something i posted somewhere else -- on meaning

[Leanne]

I wrote a poem today. I was in a certain mood while writing it. I did not consciously intend for that mood to come across. I was trying to make it a "happy" poem..
But ella observed that the poem had a melancholic undertone.
And that was my state of mind when I wrote the poem. An example of where the reader finds meanings that the author intended only subconsciously.

Precisely. As Todd intimates, it's in the dialogue between reader and poem that the true meaning, or *a* true meaning, often emerges. Unless we're paint-by-numbers poets, we don't always know what is going to make it out onto the page until we write it and give it to someone else to read.