Meaning is a word we use every day. How many times have you heard the question: ―what do you mean (or) what is the meaning of that?‖ Have you ever asked yourself the meaning of the term ‗meaning‘? Let us begin by engaging in a brief examination of the term, meaning. This will assist you in comprehending the content of this unit. Human beings strive to find meanings in different aspects of their world, existence and experiences. Scholarship also engages in methodical analyses, categorisations and explanations to discover and or develop meanings in relation to different fields of human endeavour. Arts naturally lend itself to indefinite interpretations. Literature is no exception. Classics like George Orwell‘s Animal Farm and Chinua Achebe‘s Arrow of God (fiction), William Shakespeare‘s Julius Caeser (drama) and John Milton‘s ‗Paradise Lost‘ (poetry) have generated vast ideas, suggestions and implications, submissions and conclusions, in terms of the meaning contained in the texts. In literary analysis, we try to identify the messages embedded in a text. Poetic analysis is no different. It entails identifying and discussing the significance or implication enclosed in poems. This means that the poems have meaning contents.
So, what is meaning? Generally, the term denotes that which something signifies, suggests or designates. It is synonymous with sense and significance and related to implication. Michael Hauge posits that: ―a message, by my definition, is a political statement. It is a principal that concerns people in a particular situation and is not universally applicable to any member of the audience‖ (1). This means the suggestions made by a poem could vary with the readers. It relates to each person specifically. Meaning is, therefore, the significance contained in a text as perceived by a given reader. That makes it subjective and particular. You can now understand why different analyses of one literary piece usually generate different meanings. This is because when two people read the same poem, they are likely to give two different interpretations. That is why Melissa Donovan says that ―one poem … can mean different things to different people … the reader is left to draw her (his) own conclusions‖ (1). In other words, the same poetic construction can engender several and different interpretations and evoke different experiences.
Please note that ―the meaning of a poem is the experience it expresses‖ (Arp and Johnson 790).
You also need to know that the human experience is constituted by ideas and therefore poems
also convey ideas. This is because the readers each approach the poem with his/her own different world of experiences.
In addition, poems convey experiences, ideas and emotions, from which several implications are derivable. The message of a work is usually expressed implicitly, or indirectly. It, therefore, exhibits complexity in its analysis, as it is constructed by the interface between several implications embedded in the elements and techniques of the work in question. The message of a poem is not readily identifiable. Why? You have been told already. This is because the message is hardly explicitly revealed in a specific sentence. Moreover, poems have hidden and deeper meanings or even tiers of meaning and that is what we are called to identify and examine through the methods used to communicate such meanings. Please always be conscious of the fact that responses to poems are elicited by the literary devices (and stylistic approaches) deployed by the poet. The same devices also give rise to different interpretations.
Self- Assessment Exercise 1
What do you understand by the term ‗meaning‘ in poetry?
The above explanations must have told you that meaning, in poetry is naturally multifaceted.
You must understand that the meanings discovered in a literary text may depart from the author‘s intended meaning. Meaning, in a poem, could cover the poet‘s intended meaning, the unintended meaning discovered by a careful reader, meaning provided by other works of the poet, or the poet‘s life history and meaning suggested by the reader‘s inadequate knowledge of the writer‘s stories and other works. A poem can also generate several layers of meaning, as it can include deliberate secret and ambiguous, or even vague, meanings. Meaning is also subject to change across periods and regions. All these are different sources of meanings in a poem. In addition, analysis demands that we discover the meaning (what is being said) contained in a poem and why such is said. Moreover, some poems‘ meanings are clear, others vague. There are also abstract poems. Your responsibility is to identify and examine the meaning elements of these.
Thus, exploring a poem for meaning is an inevitable task in analysing poetry. Searching for meaning in poems is very essential, especially to a student of Literature like you. It entails a close reading of all the lines of the poem. Sometimes, you may need to read more than once to identify the hidden significance of a poem. Consequently, when it comes to the message of a literary text, you need to contemplate and to comprehend and this process cannot exclude the theme of the work.
3.1.1 Message and Theme
Message and theme are irrevocably linked but they are not the same, although both are, in many interpretations, used interchangeably. For instance, Lineberger defines theme as the ―lesson or message‖ of a poem (1). A poem‘s theme/concern/interest is noticeably different from its message/meaning or moral. So, what is the difference? Theme conveys universal truths that are general or common to all readers, but the message of a poem is hardly exact and relevant to all readers. K. M. Weiland (2016, p. 1) articulates the difference in simple terms thus:
Theme is a general principle, message is a specific example of that theme in action … theme is the big stuff … message, on the other hand, is found in the specific story situations that illustrate thematic principles. Your message is your story‘s theme in action.
… The most important difference to understand about theme and message is that theme is inclusive and message is exclusive.
For instance, if the theme of a poem is hard work and persistence, the message could be that a student who avoids hard work is courting failure and a miserable future. Thus, the poem, through the theme, appeals particularly to students. The poem ‗Night‘, by the Lusophone poet, Agostinho Neto, ―one of the twentieth century‘s most important African poets‖ (Pallister 137) can be used to illustrate this point further. The poem is concerned with colonial domination. However, lines like ―dark quarters of the world,‖ second line of the first stanza, suggest the living condition of Angolan people under the political and economic system of the Portuguese, who systematically impoverished and enfeebled the colonised. Many African countries, like Nigeria, even under colonialism, were not subjected under the inhuman urban life found in Angola. Colonialism is universal, but the impact is specific to the different countries, depending on who colonised them.
Consequently, one of the main meanings of the poem, particularly to an Angolan reader, is the enervating impact of colonial control on the colonised and this derives from the theme of colonial domination. Thus, the poem generates specific meaning for readers from Angola, because of their peculiar experience and circumstances. Do you understand the relationship? The concern of a poem, which is inclusive, must be expressed in the message, which is exclusive.
The implication is that while theme is relevant to all, message is relevant to specific readers and their particular conditions. In other words, the message of a poem is specific to each reader, while the theme applies to all readers.
However, there could be no theme without attendant messages. The theme of the poem is communicated through the message. This means that the theme is embedded in the message and the message in theme. Please take note of the relationship between both. Theme and message are inherently connected. Your analysis of a poem‘s message would be more coherent and incisive, and thus, beneficial, if it identifies the poem‘s moral and uses it to vivify the theme. Let us make this more practical by reading the seminal poem, ‗The Vultures‘, by the Senegalese Negritude poet, David Diop. The central theme is colonisation of Africa by the British. So, what is the message(s). Please read the next line.
Self-Assessment Exercise 2
Read the poem ‗The Vultures‘ and articulate the message(s) in clear terms.
From the above explanations and the exercise, you must have discovered that theme and message are not the same. A poem‘s concern is broader than the message. Theme is universal but message is specific. A message is a specific idea a poem elicits from the theme. For example, a theme of
―religious bigotry‖ could have an attendant message that religious intolerance is a child of bigotry and leads to segregation and alienation. Literary works obligatorily have themes and the author‘s perspective and creative attitude to the problem, entrenched in the theme, is manifest in the manner such themes are developed. These also influence the meanings generated by such works. As a result, theme and message are naturally linked. The objective of reading a poem is to
discover some meanings. The meanings are also found in the form, structure and language of a poem. Poetic techniques function to communicate meaning. For instance, anaphora can inject emphasis, intensity or texture into a word or an idea to create meaning and implications.
Consequently, message cannot be hacked out of method.
3.1.2 Message and Method
Literature operates subliminally; that is covertly. It makes suggestions, directly or by implications, communicated by literary techniques such as structure, form, repetition, parallelism, etc. Its messages are skilfully enrobed in imaginative experiences and conditions, poem, through literary devices, arouses intellectual, pragmatic and spontaneous responses of the reader. The message of a work of art is usually implicitly stated and characteristically implied by a mixture of methods, including contrast, metaphor, form and structure. Literary analysis entails a comprehensive examination of the suggestive or symptomatic intricacies of the literary elements and techniques like theme, language, images and symbols, etc. You can see that method and message are again closely connected. One cannot do without the other. That relationship is rooted in the fact that a poetic analysis should, obligatorily, examine how literary devices are employed to make meaning. That is why it is important to examine the method in the process of analysing the meaning inherent is a poetic text. This tells you the essence of paying close attention to meaning and method/manner in literary analysis.
Self-Assessment Exercise 3
Message and method are close associates. Explain the basis of that association in not more than 5 lines.
In the subsequent section of this unit, we will demonstrate the intricate relationship between meaning and method using two poems, ‗Still I Rise‘ by Maya Angelou and ‗I‘m Nobody! Who Are You?‘ by Emily Dickinson