Tuesday Morning Cantos Assignment Forum

I think that he’s talking about the mechanics of a poem, and how you can analyse it for all the various devices that a poet uses to stir an emotion within their reader, but if it were that simple then we could all write great poetry right off the bat. When he says, “You’re back with the mystery of having been moved by words”, I think he means that truly heartfelt poetry doesn’t come from a rote way of learning or practising. Rather, it’s about emotional expression which resonates with the reader, and something which comes from more than just the words. I like that he calls it a ‘mystery’, because it does seem inexplicable the power that poetry can have over a person, and though we might be able to pick out where, it can be much harder to work out exactly why, even simple groupings of words, incur such a profound effect. I think it’s something which has to be felt, when writing, not something which can be ‘designed’ as such.

He mentions there being spaces in between the words, and that this is really where the depth of a piece of writing is found, and the challenge for the author is to know just where to halt. These holes and gaps are sort of filled in subconsciously by the reader, and this is where each reader’s experience of a book will be different to any other reader’s. We are allowed to fill in those gaps with our individual imaginations, so in a way we indulge ourselves, with the words themselves being really more like a channel.





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