Poetry to me is a language of beauty that has always mystified and kept me guessing. My relationship with it has become more complex over the years as I've been introduced to more poets and works. Unlike with a story or tale, I find myself having difficulty truly understanding poems and discovering their meaning. It often feels as though beneath all the symbolism and lyrical verses is a message that I just can't hear.
It's not for lack of trying, as often I have to really wrack my brain to get at the meat of what a poem is trying to say but sometimes to no avail. I guess sometimes poems are just so heavy in symbolism, imagery, and subtlety that I find them to be overwhelming compared to my preferred outlet of the written word, Fiction. It also feels like I'm trying to peruse another language entirely, and that finding the meaning of the words before me is akin to translating a script.
But I still appreciate the beauty of poems and understand why people are so fond of them. And I am somewhat versed in poets such as Wordsworth, Keats, Frost, and Coleridge. Such poems as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Eve of St. Agnes are poems that in classes I have gone over and studied, though more out of a need to complete schoolwork than an actual passion for poetry. Their is no poem that I can recite completely from memory, and I don't think they speak to me in the same way they do others, but I still acknowledge their worth in the world of literature and writing.
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