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Notes -
When I tried to get into poetry I realized that the meaning of the poem doesn’t reside in the author but in your own memory of what each word connotes, and what the rhythms and the releases connote. This isn’t some death of the author argument but just the psychology of how words work. And as poetry is about great and worthwhile experiences (at least historically), this means it’s about re-collecting your own great and worthwhile experiences. So we read
This is a cathartic expression; there is strain and relief. Mercy is associated with the relief. This poem is impossible to comprehend unless you’ve been under or seen an awaited gentle rain. Heaven, the place of ideal perfection, is associated here with the beauty of a sky in a gentle rain — have you ever seen the rain on a sunny day? We can imagine Man looking up at the beauty of the heavens, focusing on the ideal of heaven, with such awe that the rain only lands “on the place beneath” — the earth unnamed. The more that you repeat the poem with added meaning, the more the words retain this greater meaning. You can come back to the poem a year later and when you recite the words the meaning will come back to you on their own, like magical runes.
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