The Difficulty of Poetry (for me at least)

     When first introduced to poetry in elementary school, I thought poems were fun to read given that all the words would rhyme and the overall message of it would just be some frog walking across the street or something. However reading poetry now, it turns out that the words won't always rhyme and the messages being presented would be more than a frog leaping around. The only thing that did seem to stay the same or at least similar, was the length. The length being shorter would seem like a good thing at first, but when the writers start to try to compress the meaning of life into 20 lines of poetry it does start becoming a bit much. With that being said, me losing interest in poetry would be an understatement. Not only did I not find reading poems as fun anymore I also found more difficulty in trying to break them down. Poetry in itself is something that is first presented as something very simple but gradually becomes more and more difficult. The difficulty for me at least tends to stem from a poem's ability to be entirely indirect with its writings and message. Being someone who is so used to regular modern conversation which is for the most part very direct and literal, reading these more abstract poems can make the most simplest words seem foreign to me. I have this habit of reading these poems and always trying to find writings' literal meanings instead of interpreting in other ways. I never really look into background detail such as the time in which it was written and what type of the person the author of the poem was which can play a big part of understanding just what was really being said in the author's writing. I also skim read at times which makes a lot of the small details of a poem go over my head. These small things such as the structure of the poem also have a key role in understanding poems. It's sad to think that poems didn't always have these minute details that needed to be paid attention to back in 5th grade but oh well. While the poetry unit is one of the more harder units for me, I am excited to try and read these poems more precisely.