Poetry 101:1 – Summarise

Welcome to Poetry 101! The revision podcast that teaches you how, why, and where you already know it from. Every episode we are take a poem your teacher might give you and a song you probably know and investigate a literary technique, so that next time you have an exam or an essay you’re prepared. Let’s dive into the texts!

EPISODE 1: SUMMARISE 

The first thing you should do when confronted with a new poem is to read it. Teachers often tell you to read it all the way through once before you even start making notes, and this is great advice. Today, we’re going to look at Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias and Billie Eilish’s Therefore I Am to show how to begin looking at a poem – and how you know what to do already.

Many people listened to Therefore I Am and said immediately that Eilish wrote it about the press. She even addresses it directly to them to make it clear. From the very first “Get my pretty name out of your mouth” it’s clear that she has some thoughts about being a public figure, but by the second verse she’s saying “I don’t want press to put your name next to mine”. She’s talking about a newspaper here, not to one. It might still be a message to the press telling them not to romantically link her with people, but Eilish appears to be talking to somebody more specific – maybe another celebrity – and that changes how we listen to the song from the very beginning. The next time you hear “Stop. What the hell are you talking about?” you might think it’s about the press… or you might think it’s to that specific person she seems to be talking to later.

This isn’t even the only time she does this in the song: at the breakdown, she repeats “I’m sorry / I don’t think I caught your name”. She might be talking to the same person as before, shading them like when she says “When they say your name, I just act confused”… but she might also be talking to somebody else. This repetition might be what it’s like for Eilish to meet fans, or attend awards shows and parties. There’s a few different interpretations of the song, but that doesn’t matter right now – we’re only thinking about the basics. Maybe the next verse changed the person the song is talking to or maybe she hasn’t. Maybe that’s why the pre-chorus is repeated – that’s exactly what she wants to say to all these people. Maybe it’s open to interpretation or maybe Eilish has an exact story in her mind. All that matters is – we as listeners now understand how the meaning of a poem can change because of something that happens part way through it, because of Eilish’s songwriting.

Another reason that Billie Eilish is a great demonstration of where to start is because her verses are delineated very clearly so it’s really easy to follow the progression of the song. What literally happens in it – what does she tell us? Well, first, “I’m not your friend / Or anything” – she’s dismissing the parasocial relationships people have with her. She’s telling us “Don’t talk ’bout me like how you might know how I feel”, letting us know that she’s not the person you might read about in the press, that conjecture is not enough to understand her. Then she tells us “We’re on different lines” – she reinforces that the relationship is parasocial, that is, one-sided, because “you remain unremarkable” – whoever “you” might be. She suggests that sometimes she puts on a persona in interviews by telling us “I just act confused”. And, all the way through, she tells us “I think, therefore, I am” – that the person she is is defined by the person in her head. Each of the verses, choruses, breakdown, each of the elements of the song, all feed into the narrative that Eilish is presenting us with and work together to tell the story of the song. We the listener follow her meaning from the beginning to the end. So how can we apply that to a poem?

Listen to ‘Ozymandias’ now, and I want you to take Billie Eilish’s wisdom on board whilst you’re listening. Ask yourself ‘What is this poem actually about? What are the events which happen in the poem? Who is speaking? Who are they talking to? And does this change over the course of the poem?’

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

If you need to rewind and listen to it again, that’s fine – it’s 110 seconds long – but I’ve also included the whole thing in a link here, so you can read it if you prefer. Let’s start off easy – who is speaking? First, we have Percy Shelley using ‘I’. Then the “traveller from an antique land” speaks; then, right at the end, we hear what it says on the pedestal. So, like how we saw in Eilish’s writing, it changes during the poem. It’s important to read the whole thing before you start annotating, because if you write that the “I” at the beginning of the poem is describing the statue and its pedestal, you will lose marks. It’s said to the “I” by the traveller.

When you break it down like this, you realise it’s not actually important to fully understand the poem to write about it. Like it didn’t matter who Eilish was talking about earlier, it doesn’t matter if you know who King Ozymandias is. Even if you google the poem to find out, it doesn’t help you know what the poem was about. So – what does? Let’s go through it.

First, the poet meets the traveller. Then the traveller tells us about “legs of stone… [and] Half sunk a shattered visage” lying in the desert. Then it describes a person – their “frown” and “sneer”. The next bit is a bit complicated, but if you break it down it’s easier: “its sculptor well those passions read”. The order is a bit funny, so just pick a word. Let’s try ‘passions’. Whose passions? Well, it’s not really clear. ‘Read’. Who read? The sculptor. OK. So the passions were read by the sculptor. It’s still not really clear what the passions were or who the sculpture is of, but we’re getting closer.

Next line: “which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things”. Again, pick out a word. Let’s try ‘survive’. What survives? It’s part of the same sentence, so it’s something from the previous line – in this case, ‘passions’ is the only thing that makes sense, the passions must survive. At first, that doesn’t seem to make sense – how do these passions survive and why does it matter? But then it says “stamped on these lifeless things”. What might the lifeless things be? In the desert, made of stone? It’s a sculpture. This whole bit of the poem is just a description of the stone visage. There’s plenty to talk about here in your essays if you use other techniques, but for now we are just going through the poem to determine the plot. So what happens next?

“And on the pedestal, these words appear: / My name is Ozymandias” – this is what we’ve been waiting for – this is the who! This is who the sculpture is of, which tells us that the passions belong to them and they are the subject of the poem. This seems correct, since the poem is called ‘Ozymandias’, so it makes sense that he’s the most important thing in it. Think back to Billie Eilish – how does seeing differences in who she is talking to affect the meaning of her song? Well, Eilish manages to bring in multiple perspectives – you know how she feels about journalists, rumours, fans who feel like they’re her friend. If you understand how Eilish’s changing persona can tell you all that then you understand what Shelley is doing here: Shelley is telling you that this isn’t his opinion, and neither is it the traveller’s opinion – this is Ozymandias’ opinion, because it’s written on the statue. The poem isn’t telling you what Shelley thinks, even though it starts with ‘I’. The poem is giving a voice to the statue of a long-dead king, and allowing the way the traveller experienced that statue’s “decay” to tell the rest of the story.

What’s amazing about the ‘summarise’ technique is that you don’t need to know what the words mean or any context. Just read the poem, and, sentence by sentence, work out what’s happening. The poem will answer some of your questions for you. What’s a visage? Whose visage is it? Well, it doesn’t tell you what a ‘visage’ is, but when we work out whose that ‘visage’ belongs to, we can already understand the poem, which means we can write about it. Even just from reading this poem twice and applying skills you learned outside of the classroom, you have the beginnings of an answer to whatever the exam is asking you about this poem.

To test yourself a little further, try this technique on another poem. All you have to do is describe what literally happens and who they are talking to. You can use a random poem from your anthology, or you could try to get ahead by looking at next week’s poem. In the next episode, we’ll be discussing Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade.

Good luck decoding!

Ozymandias was first published in 1818 in The Examiner. It was read here by Bryan Cranston. ‘Therefore I Am’ was written and performed by Billie Eilish. It was produced by Finneas, Rob Kinelski and Dave Kutch, and released on Interscope Records in 2020.

Poetry 101 was written, edited and produced by me: my name is Kitty Shaw – I’m studying for my PhD in literature and have worked for over five years in schools, so this podcast is the marriage of my two worlds. You can contact the podcast on kitty@lateromantic.com. Artworks are reproduced in part under Section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Thank you so much for listening!