When I was a freshman college student in the early 70s I took a class called CRITICAL AND EVALUATIVE READING. The class required the reading of five books of our choice, and our assessments of those books on 3″ x 5″ cards. I only remember four of the five books I chose. They were Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, A Patch of Blue by Elizabeth Kata, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. The last was far and away the densest, most difficult of the books, and I struggled to get through it. Midway I thought I needed some help and so I bought the Cliffs Notes (or it may have been a different study guide; the bookstore had two) plot summary/analysis of Portrait. But I quickly became skeptical of the analytical integrity of the thing. Near the very beginning Joyce writes
When you wet the bed first it is hot then it gets cold.
According to the “analysis” this occurs because Joyce is riffing on the dichotomy of Heat and Cold as a theme for the book.
I didn’t buy it. I think Joyce was reporting a tiny child’s experience, one I remembered myself. It’s true, especially in winter, that the blood-temp urine starts hot and cools quickly. And the “analyst” also didn’t pick up on the growth of the sophistication of the language of the book from the very beginning, which if memory serves is
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down the road…
to the very end, which I think is
Old friend, old artificer, serve me now and in good stead.
So I ditched the Notes and struggled the rest of the way through the book solo. I can say with confidence that I did not fully understand the book and was often baffled by what was being described, or emphasized, or driving the behavior of the principal characters. My assessment was fudgy and deliberately vague so as not to be wrong. C’est la vie.
More than 40 years later, on a different index card, I’ve brought something into existence which would baffle almost anyone, and I don’t exclude myself. A person looking like a blend of Charles Laughton and Eleanor Roosevelt stares over the right shoulder of the viewer, not quite stupidly. He or she is flanked by two dichotomous (perhaps) acrostic poems, transcribed below:
go away
got a pair? well ha ha ha
get a REAL life–it’s the law
only when it’s time for tea
one might stir things gracefully
STAY HOME
Soothing makes a baby Oooooh
Touching when unwelcome: shoo
Adding moisture gains a gleam
Yawning oft subverts the theme
The good news is these are two poems in trochaic tetrameter, with perhaps perfect rhyme and rhythm. The “go away” poem does seem go-awayish, and the “STAY HOME” poem seems to have the lulling comfort of home.
The bad news is it’s hard to tell what has been accomplished here. Some meaning had to take a back seat to the puzzle-solving of the acrosticization. As Chief Dan George says in Little Big Man, “Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
I conclude that its entertainment value is chiefly in the niftiness of the acrostic construction, and may be enjoyed in a similar way that a Lego sculpture might, when all the pieces fit together just right. But, dear Reader and friend, please don’t struggle overmuch with the extraction of meaning from the content. It may remind you of little life moments, or it may seem off the wall. With Acrostics, a perfect blend of content and form is sometimes unattainable.
