WEBVTT

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Now I'd like to tell you of
a problem that faces poetry,

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and it's very amazing.

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I'm going to read you
a little four line

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poem called "For a Lamb," which
probably some of you students

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know.

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And I read it last spring
at Plattsburgh, New York.

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I gave a reading at night,
and then the next morning I

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attended a large class.

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And the students had
been studying my work

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for a couple of weeks,
and I read this poem

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and I told them what
I thought it meant.

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I'll read the poem
first, and then I'll

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tell you what happened.

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"I saw on the slant
hill, a putred lamb

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propped with daisies.

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The sleep looked deep.

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The face nudged in
the green pillow,

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but the guts were
out for crows to eat.

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Where's the lamb, whose
tender plaint said all

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for the mute breezes?

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Say he's in the wind somewhere.

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Say there's a lamb
in the daisies."

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Well, I thought of that
poem as a postcard picture

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of the world, or of a datum.

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And I also felt that it was
a transcendental poem, as you

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could see from the ending.

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It was-- I had been
influenced by Wordsworth,

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and it was a sort of
a transcendental idea.

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Well, these students
insisted that the first four

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lines were about the fall.

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And the second four lines
were about the Resurrection,

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and I couldn't dissuade them.

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They simply wouldn't
have my explanation,

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and here I was standing
there in the flesh.

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If I hadn't been there, if I
had already died 20 years ago,

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they would still be
able to read the poem,

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but they wouldn't
have my say so,

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but they wouldn't listen to it.

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And so I learned from that,
really a very hard thing.

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That the poem really
belongs to you.

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It belongs to the reader.

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And once it's on the page,
you can make anything of it

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that you wish.