How to Read a Poem

And Fall in Love with Poetry

By EDWARD HIRSCH
Harcourt Brace and Company

seaweed and rotten wood, the crushed cans

Message in a Bottle and dead fish— you find an unlikely looking
bottle from the past. You bring it home and
Heartland discover a message inside. This letter, so
strange and disturbing, seems to have been
Read these poems to yourself in the middle making its way toward someone for a long
of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read time, and now that someone turns out to be
them while you’re alone in an otherwise you. The great Russian poet Osip
dark room or while someone else sleeps Mandelstam, destroyed in a Stalinist camp,
next to you. Read them when you’re wide identified this experience. “Why shouldn’t
awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say the poet turn to his friends, to those who are
them over to yourself in a place where naturally close to him?” he asked in “On the
silence reigns and the din of the culture— Addressee.” But of course those friends
the constant buzzing noise that surrounds aren’t necessarily the people around him in
us—has momentarily daily life. They may be the
stopped. These The idea of a poem as a friends he only hopes exist,
poems have come or will exist, the ones his
from a great distance message in a bottle means
words are seeking.
to find you. I think of that it's sent out towards Mandelstam wrote:
Malebranche’s some future reader, and
maxim, At a critical moment, a
“Attentiveness is the the reader who opens that
seafarer tosses a sealed
natural prayer of the bottle becomes the bottle into the ocean waves,
soul.” This maxim,
beloved by Simone
addressee of the literary containing his name and a
message detailing his fate.
Weil and Paul Celan, text. // Edward Hirsch Wandering along the dunes
quoted by Walter many years later, I happen
Benjamin in his magisterial essay on Franz upon it in the sand. I read the message,
Kafka, can stand as a writer’s credo. It also note the date, the last will and testament of
serves for readers. Paul Celan said: one who has passed on. I have the right to
do so. I have not opened someone else’s
mail. The message in the bottle was
A poem, as a manifestation of language and addressed to its finder. I found it. That
thus essentially dialogue, can be a message means, I have become its secret addressee.
in a bottle, sent out in the—not always
greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and Thus it is for all of us who read poems, who
sometime it could wash up on land, on become the secret addressees of literary
heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense, texts. I am at home in the middle of the
too, are under way: they are making toward night and suddenly hear myself being
something. called, as if by name. I go over and take
down the book—the message in the
bottle—because tonight I am its recipient, its
Imagine you have gone down to the shore posterity, its heartland.
and there, amidst the other debris—the