Like The Burglar
Like the burglar who distracts
the guard dog with a piece of meat,
the poet, serving meager facts,
intends the words to be his treat.
The words are music that should wow
but their meanings’ mist and fog
if higher than the reader’s brow
may leave him barking like a dog.
TS Eliot in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, cited by Mark Ford reviewing Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form by Helen Vendler, compared the ostensible meaning of a poem to the bit of meat with which a burglar distract a guard dog.
3/22/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
Added by Poetry Lover
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