Comment by StringEpsilon

If these tests are about text comprehension and not interpretation of art, why use poems then? Wouldn't an advertisement, a legal text or simply a newspaper article serve a better purpose?

I've written some (bad) poems and asked people to tell me what it means for them and got some answers that are wildly different from my own. For example: I once described the sunrise as a "bleeding ceiling of the world", mainly because I needed a dramatic phrasing. But many people I asked thought it was about suicidial thoughts or death. Rather, I just wanted to emphasize the importance of (reaching) the sunrise while keeping the overall somber / grim tone I established in the first and second verse.

Which leads me to 'death of the author' vs. 'authorial intent'. What is the objective meaning of my metaphor? The readers or mine? And is my psychologists guess more valuable than that of a childhood friend of mine?

> Dissecting meaning like this is also where you get into the whole death of the author vs. authorial intent rabbit hole. And you can write whole books about that topic and which is also a quite subjective topic (I'm leaning more towards death of the author, as you might guess).

That is also just another interpretation of the metaphor. A kid on a small island country might not associate trains with a fixed daily schedule at all, because they only know about trains from other media. Your answer only is "objective" within cultures that can make that association between trains and schedules. In duringearly industrialization, the SAT answer might be that the train stands for the unrelenting progress of technology and how it sucks all live out of factory workers (see charlie chaplins 'modern times').