Time for Ryhme Comprehension

Making sense of poetry has forever been difficult for me; I have always found it easier to be on the other side of poetry, penning my thoughts onto paper. It was tough for me to decipher what the poems meant when we were handed them in class. And then, when I read Perrine's musings on the matter, it did not add to my confidence in interpreting poetry. I was totally wrong on several lines, not to mention entire poems! But then I began to think about Perrine's essay. In the first few reads, I found that he seemed to be quite contradictory, almost as if he can't make up his mind. He says, "there are no correct or incorrect meanings; there are only readings which differ more or less widely from a statistical norm." It took me until my third reading of the essay to understand this line, but I still think it to be a bit hypocritical in my mind. There are a variety of spots in the article in which I believe Perrine to not be able to decide for himself what the rules are in regards to interpreting poetry.
In addition to Perrine's varied statements, I did learn a few things about interpreting poetry. In his second paragraph, I was forced to consider that a poet might believe "'the meaning may be different for everyone.'" I found this concept to be rather intriguing; I like that poets want their work to be versatile. Also, before reading this article, I had not ever thought about the fact that the entire poem (as in every word) must stand for something. I had always believed that poems were symbolizing the gist of an idea. I now feel pretty unintelligent to not have recognized this at a previous time in my life, but I suppose 'you learn something new every day.' A final thought about Perrine's essay is that I did like reading the universal accepted interpretations of each poem we read in class. I found it to be interesting to see what I had and had not understood. I am hoping that I will improve my skills of interpreting poetry by using techniques from this paper as this year continues.