a poem, “Reckoning” (later re-titled “Observance”), that made me catch my breath. Did I write that? For the first time, I felt like a “real poet.”

Observance
by Michael R. Burch

Here the hills are old, and rolling
casually in their old age;
on the horizon youthful mountains
bathe themselves in windblown fountains . . .

By dying leaves and falling raindrops,
I have traced time's starts and stops,
and I have known the years to pass
almost unnoticed, whispering through treetops . . .

For here the valleys fill with sunlight
to the brim, then empty again,
and it seems that only I notice
how the years flood out, and in . . .

Another poem, “Infinity,” written around age eighteen, again made me feel like a real poet.

Infinity
by Michael R. Burch

Have you tasted the bitterness of tears of despair?
Have you watched the sun sink through such pale, balmless air
that your soul sought its shell like a crab on a beach,
then scuttled inside to be safe, out of reach?

Might I lift you tonight from earth’s wreckage and damage
on these waves gently rising to pay the moon homage?
Or better, perhaps, let me say that I, too,
have dreamed of infinity . . . windswept and blue.

Now, two “real poems” in two years may not seem like a big deal to non-poets. But they were very big deals to me. I would go off to college feeling that I was, really, a real poet, with two real poems under my belt. I felt like someone, at last. I had, at least, potential.

But I was in for another rude shock. Being a good reader of poetry—good enough to know when my poems were falling short of the mark—I was absolutely floored when I learned that imposters were controlling Poetry’s fate! These imposters were claiming that meter and rhyme were passé, that honest human sentiment was something to be avoided, that poetry should be based always and only on concrete imagery, etc.

At first I was devastated, but then I quickly became enraged. I knew the difference between good poetry and bad. I could feel it in my flesh, in my bones. Who were these imposters to say that bad poetry was good, and good was bad? How dare they? I was incensed! I loved Poetry. I saw her as my Savior because she had rescued me from depression and feelings of inadequacy. So I made a poetic pledge to aid my Savior in her triumph over the imposters. And that is how I came to write “Poetry,” my Ars Poetica.



Bio: Michael R. Burch is an American poet who lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife Beth, their son Jeremy, and three outrageously spoiled puppies. His poems, epigrams, translations, essays, articles, reviews, short stories and letters have appeared more than 6,000 times in publications which include TIME, USA Today, The Hindu, BBC Radio 3, CNN.com, Daily Kos, The Washington Post, Light Quarterly, The Lyric, Measure, Writer's Digest—The Year's Best Writing, The Best of the Eclectic Muse, Unlikely Stories and hundreds of other literary journals, websites and blogs. Mike Burch is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts, a former columnist for the Nashville City Paper and, according to Google's rankings, a relevant online publisher of poems about the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Trail of Tears, Darfur, Haiti, Gaza and the Palestinian Nakba. He has two published books, Violets for Beth (White Violet Press, 2012) and O, Terrible Angel (Ancient Cypress Press, 2013). A third book, Auschwitz Rose, is still in the chute but long delayed. Burch's poetry has been translated into fourteen languages and set to music by nine composers. His poem "First They Came for the Muslims" has been adopted by Amnesty International for its Words That Burn anthology, a free online resource for students and educators. He has also served as editor of International Poetry and Translations for the literary journal Better Than Starbucks.

For an expanded bio, circum vitae and career timeline of the poet, please click here: Michael R. Burch Expanded Bio.

Related Pages: "Davenport Tomorrow" Analysis, "Epitaph" Analysis, "Neglect" Analysis, "Passionate One" Analysis, "Poetry" Analysis, "Something" Analysis, "Self Reflection" Analysis

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