Touching your goodness,
The opening three words leads to an extended simile which comprises practically the rest of the poem. The act of touching the goodness of the person being addressed is like being an illiterate man who has received a letter and won’t ask anyone out of pride to read him the contents and so remains in perpetual wonder. The key to understanding the meaning of the poem, then, clearly rests not so much on the words that come after “Touching your goodness” as it does on interpreting exactly what that idiosyncratic phrase means. Since meaning is everything to this poem, that is a task no to be undertaken lightly.
I am like a man Who turns a letter over in his hand And you might think this was because the hand Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
The extended simile making up the bulk of the poem begins with this description. So the poet is essentially saying that touching another’s goodness is like a man fidgeting with a letter in his hand, but not because he doesn’t recognize who the letter is from. Later, it will become clear that he is incapable of knowing who sent the letter since he is the illiterate of the title. They real key to this section is not the man, anyway, but the rhyme. In English poetry, it is considered bad form to make two rhymes in a row using the same exact two words; even rock lyrics get slammed for what is perceived a lack of effort. But this immediate rhyming of hand and man after having just rhymed man and hand is not a sign of laziness on the part of the poet, but rather the opposite. This and other repetition use of the same words as end rhymes is integral to the thematic structure of the poem. The poem is all about literacy and literacy is all about words and meaning. (Except when it may be about emotions and meaning.) The truth is that while the word “hand” is used to rhyme with the word “man” back to back, it is really only “man” that is the same word. “Hand” is, of course, technically the same word in the meaning of the construction of its letter arrangement, but as far as meaning—an essential element of literacy—they may as well be spelled completely different since they mean completely different things contextually. The first use of “hand” is literal in reference to the body part while the second use is a figurative term synonymous with writing. Consider the general idea of being literate for most people: knowing how to read (as the poem implies.) Now consider a person who knows how to read the word “hand” but is not familiar with the figurative use. Are they literate or illiterate?
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
This particular line is important for a reason apart from the poem’s meaning. This poem is a sonnet, the traditional form for poetry intended as a declaration of love. The “dark girl” is an allusion to a mysterious subject of several Shakespearean sonnets. Some scholars over the centuries have suggested that the “Dark Lady” to whom Shakespeare addressed his sonnets was actually a male. Another interpretation has been that “Dark Lady” sonnets can be distinguished from those unquestioningly addressed to a young male on the ground that the latter are expressions of Platonic love while the Dark Lady love poems are charged with lust. Thus, the reference to the dark girl is taken to be a reference to sexual passion by the closeted homosexual Meredith, indicating that the person whose goodness the speaker touches is another man.
What would you call his feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
The last two lines of the poem bring it back from the realm of the simile with a question posed to the object of the verse. This is yet another aspect of the poem that calls attention to meaning as construction of literacy. At first glance, the question does not appear to be literal, but rather a rhetorical query based on the content of the preceding simile to which the speaker does not actually expect a reply. Some critical assessment of the poem, however, strong disagrees with that interpretation and insists that, in fact, the entire point of the poem is for the speaker to get an answer to this question. Remember, the simile that sets up the example of the contents of the letter possibly making the illiterate man rich or making him an orphan or informing him that he is loved was a comparison to how the speaker feels when he is touching the other people’s goodness. One way of interpreting that strange phrase is that he is trying to “read” exactly why this other person is so good. So if the man with the letter can’t read the contents, the meaning of what lies inside is open to limitless interpretation, but will forever remain a mystery until he learns to read. If the speaker can’t read exactly why the other person is so good that he is deeply touched by it, how will he ever know the truth? Like the illiterate reader, he has too much pride to come right out and ask. Unlike the illiterate reader, however, he can use language to ask without asking. That, at least, is one possible interpretation of meaning.
