considerable authority, and indeed I have a pretty strong grasp of what they mean—for me. The authority
I bring to these readings is that of my own background and experience. I incline, for instance, toward a
reading of The Waste Land based on its historical context (a historicist reading, if you will) in which the
poem cannot be divorced from the recent war and its aftermath, but not everyone comes at the poem
from that angle. Others may approach it chiefly in formal terms or on biographical grounds, as a response
to violent personal and marital upheaval. These and many other approaches are not only valid but
produce readings of considerable insight; in fact, I have learned a great deal not only about the poem but
about my own shortcomings from alternative approaches. One of the pleasures of literary scholarship lies
in encountering different and even conflicting interpretations, since the great work allows for a
considerable range of possible interpretations. Under no circumstances, in other words, should you take
my pronouncements on these works as definitive.
The other problem with symbols is that many readers expect them to be objects and images rather than
events or actions. Action can also be symbolic. Robert Frost is probably the champion of the symbolic
action, although his uses of it are so sly that resolutely literal readers can miss the symbolic level entirely.
In his poem “Mowing” (1913), for instance, the activity of mowing a field with a scythe (which,
mercifully, you and I will never have to do) is first and foremost just what it is, a description of sweeping
a field clean of standing hay one stroke at a time. We also notice, though, that mowing carries weight
beyond its immediate context, seeming to stand in for labor generally, or for the solitary business of living
one’s life,p. 106or for something else beyond itself. Similarly, the speaker’s account of his recent actions
in “After Apple Picking” (1914) suggests a point in life as well as a point in the season, and the memory
of picking, from the lingering sense of the swaying ladder and the imprint of the rung on his foot soles to
the impression of apples on his retinas, suggests the wear and tear of the activity of living on the psyche.
Again, the nonsymbolic thinker can see this as a beautiful evocation of an autumnal moment, which it is
and pleasurably so, but there is more than just that going on. It may be a little more obvious with the
moment of decision in his “The Road Not Taken” (1916), which is why it is the universal graduation
poem, but symbolic action can also be found in poem after poem, from the terrible accident in “Out,
Out—” to climbing in “Birches” (1916).
So, what are you to do? You can’t simply say, Well, it’s a river, so it means x , or apple picking, so it
means y. On the other hand, you can say this could sometimes mean x or y or even z , so let’s keep that
in mind to see which one, if either, happens here. Any past experience of literary rivers or labor may be
helpful as well. Then you start breaking down the work at hand into manageable pieces. Associate freely,
brainstorm, take notes. Then you can organize your thoughts, grouping them together under headings,
rejecting or accepting different ideas or meanings as they seem to apply. Ask questions of the text: what’s
the writer doing with this image, this object, this act; what possibilities are suggested by the movement of
the narrative or the lyric; and most important, what does it feel like it’s doing? Reading literature is a
highly intellectual activity, but it also involves affect and instinct to a large degree. Much of what we think
about literature, we feel first. Having instincts, though, doesn’t automatically mean they work at their
highest level. Dogs are instinctual swimmers, but not every pup hits the water understanding what to do
with that instinct. Reading is like that, too. The more you exercise the symbolic imagp. 107ination, the
better and quicker it works. We tend to give writers all the credit, but reading is also an event of the
imagination; our creativity, our inventiveness, encounters that of the writer, and in that meeting we puzzle
out what she means, what we understand her to mean, what uses we can put her writing to. Imagination
isn’t fantasy. That is to say, we can’t simply invent meaning without the writer, or if we can, we ought not
to hold her to it. Rather, a reader’s imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another.
So engage that other creative intelligence. Listen to your instincts. Pay attention to what you feel about
the text. It probably means something.