by A. S. Maulucci

Created on: April 02, 2009   Last Updated: April 03, 2009

Emotional Engagement

Emotional engagement is a poem's primary appeal, and the main reason many of us enjoy reading poetry. We want to experience new feelings and our forgotten passions all over again. A well crafted poem will go straight to the heart and seize upon our emotions. It can move us with the wonder of childhood or the bitterness of disappointment. It can fill us with sadness for life's passing beauty, tenderness for the small and sensitive, and with awe for the grand and overpowering.

The most satisfying part of a poem is its description of the concrete experience that creates the emotion in the speaker. For example, "My cat died yesterday, and I am heartbroken," is likely to evoke sympathy but not much empathy. However, bringing the cat alive for the reader and then making his death real will usually arouse the reader's feelings. "Surefooted, graceful/he climbed the rooftops as if they were no more than pillows on a bed/and when I'm resting /I still feel his weight and hear his purring in my head." This conveys the speaker's inner life while suggesting but not stating his emotions directly.

The better you are at expressing your emotions, the more effectively you will engage the reader's own feelings. There's a delicate balance here. You must avoid the maudlin and the melodramatic. Overstated emotion will annoy or backfire, and come across as ridiculous. It's always preferable to use understatement when describing the speaker's feelings. "I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled . . . Dare I eat a peach? I hear the mermaids singing, each to each, they do not sing to me" is a masterful expression of Prufrock's despair, his fear of aging, his sense of insecurity and insignificance.

In another example, Sylvia Plath expresses the misgivings of a pregnant woman by using a series of metaphors: "I am a an elephant, a ponderous house, a melon strolling on two tendrils/O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! . . . I've eaten a bag of green apples/boarded a train I cannot get off." This works wonderfully well in depicting the speaker's uneasiness, her nausea and fear.

Writing about the most complex of all emotions, romantic love, is tricky business. Perhaps it is simply impossible to capture all the rapture of love in a single poem. Shakespeare's 150+ sonnets come very close. So do Petrarca's 350+. The formality of the sonnet form may give the necessary structure to contain such wild ecstasy. The more profound the passion, the more the poet needs to exercise stylistic control. The speaker of Shakespeare's Sonnet #29 "sings hymns at heaven's gate" and thus deftly gives wings to his joyfulness. Petrarca, the Italian poet from the early Renaissance, communicates the lover's soul in torment with "I burn like fire, I freeze like ice." Please note that neither poet goes to extremes or uses the excessive language of overheated sentimentality. They do not gush. They glow with classical self-restraint.

All of the fine poets alluded to here stand back, as it were, and let the metaphors do the work for them.

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