Something Shared

Early in the afternoon I was talking to a couple of colleagues about Hopkins's poem Brothers. They'd asked me a while back to take them through it as there were a few details they weren't quite sure of. I'd more than happily agreed, Hopkins being a great favourite of mine. In fact I recalled doing the poem at 'A' level. Not that Hopkins was a set text, but Jack, our teacher, had a way of getting us to read and discuss a ship-full of poetry and drama that wasn't on the syllabus, great man that he was. To be honest I remember thinking that it wasn't exactly one of Hopkins greatest pieces; a bit slushy if truth be told.

So I had a look at it a few weeks back, to prepare for the pow wow. It was then that I realised a couple of lines, one and a half to be precise, quite escaped me on the level of literal interpretation. I had another look a week or so later to see if sleeping on it might have proved illuminating, but the lines remained stubbornly opaque. Not that this bothered me, I'm quite used to not getting a poem one hundred percent and rather enjoy a bit of mystery. I mentioned to one of the teachers involved that I wasn't likely to be able to explain everything and was quite prepared to find myself stalled on the lines when going through the poem as I had found myself previously.

And then something odd happened today - well not really odd as I've experienced the same thing quite frequently over the years. As I was explaining the poem I came to the lines and immediately saw what they meant with a kind of absolute certainty. It was as if the act of talking about the poem generated the meaning for me. And the slush disappeared as well. Suddenly the poem came vibrantly alive for me in a way it had never quite done before.

Frankly this is the only real use I can see for literary criticism, analysis, commentary, whatever you care to call it. Those moments when just discussing a text does something to you and the text that's transformative. There's a social power involved that takes the text beyond the private experience that's enormously useful. This is really what 'sharing', that much abused word, is, or can be.