In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1956, W.H. Auden said that the two questions which interested him most when reading a poem were: I) Here is a verbal contraption, how does it work? and 2) What kind of a guy inhabits this poem? Ultimately poetry is a verbal design, but it has designs upon us, in the sense that the poet is communicating not only a pattern of sounds but a theme, some personal response to life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Auden
If we pay attention to the following diagram showing different gates into and out of a text, we realize that W.A. Auden’s first interest is the text itself, the ingredients which have been used to ‘cook’ the poem, and how these ingredients have been combined to give the text its special ‘smell’, ‘flavour’ and ‘texture’. He refers to the poem/text/recipe as ‘verbal contraption’, which echoes the idea that a poem is a special use of language; we could even say that it is a kind of ‘meta language’ because it conveys meaning by drawing attention to itself, to the specificity of its rules and architecture.
Auden is also interested in the connection between literature and life, especially the life of the author because, to a great extent, poetry – and art in general – is ultimately autobiographical as it results from the interaction between self and world or, to quote Hélène Aji: “Irredeemably, it seems, the freely-composed poem aspires to autobiography, however coded it might be”.
In this module we shall concentrate on the poem, adopting ‘the formalist/textual/close reading approach. We shall try to answer the questions: how is the poem made? And because form and meaning cannot be dissociated, while we explore the ingredients of the poem we shall also create meaning.
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.
Language creates the spaces we inhabit. Words structure thought and shape “even the most fundamental dimensions of human experience: space, time, causality and relationships to others.” The questions we need to ask ourselves are: How powerful are words? Do we take them too much for granted? Should we not pay more attention to them? Are we aware of the fact that language is a living organism subject to decay but also renewal? As Elizabeth Drew explains:
Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust its vitality. It needs constant re-invigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile. Poetry is one great source of the maintenance and renewal of language. (69)
A poet’s choice of words reveals his/her ability to suggest ideas and feelings in a context of compression and design. In other words, the poet’s craft does not only consist in selecting words to achieve a desired effect, but in combining them so that their degrees of ‘consanguinity’ establish a net of relations accounting for and justifying the poem’s shape and structure.
In the following poems some words and/or phrases have been underlined. By clicking on them you will find synonyms , synonymous phrases or questions. Explain why, in your opinion, the author’s choice of words is effective, if you think that such choice creates a special effect. Perhaps you are puzzled by the words used, by the ideas, images or feelings they elicit from you. Write your response(s) on a piece of paper. You will be asked to share them with the rest of the class.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –This is the Hour of Lead–
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
It is perhaps through translation that we realize how carefully a poet chooses his/her words. Here is an extract from T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton translated by Esteban Pujals.
Here is a place of disaffection |
He aquí un lugar de descontento, antes y después a una luz turbia: ni claridad diurna que de lúcida paz reviste la forma al hacer de la sombra belleza pasajera en lenta rotación que sugiere permanencia, |
In An Essay on Criticism Alexander Pope wrote: "The sound must seem an echo to the sense". As these words suggest, we read poetry with our eyes but also our ears. The physical layout of a poem on the page is a visual pattern that turns to sound as soon as we start reading it. Both the eyes and the ears, as well as the other senses, are involved in the sense-making process. Elizabeth Drew explains that “when we open a book of verse and see short lines of print on the page, unconsciously we prepare ourselves immediately for an experience different from that of reading a page of solid print. The response is an instinctive mental adjustment, like the mobilization of the necessary muscles to perform any simple physical action, and in the same way it is in fact a multiple movement. At once we prepare to meet a use of language which cuts of the words on the page from their practical, simple uses in our daily lives. Then, since we expect the language to be more concentrated, we also expect an intensification of our faculties of feeling; but the one thing we know will differentiate verse from prose is an experience of the ear: poetry is a rhythmically patterned language”.
Although inextricably intertwined, rhyme and rhythm are not the same thing. Rhyme is part of the rhythm of a poem, but rhythm encompasses far more than rhyme. According to Webster’s Dictionary, rhyme is “a regular recurrence of corresponding sounds” which occurs usually at the end of a line. There are three main types of end-rhymes:
To this list we may add the concepts of visual rhyme and internal rhyme. Visual or eye rhyme occurs when two words are spelled similarly but pronounced differently as in: blood/good; love/move or pint/sprint. Internal rhyme refers to sound similarity between a word within a line and another word either at the end of the same line or within another line, as in the first and third lines of the following quatrain from the last stanza of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "The Cloud":
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
Elizabeth Drew reminds us that “classical poetry was unrhymed, and rhyme wasn’t introduced into English poetry until the Middle Ages, when it came into fashion from France and Italy. The Elizabethans all used blank verse as their dramatic medium, but they carried on a new controversy on the merits and demerits of rhyme for lyrical writing”. However, it was at the beginning of the 20th century with the advent of modernism that the tendency to break free from the moulds of rhyme became widespread. “Eliot makes a distinction between verse as speech and verse as song. It was the first that the twentieth-century revolution in poetry emphasized. At its best, it illustrated that the lyric could be founded as well on the rhymeless speech rhythm as on the traditional song”. The first verse of a love song by Auden is a good example:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Only one true rhyme appears here (away/day), but the lines have a beautiful pattern of echoing consonant and vowel similarities creating a pleasant melody. Think of the possible effects produced by liquid consonant sounds highlighted in red, nasal consonant sounds in green, and the diphthong [ei] as in "lay", "faithless", "away", "grave", "day", "break" or [ai] as in "time", "child", "my" "lie", "entirely".
The following poems reveal different types of rhyme. Try to identify them and establish connections between rhyme and meaning, that is, between sound and sense.
Poem 1: "To My Dear and Loving Husband" by Anne Bradstreet If ever two were one, then surely we. |
Poem 2: "Juan’s Song" by Louise Bogan When beauty breaks and falls asunder |
Poem 3 : "A dream of Jealousy" by Seamus Heaney Walking with you and another lady |
Rhythm, in poetry is the patterned recurrence, within a certain range of regularity, of specific language features, usually features of sound. Although difficult to define, rhythm is readily discriminated by the ear and the mind, having as it does a physiological basis. It is universally agreed to involve qualities of movement, repetition, and pattern and to arise from the poem’s nature as a temporal structure. Rhythm, by any definition, is essential to poetry; prose may be said to exhibit rhythm but in a much less highly organized sense. The presence of rhythmic patterns heightens emotional response.
The rhythm of a poem is, essentially, an auditory phenomenon, though it is also affected by syntax and semantics. We have already dealt with rhyme as an important ingredient of rhythm. Does this mean that poems without any recognizable rhyme scheme lack rhythm? Obviously not.
Rhyme is only an ingredient of rhythm. Rhythm also depends on meter, line length, line break, form and stanzaic pattern, choice of words and punctuation.
Meter depends on the number of stresses in the lines. When we speak, we stress some syllables and words more than others creating, albeit unconsciously, a speech rhythm. When we read poetry we are aware of the cadence of our discourse, of its rhythm. Read the following extracts of poems and feel their different rhythms:
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.John Donne (1572-1631)
The basic rhythm of these lines is trochaic tetrameter. The trochaic beat is created by the repetition of the pattern stressed/unstressed syllables. The word ‘tetrameter’ indicates that there are four stresses per line. The basic rhythm, in this case trochaic tetrameter, pervades the poem but does not impose itself completely. There is no absolute regularity in normal speech rhythms, it would be unnatural, monotonous and boring. Poets tend to avoid straightjackets for the same reasons. When we read poetry we are also aware of punctuation regulating the flow of speech and of line breaks. Lines may be self-contained units of sense, as in the well-known lines from William Shakespeare's Hamlet:
To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Alternatively a line may end in mid-phrase or sentence:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
this linguistic unit is completed in the next line,
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
This technique is called enjambment, and is used to create a sense of expectation in the reader and/or to add dynamism to the movement of the verse. Read the following poems aloud to become aware of how punctuation and line breaks determine rhythm:
Shakespeare, sonnet 129
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
“Men at Forty” by Donald Justice
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret,And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, somethingThat is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.
Read the obligatory readings and explain the main ideas included and developed in them. Your summary should be personal and creative. It should show that you have read, digested and given thought to the material you have read. The length of your essay should be between 500 and 600 words. Write clearly, concisely and meaningfully. Edit your essay carefully to avoid unnecessary mistakes.