I can recommend the same recommendation that was given me -- don't worry too much about the scholarly side, just feel it like you would any other poem. I looked up a couple of things along the way, but not much, and enjoyed reading it at that level.

I can recommend the same recommendation that was given me -- don't worry too much about the scholarly side, just feel it like you would any other poem. — Moliere

That's generally how I approach poems when I read them. If they get to me enough, I'll put more effort into subsequent reads. That's why I'm enjoying this thread. It gives me motivation to dig deeper.

A thought on demarcation between poetic and truth-conditional meaning --

Would it be possible to develop a logic of phrases? (heh, probably anathema to the two camps who'd usually ponder one side or the other of that question)

I dont think this would help in interpreting a poem. Mostly still just looking at that "what's left, if we are able to conceptually "take away" truth-conditions?" question.

In particular, it'd be interesting to simply answer the question "what constitutes a phrase?" when we take a string -- is it possible to devise a relationship between a string and how many phrases are in a string?

One thing that should be obvious from my approach is that I don't think there'd be a general answer for all languages, given that poetic meaning -- as I've been rendering it thus far at least -- includes phonic structure. So the question would be about, first, what is a reasonable delimitation on generality such that it's still interesting, and not just a set of rules for interpreting a sonnet?

That's what form does for us, in a way -- it tells us exactly how many phrases a poem will have, and some of its internal structure. In a way poetic form is a logic for answering the question "What constitutes a phrase?" -- and the modern poets basically assert that such formalities are not necessary to convey meaning (thus making it much harder to answer the original question, but taking us back to the original impetus -- the feeling of poetry)

EDIT: Just as an example using the first four indentations of The Wasteland -- you could count 4 phrases, based on indentation, or any number of phrases based upon how you interpret them (like I noted how April itself was also breeding, adding another phrase). But this procedure, right now, isn't even as robust as "guess and check", since there's no necessary answer to the question. Hence, not quite a logic with respect to modern poetry, but possibly a very weak and un-interesting one in the case of defined forms -- still, the focus on counting phrases is interesting for compare/contrast, i think -- perhaps this could count as showing a difference in approaches to meaning.

In particular, it'd be interesting to simply answer the question "what constitutes a phrase?" when we take a string -- is it possible to devise a relationship between a string and how many phrases are in a string? — Moliere

What kind of a phrase?
https://natureofwriting.com/courses/sentence-structure/lessons/phrases/topic/phrases/

What kind of a string? Examples?

Would it be possible to develop a logic of phrases? — Moliere

What is a 'logic of phrases'?

Mostly still just looking at that "what's left, if we are able to conceptually "take away" truth-conditions?" question. — Moliere

What is left where... in a poem? What is a 'truth-condition'? Why would a poem need one?
I struggle to understand what is at issue. Even after I read the following:

Sentences are valuable primarily because they are meaningful. Typically, we have little use for random strings of symbols. Such strings, no matter how complex or interesting, are regarded as at most curiosities, unless they are thought to be meaningful. To be meaningful is to have a meaning. But what is this thing, this meaning? What is the meaning of a sentence?

How can we answer this question? The first step is to notice that "meaning", as it is used in the question, suggests that we are looking for some type of thing. But where and how do we look for this thing? You can't touch it or see it, so empirical methods would appear to be useless. You might say: "Yes, I can't see it, but I know when it is there and I know when it isn't, even if this knowledge isn't observational." This response yields a hint: perhaps if we approached meaning from the perspective of our knowledge, we might be able to get a foothold. In particular, if we found something that (a) if we know it, we know a meaning, and (b) if we know a meaning, we know it, then we might discover a way of analyzing meaning. We will begin (and end) our search for this thing by examining truth conditions.

II. Truth Conditions

The truth condition of a sentence is the condition of the world under which it is true. This condition must be such that if it obtains, the sentence is true, and if it doesn't obtain, the sentence is false.

Now, whether a sentence is true or false in a given circumstance will depend on its parts. For instance, the sentence, "Snow is white," depends for its truth on snow and the property of being white. For it to be true, these things must be related in the right way; if they are not, then the sentence is false. Thus, the truth condition of a given sentence S will consist in a relation between the things in the world that correspond to the parts of S. This is often expressed in the following way:

"Snow is white" is true if and only if (or just in case) snow is white.

This seems like a platitude, but it really isn't. The first part of the sentence, "Snow is white", is a name, in this case, the name of a sentence. Thus, the sentence could be rewritten:

S is true if and only if snow is white.

This looks much less trivial. The part of the sentence on the right of the "if and only if" specifies the condition of the world that must obtain for the sentence named by the quote to be true. — Philosophy 202 - Meaning and Truth Conditions

***
Another kind of logic question, grammatical:

Let's consider, for example, this excerpt from a poem by Grenfell:

Those ancient Jew boys went like stinks,
They knew not reck nor fear,
Old Noah knocked the first two jinks,
And Nimrod got the spear.
And ever since those times of yore
True men do ride the fighting boar.

The last line here contains two verbs—do and ride—and I know that do here is used to make the phrase emphatic.
What I'm curious about is the underlying logic of such emphatic constructions. As a non-native speaker, I find it difficult to see how it makes any sense to use a transitive verb, do, right before another verb, ride. How can a verb be an object? Or should I see ride here as a noun rather than a verb?
My question: What exactly is the logic of using do to make phrases emphatic? — The Grammatical Logic of Emphatic Phrases

***

One thing that should be obvious from my approach is that I don't think there'd be a general answer for all languages, given that poetic meaning -- as I've been rendering it thus far at least -- includes phonic structure. — Moliere

Nothing is obvious to me, perhaps I missed it. If you could explain again, I'd be grateful.

So the question would be about, first, what is a reasonable delimitation on generality such that it's still interesting, and not just a set of rules for interpreting a sonnet? — Moliere

Again, I lack understanding of what it is you are asking. What do you mean by 'reasonable delimitation on generality'? What are the 'rules for interpreting a sonnet'?

That's what form does for us, in a way -- it tells us exactly how many phrases a poem will have, and some of its internal structure. In a way poetic form is a logic for answering the question "What constitutes a phrase?" -- and the modern poets basically assert that such formalities are not necessary to convey meaning (thus making it much harder to answer the original question, but taking us back to the original impetus -- the feeling of poetry) — Moliere

I am not sure what you are getting at. Perhaps if you could provide a complete and simple poem, an example to show how poetic form is a logic for answering the question 'What constitutes a phrase'?'
What is the importance of this question, in any case, when it comes to understanding meaning?
Wouldn't looking at the content be just as helpful?
Content + Form = Meaning

Content = title, subject matter, theme, word choices and order, imagery...

Again, do you have a source for your claim about 'modern poets' - who are they and where do they assert that 'formalities are not necessary to convey meaning?

A poem might initially be 'felt' by a simple read; not fully engaging the mental faculties.
However, to reach any obscure or symbolic meaning requires us to go beyond.
To read again. With care. To connect, compare and contrast with our own 'truths'. To relate.

The 'truth' of poetry I discussed earlier:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13562/poem-meaning/p4
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2015/4/poetry-truth

What kind of a phrase?
https://natureofwriting.com/courses/sentence-structure/lessons/phrases/topic/phrases/ — Amity

Hopefully any of those, and more, given that poems tend to invent their own phrase kinds.

What kind of a string? Examples?

Well, for now, I just mean a set of characters with some kind of single-dimensional direction that has a place where it begins and a place where it ends -- speaking more formally, basically. When I'm speaking as abstractly at the level of "strings" I'm kind of coming at the question "from the other side" of feeling -- attempting to put down abstract theories that provide clarity.

What is left where... in a poem? What is a 'truth-condition'? Why would a poem need one? — Amity

A poem would certainly not need one -- that's why I thought it a good topic! :D I'll try to explain responding to this:

I struggle to understand what is at issue. Even after I read the following: — Amity

I suppose I'd say that truth-conditions do not exhaust the meaning of even sentences in the form of a statement. The meaning of a statement may include truth-conditions, but my impression is that something is left out, that there is some remainder of meaning not included in such a definition of meaning. I don't think I'm even at a point where anything is quite at issue -- I'm still forming nascent thoughts.

But one of the things I'm trying to do is focus on the bits of language that truth-conditional semantics doesn't. So poetry, and its evaluation, as @SrapTasmaner pointed out earlier, is a concrete topic under which we might come up with distinctions to figure out what this "left over" is -- if we think there's more to meaning that the truth of statements at least. While I don't think that (EDIT, for clarity: I don't think that the meaning of a statement can be reduced to truth-conditions), if someone does then they'd likely see this endeavor as "following from" truth-conditional theories of meaning, where poetry is parasitic upon the truth embedded withing language.

Or the opposite, if someone is more given over to this notion of sentences simply meaning (like myself) and not needing a theory of meaning, though I'm obviously not satisfied else I wouldn't be creating threads like this -- then it would seem all the logical constructions are extraneous, superflous, unhelpful. (but they are interesting!)

Another kind of logic question, grammatical: — Amity

Perfect! That's exactly the sort of question I'm asking after. What does "do" do? Here we're asking about the meaning of the word within a sentence rather than the conditions under which it would be true. What is up with that?

Nothing is obvious to me, perhaps I missed it. If you could explain again, I'd be grateful. — Amity

heh, fair.

I think that the approach which prefers to talk about meaning in terms of a Language "L", such that we're speaking about language in the abstract rather than a particular natural language (like German or English or..), would say that the actual sound of a given unit of meaning is not important. But the phonic structure of a poem is part and parcell to poetry, even when it's not one of the forms.

A linguist would say that you could say--

"Snow is white" is true iff Schnee ist weiß

Has the same meaning because the conditions under which either sentence is spoken are the same. So the phonic structure is "accidental", or could be any other phonic structure insofar that the truth-conditions are somehow "attached" to this phonic bit or plank.

A poet wouldn't. Poets frequently complain about the impossibility of translating poetry. And one of the main complaints in translating poetry is exactly the phonic structure of the poem, and the relations that invokes within the spoken language.

That is -- it's not just the truth conditions that brings about the total meaning of a phrase, it's also all the relationships it holds with the other meaning-bits or meaning-planks (mostly making a distinction here based upon whether one might prefer analytic or holistic "units" of meaning -- the "unit" being undefined at this point because poems don't define things in terms of a sentence, for instance)

What do you mean by 'reasonable delimitation on generality'? — Amity

I mean the domain under consideration. So rather than all languages, I'd at least limit myself to a particular, natural language. But I wouldn't make a theory so specific such that it could only interpret the 108's sonnet of Shakespeare.

What are the 'rules for interpreting a sonnet'?

Iambic pentameter, 3 stanzas. Rhymes as follows: ABAB, CDCD, EE
And then with respect to the question "how many phrases are in a sonnet?" I think we could propose something like 10 phrases. Though there are constructions which would require us to look at the content, as opposed to the form -- so that's not quite a steadfast rule either, only the closest thing to a formal answer to the question. (also itself not necessary for providing an actual interpretation of a poem, which I've agreed is more about feeling and sharing and connecting than this attempt at making something formal)

What is the importance of this question, in any case, when it comes to understanding meaning?
Wouldn't looking at the content be just as helpful? — Amity

Heh, I'm sort of looking at meaning from two sides -- but with respect to poetry I think you're right to say that looking at the content is even more helpful than these questions I'm asking. I guess I'm starting to dip into the philosophy side of the question here, more than the poetic feeling side (though I also want to keep the poetic feeling side going -- rule 1 holds for me still)

Again, do you have a source for your claim about 'modern poets' - who are they and where do they assert that 'formalities are not necessary to convey meaning? — Amity

Mostly just using T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland as a standin for the category, since the essay I read pretty much treated it as a sort of revolutionary moment in poetry, where I thought it was clear he was inventing his own form and following it -- and certainly I felt the meaning that was there, the mood, the imagery... assertion isn't the right word, but I'm claiming that T.S. Elliot shows with this poem that we don't need the classical forms to convey meaning, (though maybe that's controversial! Others might say that it's clearly meaningless because it doesn't follow the forms....)

(EDIT: Just to be clear, the essay wasn't anything fancy -- literally just the introduction to a collected works I own, written by someone who works in the academy in New York at the time in the 80's, from the sound of it. It was a good essay on poetry in general, I thought, though... might type it up to share. Doubt I could find the exact one online)

A poem might initially be 'felt' by a simple read; not fully engaging the mental faculties.
However, to reach any obscure or symbolic meaning requires us to go beyond.
To read again. With care. To connect with our own 'truths'. — Amity

True. So we can't just say, what Davidson calls a "first reading", is the true reading -- the real meaning. And I completely agree that this is part of the interpretive process for poems. We connect to it with our own 'truths', as you say.

Do you see why, then, poetry serves as a good contrast case for truth-conditions to explore the nature of meaning?

Boy, you really lost me here. No need to go into a longer explanation. Sorry I can't respond more helpfully.

Heh. Sorry. I may have even lost myself. Feel free to skip the philosophy-bits, as they may well just be nonsense anyways :D

Sorry. — Moliere

No need to be sorry. I've been reading everything here and I'll read if you post more on this, but I won't likely be able to respond intelligently.

Hopefully any of those, and more, given that poems tend to invent their own phrase kinds. — Moliere

Given that, why pose the question of 'what constitutes a phrase?' and the follow-up:

is it possible to devise a relationship between a string and how many phrases are in a string — Moliere

If there are a number of phrases in a 'string', I would have thought any 'string' would be the sentence or more. But this doesn't seem to be the case:

What kind of a string? Examples?

Well, for now, I just mean a set of characters with some kind of single-dimensional direction that has a place where it begins and a place where it ends -- speaking more formally, basically. When I'm speaking as abstractly at the level of "strings" I'm kind of coming at the question "from the other side" of feeling -- attempting to put down abstract theories that provide clarity. — Moliere

So again, a clear-cut example of what your first sentence means would be helpful.
Clarity is necessary for understanding. How will unclear abstract theories provide this?

[...] But one of the things I'm trying to do is focus on the bits of language that truth-conditional semantics doesn't. So poetry, and its evaluation, as SrapTasmaner pointed out earlier, is a concrete topic under which we might come up with distinctions to figure out what this "left over" is -- if we think there's more to meaning that the truth of statements at least. — Moliere

Thanks. A pity that this was skipped over:

This thread might provide a better opportunity for discussing the subjective and objective [...]
The interpretation of a work of art is a good test case in part because, as I think Dawnstorm suggested, there's stuff in there the artist didn't put in deliberately. But it is, objectively, there. Some stuff you find only if you bring it with you, so subjective.

There's also the peculiarity that what's not there, might not be there on purpose, which happens with expression not intended as art too, but plays out differently with art. There are various ways this is done for various purposes with various effects. Always cases. Since it's not there, but the place for it is, this is particularly interesting spot for addressing the objectivity and subjectivity of interpretation. — Srap Tasmaner

Interesting to consider the possibly purposeful missing pieces of the poetic puzzle.
A message hidden from plain sight for whatever reason. We see that in philosophy where the anti-religious had to hide their views from the status-quo for health and safety reasons.
The reader then must figure out any clues that might lead to a new unspoken 'truth'.

So yes, of course, there is always a combination of subjectivity and objectivity in any text; poem or art.
The 'subjective' is not 'left over'.

I think that the approach which prefers to talk about meaning in terms of a Language "L", such that we're speaking about language in the abstract rather than a particular natural language (like German or English or..), would say that the actual sound of a given unit of meaning is not important. But the phonic structure of a poem is part and parcell to poetry, even when it's not one of the forms. — Moliere

Thanks for clarifying. It shows what most readers would know. The sound is the pound.
And yes, I now see that the absence or silence within can create or disturb a rhythm, as in music.
Also how reading aloud, or listening, can provide the musicality and a more meaningful experience.
I found help, here: (included for my own recall !)
https://owlcation.com/humanities/Sound-Devices-in-Poetry

What are the 'rules for interpreting a sonnet'?

Iambic pentameter, 3 stanzas. Rhymes as follows: ABAB, CDCD, EE — Moliere

Those are structural rules, no? How do they help in interpretation? Ah, reading on:

(also itself not necessary for providing an actual interpretation of a poem, which I've agreed is more about feeling and sharing and connecting than this attempt at making something formal) — Moliere

Got it :up:

Poets frequently complain about the impossibility of translating poetry. And one of the main complaints in translating poetry is exactly the phonic structure of the poem, and the relations that invokes within the spoken language. — Moliere

Yes, I don't envy the translator's task. I've read more here:

[...] One of the features that makes poetry even more special is to be found on a “deeper” level. The thing about poetry is that it manages to explore the author’s feelings and express them in such an overpowering way, that it does so with a twist.

The trademark of poetry, in fact, is that it resonates with the reader’s feelings too. And even if unable to fully appreciate the intricate meanings and messages hidden in a certain use of words, readers’ emotions are triggered by a simple word or rhyme, or even by the associations made by their own imagination. — Creative Translation

[my bolds]

I appreciate all the time and energy spent in responding to my queries.

Do you see why, then, poetry serves as a good contrast case for truth-conditions to explore the nature of meaning? — Moliere

I understand a whole lot more now than I did before, thanks :sparkle:

Iambic pentameter, 3 stanzas. Rhymes as follows: ABAB, CDCD, EE — Moliere

That's the Shakespearean sonnet, with the volta coming rather abruptly at the start of line 13. The older form (petrarchan I think) has a group of 8 and then 6, so there's more time after the volta to develop the counterpoint to the first 8.

Trying to make it obvious here how the structure of a poem shapes its meaning.

So again, a clear-cut example of what your first sentence means would be helpful.
Clarity is necessary for understanding. How will unclear abstract theories provide this? — Amity

Ah! I'm lifting the term from computer science.

So, as the wiki shows, "This is a string!" is a string.

And if it is a sequence then, to make things more abstract, any set of characters with members greater than 1 would count as a string, I think. <-- Keeping it here cuz I started here, but re-reading I think this is a tangeant.

So in positing the question "How many phrases are in a string?" I'm asking is for a rule that would allow a computer to compute some number given any string -- so it couldn't be infinite, but it could be any combination of characters, including spaces and indentations and dashes and every bit that we'd consider in reading a string (as these themselves were added later).

Also, I added the information about direction of reading because we're dealing with poetry which is itself not necessarily digital. It's written on an open page, and the notions of space aren't as easy to define when we have a whole page to write on vs. some line that might include "paragraph break" as a character in its alphabet, which means "new plank of meaning", or something like that -- time to consider something else.

So one rule I could propose in counting phrases would be "every time there is a paragraph break, add one" -- and with the sonnet we'd get a definite number of "10" this way. However, in looking at the content, we'd probably contend this derivation in some poems. Thinking here of lines that invoke two contrasting ideas or feelings or meanings within the same line -- we'd likely, as humans, count those as two phrases instead of 1. Actually I should highlight here just how odd my line of questioning is, because as humans reading a poem we wouldn't usually ask "How many phrases are in this poem?" -- such a question seems to entirely miss the point!

So yes, of course, there is always a combination of subjectivity and objectivity in any text; poem or art.
The 'subjective' is not 'left over'. — Amity

Yes, very true. This is by way of trying to delineate what I'm attempting to get at. I agree that it's not actually left over -- hence why I could see how someone would call into question my little thought experiment, claiming that it is not as innocent as I'm proposing.

But I'm not sure how else to get at what I mean other than by contrasting...

I appreciate all the time and energy spent in responding to my queries. — Amity

Heh, I'm just glad there's enough interest here that I'm able to think through my wacky thoughts. :)

I hate sonnets. To me, all sonnets day the same thing. — WCW

What are the 'rules for interpreting a sonnet'?

Iambic pentameter, 3 stanzas. Rhymes as follows: ABAB, CDCD, EE — Moliere

I just accepted that as true. Unfortunately, you didn't provide a source so that I could check.
Do you have one?

I found this interesting. Again, not sure if it's correct:

Shakespearean sonnets are broken into 4 sections, called quatrains.
They maintain a strict rhyme scheme:
ABAB // CDCD // EFEF // GG
The sonnet must have 14 lines.
Each line has 10 syllables.
Each line usually rhymes using the following syllable pattern:
soft-LOUD-soft-LOUD-soft-LOUD-soft-LOUD-soft-LOUD
Sonnets often describe a problem and solution, or question and answer.
The transition from problem to solution (or question to answer) is called the volta (turn). — Sonnet Rules and Rhyme Scheme

Trying to make it obvious here how the structure of a poem shapes its meaning. — Srap Tasmaner

Do you have an easy-to-understand example of a sonnet?

Yup yup, true. Even the example sonnet 108 I gave doesn't follow what I said, too. (does it really surprise you that a person whose fine without form would forget forms? :D But they're still useful to think through) -- and there are other forms of the sonnet, like you mention.

But surely you see what I mean by form now, though? The rhythm-rhyme scheme, at a minimum, defines a poetic form.

.

I hate sonnets. To me, all sonnets day the same thing. — WCW

WCW :chin:
Woman Crush Wednesday or World Championship Wrestling.
'All donnets day the dame thing' :cool:

Yup yup, true.
...does it really surprise you that a person whose fine without form would forget forms? :D — Moliere

Funny but not the point, if you're trying to be serious - don't dismiss with carelessness :naughty:
It's bad form, old boy :smirk:

Heh, I'm just glad there's enough interest here that I'm able to think through my wacky thoughts. — Moliere

Well, I have my limits. And I think I've reached them. I might leave the rest to others. Thanks anyway :up:

Sorry. I don't mean to be dismissive. You're right that it's important to get the facts correct, and I made a mistake. I was hoping the mistake wasn't critical, though, to the point -- but apparently I was wrong there too.

Heh, yes, feel free to skip over the wacky thoughts. :D I appreciate everything you've contributed, and definitely do not want to lose that feeling of poetry, or the interpretation of poetry, in the wacky thoughts.

You're forgiven but only because I'm an :halo: with a :naughty: streak.
Take care :sparkle:

I appreciate everything you've contributed, and definitely do not want to lose that feeling of poetry, or the interpretation of poetry, in the wacky thoughts. — Moliere

Thank you. I much prefer the feeling/meaning but form is good for me too. I've learned a lot about how it contributes. It took a lot of questions to get there... :flower:
Have placed your last explanatory post on my back-burner...

:) Thank goodness. I didn't want any bad blood after so much good interaction. And I appreciate being corrected. It's always better to change beliefs to what's true than hold onto what we think is false.

Love him.

I went to look at his page on Poetry Foundation and didn't like any of the poems they had on offer as much as This is Just To Say:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

One of my favorite gems.

I didn't want any bad blood after so much good interaction. — Moliere

No worries. I don't do 'bad blood'...much. Certainly not in this kind of discussion :sparkle:

Love him. — Moliere

Hadn't heard of @Srap Tasmaner's 'WCM' but now I have.
William Carlos Williams: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-carlos-williams

I went to look at his page on Poetry Foundation and didn't like any of the poems they had on offer as much as This is Just To Say:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold — Moliere

I like it too, and I it made me ask myself something. If I wrote "I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. They were delicious, so sweet and so cold."

Is that still a poem? If not, what made Williams' version one? The pauses at the end of each line? The way it flowed differently? The way it looks? What about the stanzas? Were the breaks between them just for visual purposes.

My initial thought - Williams' version is definitely a poem but my edited version is not. I haven't read much of his work. I should.

Is that still a poem? If not, what made Williams' version one? The pauses at the end of each line? The way it flowed differently? The way it looks? What about the stanzas? Were the breaks between them just for visual purposes. — T Clark

Music to my ears. The exact sort of thing I'm asking after.

.

Oh dear, there's way too much going on here, and.. well, it's a secondary topic I've studied on university level, so my problem is mostly how to be brief and not too technical. Easy things first: What people say about sonnetts here is all correct; Amity is right about the form the of Shakespearean sonnets, and Srap Tasmaner is right about Petrarchan sonnets.

Next: metre is more something you approach assymptotically than keep to slavishly. Strict regularity is more a feature of poems that are supposed to entertain. A Limerick or a doggerel is going to be more regular metre-wise than a sonnet, on avarage. Regularity creates a sing-song feeling that many poem types (especially the more serious forms) wish to avoid.

Next, semantics. I've never liked truth-conditional semantics too much. My hunch is that meaning needs to be there before you ever get too truth, and truth itself needs to be a meaningful concept. I think that meaning is pre-linguistic even. For that reason, I'm not too fond of a simple reference semantic either. I tend towards cognitive semantics. But I've never looked into semantics too much, so I'm not an expert what they actually say. If you go by the usual semantic triangle, of sign - thing - concept (whatever the different versions might conceptualise the points of the triangle as), I'd say that the concept is central, and both the sign and the thing evoke the concept, but in different concepts. Truth is irrelevant until rather late in the game. A poem, especially a long one as the Wasteland, will have its own meaning, both while reading, and after reading as a memory trace, which then influences a consequitive reading, and so on. You can never read the same poem twice.

The term phrase is rather precise in linguistics (but doesn't only have one meaning, since there are different theories). Language is compositional. Basically morphemes make words make phrases make clauses, and after that you get into text analysis and leave the realm of syntax. A phrase can be composes of words and other phrases and even clauses. For example, one way to count phrases, could be the follwoing: "the red apple":

1. Determiner Phrase: "the red apple"
2. Noun phrase: "red apple"
3. a) adjective phrase: "red"
3. b) noun phrase: "apple".

Not all ways of counting recognise determiner phrases. The numbering shows compositional levels, and goes inwards. If 3. a) were "red and yellow" (as in "the red and yellow apple"), for example, you'd have to decide (by your theory) if it's meaningful to count "red" and "yellow" as their own phrases. I could say that at that point we just have a co-ordination of adjectives. It's not that easy, though, since you could have "the mostly red and somewhat yellow apple", which then would make you decide what to do with the adverbs. In that case, I'd count "mostly red" and "somewhat yellow" as adjective phrases, since while the adjectives are co-ordinated, the adverbs are not co-ordinated, which means the co-ordination is on the phrase level. If all it takes to get phrases is a modification of the adjectives, though, there's no good reason to not also see the unmodified version as co-ordination of phrases rather than words.

Next, "phrase" is also a word used in music theory: a phrase is built from lower level stuff, too, like, say, motifs, but I'm not that knowledgable here. In any case, if you riff of this term, you might consider a phrase a compositional unit that somehow completes a rhythm. A phrase might co-incide with a line, with half a line, with a couplet... depending on the poem. You can then compare the rhythmic units with units of meaning: Do they co-incide? Do they overlap? And so on.

Meaning tends to influence rhythm as much as the other way round, and different people might emphasise different words. A short Poem:

Danielle Hope, "The Mist at Night" (from The Poet's Voice, 1994):

Perhaps it's the trees, look -
on sentry parade by the lake,
October weighting their branches,
a flotilla of shadows
casting nets over the water.
Perhaps it's the black-out under the trees -
terse chestnuts crack underfoot.
The water-rat snores from dumb roots,
the hawthorn racked red with doubt.

Perhaps it's the mist - wide awake
like a child before Christmas -
or that you think the air weeps
and you don't want it to stop.
So you tug up a tough ugly stump
to wake the lynx that sleeps
just under your heart.
To chase the sleepy lynx out of its lair.
To run wild in the mist in the night.

You get two ten-line stanzas, both subdivided into lines of five. The most striking means of subdivision is the repetition of "Perhaps it's the...", which gives the poem its structure, until the final five lines are introduced with "So," initiating a conclusion (which is what the word "so" often does). On the semantic level, the "perhaps" refuses to make a definite statement, and the "it" is indeterminate, never telling you what it's talking about. So you have a sort of vague, dreamy feel just from non-sensual words.

The mist from the title doesn't come in until the start of the second stanza. The first stanza gives the setting, but does smuggle in impressionistic figurative language. What strikes me are the adjectives that sort of hint at communication, but with inanimate nouns: "terse chestnuts", "dumb roots" - until the stanza ends with "doubt" attributed to... hawthorn?

Phonetically, the first stanza starts out with frictatives and long vowels (the first line ends with a plosive; so does the second one, the same one, "k", but this time with a diphtong, which sounds more relaxed). The other three lines end in unstressed syllaber. All in all, I read this in a quite relaxed, tone - with "look" standing out as an exclamation of excitement. The next five lines start out in a similar vein: this time it ends on "trees", a long-vowel word. But then you get the terse chest-nuts: the line has lots of plosive and darker vowel sounds. It's a change in the mood (and the "blackout" foreshadows this, actually). Semantically, the chestnuts being terse fit well with a "crack", but the word is a little odd. The water-rat line feels a little more relaxed again, but not quite as much as the trees-line, and the hawthorn line ends on the plosive of "doubt".

Then we get to the mist, and here we have a intra-line break, like the first line before "look", but we're now fully in the poet's projection space: it's not the mist that's wide awake, it's... the poet? the reader? the adressee? To me, the lines that follow have the strongest run-on quality so far in the poem: it's a consecutive idea that mixes the outer world with the inner world, and then it gets explicit with the next three lines.

Phonetically the so-line is one I hurry through. Very dark vowals, and a very interesting phonetic construction in "tug up a tough ug..." You're almost repating the sounds with switched letters: tug and ugly - and up and tough (not quite perfect, but both unvoiced vowel sounds. The line ends with another "p", and then the poem slows down again (or at least I do when I read it). The seciton ends with lynx sleeping explicitly under "your heart", now. The mix-up between the inner and outer world is out in the open. And we get a full-stop here. That slows the poem down even further. You could co-ordinate the following to-lines with commas (the poem's used commas before), but it doesn't. The lines slow down, until the last line has internal repetion of "in" - which to me creates a three-part rhythm in a single line. I tend to svaour this, reading the line. I end the poem at its slowest (even though semantically, the poem's adressee is supposed to run wild).

There's a very clear mood to the poem for me, and a great sense of progression, but there's no clear meaning that's explicable. The phonetics, the punctuation, everything guides the reading. I'm not reading this poem at a constant speed; I can't. And that wraps into content of the metaphors, too. Oddly, I calm down when the poem invites you to run wild, but that sort of gives me a perfect sense of catharsis. Natural stops and run-on lines are very well placed to that effect. You (or, well, I) don't just get that effect from the meaning of the words. There's the vivid imagery, and the mix up of inner and outer world. (For example, if you tug up a tough ugly stump to wake the lynx that sleeps just under your heart, where was the stump, and did it hurt? It's not like I ever thought about it explicitly like that before I typed those lines, but that's sort of the... mulch of what's going on in my mind when I read that poem.)

It's one of my favourite poems.

PS: I distinctly recognise the plum poem, but the poet's name doesn't ring a bell. This is rare. Normally, when I remember a poem, I remember the name, and if I forget it, it'd at least sound familiar. I might be getting old.

I like it too, and I it made me ask myself something. If I wrote "I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. They were delicious, so sweet and so cold."

Is that still a poem? If not, what made Williams' version one? The pauses at the end of each line? The way it flowed differently? The way it looks? What about the stanzas? Were the breaks between them just for visual purposes. — T Clark

I'm guessing it's that linebreaks slow you down, and you pay more attention to the words in themselves. We're conditioned to read prose for meaning first. (Though some prose can override that for me, like the final paragraph of James Joyce' "The Dead".)