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.'
Is this because the book has already been checked out, and someone else has already annotated the book?
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
I am assuming this means the author, or whom the author is referring to is so caught up in books that they never had a social life?
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
You know it so well that you wear it everyday.
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
Is that referring to them reading the Bible, and what happens when you die?
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
Everybody annotates it is a way of understanding the text.
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
To show that you actually understand what the text is saying you scribble something down.
without ever having written 'Man vs. Nature'
Type of conflict that pops up in most novels.
One scrawls 'Metaphor' next to a stanza of Eliot's.Another notes the presence of 'Irony'
I assume this is referring to how most students annotate?
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,Hands cupped around their mouths.'Absolutely,' they shout
This shows that there are some people that agree with the ideas of the writer.
'Nonsense.' 'Please! ' 'HA! ! ' -
I think this is referring to poor annotations.
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
This stanza shows that the notes disagree with the author.
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
The author personifies the notes.
Marginalia
The title tells me or makes me think that the poem may be clustered.
—
Is the author cutting themselves off?
feet on the cold floor,
Reminds me whenever I wake up in the night and walk into my bathroom. The tile is always cold.
then night with his notorious perfumes,
The author is personifying the night and its smells.