Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

David Lehman’s "How to Think" explores the act of thinking itself, capturing the elusive and often disorienting nature of thought, memory, and the passage of time. The poem’s loose, reflective structure mirrors the meandering and fragmented way in which the mind operates, filled with interruptions, uncertainties, and sudden insights. It reads as an interior monologue, moving seamlessly between moments of clarity and lapses into forgetfulness, creating an almost hypnotic rhythm that mimics the mind’s own wanderings.

The poem opens with a striking simile: "As the hum of a fly surrounds a thinker, / Lifts his face from the book on his lap." This image immediately establishes the poem’s concern with distraction and the fragility of concentration. The hum of a fly represents an external disturbance, but it also symbolizes the background noise of the mind itself, the small, persistent thoughts that interrupt deeper contemplation. The reader sees the thinker, likely the speaker himself, momentarily shaken from his reading, his book slipping from his grasp—"too fast to be noticed, like a fall asleep." The phrase evokes the sensation of drifting off unintentionally, suggesting that both sleep and thought share a kind of inevitability, an inescapable pull beyond conscious control.

This idea of falling—both into sleep and into thought—permeates the poem. The speaker describes moments in which "the words were too heavy / For my book to carry," implying that language itself can become overwhelming. His head "on the top of my desk" suggests both exhaustion and an unconscious surrender to the weight of knowledge. This moment of resting his head serves as a metaphor for the mind’s struggle to retain what it learns, an attempt to "test the uncertainty of being awake." The phrase resonates on multiple levels: it could refer to literal wakefulness, but it also gestures toward a deeper, existential awareness—the uncertainty of knowing anything with absolute certainty.

The speaker describes a feeling of "homesick for heaven, head in a sling," suggesting a sense of dislocation or yearning for some higher understanding that remains just out of reach. This phrase, with its mix of the celestial and the mundane, captures the tension between intellectual ambition and human limitation. The poem then moves into an exploration of memory and the process of forgetting. The speaker wonders if a newly acquired fact has displaced an old one: "Or maybe a new fact I had hastily let enter / Was crowding out one of the old standbys." This reflects the way knowledge accumulates and how, paradoxically, the more one learns, the more one forgets. He even imagines the facts "arguing with each other," suggesting that memory is not static but constantly in flux, reshaped and distorted by the act of remembering itself.

A key insight emerges as the speaker notes, "And then it occurred to me that in time / I would know why but never how." This distinction between why and how is crucial. While why suggests an understanding of cause or motivation, how implies process—an answer that remains elusive. The speaker observes that people often ask why when they really mean how, reinforcing the idea that our attempts to make sense of things often fail to grasp their deeper mechanisms. The forgetting, he realizes, is continuous, "that even now, / In the time it takes to formulate a phrase, / Whole years are reduced to no more than a phrase / Softly whispered, once and once only." This passage beautifully encapsulates the way time collapses in memory, entire periods of life distilled into fleeting impressions, just as language condenses complex thoughts into single phrases.

The poem’s final image likens the repetition of memory to "the tiny hammers / Of a headache commercial on the television— / Too slow to seem out of the ordinary / Or too fast to be noticed, like a fall asleep." This comparison to a headache commercial is striking, suggesting that the persistence of memory, like an advertisement, can be both nagging and insubstantial. The phrase "too slow to seem out of the ordinary / Or too fast to be noticed" returns the reader to the paradox at the heart of the poem: that thought and memory operate at speeds that are either imperceptible or overwhelming, making it impossible to fully grasp them in real time.

Structurally, "How to Think" is fluid and free-form, without a strict rhyme or meter, which suits its contemplative subject. The use of enjambment creates a sense of movement, mirroring the way thoughts flow unpredictably. The repetition of certain phrases ("like a fall asleep," "no doubt") reinforces the cyclical nature of thought and memory, emphasizing how the mind circles back on itself, revisiting ideas in slightly altered forms.

Lehman’s poem ultimately captures the slipperiness of cognition—the way thoughts flicker in and out of consciousness, how memory reshapes itself, and how understanding often remains tantalizingly out of reach. In its quiet, meditative tone, the poem acknowledges the limits of knowledge while reveling in the act of thinking itself.

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