One Approach To Lyric Poems: A Brief Note To Someone I Know

Here’s one way I think about and often respond to lyric poems. They’re soliloquies, a progression of consciousness, from first word to last. Their poetry in good poems—charged language, imagery, repetition, coupling, symbolism, metaphors, metre, rhythm and the like—works in unison with that progression as form becomes meaning. Simply paraphrasing poems is a start, perhaps a necessary but insufficient condition of understanding a poem, where understanding is a continuum of depth.