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This is my first blog post!
It was interesting to read what Miller had to say in How to Read Literature. In past English classes, similar readings have been assigned but I like that he viewed the perfect close reader to be critical yet childlike. This ensures that the reader understands everything that the author wanted while maintaining the “big-picture” of the book.
Secondly, I read the two poems by Frost and Williams.
I think that I understand “The Red Wheelbarrow” better than “Mending Wall”. A few questions I have for “Mending Wall” are:
1. Why does Frost mention hunters in the beginning? I don’t see the correlation between that and rebuilding a wall.
2. What do the holes symbolize? When I think of holes in structures, I think of weakness and if there is weakness in keeping one another out, wouldn’t the two neighbors be friends? Why does the other neighbor want to keep the author out or what does he want to protect?
For “The Red Wheelbarrow”, the first few questions I asked were:
1. Why does so much depend on a red wheelbarrow and white chickens?
2. And why does the author use such contrasting words like red (blood, violence) and white (purity, hope)?
Then I thought about who uses those things and the first thing that came to mind was a farmer. For a farmer, so much does depend on a wheelbarrow (for working in his fields), chickens (for food or for the marketplace), and rain (to keep his crop from failing). These may be wrong interpretations, but it’s what I came up with.
Ta-da! First post is completed.
2 comments
I had the same confusion about the hunters at first but when I re-read the poem I got the feeling that the speaker seemed annoyed at the hunters because they destroy the wall and then he has to fix it. He seems to think poorly of them because they destroy the wall simply to please themselves by finding a single rabbit, which is selfish and inefficient. Perhaps he mentions it in passing or maybe he dislikes the hunters destroying a boundary he so carefully set up?
I could be wrong though!
I’m curious, Kate, if a child-like approach (which Miller espouses in one way) has helped you to read these poems? It’s certainly an appropriate approach to reading something like Williams’s poem. I like both of them because they are especially easy to read for plot: no complicated language, not especially long, and nothing that is intentionally obscure…except for that matter of the wheelbarrow. This is something we definitely want to think about further.
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