A Few Meaningful Words

Ending abruptly, shorter poems are typically more difficult to understand. While reading a longer poem, we can sometimes skip over the words that confuse us and still arrive at an understanding at the end of the poem. When analyzing shorter poems, the words are few so each one of them holds some importance to the understanding of the poem. I chose the Senryu Karai and a Limerick as they sparked much interest in me as I read them.

Short, overlooked, and often misunderstood, the poem “Senryu Karai” left me with much to ponder on. The speaker is anticipating the capture of a robber he knows to exist, but does not know that when he finally catches the robber, we will have caught his own son. In the same way, we never quite expect bad things to come from people we know and care about, much less from people who should care about us the same way. His son was a thief. The word thief is always interpreted in our minds to be someone we are not fond of—a delinquent or a criminal. But sadly, the people we are closest too may be the ones that hurt us the most, simply because we do not expect negative things to come from them.

The Limerick by Gelette Burgess was also one that I interpreted very uniquely. the poem itself appears to be very unusual at first, and could very much be about nothing, but I chose to give it much meaning. The first two lines state how his room has a door but no floor, as he then goes on to say that he is “crawling around without touching the ground”, and action he is becoming bored with. I believe that his room is symbolizing his life. The room has a door, symbolizing where he longs to go in the future, but has no floor as he finds himself moving constantly but not necessarily getting anywhere productive. He wishes to have a floor rather than the door because having a floor would mean his movements mattered. Instead, he is moving for without any purpose behind his motion, and the door—symbolizing where he longs to go—is staring him in the face when he knows he will not be arriving where he longs to be anytime soon. I think the speaker longs for somewhere to stand firm to get where he’s going.

Those poems may be about nothing, possibly a few random words written down in the midst of someone’s boredom—but I chose to interpret them as so much more than that. I will never know what the writers of these poems intended their messages to be, but I will interpret them as I please, giving meaning to the possible meaningless.