Reading is Fun Late at Night!

The ideas in How to Read Literature served as a great jumping off point for the poems! The argument Miller made about reading both like a child, who suspends his disbelief, and a critical reader, who sucks every meaning possible out of the text, reminded me to read each poem in these two ways to understand them better.

“Mending Wall” interested me in a few ways. The idea of the fence as a boundary between the two neighbors really made me stop and think. The speaker seems to think the wall is useless when he mentions that, “my apple trees will never get across,” but his neighbor holds onto the tradition of his father. For the neighbor the “fences” seem literal but for the speaker perhaps they mean something different? I can’t tell if the speaker thinks boundaries themselves are useless or just that a physical boundary is useless because they are already separated in other ways.I vaguely remember a history class when we talked about the Romans and how they celebrated boundaries for the sake of having boundaries. Throughout the poem it seems that the neighbor upholds the tradition of fixing the boundary because it was passed down to him in the same way that the Romans celebrated boundaries because it was tradition. 

The “Red Wheelbarrow” really confused me at first because I just didn’t understand what was going on other than a red wheelbarrow sitting there. It was only after I stopped and read it in a “childlike” manner like the previous reading suggested that I had an idea of what the poem was actually about. First off, I really loved the structure of the poem, the simplicity makes it for me. The single syllable words and broken up sentences cause you to analyze them more closely and turned a single sentence into a poem for me. What I’m wondering is: Is the poem meant to contrast Romanticism? Is the purpose of the poem to turn a wheelbarrow into art? Was the use of “glazed” meant to transform the ordinary wheelbarrow into something more extraordinary? 

I tried to answer the questions myself by reading the poem a few more times. I feel like the wheelbarrow is the poem, if that makes sense. By simply being, the wheelbarrow is important. It seems like this poem contrasts Romanticism by using simplicity and clear visual images to get a point across rather than long, super involved sentences with too many details. Lastly, the only descriptive words are red, white, and glazed. Red and white and clear cut descriptions but glazed is open to interpretation. The use of that single word makes the wheelbarrow interesting to me. 

The last couple questions I had about the poem were: Are the chickens just part of the backdrop of the poem or do they have some deeper meaning that I’m overlooking? When the author writes “so much depends upon,” is that open ended or is it calling attention to the rest of the poem?