Public Service Announcement to all Future Literary Critics:

Please, please, keep a bit of perspective.

Now, I've got nothing against a bit of close reading, delving into things, so on.

For example, ysterday, my American Lit class was doing Dickinson, whose poetry can sometimes be deliberately ambiguous and confusing. We had a good time debating what she means when, in a few poems, she calls herself the "Empress of Calvary." Would that be the Virgin Mary? Mary Magdalene? Both Marys? Neither Mary? (I go for all of the above--the more the Mary-er, I say).

This sort of thing is all well and good, but sometimes people go a little too far in trying to argue that every single detail is deeply symbolic.

To wit, I came across an article on The Scarlet Letter which argues that the book itself is symbolic of inescapable Puritan society. It contains this priceless sentence:
"The material text is no less a prison/grave (books, after all, do in their three-dimensional rectangularity evoke prison-houses and tombstones)."

Really? Really? So remember, critics of the future: sometimes the sea is the sea, the old man is an old man, the boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.