A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- 'Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.'
This occasion was definitely important for the speaker of the poem. It shows how even the smallest indications can tell you a lot about a person, and how sometimes the unintentional annotations can mean the most.
dangles from me like a locket,
This metaphor describes nicely how the speaker of the poem remembers this occasion frequently and it has nearly become a part of him.
Blake's
Who is Blake and how does he relate to Joshua Reynolds?
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
Shows how literature endures
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels
This could show how annotating and engaging in what you are reading is a part of the human experience since people of every applicable century have felt the need to get more out of what they are reading.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge.
This stanza is important since it summarizes the poem in some ways. It shows that each person has their own way of annotating and having an inner conversations with what they are reading, and that people want recognition of their work.
empty bleachers,
There aren’t many people who appreciate what they are reading as much as they do.
Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls 'Metaphor' next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of 'Irony' fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Shows how students aren’t always that engaged in what they are reading and only write down the bare minimum of what they have been trained to find.
Other comments are more offhand,
These comments are more subtle and less passionate disagreements with the author than the “ferocious” ones before.
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Why does the reader read works by these authors if they make them feel so frustrated?
Marginalia
This title shows how the writer sees annotations as something more living since marginalia usually refers to pictures drawn in the margins.
Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author
Shows that the reader is very engaged in their reading and is actively thinking about what the text says and how it could be made better.