I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
1. Metaphorically,
and watch him probe his way out,
the speaker does
or walk inside the poem's room not like how
and feel the walls for a light switch.
people "torture" a
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
poem. What do
waving at the author's name on the shore. you think it meansPLLEASE HELP QUICK
But all they want to do
(literally) to
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
“torture” a poem?
"Introduction to
Poetry"
By Billy Collins
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Yeah that could be one way to LITERALLY torture a poem

it was surely an odd creature that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets afterwards a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and elegance and charm,   in a kitchen chopping up suet. but these creatures, monst'r however entertaining to the imagination, hast no existence in fact. what one might doth to bringeth h'r to life wast to bethink poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment,   thus keeping in toucheth with fact—that the lady is mrs martin, ag'd thirty-six, did dress in blue, wearing a black coxcomb and brown shoeth; but not losing sight of fiction eith'r—that the lady is a vessel in which all s'rts of spirits and f'rces art coursing and flashing p'rpetually. the moment, howev'r, yond one tries this method with the elizabethan mistress, one brancheth of illumination fails; one is did hold up by the scarcity of facts.   one knoweth nothing detailed, nothing p'rfectly true and substantial about h'r.   hist'ry scarcely mentions h'r.   and i did turn to professeth'r trevelyan again to seeth what hist'ry meanteth to that gent.   i hath found by looking at his chapt'r headings yond t meanteth.