ABSTRACT
My main aim is to explore some of the possibilities available within a framework of discourse analysis for explaining effects produced by conversation in poetry. The text I wish to devote particular attention to is a dialogue by W.H.Auden, entitled ‘Song V’ in Collected Shorter Poems (London: Faber, 1966), but more widely known as ‘From Reader to Rider’. It will, I hope, be an interesting exercise, since this is the kind of poem to which stylistic analysis is not normally applied. In performing this analysis the following subsidiary purposes may be fulfilled: first, I want to suggest, that, in tackling such poems, grammatical analysis is not always particularly useful; second, I hope to make out a case for all poems being in varying degrees interactive, and to suggest that analysis should therefore acknowledge appropriate contextualizations for the literary message.
