The Layers of a Poem
balloon!
Hold on to your
I often have unbrilliant thoughts. I treasure them, because sometimes they ignite Brilliant
Thinking. (Or, more likely, put me in the manic part of my insanity.) This happened
recently when I was thinking about the poem above by Adam Gamble, intending to write
another commentary on it. My unbrilliant thought was that the poem's characters, the balloon
(escaped or lost), the child who lets go of it, and the parent (or other grown-up) who
makes the futile warning, comprised a layer of the poem--its meaning. It was on top of
the layer consisting of the poem's words on the page, or, to be more detailed, how the words look
to the eye, because this is a visual poem, and how they sound and are felt when
pronounced. What the eye, ear and mouth making them (and the mouth should be
involved even in silently reading a poem; poems are not for the Evelyn Wood variety of
reading). In other words, a poem is something perceived by the senses plus what the brain
makes of it. Two layers.
An unbrilliant thought because everybody knows that about any piece of readable printed
matter. The Brilliant Thinking resulted when it occurred to me that the second layer, what
the poem meant in the brain, should itself be two layers, one concerned with what the poem
directly means--in this case, a child holding a balloon, while warned to hold on tight, and
the balloon escaping--and one concerned with the emotional meaning of that meaning,
empathy for the parental concern for the child, and for the child with a wonderful bright-
hued balloon--and for the balloon, leaping free, or tumbling fearfully away.
The fact that the balloon was either gaining freedom or losing the security of a home
suggested my scheme was not yet complete: the poem had a fourth (and, I now believe,
final) layer, its symbolic layer. For the little scene the poem depicts, taken from the
balloon's viewpoint (and in poems a balloon can have a viewpoint!), can symbolize either
the joy of freedom or the despair of loss of security. From the child's viewpoint, it can
symbolize Loss, Failure--but maybe something else, maybe elation at letting go of the
balloon and watching it climb the sky!
So, a poem has the layer of what's there; the layer of what that directly means; the layer of
how it makes one experiencing it feel; and the layer of what grander, generalized meaning
it can symbolize, without forcing things. My tentative names for these are concrete,
literal, emotive, and archetypal layer, incidentally.
Apprehending a poem as four layers is pretty abstract, and far from the unified experience
of a poem any normal person would have (or should have initially) when encountering it, but I believe
presenting it as four-layered (after presenting it the normal way) might prove useful
as a teaching tool. A teacher should try every way the teacher knows to capture students
for poetry. Its main value, however, would be to provide a clearer, more detailed idea of
what poems are, and what they do. Where they may not be fully successful, too, many
poems not having much of an emotional layer, or too vague a literal layer, or little or no
archetypal layer. Or a student having trouble with a poem might be more easily helped to
enjoy it if a particular layer that's not working for the student is identified. A few analytically-minded students exposed to a poem as a four-layered mechanism might might suddenly find it much more interesting than they had previously, too.
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