Reading Texts

The Difference between a Primary and Secondary Source

Literature: Primary Sources

In the field of literary study, a primary source is the original work of art or document: a poem, a novel, an essay, play, film or other written material created by an author. These are the works upon which later analyses, interpretations, summaries, or reviews are based. In our course, a primary source is a poem, story, essay, or novel. For example, Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" is a primary source, and so is his essay "Culture and Anarchy." Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South is a primary source. Other types of primary sources include diaries, contemporary newspaper articles, paintings, works of art, records and descriptions of events, statistics, data, reports, experiments and so on.

Literature: Secondary Sources

Secondary sources, on the other hand, offer an analysis or other treatment of primary sources. They often attempt to describe or explain primary sources. Some secondary sources not only analyze primary sources, but use them to argue a contention or to persuade the reader to hold a certain opinion. Examples of secondary sources include: dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, and books and articles that interpret or review research works.

For example, the article "The Meters of Dover Beach," by Nigel Faff is a secondary source that discusses the poetic structure of the poem "Dover Beach." Dorice Elliott's article "The Female Visitor and the Marriage of Classes in Gaskell's North and South," published in the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature, is another example of a secondary source. A book about Victorian poetry or about Victorian women writers is a secondary source, as is an entry from a literary encyclopedia that gives a general overview of Elizabeth Gaskell's life, work and reception.

History: Primary versus Secondary Sources

Primary sources consist of first-hand accounts of events or developments written by contemporaries and eyewitnesses. Secondary sources are interpretations of events written by historians. For instance, a speech by President Abraham Lincoln is a primary source. An eyewitness account of this speech also counts as a primary source. A historian's discussion of the speech in a book, however, constitutes a secondary source. This discussion is an interpretation of Lincoln's speech.

Primary sources are important because they serve as the sturdiest foundation for any historical argument. And that is just what any secondary source is—an argument assembled by a historian. All of these arguments depend on an interpretation of primary sources. For a variety of reasons, different historians will produce different interpretations of the past. The strength of these arguments rests in the end on their correct interpretation of primary sources. Unfortunately, these primary sources are often difficult to evaluate. For one thing, eyewitnesses of events produce interpretations of these events that are frequently inaccurate. As historians seek to understand eyewitness accounts, they often find themselves interpreting an interpretation. This is only one problem among many. The "past is a foreign country"—people in countries and times that differ from our own are difficult to understand. The alien culture, conditions, and ideas of this "foreign country"—in other words, the entire context within which people operate-makes interpretation of primary sources a confusing task. On top of that, the "foreigners" who produce our primary sources are often biased in one way or another.

While it is true that textbooks and other secondary sources deal with "facts" (e.g. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939), they also present interpretations (e.g. Hitler was surprised when Britain and France declared war on him for his assault on Poland). The authors of these works do not present interpretations at random—these interpretations constitute part of an overarching thesis.

Often described as "arguments," these theses often do not agree. Different historians look at different types of sources or interpret the same sources in various ways. Moreover, historians—just like everyone else—have different ways of understanding the world and the way it works. Over the years, then, historians conduct a dialogue with one another through their books and articles, challenging one another by presenting conflicting interpretations of the same events. Historians usually do not keep writing books about the same old topics over and over again because they have discovered new documents or sources (although this does happen) or because they need the money (although this also does happen), but because they have brought new questions to bear on the primary sources and produced new interpretations.

How to Analyze a Poem

Motto: "What does the poem say and how does it say it"?

1. Read the entire poem. Don't worry about what it means. Just read it.
2. Read the poem again. Think about what it says. Use this idea—"What does the poem say?"—rather than worry about "interpreting" the poem.
3. Read the poem again. Now, what do you notice? What confuses you? What parts of the poem do you want to understand more fully? You should be using a pencil or pen, and you should be writing all over the poem.
4. Read the poem again. This time, mark the ends of each sentence (not the ends of lines) by using a colored pencil or pen to backslash the end of each sentence. Remember that each line of a poem begins with an upper case letter. That's what makes it hard. Do the whole poem and do it like this:

"Strike leftward! / cries our guide; and higher
Mounts up the stony forest way,
At last the encircling trees retire;
Look! through the showery twilight grey
What pointed roofs are these advance? /
A palace of the Kings of France?/

Approach, for what we seek is here! /
Alight, and sparely sup, and wait
For rest in this outbuilding near;
Then cross the sward and reach that gate. /
Knock; pass the wicket! / Thou are come
To the Carthusians' world-famed home. /

5. As you mark the ends of sentences, make a note of words you don't understand. This list might include words you don't know at all or words you don't understand in context. So, for the above passage, you'd write down "advance" and "wicket" and maybe "sup." Then you'd find out what these words mean. "Advance" is used oddly here to mean "to give the impression of advancing;" so the line means "what are these pointed roofs that seem to be coming toward us (even though it's us who are moving toward them)"? Play with the order of the words so that you can use content and sentence structure to understand what the poem is saying. Remember, think: What does the poem say and how does it say it?
6. Also make note of other elements of content you don't understand, like the part above about "Carthusians' world-famed home." Here, the speaker is arriving with his fellow travelers at the world-famous home of the Carthusians, who are an order of monks who reside at the monastery called the Grand Chartreuse.

Read the whole poem using these practices. Mark up the poem. Write down questions. Make sense of it on a literal level. Do this for a while.

7. Now, ask yourself: "Why did the poet choose these words and this structure to express this idea"? The poet didn't write an essay or a speech or a letter to the newspaper. He wrote a poem. That's the next directive question: Why these words? Why this form? Remember, it's no different from a painting. It's a work of art using words as its medium. You are observing the parts and how they work together.
8. Who is the poem's speaker? If that's not clear, then think about the speaker's tone of voice. How does he or she sound? What type of energy do you detect in the voice and pace of the poem? Is it joyful, like Christina Rossetti's "A Birthday" or ambivalent, like Tennyson's "Lockesley Hall"? Is it alternately despairing and urgent, like the speaker of "Ulysses"? Consider what the speaker is saying and who he is saying it to.
9. If the poem is long, break it into parts. The stanzas help with this task. Where would you divide the poem into sections? Does it develop in time or space, like "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse," in which the speaker is hiking into the mountains and then walking through a monastery? Do the poem's stanzas shift in topic, tone or language, like "Ulysses," which moves from the speaker's dissatisfaction with his life home in Ithaca ("it little profits that an idle king") and his longing for his old life and theory of life as action ("I cannot rest from travel". . . . "Yet all experience is an arch") to his acceptance of Telemachus's rule ("This is my son, mine own Telemachus") to his rally cry to his fellow mariners ("There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail")?
10. Think about language now. What types of words does the speaker choose? What do those words have in common? What makes them striking? Can you group some words together, even if they are far apart in the poem? In "Dover Beach," the speaker refers often to what he sees, like the sea, the moon, the light, the coast, the cliffs. Then later, he refers to similar images, but not literally. He refers to the "Sea of Faith" and later, says, "We are here as on a darkling plain."
11. Group words together. Put "sea" type words together and color words together. Look at active verbs and "ing" verbs. Think about simple, straightforward words as compared to the more complex, abstract words. What about single-syllable words and multiple-syllable words?
12. Think also about sound. Are some words alliterated (share the same initial consonant sound)? Are some words examples of assonance (shared vowel sound), like "moon-blanched land" ("blanched" and "land" have the same vowel sound). Are some words harsh while others sound smooth or calm? "moon-blanched land" is calmer than the "vast edges drear."
13. Try to identify when the speaker is describing or speaking literally, as when the speaker of Dover Beach describers the night. Make distinction between these observations and metaphorical expressions, in which one thing is compared to another. For example, in Arnold's "Stanzas," the speaker often remarks upon what he sees, but also refers metaphorically to his own situation. He is not literally "A Greek in pity and mournful awe . . . before some fallen Runic stone" (81-83), but he feels like a Greek standing before an even older, extinct faith when he sees the old monastery.
14. Of course, you can also mark the poem's rhyme scheme. "Lockesley Hall"'s rhyme is obvious. The stanzas are paired rhyming lines. "The Scholar Gypsy" is a little more complex: ABCBCAEFFE. Look for internal rhyme, too, which is rhyme within a line. End rhyme is the "normal" rhyme that occurs at the ends of lines.
15. When you have observed all this, think about what ideas have occurred to you during your careful analysis. What formal elements of the poem's content or structure are most interesting to you? Identify those and think about how they work.
16. Enjoy the poem. It's a work of art.

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Copyrighted by Hugh Dubrulle and Meg Cronin, 2006.