Some tips for the close reading of poetry

‘Close reading’ is not as straightforward as it may appear. Many readers of poetry, for instance, may have encountered ‘close readings’ of poems which are anything but. They’re not so much ‘close’ as ‘at arm’s length’. How do you close-read a poem? F. R. Leavis was one of the most influential literary critics writing in English in the twentieth century. Yet he often claimed he was performing a ‘close reading’ of a poem which was actually, at best, a sort of flirtatious dalliance with the words and meaning of the text.

The origins of a classic children’s rhyme

‘Jack and Jill went up the hill’: we all know these words that call back our early childhoods so vividly, yet where did they come from and what does this rhyme mean? It can be dangerous to try to probe or analyse the meaning of nursery rhymes too deeply – much like analysing the nonsense verse of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll, we are likely to come upon a hermeneutic dead-end. But ‘Jack and Jill’ is so well-known that a closer look at its meaning and origins seems justified.

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

Up Jack got, and home did trot,
As fast as he could caper,
To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob
With vinegar and brown paper.