Prior to this introduction, I like to have my students read page 1-3 of John Ciardi and Miller Williams’ How Does a Poem Mean? but it’s not necessary to do so. The epigraph to those pages is an excerpt from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, in which a school master asks his students to explain what a horse is. The incident appears in the movie of Hard Times, which, as you’ll see, I’ve excerpted here.
