Introduction
Poems are very complex. Often, people have difficulties understanding the different elements in a poem. Many of my students, after I explain the meaning of a poem, look at me perplexed. "Where did you find that?" I can see them wondering.
In the next 4 articles, I am going to show you 4 areas to consider when trying to find meaning in a poem. The four areas that we will explore are:
- Meaning
- Word significance, choice, and title
- Images
- Structure
I am going to focus on a poem by W.D. Ehrhart: "Not Your Problem."
"Not Your Problem" by W.D. EhrhartAvoid this place.
Here time travels in tiny circles
like the hands of a clock.Here dust rises like smoke
until it rains;
then we lie down in mud
and dream of dust.Here our children will never learn
to read or write; their teeth
will rot from their heads;
they will join the army, or die
like us beneath foreign bombs.Here men with guns at night
make sleeping people in houses
disappear.Here voters are branded with ink,
and those unmarked are found
days later in trash dumps.Here being poor is a crime
unless we are also quiet;
almost everyone is poor,
and we can hear a bullet
being chambered a mile away.We will change all of this.
You won't want to be here
when we do.Works Cited:
Ehrhart, W.D. "Not Your Problem." Just For Laughs. Silver Spring, MD: Vietnam Generation, Inc. & Burning Cities P, 1990. 63 - 64.
This poem has been reprinted with the permission of W.D. Ehrhart. Please visit his website for more information about him and his writing: http://www.wdehrhart.com/
Meaning of W.D. Ehrhart's "Not Your Problem"
I want to begin with the meaning because one of the first things my students ask me is, "What does this poem mean?" They know that I assigned the poem as homework for a reason, but they are baffled as to what they are supposed to learn from it.
Poems have different purposes. Some express personal feelings; some have underlying universal meanings that can be applied to circumstances around the world. Some poems simply exist to show beauty, ugliness, anger. Some poems include all of these things. Other poems try to reflect an atmosphere, a general feeling, maybe even what a place is like.
"Not Your Problem" by W.D. Ehrhart does almost all of the above.
Narrator/Point of View
One of the first things you need to notice is what kind of narrator do we have in the poem; what is the point of view? Who is speaking? Is it a:
- First person narrator - uses the pronouns I, me, my, us, we, our — A first person narrator is one that tells the story by using the first person pronouns. This can be a major or minor character in the story or even an observer. (Do not assume that if the poem is in first person that it is the poet.)
