Poem Interpretation Quotes

I am bothered by poems I don't understand. ~ Joyce Rachelle

If Erik existed and lived life in despair,
We wish him to know we are here and we care. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Too many times, I confused my melancholy for loneliness and sought comfort in the wrong arms. Too many times, I surrendered myself to my own illusions, trying to find something that I didn't understand. Always searching for an elusive affection, desire so pervading it was painful in its insatiability. Every time I held it close, it slipped through my fingers, my body resting in the depth of others only to find myself shivering in shallow water.

When you wrapped yourself around me, I knew it was different. A subtlety I had never known, in your embrace. Our restless, wandering souls came together, ideas and passions transforming into redamancy. I know it now – that elusive something I had always wanted – with you, every day, in every kiss, the way you touch me, in dark and light, in the illumination of all of the little things, with hundreds of no matter whats and the taste of forever. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

The Psalms are the steady, sustained subcurrent of healthy Christian living. They shaped the praying and vocation even of Jesus himself. They can and will do the same for us. The Psalms do this, to begin with, simply because they are poetry set to music: a classic double art form. To write or read a poem is already to enter into a different kind of thought world from our normal patterns. A poem is not merely ordinary thought with a few turns and twiddles added on to make it pretty or memorable. A poem (a good poem, at least) uses its poetic form to probe deeper into human experience than ordinary speech or writing is usually able to do, to pull back a veil and allow the hearer or reader to sense other dimensions. Sometimes ~ N. T. Wright

Like a tree
I have stood my ground
Not fallen. ~ Ben Ditmars

Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem. ~ John Barton

An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could have almost written a poem. ~ Matt Haig

It sometime takes a long time and a hard time to realize he just doesn't deserve your you. ~ Atticus Poetry

The thing was, I didn't love him anymore. You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a whole poetry movement. ~ Roberto Bolano

If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that sometimes our assumptions and preconceived notions are wrong, and therefore, our interpretation of events is incorrect. This causes us to overreact, to take things personally, or to judge people unfairly. ~ Elizabeth Thornton

I became famous, I think, really because of the interpretation of other people's songs, way back when, and that's what I enjoy the most. And I'm a lazy bugger. ~ Rod Stewart

Inferno is the underworld as described in Dante Alighieri's epic poem The Divine Comedy, which portrays hell as an elaborately structured realm populated by entities known as "shades" - bodiless souls trapped between life and death. ~ Dan Brown

The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets. ~ William Carlos Williams

Before we examine some of those questions in more detail, it is important to affirm the genuine evangelical standing of those who have differing positions on these questions. Evangelicals who hold to these various positions all agree that Scripture is inerrant, and they have a commitment to believe whatever is taught by Scripture. Their differences concern the interpretation of various passages relating to these events, but their differences on these matters should be seen as matters of secondary importance, not as differences over primary doctrinal matters. ~ Wayne A. Grudem

Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Richard Nixon, described the new interpretation of the Second Amendment in an interview after his tenure as 'one of the greatest pieces of fraud-I repeat the word FRAUD-on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. ~ Fareed Zakaria

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain. ~ David Whyte

Give winter nothing; hold; and let the flake
Poise or dissolve along your upheld arms.
All flawless hexagons may melt and break;
While you must feel the summer's rage of fire,
Beyond this frigid season's empty storms.
Banished to bloom, and bear the birds' desire. ~ James Wright

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it. ~ James Schuyler

The Cloudy Vase
Past time, I threw the flowers out,
washed out the cloudy vase.
How easily the old clearness
leapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it. ~ Jane Hirshfield

There is a LOT of bad news every day. The world seems to be getting more and more crazy.

So every time you see some bad news, go do something nice for someone or go create something. Write a poem or a song, draw or paint a picture, do something nice for a stranger, even something as simple as complimenting a stranger's outfit or doling out extra smiles during your day.

We have to balance out the evil of the world somehow. As artists we are most well equipped to do so! ~ Marcy Ferro

Poetry's Expiration Date {Couplet}
No poem older than a day,
has anything truly timely to say. ~ Beryl Dov

A great thinker does not necessarily have to discover a master idea but has to rediscover and to affirm a true but forgotten, ignored or misunderstood master idea and interpret it in all the diverse aspects of thought not previously done, in a powerful and consistent way, despite surrounding ignorance and opposition. This criterion we think would include all prophets and their true followers among the Muslim scholars. He is both a great and original thinker who brings new meanings and interpretations to old ideas, thereby providing both continuity and originality to the important intellectual and cultural problems of his time and through it, of mankind. Thus the brilliant interpretations of scholars and sages like al-Ghazali and Mulla Sadra then, and Iqbal and al-Attas now, deserve to be recognized and acknowledged as manifesting certain qualities of greatness and originality. ~ Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud

There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. ~ Ted Hughes

A final caution to students: in making judgments on literature, always be honest. Do not pretend to like what you really do not like. Do not be afraid to admit a liking for what you do like. A genuine enthusiasm for the second-rate is much better than false enthusiasm or no enthusiasm at all. Be neither hasty nor timorous in making your judgments. When you have attentively read a poem and thoroughly considered it, decide what you think. Do not hedge, equivocate, or try to find out others' opinions before forming your own. But having formed an opinion and expressed it, do not allow it to petrify. Compare your opinion then with the opinions of others; allow yourself to change it when convinced of its error: in this way you learn. Honestly, courage, and humility are the necessary moral foundations for all genuine literary judgment. ~ Laurence Perrine

I want you alongside
So near to each other
For I could listen to your heartbeats
I want to stare at you
I know this makes me super shy
But baby
I will try ~ Jyoti Patel

It is winter now,
and the roses are blooming again,
their petals bright against the snow.
My father died last April;
my sisters no longer write,
except at the turning of the year,
content with their fine houses
and their grandchildren.
Beast and I
putter in the gardens
and walk slowly on the forest paths.
[from the poem, Beauty and the Beast: An Anniversary] ~ Jane Yolen

The notion that we read the New Testament exactly as the early Christians did, without any weight of tradition coloring our interpretation, is an illusion. It is also a dangerous illusion, for it tends to absolutize our interpretation, confusing it with the Word of God. ~ Justo L. Gonzalez

One of the ex-sucias publishes a poem about you online. It's called El Puto ~ Junot Diaz

loved a man for years who said her eyes looked like the ocean, because she always wanted to be somebody's poem, somebody's simile, somebody's lackluster metaphor. ~ Trista Mateer

Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Everything is blood and vines. The mark of another day of revolving the body exact And the sky is ours our hope our blue our silence our throat of burning wildflowers. ~ Gwen Calvo