Imagine we see a big dog. A very big dog. Naturally, we want to share this curious event with our serious young friend Earnest:

I have seen a very big dog.

Earnest will think of large dogs he has seen in the past. Perhaps he will think of a Rottweiler or a Doberman.

No, no, Earnest! A very big dog. An extremely big dog!

Now, Earnest might think of the biggest dog he has ever seen, or perhaps even a dog a little bigger than that. But, being so very serious and sensible, it won’t be much bigger. As you recall, the dog we saw was so tremendously big that we could have ridden around on its back like a cowboy on a bronco. Poor Earnest will have no idea. This won’t do at all!

The problem with words like “extremely” is that they are used so commonly, they lose their true meaning. “Extremely” should really mean “close to the extreme”, or in other words, “as much, or almost as much, of a certain thing as it’s possible to be.” An “extremely big dog” should be a dog that’s as big as a dog can be (which, as we have seen, is very large indeed!)

However, because Earnest hears “extremely” rather a lot, when we say the word he doesn’t think about what its definition in the dictionary is. His mind jumps straight to the everyday meaning of the word. For Earnest, the everyday meaning of the word is taken from the time Charles said it was “extremely unfair” that his mother wouldn’t let him have a second serving of cake, or when Michael thought it was “extremely unlikely” to rain on Tuesday. But in fact, it was only a little unfair for Charles’ mother to stop him from eating so much cake (for it would not do to have an upset stomach), and it was only fairly unlikely for it to rain on Tuesday (for it does rain at this time of year). Every time Earnest hears “extremely” used to mean something that isn’t extreme at all, its true meaning becomes worn away a little more. Now that we need to tell him about something that really is close to the extremes of what is possible, “extremely” simply isn’t intense enough.

Choosing which word to use to describe something is like choosing which tool to use when making dinner. Everyday language is like a cook’s knife; it is fairly good at many different tasks. It’s important to know how to use it properly because we use it to prepare almost every meal. In fact, it’s often the only tool we need. But because we use it so much, it doesn’t keep a razor-sharp edge, and it can be hard to use for some delicate tasks.

The word “extremely” is like a boning knife; it should be very good at one particular thing and hopeless at everything else. It’s possible to use a cook’s knife to bone a fish, but only the most deft and practiced cook can do so well. For most of us, the boning knife is the better tool because every part of its shape and structure has been designed with removing bones in mind.

The problem is that Charles has been using our boning knife to chop tomatoes, and Michael has been using it to open cans, tasks that it was not designed to do; it’s now bent and blunt and not much use to anyone. If we try to use it to bone our fish now, we’ll be hacking away for hours and we still won’t be able to remove the bones well.

We need to reach to the very back of the drawer and find a knife that hasn’t been used for anything else, a knife that is still sharp and well suited to our particular task.

So, perhaps we can use a word Earnest doesn’t hear very often. What if we say to Earnest:

I have seen a Brobdingnagian dog.

Earnest, despite being sensible to a fault, has never heard the word “Brobdingnagian” before. Never one to shy away from a challenge, he will search out the very largest dictionary he can find and see that the word “Brobdingnagian” refers to an inhabitant of Brobdingnag, a made-up country in a book called Gulliver’s Travels by a man named Jonathan Swift. And because he is so very serious, Earnest will borrow his father’s copy of Gulliver’s Travels and pore through it until he finds the section that describes the land of Brobdingnag. He’ll read that the Brobdingnagians are sixty feet high with a stride that spans ten yards. When we next see Earnest, he’ll say, “That dog must truly have been the biggest that has ever come to the village!”

Because “Brobdingnagian” is not a word Earnest hears often, it has only a very particular meaning for him: something very large indeed.

And that is all very well, but it was rather a lot of work for poor Earnest, and many people are not nearly so patient or curious as to look up the meaning of a word as intimidating as “Brobdingnagian”.  In choosing a word to use, we need to balance ease-of-understanding with intensity-of-meaning.

What if we plotted this relationship on a line? It might look something like this.

On this scale, the word “big” would be a zero or a one, and the word “Brobdingnagian” would be a nine or a ten. “Extremely big” might be a three, “tremendous” and “enormous” might be a four or a five, and “gigantic” might be a six. More unusual words like “behemothic“, “elephantine” or “cyclopean” would be closer to the top of the scale. We can see that as words become less commonly used, their meaning becomes more intense. We can use this scale to find balance between using easy words and difficult words; we don’t want to confuse people with complicated language when it isn’t necessary.

This scale works fairly well for describing a very large dog; we could even use the same scale for words that mean “very small” or “very hot”, or any other type of meaning that relies on intensity.

But what if we see a particularly unusual color of butterfly and want to describe its color?

We can call the color “red”, but “red” is a very general word. The butterfly’s color isn’t any more intense than “red”; it just isn’t quite the same everyday red of tomatoes or strawberries. If we think of less common words for “red”, we might light upon “scarlet”, which matches the butterfly a little better. If we think for longer we might eventually reach “terracotta“, the color of baked clay, which is closer to the color of the butterfly even than “scarlet”. And if we think for a very long time indeed and consult many long books full of difficult words, we might at long last settle upon “vermilion“, which is a very fine word indeed to describe the color of the butterfly, for it is vermilion through and through.

But the butterfly is also red. Vermilion is simply a type of terracotta, and terracotta is simply a type of scarlet, and scarlet is simply a type of red. Any of those words could correctly describe the color of the butterfly; vermilion is just the most precise word.

In fact, if we think back to the words we used to describe the dog, “Brobdingnagian” is nothing more than a type of “elephantine”, which is, in turn, simply a variety of “enormous”, which is a subset of “extremely big”, which is itself a type of “big”.

If we were to draw the relationship between these words, it might look something like this:

We can see that “Brobdingnagian” is a useful word not only because it is very intense, but because it is very precise. “Big” could mean a great range of sizes (from the second-smallest dog to the largest); “enormous” could mean a reasonable range (any of the three largest dogs); but “Brobdingnagian” could mean only a very narrow range (the largest dog). It is a useful word because it hones in exactly on what we want to say.

We can use this to update our original line:

But hang on! What if that butterfly hadn’t been vermilion but had been black? “Black” is a very commonly used word, but it has a precise meaning. Unlike red, there aren’t many shades of black. So where would that word fit on our scale?

And what if we had thought of the word “rufescent” instead of “vermilion”? “Rufescent” is a very rarely used word for red, but it doesn’t mean a precise color like “terracotta” or “vermilion”. So where would that word fit on our scale?

“Rarely used” and “precise in meaning” usually go together; “commonly used” and “general in meaning” usually go together. But there are many exceptions. We know that it’s better to use easy-to-understand words when possible, because what we say we will be less confusing, and it’s better to use precise-in-meaning words when possible, because they will express what we want to say more finely. We can plot precision of meaning against frequency of use to see how useful a particular word is.

The best words possible will score well on both axes and be at the top-right of the graph. However, as we’ve discovered, being frequently used tends to wear down a word’s meaning, so there aren’t any that score a ten on both scales.

The worst words will score close to zero on both axes. They are both hard to understand and vague in meaning. They confuse people with their unfamiliarity and yet, even when encountered by someone who happens to know what they mean (someone even more serious and sensible than Earnest–imagine!), they fail to be specific and precise. These are the words to avoid at all costs.

We can see from the graph that, for describing the very large dog, “gigantic” is a better word than “tremendous” because it is both easier to understand and more precise in meaning. In the same way, “cyclopean” is a better word than “behemothic” (perhaps because more people know of the cyclops than the behemoth). Of course, if Earnest happened to have a keen interest in the Book of Job and no interest at all in Greek mythology, than the rating for those particular words might be different (but, as we know, Earnest loves nothing more than reading Hesiod and Homer).

Which words we choose to use depends on how precise we need to be. When we tell Earnest about the very big dog, it’s important for him to understand just how large a dog it is (for otherwise, it is a very boring story). It makes sense to use a precise word like “brobdingnagian” or “cyclopean”, even if it might seem a little confusing at first.

If we wanted to tell Earnest that the dog had bitten us, the word “enormous” or “extremely big” would do perfectly well, for all we would want Earnest to understand is that he needed to fetch the doctor.

One thing we must never do is use a word that is difficult to understand just to make ourselves feel clever. It won’t do for all of our words to be long and difficult to understand, just as it wouldn’t do to have one knife for chopping tomatoes and another for dicing onions and another for slicing carrots and yet another for mincing garlic. Our kitchen would become hopelessly cluttered and we would trip over ourselves at every turn.

The secret to fine writing is to find the right balance between making your readers think about the words you have chosen and making your writing easy to understand. Hopefully, the tools we have developed together will let us choose the right words for our poem.

In the next post in the series, we will see if the same tools and balance can be applied to other aspects of our poem.

However, we are left with the problem of finding, selecting and editing such an experience from our ill-fated romance with Julia. Here, I must cheat a little, for I know all sorts of particular details about how we met and fell in love with Julia, and you (even though I’m sure you have been reading very carefully), know only a few.

As is common to many young men (and you must imagine, for a few moments, that you are a young man who falls in love with young ladies), we fell deeply in love with Julia at first sight. We were too afraid to tell Julia how we felt about her (as is also far too common). Although we eventually summoned enough courage to ask Julia to the dance (and she refused), we always wondered if things might have turned out differently had we acted sooner.

To capture our experience, the memory we choose for our poem must contain the essence of:

• Seeing Julia and falling in love
• Missing a vital moment during which to act
• Attempting to act too late with no success
• Wondering if things might have happened differently

On a certain evening I walked by the river just as the sun was going down over the horizon. As I turned a corner in the path, I saw Julia and a friend of hers standing by the water. Julia reached to pull a pomegranate from a low branch. She looked very beautiful; I felt excited to see her. I greeted them and the three of us walked together for a time. Julia began to eat the pomegranate. She offered me a portion. I refused; my hands were dirty. I had fallen over a tree root. We came to the river and I washed my hands, but by then Julia and her friend had finished the fruit. It quickly became dark. I asked if Julia would like for me to walk home with the two of them. She told me they lived nearby and could see well in the moonlight. I turned to walk home alone through the trees. I felt very sad.

This experience shall make a fine foundation stone for our poem. However, although we have discussed the way in which each little part of such an experience seems important, if we consider how to best communicate with Earnest, we can edit our memory of Julia a little.

For instance, the fact that Julia’s friend was there at the river bank that evening doesn’t add much to the experience that will be meaningful to Earnest. It may mean something to us–perhaps how frustrating it was not to be able to talk to Julia alone–but those same feelings are contained more neatly in other parts of the memory. Removing Julia’s friend will make the poem easier to understand; it will be more obvious that the feelings and thoughts we are trying to capture are caused by Julia and not anybody else. Because every word and sentence in our finished poem must be full of meaning, we have to remove any excess material that will dilute our writing and confuse poor Earnest.

Similarly, the fact that we muddied our hands by falling over a tree root may be significant to us–perhaps it seemed like the world was conspiring against us that day–but it is not necessary to understand how we fell in love with Julia. Earnest, despite being a very serious and sensible young man, has climbed enough trees and played in enough river beds to be well acquainted with the many ways in which a young man may get his hands dirty. We can remove that unnecessary detail.

We can also add a little to our memory. As we remember, we left Julia and her friend to walk home across an open pasture. However, much of what we want to express to Earnest is the feeling of wondering what could have happened if we had acted differently. A fork in the path by the river, rather than an open pasture, might represent that to Earnest rather better.

A further problem is that parts of our memory are feelings. As we learned from Part 2, it will be more effective to use language to recreate those feelings in Earnest’s mind rather than simply describe them to him. We must work to recreate the feeling of “exciting” at the beginning of the memory and the feeling of “very sad” at the end. This is a difficult task that we shall cover in more detail later on; for now, we shall emphasise how warm, light and fragrant the evening seemed as we met Julia (to try to create the feeling of excitement), and how cold and dark it seemed as we walked home alone (to try to create the feeling of sadness).

Finally, our memory is naturally in the past tense. Because we want to recreate our experience in Earnest’s mind as if it were happening to him, we shall write in the present tense. There are many reasons to write in the past, present and future tenses, but without a particular reason to choose differently, the present tense shall suit us very well.

After making those changes, we are left with:

It is evening. I am walking by the river just as the sun is setting; the light is golden and warm and I can smell many flowers in the air. I turn a corner in the path and see Julia standing by the water. She is reaching to pull a pomegranate from a low branch. She looks very beautiful. I greet her and the two of us walk together for a time. Julia begins to eat the pomegranate. She offers me a portion. I refuse; my hands are dirty. We come to the river and I wash my hands, but Julia has finished the fruit. It becomes dark. I ask Julia if she would like me to walk home with her. She tells me that she lives nearby and can see well in the moonlight. I turn to walk home alone through the trees in the cold, dark night.

We have made excellent progress! However, one problem remains. Imagine you are eating a very large bar of chocolate. What is going through your mind?

Perhaps you think:

I am eating a very large bar of chocolate. It tastes very nice.

But I don’t think that is what is going through your mind. Living would be terribly tedious if we thought to ourselves, “I am sweeping the floor.” or, “I am washing my face.” every time we were doing those things. I suspect that what you are thinking is:

This chocolate tastes very nice.

If we are trying to teach Earnest about enjoying chocolate (and that is, thankfully, one task we shall not be asked to do, for he is an interminable glutton), which description will be more effective?

If we are doing something very unusual or complicated, like dancing with a goat or learning trigonometry, it would probably be best to include “I am dancing…” or “I am learning…” to help Earnest understand what is actually happening.

If we are doing something common or simple, like eating chocolate, we can probably just describe the chocolate, as Earnest is clever enough to work out we must be eating it from our description. What’s more, by leaving out the “I am…” part, the thought becomes closer to what Earnest himself would think if he were eating the very large bar of chocolate. That makes it easier for him to recreate the experience in his mind, as we discussed in Part 2. In other words, it is better to describe things as we see them than to describe the act of seeing them. So, we shall leave out the “I am…” in those parts of the memory where it will not stop Earnest from understanding what we are doing.

The light of the setting sun is golden and warm. By the river, the scents of many flowers are in the air. I turn a corner in the path; Julia is standing by the water. She reaches to pull a pomegranate from a low branch. She is very beautiful. She seems pleased by my hello and begins to peel the pomegranate as we walk together. She offers me a portion, but my hands are dirty and would ruin the rest for her. At the river, I rub my hands in the cold water but she has already finished the fruit. She doesn’t want me to walk home with her; she lives nearby and the moonlight is bright. It is dark in the trees.

As you see, by removing some of the “I…” language we have cleaned up our description of the memory. If Earnest knows we can smell the air by the river, he can assume we are walking down there. By the same process, we have removed “It is evening” because Earnest knows the sun sets in the evening. We don’t need to tell Earnest that we refused Julia’s offer of a piece of pomegranate because it’s clear from the way we describe our dirty hands.

What’s more, by taking out the unnecessary language, we have uncovered and made room for more details that are important: Julia seemed pleased to see us; the river water was cold; we were worried about spoiling the pomegranate for Julia. We have changed the way some aspects of the description seem important: what Julia tells us isn’t important, but the fact she doesn’t want us to walk home with her is. Not only have we removed unnecessary words that aren’t full-to-the-brim with the kind of meaning we are looking for, but by forcing ourselves to use language differently, we have improved the focus and accuracy of our writing.

We now have our prototype poem; we have decided on a subject matter and drawn the outline of how to express it. In Part 5: Big Words and Little Words, we shall further refine our use of language, and investigate how and why different ways of describing things work.

That helps us decide how to write, but it doesn’t help us decide what to write about.

If we have fallen in love with Julia, there are many things we could write about. We could write about the first time we saw her. We could write about the first time we spoke to her. We could write about the long evenings we spent writing her letters, and the many mornings we scrumpled them up and threw them away. We could describe the bravery it took to ask her to the dance, or the sadness we felt when she refused.

There are so many things to write about, in fact, that if we tried to write about them all completely and well, we would soon be writing a novel, or a series of novels! It might end up taking longer to read about our experience than it took for us to fall in love with Julia in the first place. Earnest (who is, as you remember, our dear and curious friend) will certainly not put up with hours and hours of reading when it is sunny outside, and there are trees to climb and rivers to swim in.

So how can we decide which part of falling in love to write about?

Perhaps we should describe the moment in which we felt the most intense emotions. We could talk about the few seconds we spent walking away from Julia after she turned us down, and the terrible sensations we had in our mind and heart and stomach. But hang on! How could Earnest understand those feelings of rejection if we don’t describe how we fell in love in the first place? That would be a little like writing about falling off the roof, but only describing the moment we hit the ground.

“Well fine then!” I hear you shout, “In that case, let’s describe the very first time we met Julia.” We could talk about how pretty she looked and how surprised we were by our unusual feelings. But hang on! How can Earnest understand the experience of falling in love without knowing how scary it is to make that love known for the first time? That would be a little like writing about falling off the roof, but only describing the moment we lost our footing.

It seems we are no closer to deciding which part of falling in love to write about. How can we solve this problem?

Well, what do you think about when you try to remember falling in love for the first time?

Perhaps you think of a detailed list of events. Perhaps you think:

I first fell in love when I was seventeen. It was with a boy named Roger. I caught him staring at me when I was sitting in the bleachers at our high school’s football game one Friday night. He asked me to have a milkshake with him after the game. The next night, we went to the movies. The Thursday after that, we went for pizza and he asked me to be his girlfriend. We were together for three months before he had to leave town to go to college.

But I don’t believe that’s what you think of, even if your first love was Roger who stared at you and bought you a milkshake.

Perhaps you think of what the person you fell in love with was like. Perhaps you think:

I first fell in love with a boy named Roger. He was tall and had shaggy black hair. He had brown eyes. He worked as a mechanic and always smelled a little of oil. He wore an old leather jacket. He was quiet but had a beautiful voice. He loved dogs. He always looked for ways to help people.

But I don’t believe that’s what you think of, even if your first love was Roger who wore an old leather jacket and loved dogs.

Perhaps you think of the feelings that ran through your body. Perhaps you think:

When I fell in love with Roger, my heart beat faster and I felt hot. My breathing grew shallow. I became giddy and full of joy. I blushed whenever he came near me. I felt like I was sweating from every part of my body, even my toes in my tennis-shoes. It felt like there wasn’t enough blood to reach all the way up to my head.

But I don’t believe that’s what you think of, even if your first love was Roger who made your breathing shallow and head feel light.

I don’t believe those things because those are the things Earnest would think of, and he is a very serious and sensible young man. (And not at all creative and clever and brilliant, like you!) Perhaps you would say those things to a friend or write them in a diary. If you dwelled on falling in love, perhaps you would think of those things in time. But I suspect that when you try to remember how you fell in love, the very first thing you think of is a particular special moment.

I believe that for an instant you think only of the way Roger smelled like oil and leather. Or you think only of the first time he sang for you, in a quiet room when no one else was around. Or you think only of the way your skin blushed so red in your summer dress when he held your hand.

It might be a moment other people understand, like a tight hug or a first kiss. It might be a moment that seems trivial to other people, like a silly joke or a sudden argument.

In fact, people are so wonderfully different to one another that you might think of almost anything when you try to remember falling in love. But if I am correct, there will be a moment or an image that feels extra special, that pushes selfishly to the front of your mind and demands your attention.

Why do you think of this particular thing? If you think of a kiss, why not a kiss from the previous day, or the next? If you think of a certain picture of your partner, why are they not dressed differently or wearing their hair cut in another fashion?

If we think of the way Roger smelled of oil and leather, why that memory?

Perhaps it is because that slight smell of oil seemed to be with the two of you for that whole summer. Perhaps it is because that smell reminds you of the work Roger did as a mechanic, and how strong and rough and careful his hands were after years of fixing machines. Perhaps because that smell was there the many evenings you sat on the cold concrete of the shop floor and waited for him to finish work, when you spied on him as he quietly repaired cars and tractors for people too poor to pay. Perhaps because the smell of leather reminds you of how cold his jacket felt on your face on those hot summer days. Perhaps because he wore that jacket to make himself seem tough and grown-up, and because you were the only person who knew how frightened he could be.

Many memories of Roger remind you of a particular quality he had, or a certain good time you spent together, but those things are jumbled up and tangled with lots of other information that doesn’t matter any more. The special memory of the smell of oil and leather is important because every little part of it connects in some way to your experience of first love. It is dense with meaning. When you try to remember falling in love, this memory is the first one to come into your mind because it contains the essence of falling in love. It is whole and compact like an acorn or a goose egg.

Perhaps we could write about that sort of experience: the kind that is full-to-the-brim with meaning. We could choose a particular part of falling in love with Julia that contains the essence of falling in love with Julia.

What’s more, if we remember the properties of language from Part 2, we can change the way we describe that special memory if that will help Earnest (or whoever else reads what we have to write) understand our experience. We can even change details or even invent new memories if they will help our reader recreate our experience in their own imagination. What’s important is that we work away and refine our writing until every little part of it carries a part of falling in love with Julia. Just like every part of the smell of oil and leather had a special meaning, every sentence and word we choose must contain a little part of falling in love for the first time.

And if we manage to do that, we shall have written a poem.

Of course, people write poems about all sorts of things. Some very fine poems have been written about things that have never happened, or happened where no one could see them, or happened differently to the way the poem describes. It would be very wrong to say all poetry is written about special memories. What is important is that special memories contain much larger experiences, in the same way that poems contain much larger ideas and feelings. These kind of memories have the same kind of dense meaning as good poems, so are a very fine tool for thinking about poetry.

In the Part 4: Finding Words, we will construct a prototype of our poem by selecting, altering, and beginning to find language to describe a special memory we have of Julia.

If you have never been in love before, imagine you are swimming in the ocean when the waves are tall and crashing on the shore, or running down a hill so fast your legs won’t stop when you tell them to. You shall have to think carefully and concentrate very hard; it is difficult to know what being in love is like if it has never happened to you, as we shall soon see.

When we experience something powerful and out of the ordinary, we often want to share those feelings with other people. How can we share the feeling of falling in love for the first time?

When being in love makes you feel happy or sad – and if it makes you happy, you are very lucky indeed – other people can tell how you feel by looking at your face and seeing if you are smiling or frowning. Your friend Earnest can tell that you are happy if you skip and jump around, singing and clapping your hands. He can tell that you are sad if you slouch and lie in bed, sulking and pouting. But he might think you are happy because it is warm and sunny today, or sad because you ate too many strawberries and have a stomach-ache. How can we let him know how we feel, and why we feel that way?

We can use language to describe the situation we are in. We might say:

I am in love with a girl.

If this makes us feel sad, we might want to explain how difficult love can be:

I am in love with a girl, but she doesn’t love me back.

Someone who has been in love before might begin to understand how this sorry situation makes us feel. But we have cheated a little! We want to explain how it feels to be in love, but we have used the word “love” in our explanation. We aren’t explaining how it is to be in love, we are simply reminding people how they have felt when they have been in love in the past. If Earnest has never been in love (and he has not, for he is a very serious and sensible young man), he is no closer to understanding our feelings after listening what we have said. If we want Earnest to understand how we feel, we have to use language that describes both what has happened and our reaction to what has happened.

I feel sad because I am in love with a girl, but she doesn’t love me back.

That’s better! Now we’re getting somewhere. Earnest now knows how we feel and what has caused us to feel that way.

However, when we use the word “sad”, Earnest might think about when he feels sad: when it rains all day, or when he has no-one to play with. But being in love can feel so much worse than that! It’s hardly better than when he thought we had a stomach-ache!

We might explain that we have strong feelings:

I feel very sad because I am in love with a girl, but she doesn’t love me back.

Unfortunately, Earnest has probably used the words “very sad” before: when it has rained for two days, or even three in a row. When we say “very sad”, that feeling is what he will think of. But that’s still not close to how it feels to be in love!

We could try adding different words: “extremely” or “intensely” or “thoroughly”. Earnest will think of a longer and deeper sadness. But no matter how clever a word we think of, being in love isn’t very much like the type of sadness you feel when it’s raining outside. Making our feelings sound stronger isn’t enough, because Earnest will still not understand the type of sadness we are experiencing.

What’s worse, Earnest still doesn’t understand why being in love makes us feel sad.

How might we solve this problem? One option might be to use detail. Perhaps if Earnest knows more about what’s happened, he will understand how it has led to our thoughts and feelings.

I feel very sad because I am in love with Julia, but she doesn’t love me back. Julia is a girl who lives in the next village. She has black hair and brown eyes. I spoke to her yesterday afternoon at around three o’clock and asked if she would come to the dance with me this Saturday. She said “No.” I now feel like crying all day.

This gives Earnest more information. It might help him a little, but he will still have many questions. “Why is it important that Julia has black hair? Why wouldn’t she go to the dance with you? Why can’t you ask somebody else?”

We could try to add more detail about our actions and feelings to solve these problems:

I feel very sad because I am in love with Julia, but she doesn’t love me back. Julia is a girl who lives in the next village. She has black hair and brown eyes. I think she looks very pretty. I spoke to her yesterday afternoon at around three o’clock and asked if she would come to the dance with me this Saturday. She said “No”. This means she does not love me. I now feel like I want to cry all day. Because I am in love with Julia, I do not want to go to the dance with anyone else.

After reading all that, Earnest might understand a little more. But he still has many questions. “Why do you think black hair makes Julia pretty? Why do you love Julia and not somebody else? Why can you only be in love with one person at a time?” If we keep on adding more and more detail to our explanation, it shall grow to be longer and longer. Soon it will be ten pages long, and Earnest will still have lots more questions. How boring!

What’s worse, even if we manage to remember and write down every detail about every time we have met Julia, Earnest might still not understand how we feel, because he will react to the situations we describe differently than we did.

Perhaps being in love is simply too hard to describe? Let’s try something simpler.

Imagine that you are very afraid of creepy-crawlies, and come home to find a large spider scurrying over your bed. You are very frightened, and run to Earnest for comfort. “Why are you afraid?” he asks, “That spider can’t hurt you.”

Let’s use the techniques we have developed to let Earnest know why we are afraid. We need to tell him what has happened and describe our feelings using as much detail as possible.

I arrived home and saw an extremely large spider on my bed. It had eight horrible legs and four pairs of scary eyes. It was covered in disgusting hair, and it moved very quickly.

Sadly, we have run into the same problems as before. Earnest (who is, as you recall, a very serious and sensible young man) isn’t afraid of spiders, so the details we’ve given don’t help him to understand our reaction. When we say “horrible legs”, he thinks of brussel sprouts, which are horrible, but then he thinks to himself, “Spider-legs aren’t horrible! Mother doesn’t make me eat those!” When we say “scary eyes”, he thinks of when he has to kiss his Aunt Mabel, which is scary, but then he thinks to himself “Spider-eyes aren’t scary! I don’t have to kiss those!”

No matter if we can describe the events or our feelings in perfect detail, Earnest won’t understand our experience because we haven’t explained how the events caused our feelings. We need to find a way to demonstrate how what happened caused us to think and feel in a certain way.

How can we solve this difficult problem?

If only we could make Earnest afraid of spiders! Even if it were only for a few minutes, he would suddenly understand our experience.

We can’t change Earnest’s view of the world, but perhaps we can change the way we describe what’s happened to make him feel as if he were afraid of spiders.

We could tell Earnest:

I came home and my bed was covered in hundreds of huge tarantulas. They had big sharp fangs and they ran towards me very fast and tried to bite me.

Earnest would leap into the air and exclaim, “How terrifying! You must be in shock! Sit down and I shall make you a cup of tea and fetch you a blanket.”

Suddenly, without even trying to describe our feelings we have communicated to Earnest a much better idea of our experience. What’s more, he’s making us a lovely cup of tea!

“Now hang on!” I hear you cry, for you are a very moral person, “You’re a big fibber! That’s not really what happened at all! You lied to poor Earnest!”

And you are correct. We lied to Earnest about the facts of what happened. If he were the pest-control man or a scientist studying the types of spider that lived in our area, we would have confused and misled him by giving him the wrong information. But we set out to let Earnest understand our fear of spiders, and by changing the way we reported the events, we have given him a much better understanding of our experience.

What an interesting property of language! Rather than trying to report the events that happened and the way in which we reacted to those events, we have used language to recreate our own experience in Earnest’s imagination. In fact, we could have told him that it was a vicious snake or an angry scorpion on our bed, and he would probably understand our feelings almost as well.

This power of language to capture the essence of an experience or thought is the foundation of poetry. But how can we use it to solve our original problem?

Rather than trying to report meeting Julia and describe our feelings and thoughts afterwards, we need to find words to recreate those thoughts and feelings, as best we can, in Earnest’s imagination as he reads what we have written.

In the next article, we will think about how to find the essence of an experience, and begin thinking about how to capture it in words.

Imagine that there is a child named Robert who had grown up in a far off and isolated village, in a place with no modern vehicles whatsoever. Imagine if Robert asked you, “What is a car?” How would you answer such a question?

I would say to Robert, “Let’s go and visit my friend, he knows the answer. He lives one hundred miles away.”

“A hundred miles?” Robert would say, “That’s too far to walk! We will become very tired, and the journey will take a long time.”

“In that case,” I would reply, “how can we visit my friend without walking?”

And we would think together for a time. And perhaps my student would say, “Someone could carry us, and then we wouldn’t get tired.”

“That’s true, but whoever carried us would get tired very quickly. We probably wouldn’t be able to find someone who would carry us all that way. But what if we found something bigger and stronger than a person?”

“A horse!” Robert would reply, happy to have solved my puzzle. “We can ride a horse!”

And so we would talk about riding a horse, and if he were interested, we could talk about the reasons horses are bigger and stronger and faster than humans. After we had talked for a while, I might ask, “But what if we wanted to take our luggage with us, and there was too much to fit on the horse?”

And we would talk again about this difficult problem. My student might suggest using many horses, and I would explain that the two of us had too much luggage to carry on two horses, and a horse couldn’t carry luggage easily without a rider.

“Perhaps if we had some kind of platform we could attach to the horse? Then it could drag us and our luggage along?”

What a marvellous and clever idea! It would lead to a talk about friction, and why it was that an ice-skater could travel so much faster on a frozen lake than a person without ice-skates. “A platform could carry all of our luggage, but it would be very hard for the horses to drag.”

And eventually, with some prompting, we might think about a rock rolling down a hill. Why is it that some rocks roll freely, but others stay put or slide? And we would talk about roundness, and think about ways we could use this interesting property of rolling to help with our own problem. And hopefully, after a good deal of head-scratching, we would come up with an axle, and a wheel, and a platform, and a horse, and we would have our first wagon. We might tinker for a while, and find that round was the best shape for wheels, and that four wheels on two axles made the wagon stable.

And Robert would be very pleased indeed at his cleverness, for he had solved my problem.

“But,” I would ask again, “what if we want to visit my friend very quickly, because it is very late in the day and he will be going to bed soon?”

“Well,” my student would reply, screwing up his eyes and thinking hard, “we would need an animal that can run faster than a horse.”

“That’s a good answer.” I’d say. “But what if we wanted to get there even faster? Faster than any animal could pull us?”

And we would think together about this problem for a long time, for it is very hard to solve. I would have to give clues to my student. I would say “I have made an exciting discovery! I have found a substance in the ground called coal that releases a great deal of energy when it burns!”

“That’s all well and good,” Robert would reply impatiently, “but I don’t see how it helps with making our wagon go faster!”

“When I heat water with coal,” I would say gently, “it generates steam. The steam builds up pressure.”

And I would explain why steam contains such great amounts of energy, and talk about the nature of pressurized gasses.

“I see what you’re getting at now!” he would say, his face glowing with understanding, “You think that we can use the power of steam to help us move our wagon! If we can contain the pressurized steam, we can release it to force the wheels to turn!”

And we would discuss how such a system could work, and the clever mechanical tricks it would need. We would talk about the nature of pistons and turbines, and the ingenious systems to convert the back-and-forth motion of a piston to the around-and-around motion of a wheel.

And Robert would be very satisfied, for together we had invented a wonderful machine for transporting people and luggage at incredible speed.

And finally, we would talk about oil, and petroleum, and roads, and the ways in which an internal combustion engine is the same as a steam engine, and the ways in which it is different. We would talk about brakes and gears and suspension and steering wheels and differentials and windscreens and all the other useful parts of cars, and what they are for, and how they work, and how each piece, in its own little way, helps the machine to move people quickly and easily and safely.

“So there you have it!” I would say in the end. “I don’t think you need to visit my friend after all! Do you understand what a car is now?”

“Yes!” Robert would reply.

“Now hang on!” you might say, “that sounds like a very long and complicated explanation. Why don’t you just show your pupil a car, and then answer his questions?”

Well, let’s say there is a second child identical to Robert in every way except for his name, which is Charles. Instead of tediously explaining the development of a car to Charles, I show him a big, red, classic sports car. I let him play with the windscreen-wipers and turn on the headlamps. I show him the leather seats and the silver exhaust pipe. I take Charles out for a drive: we roll down the electric windows and fill up the big fuel tank, and on the way home we put down the roof and some pretty girls wave at us.

“So there you have it!” I would say to Charles. “Do you understand what a car is now?”

“Yes!” Charles would reply.

And if you were to ask Robert, “What is a car?” he might say that it was a device for transporting people and cargo across large distances at great speeds, and that it used wheels and axles to reduce friction, and that it was powered by an energy source that fuelled the mechanical work of turning the wheels, creating motion.

And if you were to ask Charles the same question, he might say that a car was something big and red with four wheels and headlamps and windscreen wipers and leather seats and an exhaust pipe, and that it travelled around and you filled up its big tank with liquid and it made pretty girls wave at you.

And if, in the future, cars have three wheels or six wheels or are powered by electricity or nuclear radiation or compressed gas, Robert will be interested and full of questions about how these new systems work and why they are more efficient than the old systems. But Charles, poor Charles will be confused and perhaps even a little angry. “Those aren’t cars!” he will shout. “Cars are red and have four wheels!”

My opinion, as you have no doubt worked out, is that most people learn about poetry in the same way that Charles learned about cars. Most people learn how to recognise a poem without understanding what it is for or how it works. Naturally, when they read a poem that is even a little different from the poetry they grew up with, they become lost. They lack the tools and confidence to tinker with the new poem to see which parts of it are better and which parts of it are not as good.

But what if we taught people about poetry in the same way that we taught Robert about cars?

The ambition of this series of articles is to construct a poem in the same way that we constructed a car with Robert. Like that car, the poem will be very basic. I am not a skilled poet, just as I am not a skilled engineer. But I hope that by building a poem openly and trying to explain its purpose at each stage of construction, I might allow some people to think about poetry in a way they have not done so before. Poetry can seem complicated and mysterious, but any person who is interested and willing to try can understand it very well when it is explained clearly.

What’s more, understanding poetry leads to a deeper understanding of language itself, which is a very valuable thing. Humans spend so much time exchanging words with one another that learning more about language can mean learning more about life.

In the next article in the series, Part 2: A Problem To Solve, we shall think about the strengths and weaknesses of using language to share experiences.