Interpreting Brittany's Poem

For this learning study, I had my friend, Brittany read this poem. I chose Brittany because she is an English major and enjoys writing poetry herself. I figured it would be interesting to her interpretation of this poem, because although we had excellent ideas in our class, this is something that she wants to do as her profession. To start this learning study, I handed her the poem and asked her just to read it and underline anything that stood out to her. When she was finished I asked her to read me the lines that had stood out. When I asked her why these stood out to her, she gave me very analytical responses. Such as she liked how the author used the poem to compare the daughter’s writing to a bird in distress. She also liked the way the author used the line, “Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy”, as a way to infer that his/her daughter has been through a lot of hardships in her life. She also commented on the personified of the house, in the line “The while house seems to be thinking”. She said this stood out to her as a house cannot actually think, saying that the author wanted the readers to feel the drama and tension that was occurring at the time where his/her daughter …show more content…
What Brittany understood about the poem fit right along with the author’s message. I thought this was interesting because as a class we over-dramatized the poem, believing that there was a deeper meaning. As an English major, Brittany knew that author’s intent is not always for a deeper meaning, sometimes a bird is just a bird, or as Brittany had explained, “the curtain is blue because I wanted it to be blue, not because I am sad”. Although poems can be ambiguous and open to interpretation, I found it interesting that Brittany, with the major she’s studying, was able to conclude that for this poem there were no clandestine