Art - and this includes poetry - is like a packet of concentrated soup. The
individual who approaches a work of artparticipates with the author in the
aesthetic process, bringing to it his own unique blend of experience and
perceptions. The final aesthetic product is, then, a result of the dried soup of
the artist and the spices, water, and cooking method of the reader/spectator.
Each person’s final product is unique. Each time the person cooks up the
soup, it is unique. And yet it is the same. A work of art is Universal.

One nice thing about art is that - if he pays attention to “internal consistency”
- the reader/spectator cannot be wrong in his understanding of the work; for
whatever the artist intended, it is not he but the reader/spectator who has
the final say in what the work “means”.

Read the following sonnet. It is one I particularly like (though I don’t agree
with a line and a half of it):

CXVI

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

What is your “final product” like? Do you “get it”, or are there some things
which you find confusing? On the next page, I’ll try to give you a few hints as
to some of Shakespeare’s raw ingredients.