Riddle
Who I am’s child’s play,
a cry in a kindergarten;
though I pun on Latin,
my Yorkshire kin’s laik,
a whole lexical rainbow
unweaving in no code,
no masonic Mahabone
nor Horseman’s Word –
but I’m caltrops at night
to the bare feet of adults
inspiring their language
to such colours as I am,
pixellating Mies blocks;
the Ephesian Artemis
in each cubist bust;
the Song of Amergin
by a Turing machine:
name me or you’ll be
thicker than any brick.
*
"Riddle" begins and ends with the figure mentioned
in its third line: the pun. In the first line, "child's play" is an
idiom for "very easy", but the literal "play of a child" is
also present. The final line varies the idiom "thick as a brick",
meaning "very stupid", but also puns on "brick", as the
answer to the riddle involves "bricks."
As a
student pointed out yesterday, "Riddle" ends by insulting readers who
have not figured out its answer: if you can't "name me", you're
stupid. This is a common understanding of poems: they are all riddles waiting to be answered. From this perspective, the poem
ends with the idea of poems as puzzles rewarding those clever enough to "solve"
them and punishing those who are not.
Yet the
poem's opening pun offers an alternative way of thinking about poems. If the
poem is "child's play", it is easy, and the way to make reading a
poem easy is precisely to play with
it. A riddle is itself a kind of game, and this poem makes poetry in general a
game as well, a game played with words, a game that plays on words, a game of
word play, of "cries" and "puns", of "lexical
rainbows", of "colourful language", of "songs" (and
not, as the second stanza makes clear, a "code" to be deciphered). Ultimately,
"Riddle" encourages readers of poetry to let go of the idea of poetry
as a set of "riddles" to be solved.
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