Learning to Read by Cilla McQueen

First published 14 February 2002

Another day, another tiny poem, and this one is cheerful for a change. It is an eight-line reflection on the struggle of making sense of black marks on white paper, and the sheer exhilaration that follows the achievement of the goal.

I do not remember a time when I couldn't read. I can't imagine what a word must look like when one's brain is not busy interpreting and comprehending it. But I do know what is meant by the page becoming transparent and ceasing to exist. Personally, I can draw a parallel with attempting to read in a noisy room; the translucency of the page is inversely proportional to the noise level.

I like the exclamation mark at the end of the last line. It perfectly complements the "all by myself" immediately before it, summing up childish exuberance extremely well.

Apparently high school students respond better to unhappy poems than to positive ones. This fact did not escape my English teachers, and Learning to Read is one of the few happy poems I recall studying at school. Of course it's difficult to capture cheerful feelings accurately in words, so it's probably even more difficult to teach students to appreciate cheerful poems. Certainly some of our best essays that year would have been written, not about It Was Long Ago or Learning to Read or Pied Beauty, but about Mid-Term Break and Ozymandias. That's just the way things go.

It's true that I don't myself remember learning to read. Apparently I could read before I started school, so perhaps I was too young to retain a memory of it. It's sad, in a way, that I don't remember - this poem makes it sound like such fun.

My teacher suggested that I imagine a text in Arabic or Chinese to help understand "the look / of the unreadable page // the difficult jumble". That helped, but it left me completely cut off from the "riding this bicycle all by myself!" part of the poem. I guess if I want to really get it, I'll just have to learn to read Arabic.

Amusingly, I've now quoted half the poem in the course of writing about it. These cute little high school poems!