Because there are so many ways to express all of the things I feel, the final poem hardly seems significant; it is just a moment's experience, put into words, while a billion more moments pass, unrecorded.

The written poem has a continuing existence to me only as an object of beauty -- through its pleasing rhythms, sounds, and images. When I read it again, it exists solely in that present time, and I experience it then in whatever context appeals to me, with the meanings I choose, for whatever reasons I find most delightful. I never need to analyze it, or wonder whether I have discovered its deeper meanings.

"Everyone wants to understand art," said Pablo Picasso. "Why not try to understand the songs of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he finds himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them." (Picasso On Art, edited by Dore Ashton. Viking.)

Dylan Thomas adds: "Read the poems you like reading. Don't bother whether they're important, or if they'll live. What does it matter what poetry is, after all? If you want a definition of poetry, say: 'poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing, and let it go at that. All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it, however tragic it may be. All that matters is the eternal movement behind it, the vast undercurrent of human grief, folly, pretension, exaltation, or ignorance, however unlofty the intention of the poem." (Modern Poetics, edited by James Scully.

It is all right to enjoy a poem superficially. And it is all right to skip over a difficult poem, if skipping pleases us. Tomorrow, if we crave challenge, we might go back to that complex work.

There are serious analyses of nursery rhymes -- which are perhaps most valuable when left to the non-analyzing minds of children. An overly intellectual approach can spoil the enjoyment of reading. Certainly, we can read with our intellectual mind sometimes -- and at other times, we can read with our child-mind and our heart and our soul and our laughter and our simple love of pleasure.

We can enjoy poetry in our own way, as a barely tangible toy that helps us to be happy.

I dream a thousand poems,
And I write the One for you.
And I rhyme my word with silence,
That you may find it true.

(From Silent Rhyme by James Harvey Stout)