You are on page 1of 34

LITERATURA INGLESA II

EXTRATOS DA APOSTILA DA PROFESSORA VERA LIMA CECCON VERSO 2009-1 *************** DISPONVEL APENAS PARA FINS DIDTICOS E ACADMICOS

PREFACE & ACKOWLEDGEMENT


Welcome to the study of poetry in the English romanticism! This booklet was assembled in the hope that it will trigger your curiosity and make you search for its original sources. After all, booklets are an ultimate resource and should never replace real books. The compilation comprises of photocopies, scanned copies or direct transcript of five sources, all of them properly listed in the bibliography: - Anthony Burgess English Literature, for items 2, 3 and 5; - Richard Ellmanns Modern Poems, for most of items 4 and 6; - the article on Prosody by Chaim Perelman in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for parts of item 4; - the article on Rhetoric by Harvey Gross in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for parts of item 5 and nd th - The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2 vol, 6 edition) for items 8 to 13 I acknowledge the copyrights of the above authors and declare to take no commercial advantage from this compilation: it is done for didactic purposes only. VeraLimaCeccon ABOUT THE NUMBERING SYSTEM: Page numbers displayed on the table of contents refer to the compilation sequence. They are located at the bottom corners of each page (often manuscripted). Make sure you dont confuse them with the page numbers in the original volumes. As for the numbers of chapters and items, they are didactic and help organize the course. However, you wont find them on the actual page when the page comes from a plain photocopy.

19

II. FORMAL ASPECTS: PROSODY AND RHETORIC


PROSODY1 In modern criticism, prosody is the study of all the elements of language that contribute toward acoustic and rhythmic effects, chiefly in poetry but also in prose. The term derived from an ancient Greek word that originally meant a song accompanied by music or the particular tone or accent given to an individual syllable. Greek and Latin literary critics generally regarded prosody as part of grammar; it concerned itself with the rules determining the length or shortness of a syllable, with syllabic quantity, and with how the various combinations of short and long syllables formed the metres (i.e., the rhythmic patterns) of Greek and Latin poetry. Prosody was the study of metre and its uses in lyric, epic, and dramatic verse. In sophisticated modern criticism, however, the scope of prosodic study has been expanded until it now concerns itself with what the 20th-century poet Ezra Pound called the articulation of the total sound of a poem. Prose as well as verse reveals the use of rhythm and sound effects; however, critics do not speak of the prosody of prose but of prose rhythm. . Many prosodic elements such as the rhythmic repetition of consonants (alliteration) or of vowel sounds (assonance) occur in prose; the repetition of syntactical and grammatical patterns also generates rhythmic effect. Traditional rhetoric, the study of how words work, dealt with acoustic and rhythmic techniques in Classical oratory and literary prose. But although prosody and rhetoric intersected, rhetoric dealt more exactly with verbal meaning than with verbal surface. Rhetoric dealt with grammatical and syntactical manipulations and with figures of speech; it categorized the kinds of metaphor. Modern critics, especially those who practice the New Criticism, might be considered rhetoricians in their detailed concern with such devices as irony, paradox, and ambiguity. RHETORIC2 The traditional rhetoric is limited to the insights and terms developed by rhetors, or rhetoricians, in the Classical period of ancient Greece, about the 5th century BC, to teach the art of public speaking to their fellow citizens in the Greek republics and, later, to the children of the wealthy under the Roman Empire. Public performance was regarded as the highest reach of education proper, and rhetoric was at the centre of the educational process in Western Europe for some 2,000 years. Institutio oratoria (before AD 96; The Training of an Orator), by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, perhaps the most influential textbook on education ever written, was in fact a book about rhetoric. Inevitably, there
1 extracted from Ellmanns and Gross 2 extracted from Perelmans 20

were minor shifts of emphasis in so long a tradition, and for a long time even letter writing fell within the purview of rhetoric; but it has consistently maintained its emphasis upon creation, upon instructing those wishing to initiate communication with other people. Modern rhetoric has shifted its focus to the auditor or reader. Literary criticism always borrowed from rhetoricstylistic terms such as antithesis and metaphor were invented by Classical rhetoricians. When language became a subject of sustained scholarly concern, it was inevitable that scholars would turn back to Classical theories of rhetoric for help. But modern rhetoric is far more than a collection of terms. The perspective from which it views a text is different from that of other disciplines. History, philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences are apt to view a text as though it were a kind of map of the author's mind on a particular subject. Rhetoricians, accustomed by their traditional discipline to look at communication from the communicator's point of view, regard the text as the embodiment of an intention, not as a map. They know that that intention in its formulation is affected by its audience. They know also that the structure of a piece of discourse is a result of its intention. A concern for audience, for intention, and for structure is, then, the mark of modern rhetoric. It is as involved with the process of interpretation, or analysis, as it is with the process of creation, or genesis. In making a rhetorical approach to various discursive acts, one may speak of the rhetoric of a discoursesay, Robert Browning's poem My Last Duchess (1842)and mean by that the strategies whereby the poet communicated with his contemporaries, in this case the Victorians, or with modern man, his present readers; or one may speak of the rhetoric in a discourse and mean by that the strategies whereby the persona, the Duke of Ferrara who speaks Browning's poem in dramatic-monologue fashion, communicates with his audience in the poem, in this case an emissary from the father of Ferrara's next duchess. The two kinds of rhetoric are not necessarily discrete: in oratory or in lyric poetry, for example, the creator and his persona are assumed to be identical. To a degree Aristotle's distinction between the three voices of discourse still holds. A poet, according to Aristotle, speaks in his own voice in lyric poetry, in his own voice and through the voices of his characters in epic (or narrative), and only through the voices of his characters in drama. Thus, the speaker of oratory or of most nonfictional prose is similar to the lyric speaker, with less freedom than the latter either to universalize or to create imaginatively his own audience.

4. PROSODY: BASIC ELEMENTS


Much of what we call poetic form is the management of the sound of a poemits rhythms, its pace, its pauses, its vowels and consonants. All writers pay attention to those aspects of language, but in most writing the effects are rather subtle and subordinate. In poetry, these effects are often in the foreground, and their studycalled prosodyis an important part of the experience of poetic meaning.

4.1. LINES
The most obvious difference between prose and poetry is that in poetry the lines of type usually don't go all the way across the page. This is a crude distinction, but it still holds; in spite of many changes in verse form, poetry is still written in lines. In fact, the line is almost the only device common to all poems, even poems as different as these two: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. (WIILIAMS, The Red Wheelbarrow) Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village, though; He will not sec me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The But And And woods are lovely, dark and deep, I have promises to keep, miles to go before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

The most important fact about the verse line is that it breaks the poem wherever the poet chooses, regardless of grammar, punctuation, or even word division (wheel / barrow;). When reading poems aloud, most people tend to stress the last word in a line or to hold it longer than usual, then to pause briefly as their eyes travel back to the left to pick up the beginning of the next line. Poets reading their own work usually do the same: listen to recordings by Dylan Thomas or Denise Levertov, and you will seldom be in doubt where the lines end, even if the poems are new to you. (Levertov says that for her the pause between lines has the value of "half a comma.") _The_ line ending, then, is a specialized1 form of punctuation, and poets use it for rhetorical and musical effects.

4.1.1. LINE ENDINGS AND PAUSES


Different poets have different uses for the line ending, but most have a few purposes in common. First, all those pauses slow down the reading; the shorter the line, the more often we must pause, and the more deliberate the poetic utterance seems. These rhetorical "pauses for effect" also allow what has just been said to sink in. Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" has seven pauses among only fourteen words, and each pause contributes to the weight of his pronouncement. The weight is greatest on the last word of the line, which is underlined not only by the pause that follows it but by that slight emphasis which most readers give it. It's not surprising, then, to find that many poets arrange their poems so that the important words come at the ends of lines. (The first word of a line is another strategic spot, since it breaks in on that slight but perceptible silence between the lines and this receives a bit of extra emphasis.)

4.1.2. END-STOPPING AND ENJAMBMENT


The pauses that end poetic lines also have a purpose that might be called "musical." They divide poems into phrasings the way rests divide the melodic line in a piece of music. Sometimes the phrasing agrees with the sentence structure, and the end of a sentence, clause, or other syntactic unit comes at the end of a line. This increases the stress on the last word and the pause after it, and is called end-stopping. The lines in the last stanza of Frosts Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening are all end-stopped. If, on the other hand, the phrasing cuts across a syntactic unit, as in line 11 of Frosts poem, the stress on the last word and the pause after it are still perceptible but less marked, and the result is called enjambment. The breaks between lines may be placed in order to ensure that each line will contain a specific number of syllables or stressed syllables, or they may measure the amount of time each line will take to read, or even specify where the reader is to breath! This rather bewildering range of choices will to some degree be sorted out in the following discussions, but often you will have only the poem itself to show you just what the poet meant by a particular plan of line-divisions and how these should sound when the poem is read aloud.

21

4.2. RHYME
The largest English dictionaries list over four hundred thousand words, yet linguists set the number of distinct sounds of which these words are composed at about thirty-five. As a result, English is full of words that rhyme. Rhyming is actively avoided in most conversation and prose writing, but for centuries it has been one of the most commonly used devices of poetry. Why should this be? There are many possible answers, none of them definitive. Children find rhyming an entrancing game, and many poets may still feel some of that enjoyment. Light verse almost always rhymes, and sometimes the rhyming is much of the fun, as when the author sets up u seemingly impossible rhyme, then solves the problem with an unexpected but inevitable word. (Ogden Nash did it often: "Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros, / Ill stare at something less prepoceros.") Rhymes help you to remember which months have thirty days, or they can keep a commercial jingle rattling around in your head. Most popular songs have rhymed lyrics; poetry and song have long been related, and possibly the recurrences of rhyme are equivalent to the recurrences of melody. And some poets use the requirements of rhyme to make poems harder to write but more engaging to them and their readers; Robert Frost once disparaged composing free verse as like playing tennis without a net.

Often words whose sounds rhyme have some relation in meaning as wellthey are similar, or opposite, or ask to be compared: Miniver Cheevy, born too late, Scratched his head and kept on thinking; Miniver coughed, and called it fate, And kept on drinking. (Robinson, "Miniver Cheevy") The rhyme between "born too late" (Miniver Chevys situation) and "called it fate" (his response to it) has a kind of unforced conclusiveness about it, while the rhyme between "thinking" and "drinking," emphasized by the short final line, is a witty comment on the quality of Chevy's thinking and seems to "clinch" the poem.

4.2.2. RHYME SCHEME


A frequent purpose of rhyme is to unify the poem: to draw you along with rising expectations of an inevitable rhyme, and to fulfill those expectations at a crucial point in the poem. The poems by Housman and Robinson share the same pattern of rhymes, or rhyme scheme, and each works the same way: the first two lines begin a thought in such a way that you can predict neither the conclusions nor the rhymes, the third line partly completes the thought and provides one of the rhymes, and the last line is the clincher. Other rhyme schemes work in other ways: It shows a mighty lot of cheek To study chemistry and Greek When Mister Charlie needs a hand To hoe the cotton on his land. And when Miss Ann looks for a cook, Why stick your nose inside a book? (RANDALL, Booker T. and W.E.B)

4.2.1. TRUE RHYMES AND EYE-RHYMES


True rhymes occur when the last stressed syllables of two or more lines share the same vowel sounds, followed by identical sounding consonants or unstressed syllables. When the last stressed syllable is also the last syllable, as in sight / ignite, the rhyme is traditionally said to be masculine; when the last stressed syllable is followed by one or two unstressed syllables, as is condition / proposition, the rhyme is feminine. (A convention of English poetry called eye-rhyme has it that cough may sometimes be assumed to rhyme with enough, or sigh with sympathy, though these words do not sound alike when read aloud.) Poets who like rhyme do not use it randomly, or merely for its own sake. It is part of the web of sound and meaning which all poetic devices help to weave. And the most obvious purpose of rhyme is that it draws still more attention to the end of a particular line, and to the break between one line and the next. Because of this, poets often put key words into a rhyming position: The chestnut casts his flambaux, and the flowers Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away, The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers. Pass me the can, lad; theres an end of May. (Housman, "The Chestnut Casts His Flambcaux") The inversion which sets "away" at the end of the second line might, in another poem, be merely a convenience of a poet seeking a rhyme for "May." But the theme of these four lines, and of the poem, is that time passes, leaves us, streams away like spring flowers; the slight emphasis on "away," then, underlines the poem's meaning.
22

Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday You meet me and you say: 'Dont forget to see about the cattle' Among your earthiest words the angels stray. (Kavanagh, "In Memory of My Mother") One dark night my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind's not right. (Lowell, "Skunk Hour")

4.2.3. COUPLETS
Dudley Randal's poem is in couplets (pairs of rhymed lines). The rhymes tie together lines closely connected by their meaning and slightly separate them from the other couplets. In couplets the rhymes are very noticeable because they follow upon each other so closely. The couplet is therefore a favorite rhyme scheme when the rhymes themselves are unusual or funny, as in light or comic verso.

4.2.6. NEAR-RHYME OR SLANT RHYME


Some poets like the patterning and underlining effects of rhyme, but find that the sound of true rhyme is a bit too noticeable, the stress too strong for their purposes. They may instead use near-rhyme (or slant rhyme): It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them one sprang up, and stared ... (OWEN, Strange Meeting) Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. (Yeats, "Under Ben Bulben") Near-rhyme is rhyme with the vowels slightly "off," but with the final consonants as expected or nearly so. (Note that technically speaking the first two lines of the Yeats selection are in eye-rhyme, not near-rhyme, but the actual effect when the poem is read aloud is the same.)

4.2.4. ALTERNATING RHYME AND OTHER SCHEMES


In Kavanagh's poem only half the lines rhyme, still exploiting the effect of rhyme out more sparingly than do Housman and Robinson. Robert Lowell, on the other hand, rhymes his poem more complexly, and to keep track of the rhymes it is useful to outline their pattern. Conventionally, the rhyme that begins first is marked a, the second is b, and so on, while unrhymed lines are all x. The rhyme scheme in "Miniver Chevy" is abab; Randall's is aabbcc; Kavanagh's, xaxa. Lowells is abcbca. The middle four lines set up the same pattern of expectation and fulfillment as in the Housman and Robinson stanzas, but within a much longer arc that takes off from night and comes to rest with right. Such a long wait for the rhyme might be expected to imply a meaningful connection between the rhyming lines, One dark night and My minds not right, as thought the speakers mind were itself darkened and in fact Lowell has said that the first line speaks of a dark night of the soul.

4.2.5. INTERNAL RHYMES


Rhymes may be placed elsewhere than at line endings, in which case they are called internal rhymes: No baby, no, you may not go, For the dogs are fierce and wild ... (Randall, Ballad of Birmingham) The And The And wilderness rose up to it, sprawled around, no longer wild. jar was round upon the ground tall and of a port in air. (Stevens, "Anedocte of the Jar") Since rhyming words command so much attention, their appearance in midline usually signals us that something important is happening, as when the mother in Randalls poem emphatically tells her daughter not to go downtown. Stevens poem, otherwise unrhymed, clusters three rhyming words in its middle, as though the jar which is said to tame the wilderness were also "taming" the sound of the poem into rhyme.

23

4.3. STANZAS
Many of the examples in the discussion of rhyme are stanzas. Stanzas are sections which are set off from each other by more space than usual. Within a poem, most or all of the stanzas are often the same number of lines long, and often use the same rhythms and rhyme scheme: Children are dumb to say how hot the day is, How hot the scent is of the summer rose, How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky, How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by. But we have speech, to chill the angry day, And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent. We spell away the overhanging night, We spell away the soldiers and the fright. (Graves, "The Cool Web") In many poems, stanzas are like verses of a song, in which the same melody returns accompanying different words. Each encompasses a complete thought, and each ends at the end of a sentence. But poets may play against the stanza divisions, and carry enjambment across the stanza break: Well, I was ten and very much afraid. In my kind world the dead were out of range And I could not forgive the sad or strange In beast or man. My father took the spade And buried him. Last night I saw the grass Slowly divide (it was the same scene But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green) And saw the dog emerging. I confess I felt afraid again, but still he came . . . (Wilbur, "The Pardon")

4.4.1. ALLITERATION AND ASSONANCE


The most frequent sound patterns within a line are alliteration (in which the consonant sounds, especially at the beginnings of words, are the same) and assonance (when several words near to each other have identical or very similar vowel sounds). Here are some examples Only the stuttering riffles rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. (OWEN, Anthem for Doomed Youth) .. . and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. (Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice Cream") Now it is autumn and the falling fruit and the long journey towards oblivion. (Lawrence, "The Ship of Death") Owen's t's and r's imitate the sounds of gunfire; Stevens's hard c's and soft s's sound, if you will, like the spoon or whisk beating the milk. In both cases it is probable that at least one word"patter" for Owen, "concupiscent" for Stevenswas chosen in large part because it fitted into the sound pattern. The effect of assonance in "The Ship of Death" is less specific, out perhaps the long, open vowels may suggest a drowsiness such as might evoke the coming of winter and of natural death.

4.5. RHYTHM
There are two species of rhythm in poetry: the pattern of regular rhythmic recurrence called meter, and the lack of such pattern, which has come to be called free verse. Each differs from the other not only in the way it sounds but in its origins and the kind of poetry that uses it. Meter goes back to poetrys origins as song or chanting to accompany ritual dances; metrical poetry, then, should always be heard against an imagined background of ideally regular rhythm, and its divergences from this ideal regularity are like syncopations in music, local effects aimed at producing emphasis and variety. Free verse, however has nothing to do with music; it is based on the actual rhythms of human speech, in which the stresses and accents of the words fall much less predictably. There is no sustained regular rhythm in ordinary human speech, but sometimes speech may briefly fall into recurring patterns, or cadences, for rhetorical effect. Meter and free verse have each been used to make good poems; neither is inherently better than the other. And like most seeming opposites, they affect each other, and have a rather large expanse of common ground.

4.4. SOUND EFFECTS WITHIN THE LINE


The sounds of rhymes stand out in a poem because they echo each other so closely, especially when they come at the ends of lines. But poets take just as much care with the less noticeable sounds of the other words in the poem. "Let's say you have a choice of adjectives," says Denise Leverlov. "and one has an onomatopoeic quality which you want, but it also has a couple of s's in it, and the rest of the line, or the line just before it, is already pretty sibilant, but you feel that line is right. You might have to forego the word that youve just found and keep on looking, because you can't have all those s's jammed together." For Levertov, as for many other poets, it's clearly not a matter of watching the sense, and letting the sounds take care of themselves.
24

4.6. METER
When you listen to the sound of people talking, you can easily notice that their speech varies from syllable to syllable in its degree of stress. (Stress is a combination of loudness, duration and pitch). This pattern of stress is inherent in all English words of more than one syllable: we always say syllable, not syllable. (in fact, the placement of an accent in a word may determine its meaning: entrance is a noun meaning place of entry. entrance is a verb meaning to spellbind.) The same is true of groups of words; some one-syllable words receive stress, others do not, according to their importance to the meaning of the sentence. Meter is a regularized form of verbal rhythm. Except for very special purposes, it does not distort the normal rhythms of speech; rather, it results from words having been arranged so that their natural stresses form a deliberately regular pattern. Meter has an attractiveness of its own, the sensuous appeal of a steady, marked rhythm. It can also enhance poetic meaning.

caesura A door sunk in a hillside, with a bolt (Nemerov, The Icehouse in Summer) Poets place caesura so as to vary the meter, in order to avoid monotony and to enhance the poems meaning. In Nemerovs line, the meter itself is already quite varied, and it would take a reading of the whole poem to know for sure that the ideal meter from which this line departs is the same as that to which Milays lines conform.

4.6.3. TRADITIONAL METRICAL FEET IN ENGLISH VERSE


[In English, a line of syllable-stress verse is made up of either two-syllable (disyllabic) or three-syllable (trisylabic) feet]. Because they are often discussed, these matters, and the feet of which they are composed, have names:

4.6.1. SCANSION
Since verbal rhythm is invisible in the written language, we make it visible for study by using a system of notation called scansion. Scansion recognizes two major degrees of stress, and marks them in this way: / strong weak (Naturally, there are many degrees of stress between the strongest and the weakest, and if you find it convenient you can mark a syllable that is neither strong or weak with a \, for intermediate stress.) These marks, when placed over a line of poetry, reveal its rhythmic pattern: Wth slppng skrts th slnd wmn stnd n grdns stripped nd sctterd, perng nrth (Millay, Hearing Your Words, and Not a Word Among Them)

THE FOUR PRINCIPAL FEET


/ the iamb; iambic (prpse; dlte) / the trochee; trochaic (sngl; ntr) / the anapest; anapestic (ftrnon; n hle) / the dactyl; dactylic (mphss; jnpr)

THE COMPLEMENTARY ONES3


// spondee, spondaic (hrd tmes, ful ball) the pyrrhic foot (n , f th)

4.6.4. LINE LENGTH


The other metrical attribute of a line is its length, which is stated in terms of the number of its feet. A line of two feet is dimeter; of three trimeter, of four tetrameter, of five pentameter, of six hexameter and of seven heptameter (the longest found in English verse) The metrical form of a line or a poem is described by combining the adjective giving the type of foot with the noun giving the number of feet. Thus the line by Millay, and that by Nemerov, are in iambic pentameter.
3 Spondees and pyrrhics occur only as substitutions for other feet, never as determinants of metrical pattern

4.6.2. THE METRICAL FOOT


Obviously, these lines are in regular meter: weak and strong stresses alternate one after the other from beginning to end. In scansion, the smallest repeted unit of the rhythmic patter (in this case, /) is called a foot, ad the line is marked off into feet this way: (feet separated by |) Wth slap|png skrts |th s|lnd wm|n stnd The foot is the basic unit of meter. In that imagined, ideally regular meter we may sense behind the rhythm of the poem itself, each foot always includes one strong stress and one or more weak stresses, and all feet within a line are the same. Not that we pause between feet, as we do between lines. Where a substantial pause occurs naturally within a line it is called a caesura and is marked with another symbol, which does not affect metrical scansion at all:

25

4.6.5. SUBSTITUTIONS
The most common departures from regular meter are substitution placing a trochee, a spondee or a pyrrhic foot in an iambic line, for example and the addition or subtraction of weak stresses at either end of the line. Here are some examples: Claned, r | rstred? Smene | wuld know: dont. (Larkin, Church Going) T pluck | life back. Th guns | f th | steeled fleet Rcoil ... (Lowell, The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket) Th world | s chrged | wth th | grndur | of Gd. (Hopkins, Gods Grandeur) r | sh p| ts, larn | yur trde Sng | whtv|r s | wll mde (Yeats, Under Ben Bulben) By itself the line from Larkin could be either trochaic or iambic; as the poem in which it appears is in iambic pentameter, three of the five feet in this line are substitutions. The spondee at the end makes the words I dont particularly emphatic. The predominance of strong stresses (which tend to take longer to speak) at the beginning of the line from Lowell slows down the movement of the verse and gives it an air of solemnity. Hopkins line, on the other hand, has only four strong stresses, and tends to move much more quickly, lightly surprising when the subject is Gods grandeur, but that grandeur is not ponderous but volatile, as the next line suggests: It will flme ut, like shning from shok fil. Yeatss line lacks a weak stress either at the beginning or the end of the line (its impossible to tell, but as most English verse is iambic we conventionally assume that it is dropped from the beginning), and the result a strong stress on either side of the line break causes an even longer pause than usual at the of the line, putting more emphasis on the rhymes and on the meaning of the words placed there. ...

4.6.6. MEANING, PACE, AND SOUND4


Sweet day, so The bridal of The dew shall For cool, so calm, so bright, the earth and skie: weep thy fall to-night; thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye: Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die. Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie; My musick shows ye have your closes, And all must die. Onely a sweet and virtuous soul, Like seasond timber, never gives; But though the whole wolrd turn to coal Then chiefly lives. Vertue by the 17th-century English poet George Herbert Scansion reveals the basic metrical pattern of the poem; it does not, however, tell everything about its prosody. The metre combines with other elements, notably propositional sense or meaning, pace or tempo, and such sound effects as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. In the fifth line of Vertue, the reversed third foot occurring at angry brings that word into particular prominence; the disturbance of the metre combines with semantic reinforcement to generate a powerful surge of feeling. Thus, the metre here is expressive. The pace of the lines is controlled by the length of number of syllables and feet, line 5 obviously takes longer to read or recite. The line contains more long vowel sounds: Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave . . . Vowel length is called quantity. In English verse, quantity cannot by itself form metre although a number of English poets have experimented with quantitative verse. Generally speaking, quantity is a rhythmical but not a metrical feature of English poetry; it can be felt but it cannot be precisely determined. The vowel sounds in Sweet rose may be lengthened or shortened at will. No such options are available, however, with the stress patterns of words. The word msc cannot be read msc. .

4 the sections from this point onwards were extracted from Gross 26

4.7. TYPES OF METRE (METRICAL PROSODY)


4.7.1. SYLLABLE-STRESS METRES
It has been shown that the metre of Vertue is determined by a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables arranged into feet and that a precise number of feet determines the measure of the line. Such verse is called syllable-stress verse (in some terminologies accentual-syllabic) and was the norm for English poetry from the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century. A line of syllable-stress verse is made up of either two-syllable (disyllabic) or threesyllable (trisyllabic) feet. The disyllabic feet are the iamb (/) and the trochee (/) (noted in the scansion of Vertue); the trisyllabic feet are the dactyl (/) and anapest (/). ... Syllable stress became more or less established in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 13401400). In the century that intervened between Chaucer and the early Tudor poets, syllable-stress metres were either ignored or misconstrued. By the end of the 16th century, however, the now-familiar iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and anapestic metres became the traditional prosody for English verse. rhyme replaced alliteration and stanzaic forms replaced the four-stress lines. But the strong-stress rhythm persisted; it can be felt in the anonymous love lyrics of the 14th century and in the popular ballads of the 15th century. Lord Randal can be comfortably scanned to show a line of mixed iambic and anapestic feet; it clearly reveals, however, a four-stress structure: O whre ha you ben, Lord Rndal, my sn? And whre ha you ben, my hndsome young mn? I ha ben at the grenwood; mother, mk my bed son, For Im waried wi hntin, and fin wad lie down. A number of 20th-century poets, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, have revived strong-stress metre. The versification of Pound's Cantos and Eliot's Four Quartets (1943) shows the vitality of the strong-stress, or, as they are often called, native metres.

4.7.2. STRONG-STRESS METRES


In the middle of the 19th century, with Walt Whitman's free verse and Gerard Manley Hopkins' extensive metrical innovations, the traditional prosody was challenged. Antecedent to the syllable-stress metres was the strong-stress metre of Old English and Middle English poetry. Strong-stress verse is measured by count of stresses alone; the strong stresses are usually constant, but the number of unstressed syllables may vary considerably. Strong-stress verse survives in nursery rhymes and children's counting songs: ne, two, bckle my she; Thre, fur, knck at the dor; Fve, sx, pck up stcks The systematic employment of strong-stress metre can be observed in the Old English epic poem Beowulf (c. 1000) and in William Langland's vision-poem, Piers Plowman (A' Text, c. 1362): In a smer ssun whom sfte was the snne, I schp me in-to a schrud a schep as I wre; In hbite of an hrmite un-hly of wrkes, Wende I wydne in this wrld wonders to hre These lines illustrate the structural pattern of strong-stress metre. Each line divides sharply at the caesura ( ), or medial pause; on each side of the caesura are two stressed syllables strongly marked by alliteration. Strong-stress verse is indigenous to the Germanic languages with their wideranging levels of stressed syllables and opportunities for alliteration. Strong-stress metre was normative to Old English and Old Germanic heroic poetry, as well as to Old English lyric poetry. With the rising influence of French literature in the 12th and 13th centuries,

4.7.3. SYLLABIC METRES


Most of English poetry is carried by the strong-stress and syllable-stress metres. Two other kinds of metres must be mentioned: the purely syllabic metres and the quantitative metres. The count of syllables determines the metres of French, Italian, and Spanish verse. In French poetry the alexandrine, or 12-syllabled line, is a dominant metrical form: O toi, qui vois la honte o je suis descendue, Implacable Vnus, suis-je assez confondue? Tu ne saurais plus loin pousser ta cruaut. Ton triomphe est parfait; tous tes traits ont port. Racine, Phdre (1677) Stress and pause in these lines are variable; only the count of syllables is fixed. English poets have experimented with syllabic metres; the Tudor poet Thomas Wyat's translations from Petrarch's Italian poems of the 14th century attempted to establish a metrical form based on a decasyllabic or 10-syllabled line: The long love that in my thought doth harbor, And in my heart doth keep his residence, Into my face presseth with bold pretense And there encampeth, spreading his banner. The Lover for Shamefastness Hideth . . . (1557)

27

Most ears can detect that these lines waver between syllabic and syllable-stress metre; the second line falls into a pattern of iambic feet. Most ears also discover that the count of syllables alone does not produce any pronounced rhythmic interest; syllabic metres in English generate a prosody more interesting to the eye than to the ear.

4.8. PROSODIC STYLE


The analysis of prosodic style begins with recognizing the metrical form the poet uses. Is he writing syllable-stress, strong-stress, syllabic, or quantitative metre? Or is he using a nonmetrical prosody? Again, some theorists would not allow that poetry can be written without metre; the examples of Whitman and many 20th-century innovators, however, have convinced most modern critics that a nonmetrical prosody is not a contradiction in terms but an obvious feature of modern poetry. Metre has not disappeared as an important element of prosody; indeed, some of the greatest poets of the modern periodWilliam Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevensrevealed themselves as masters of the traditional metres. They also experimented with newer prosodies based on prose cadences, on expansions of the blank-verse line, and revivals of old formssuch as strong-stress and ballad metres. Also noteworthy are the visual prosodies fostered by the poets of the Imagist movement and by such experimenters as E.E. Cummings. Cummings revived the practice of certain 17th-century poets (notably George Herbert) of shaping the poem by typographic arrangements. The prosodic practice of poets has varied enormously with the historical period, the poetic genre, and the poet's individual style. In English poetry, for example, during the Old English period (to 1100), the strong-stress metres carried both lyric and narrative verse. In the Middle English period (from c. 1100 to c. 1500), stanzaic forms developed for both lyric and narrative verse. The influence of French syllable counting pushed the older stress lines into newer rhythms; Chaucer developed for The Canterbury Tales a line of 10 syllables with alternating accent and regular end rhymean ancestor of the heroic couplet. The period of the English Renaissance (from c. 1500 to 1660) marks the fixing of syllable-stress metre as normative for English poetry. Iambic metre carried three major prosodic forms: the sonnet, the rhyming couplet, and blank verse. The sonnet was the most important of the fixed stanzaic forms. The iambic pentameter rhyming couplet (later known as the heroic couplet) was used by Christopher Marlowe for his narrative poem Hero and Leander (1598); by John Donne in the early 17th century for his satires, his elegies, and his longer meditative poems. Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), first introduced into English in a translation by Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, published in 1557, became the metrical norm for Elizabethan drama. The period of the Renaissance also saw the refinement of a host of lyric and song forms; the rapid development of English music during the second half of the 16th century had a salutary effect on the expressive capabilities of poetic rhythms.

4.7.4. QUANTITATIVE METRES


Quantitative metres determine the prosody of Greek and Latin verse. Renaissance theorists and critics initiated a confused and complicated argument that tried to explain European poetry by the rules of Classical prosody and to draft laws of quantity by which European verse might move in the hexameters of the ancient Roman poets Virgil or Horace. Confusion was compounded because both poets and theorists used the traditional terminology of Greek and Latin prosody to describe the elements of the already existing syllable-stress metres; iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and anapestic originally named the strictly quantitative feet of Greek and Latin poetry. Poets themselves adapted the metres and stanzas of Classical poetry to their own languages; whereas it is not possible here to trace the history of Classical metres in European poetry, it is instructive to analyze some attempts to make English and German syllables move to Greek and Latin music. Because neither English nor German has fixed rules of quantity, the poets were forced to revise the formal schemes of the Classical paradigms in accordance with the phonetic structure of their own language. A metrical paradigm much used by both Greek and Latin poets was the so-called Sapphic stanza. It consisted of three quantitative lines that scanned - - - - - - , followed by a shorter line, called an Adonic, - - - . Sapphics by the 19th-century English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne shows the Sapphic metre and stanza in English: All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids, Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather, Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron Stood and beheld me . . . Saw the white implacable Aphrodite, Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled Shine as fire of sunset on western waters; Saw the reluctant . . . . The same metre and stanza in German are found in Sapphische Ode, by the 19th-century poet Hans Schmidt, which was beautifully set to music by Johannes Brahms (Opus 94, No. 4): Rosen brach ich nachts mir am dunklen Hage; ssser hauchten Duft sie, als je am Tage; doch verstreuten reich die bewegten ste Tau den mich nsste. Auch der Ksse Duft mich wie nie berckte, die ich nachts vom Strauch deiner Lippen pflckte: doch auch dir, bewegt im Gemt gleich jenem, tauten die Trnen.
28

4.8.1. THE PERSONAL ELEMENT


A poet's choice of a prosody obviously depends on what his language and tradition afford; these are primary considerations. The anonymous author of the Old English poem Deor used the conventional four-stress metric available to him; but he punctuated groups of lines with a refrain:

aes ofereode: isses swa maeg! (that passed away: this also may!) The refrain adds something to the prosodic conventions of regulated stress, alliteration, and medial pause: a sense of a smaller and sharper rhythmic unit within the larger rhythms of the given metre. While the poet accepts from history his language and from poetic convention the structure of his metre, he shapes his own style through individual modifications of the carrying rhythms. When critics speak of a poet's voice, his personal tone, they are also speaking of his prosodic style.

4.8.3. WALT WHITMAN (NON-METRICAL PROSODY)


A poet's prosodic style may show all of the earmarks of revolt against prevailing metrical practice. Whitman's celebrated free verse marks a dramatic break with the syllable-stress tradition; he normally does not count syllables, stresses, or feet in his long sweeping lines. Much of his prosody is rhetorical; that is, Whitman urges his language into rhythm by such means as anaphora (i.e., repetition at the beginning of successive verses) and the repetition of syntactical units. He derives many of his techniques from the example of biblical verses, with their line of various types of parallelism. But he often moves toward traditional rhythms; lines fall into conventional parameters: O past! O happy life! O songs of joy! Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking (1859) Or they fall more often into disyllabic hexameters: Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd with missiles I saw them . . . . When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (186566) Despite the frequent appearance of regular metrical sequences, Whitman's lines cannot be scanned by the usual graphic methodof marking syllables and feet; his prosody, however, is fully available to analysis. The shape on the page of the lines below (they comprise a single strophe or verse unit) should be noted, specifically the gradual elongation and sudden diminution of line length. Equally noteworthy are the repetition of the key word carols, the alliteration of the s sounds, and the use of words in falling (trochaic) rhythm, lagging, yellow, waning:

4.8.2. SHAKESPEARE
Prosodic style must be achieved through a sense of tension; it is no accident that the great masters of poetic rhythm work against the discipline of a given metrical form. In his sonnets, Shakespeare may proceed in solemn iambic regularity, creating an effect of measured progression through time and its legacy of suffering and despair: No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled . . . Sonnet 71 Or he may wrench the metre and allow the reader to feel the sudden violence of his feelings, the power of a conviction raised to a command: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit any impediments. Love is not love Sonnet 116 The first two feet of the first line are trochaic reversals; the last two feet comprise a characteristic pyrrhic-spondaic formation. A trochaic substitution is quite normal in the first foot of an iambic pentameter line; a trochaic substitution in the second foot, however, creates a marked disturbance in the rhythm. There is only one normal iambic foot in the first line; this line runs over (or is enjambed) to the second line with its three consecutive iambic feet followed by a strong caesura and reversed fourth foot. These lines are, in Gerard Manley Hopkins' terms, metrically counter-pointed; trochees, spondees, and pyrrhics are heard against a ground rhythm of regular iambics. Without the ground rhythm, Shakespeare's expressive departures would not be possible.

Shake out carols! Solitary here, the night's carols! Carols of lonesome love! death's carols! Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon! O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea! O reckless despairing carols. Out of the Cradle No regular metre moves these lines; but a clearly articulated rhythmproduced by shape, thematic repetitions, sound effects, and patterns of stress and pausedefines a prosody. Whitman's prosody marks a clear break with previous metrical practices.

29

4.8.4. T.S.ELIOT AND EZRA POUND


Often a new prosody modifies an existing metrical form or revives an obsolete one. In Gerontion (1920), T.S. Eliot adjusted the blank-verse line to the emotionally charged, prophetic utterance of his persona, a spiritually arid old man: After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now . . . The first three lines expand the pentameter line beyond its normal complement of stressed and unstressed syllables; the fourth line contracts, intensifying the arc of feeling. Both Pound and Eliot used stress prosodies. Pound counted out four strong beats and used alliteration in his brilliant adaptation of the old English poem The Seafarer (1912): Chill its chains are; chafing sighs Hew my heart round and hunger begot Mere-weary mood. Lest man known not That he on dry land loveliest liveth . . . He uses a similar metric for the energetic opening of his Canto I. Eliot mutes the obvious elements of the form in the celebrated opening of The Waste Land (1922): April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Here is the native metre with its falling rhythm, elegiac tone, strong pauses, and variably placed stresses. If this is free verse, its freedoms are most carefully controlled. No verse is free, said Eliot, for the man who wants to do a good job. The prosodic styles of Whitman, Pound, and Eliotthough clearly linked to various historical antecedentsare innovative expressions of their individual talents. In a sense, the prosody of every poet of genius is unique; rhythm is perhaps the most personal element of the poet's expressive equipment.

4.8.5. TENNYSON AND BROWNING


Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, English poets who shared the intellectual and spiritual concerns of the Victorian age, are miles apart in their prosodies. Both used blank verse for their dramatic lyrics, poems that purport to render the accents of real men speaking. The blank verse of Tennyson's Ulysses (1842) offers smoothly modulated vowel music, carefully spaced spondaic substitutions, and unambiguous pentameter regularity: The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Browning's blank verse aims at colloquial vigour; its irregularity is a function not of any gross metrical violationit always obeys the letter of the metrical lawbut of the adjustment of abstract metrical pattern to the rhythms of dramatic speech. If Tennyson's ultimate model is Milton's Baroque prosody with its oratorical rhythms, Browning's model was the quick and nervous blank verse of the later Elizabethan dramatists. Characteristic of Browning's blank verse are the strong accents, involuted syntax, pregnant caesuras, and headlong energy in The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church (1845): Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity! Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back? Nephewssons mine . . . ah God, I know not! Well She, men would have to be your mother once, Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!

30

4.8.6. INFLUENCE OF PERIOD AND GENRE


In the lyric genres, the rhythms of the individual poetor, in the words of the 20thcentury American poet Robert Lowell, the person himselfcan be heard in the prosody. In the long poem, the dramatic, narrative, and didactic genres, a period style is more likely to be heard in prosody. The blank-verse tragedy of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, the blank verse of Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) and its imitators in the 18th century (James Thomson and William Cowper), and the heroic couplet of Neoclassical satiric and didactic verse, each, in different ways, defines the age in which these prosodies flourished. The flexibility and energy of the dramatic verse of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and John Webster reflect the later Renaissance with its nervous openmindedness, its obsessions with power and domination, and its lapses into despair. Miltonic blank verse, based on Latin syntax and adaptations of the rules of Latin prosody, moved away from the looseness of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans toward a more ceremonial style. It is a Baroque style in that it exploits the musical qualities of sounds for their ornamental values. The heroic couplet, dominating the poetry of the entire 18th century, was unequivocally a prosodic period style; its elegance and epigrammatic precision entirely suited an age that valued critical judgment, satiric wit, and the powers of rationality. It is in dramatic verse, perhaps, that a prosody shows its greatest vitality and clarity. Dramatic verse must make a direct impression not on an individual reader able to reconsider and meditate on what he has read but on an audience that must immediately respond to a declaiming actor or a singing chorus. The ancient Greek dramatists developed two distinct kinds of metres: stichic forms (i.e., consisting of stichs, or lines, as metrical units) such as the iambic trimeter for the spoken dialogues; and lyric, or strophic, forms (i.e., consisting of stanzas), of great metrical intricacy, for the singing and chanting of choruses. Certain of the Greek metres developed a particular ethos; characters of low social standing never were assigned metres of the lyric variety. Similar distinctions obtained in Elizabethan drama. Shakespeare's kings and noblemen speak blank verse; comic characters, servants, and country bumpkins discourse in prose; clowns, romantic heroines, and supernatural creatures sing songs. In the early tragedy Romeo and Juliet , the chorus speaks in excellent conceited sonnets: in what was one of the most popular and easily recognized lyric forms of the period. The metrical forms used by ancient and Renaissance dramatists were determined by principles of decorum. The use or non-use of a metrical form (or the use of prose) was a matter of propriety; it was important that the metre be suitable to the social status and ethos of the individual character as well as be suitable to the emotional intensity of the particular situation. Decorum, in turn, was a function of the dominant Classical and Neoclassical theories of imitation.

31

5. (TRADITIONAL) ENGLISH VERSE FORMS5


5.1. THE COUPLET
Some kinds of English verse admit of no greater organisation than the single linedramatic and narrative blank verse, for example. The bigger unit known as the' verse paragraph' depends on sense, on meaning, and not on the technical resources of verse alone. The minimal verse-unit greater than the single line is the couplet : Had we but world enough and time, (a) This coyness, lady, were no crime. (a) We would sit down and think which way (b) To walk, and pass our long love's day. (b) Here rhyme is used to bind two successive lines into a single unit (letters indicate the rhyme-scheme). These are, of course, 'four-beat couplets'.

5.2.1. QUATRAINS
Tiger! tiger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (William Blake). (Four-beat line, rhyme-scheme aabb)

HEROIC STANZA
The The The And curfew tolls the knell of parting day, lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, ploughman homeward plods his weary way, leaves the world to darkness and to me. (Thomas Gray). (Five-beat line, rhyme-scheme abab. This is known as the Heroic Stanza.)

5.1.1. HEROIC COUPLETS


Five-beat couplets are known as heroic couplets: A little learning is a dangerous thing: (a) Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. (a) There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, (b) And drinking largely sobers us again. (b)

THE BALLAD STANZA


Then he pulled out his bright, brown sword, And dried it on his sleeve, And he smote off that vile lad's head And asked for no man's leave. (The ballad' Glasgerion '.) (Four beats alternating with three beats, rhyme-scheme abcb. This is the Ballad Stanza.)

5.2. THE STANZA6


A couplet is a verse-unit, but not quite a stanza. A stanza, as its setting-forth on the printed page clearly shows, is 'framed in silence'-in other words, its sense is complete enough for it to be followed by a lengthy pause: a couplet, though it may make a pithy and memorable statement, always seems to require qualification or amplification from another couplet, and so couplets tend to ' go on for ever'. The commonest stanza form is the quatrain, and here are some examples of typical rhyme schemes:

IN MEMORIAN STANZA
I held it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things. (Tennyson.) (Four-beat line, rhyme-scheme abba. Often called, because Tennyson employed it consistently in the long poem of that name, the In Memoriam Stanza.)

5 section extracted from Burgess 6 The examples that follow are a mere illustration of the great variety of verse forms in English; they are not meant to be memorized or taken as rigid rules. 32

OMAR KHAYYAM STANZA


Awake, for morning in the bowl of night Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight, And, 10, the hunter of the East has caught The Sultan's turret in a noose of light. (Fitzgerald.) (Five-beat line, rhyme-scheme aaba. A Persian form, adopted by Edward Fitzgerald for his translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, and often called the Omar Khayyam Stanza.)

5.2.3. SAPPHIC STANZA


A stanza-form that seems to suggest both the quatrain and the threeline stanza is the Sapphic (named after the Grecian poetess Sappho): Sit like a fool then, crassly emptying Glass after wineglass in some foul tavern, Watching the night and its candles gutter, Snoring at sunrise. A.B. (First three lines have four beats~ last line has two beats; no rhyme.)

OTHER VARIANTS OF THE QUATRAIN


Many variants of the quatrain are possible. Andrew Marvell, in his Horatian Ode on Cromwells Rreturn from Ireland, rendered Horace's ode stanza as follows: He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene, But with his keener eye The axe's edge did try. (First two lines have four beats, last two lines have three beats, rhymescheme aabb.) Collins, in his Ode to Evening, attempted a similar rendering of Horace's stanza without using rhyme: Now air is hush'd, save where the weak-ey'd bat With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn ... (First two lines have five beats, last two lines have three beats, no rhyme.)

5.2.4. COMPLEX STANZAS


I shall now list three' standard' complex stanza-forms.

RIME ROYAL
It was no dream; for I lay broad awaking: But all is turned now through my gentleness Into a bitter fashion of forsaking, And I have leave to go of her goodness, And she also to use new-fangledness. But since that I unkindly so am served: 'How like you this,' what hath she now deserved? (Sir Thomas Wyatt.) (Seven five-beat lines, rhyme-scheme ababbcc.)

5.2.2. THREE-LINE STANZAS


Three-line stanzas are less common than quatrains, chiefly perhaps because of the need for an aaa rhyme-scheme, which obviously presents more technical difficulties than any dual rhyme-scheme like aabb or abab. The Earl of Rochester's poem Upon Nothing is a triumphant example of the use of a three-line stanza: Nothing! thou elder brother ev'n to Shade, Thou hadst a being ere the world was made, And (well fixt) art alone of ending not afraid. (First two lines have five beats, last line has six beats-a six-beat line is sometimes called an Alexandrine; rhyme-scheme aaa.)

SPENSERIAN STANZA
St. Agnes' Eve-ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold: Numb were the Beadsman's fingers while he told His rosary, and while his frosted breath, Like pious incense from a censer old, Seemed taking flight for heaven without a death, Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith. (John Keats.) (Eight five-beat lines followed by one six-beat line or Alexandrine; rhyme-scheme ababbcbcc.) 33

BYRONICSTANZA
O Hesperus! thou bringest all good thingsHome to the weary, to the hungry cheer, To the young bird the parent's brooding wings, The welcome stall to the o'erlaboured steer: Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings, Whate'er our household gods protect of dear, Are gathered round us by thy look of rest; Thou bring'st the child, too, to the mother's breast. (from Don Juan: Lord Byron.) (Eight lines, all with five beats; rhyme-scheme abababcc.) An infinite number of other complex stanza-forms is, of course, possible, and many poets invent their own, use them, perhaps once, in a particular poem, and then discard them.

The other' standard' verse-forms are not stanzaic, because they are not units but entities: the whole point of a stanza is that it appears more than once in a poem, whereas the following make complete poems in themselves.

5.4. THE SONNET


Examples are to be found in this book of the two main sonnet-forms used in English-the Shakespearian and the Petrarchan. We can summarise them as follows:

5.4.1. SHAKESPEARIAN:
fourteen lines, each containing five beats, divided into three quatrains and a final couplet; rhyme-scheme abab cdcd efef gg.

5.4.2. PETRARCHAN:
fourteen lines, each containing, five beats, divided into an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The octave rhymes abba abba, the sestet cde cde or cdc dcd or any other combination of two or three rhymes. Strictly, a final couplet should be avoided. The point of change-over from octave to sestet is known as the volta, though the statement made in the octave is often not completed until the middle of the first line of the sestet: the volta is then said to be delayed.

5.3. THREE-LINE UNITS (TERZA RIMA)


A form not properly stanzaic, but based on a three-line unit, is the Terza Rima used by Dante in his Divine Comedy, Here lines interlock as follows: aba bcb cdc ded efe ... The sequence may run for over a hundred lines, and it is brought to a close with an extra line in the following way: yzy z. Shelley uses terza rima in his Ode to the West Wind, but the sequence is compressed to a stanza of fourteen lines with a final couplet. If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; (a) If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; (b) A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share (a) The impulse of thy strength, only less free (b) Than thou, 0 uncontrollable! If even (c) I were as in my boyhood, and could be (b) The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, (c) As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed (d) Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven (c) As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. (d) Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! (e) I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! (d) A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed (e) One too like thee: tame1ess, and swift, and proud. (e)

5.4.3. VARIATIONS
Variations on these two sonnet-forms have been attempted. Milton and Hopkins have written sonnets with codas or 'tails', in other words, extra lines added as afterthoughts to the strict fourteen. Hopkins has written two' curtal-sonnets '-ten lines with a coda of one foot, rhyming abcabc dbcdbd-one of which is the well-known Pied Beauty. Hopkins is perhaps also the first English poet to write sonnets with six-beat lines or Alexandrines (on the French model) and his sonnet Spelt From Sybil's Leaves has eight-beat lines with a marked caesura between each four. (A caesura is a pause, real or imaginary, cutting a long line into two halves. It is only found when the total number of beats in the line is a multiple of two.) The sonnet-form is, in origin, Italian. Those that follow now were first used by mediaeval French poets.

34

5.5. THE BALLADE


A poem of three eight-line stanzas and a half-stanza called the Envoy or Envoi. The number of stresses to the line is immaterial, but the rhymescheme is strict: ababbcbc ababbcbc ababbcbc Envoi bcbc. The envoy is a message to some great person, living or dead, real or fictitious, frequently unnamed, and its characteristic beginning is 'Prince! ' The three stanzas and the envoy all carry the same final line as a refrain. A Ballade of Studying English Literature. Extol the virtue of the verse, The myriad wonders of the prose; And then with reverent breath rehearse The marvels that the' plays disclose. Show me the endless serried rows Where sleep the masters, great and small. Yet I a minor problem pose: How can I ever read them all? Glittering the gold and rich the purse: The Muses blessed us when they chose This island as the bounteous nurse Of poesy that, the world well knows, Is the world's writing's reddest rose, Its brightest-woven coronal. But still the problem swells and grows: How can I ever read them all? Surely this richness is a curse? For my ascetic instinct flows Not to the better, but the worse The meanest that the Muse bestows. Count me not one of learning's foes That I for sham and shoddy fall; The great repel with countless blows: How can I ever read them all? ENVOY Prince! Twitch not Nor bite me with a , All or nothing.' And how can I ever a disgusted nose, fang of gall. Thus it goesread them all? A. B.

Once used, by men like Villlon in France and Chaucer in England, or themes of high seriousness, the ballade-form is now most in favour with writers of light and facetious verse. (A very amusing ballade by J. C. Squire has for refrain: 'I'm not so think as you drunk I am.')

5.6. THE RONDEL


Again, a form which insists on economy in rhyming and makes us~ of a refrain. The refrain is, properly, the opening phrase of the poem, which is heard again at the end of the second and third stanzas. The following improvisation is based on a phrase from Browning- In England now . In England now the wind blows high And clouds brush rudely at the sky; The blood runs thinly through my frame, I half-caress the hearthstone's flame, Oppressed by autumn's desolate cry. Then homesick for the south am I, For where the lucky swallows fly, But each warm land is just a name In England now. The luckless workers I espy With chins dipped low and collars high, Walk into winter, do not blame The shifting globe. A gust of shame Represses my unmanly sigh In England now. A.B.

5.7. THE TRIOLET


A light, brief but difficult form, using .two rhymes and a refrain. The scheme is: a (refrain-first half) b (refrain-second half) a a (refran first half) ab a (refrain-first half) b (refrain-second half). What can I say of any worth In lines as crabbed and crimped as these? I scan the sky and then the earth: What can I say of any worth? The poem comes, at last, to birth Only to meet its obsequies! What can I say of any worth In lines as crabbed and crimped as these? 35

A. B.

5.8. THE VILLANELLE


Like the triolet, this has a two-line refrain which only appears as such at the very end of the poem. The scheme is: a (refrain 1) b a (refrain 2) a b a (refrain 1) a. b a (refrain 2) a b a (refrain 1) a (refrain 2) This writing of a villanelle Takes lots of paper, ink and time. It's difficult to do it well. Each verse is like a prison-cell; Tricky as dancing on a dime, This writing' of a villanelle. More blood and tears than tongue can tell Must go to juggling with the rhyme. It's difficult to do it well. To poets whom the gods impel To tame in words the vast sublime, This writing of a villanelle, This tinkling of a tiny bell, Must seem a waste of time, a crime! It's difficult to do it well, However; it's a hill that's hell (Though sound your wind and limb) to climb, This writing of a villanelle. It's difficult to do it well. A. B. This form has, in our own day, carried serious and moving themes. One of the finest modern examples is Dylan Thomas's, addressed to his dying father, based on the lines: 'Do not go gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.' Last of these strict verse-forms I must mention the Sestina, Italian in origin, which, though no rhyme is used, is certainly the most difficult of all. There are six stanzas of six lines each and a half-stanza to conclude. Melody is provided through the repetition of certain key-words, first J heard at the ends of the first six lines, then appearing in the five following stanzas, at the ends of the lines, but not in the order in which they first appeared. Here is an example of an opening stanza:

On that still night, in that autumnal weather, When all the air was silver-drenched in starlight, We stood entranced, crowning that grassy hill-top, With, all below us, leagues of murmuring ocean, And, though so high, we knew no fear of falling; More than embracing arms would keep us steady. The key-words are 'weather', 'starlight', 'hill-top', 'ocean', 'falling', and' steady'. Each key-word must have a chance to come at the end of a first line and at the end of a last line. 'Steady' ends the first stanza, so the first line of the second stanza might run: Come highest winds, love keeps the vessel steady ... In the concluding half-stanza the key-words appear at the end of halflines: Changed our hearts' weather, for the glass is falling, Now no more starlight, rain will patter steady, Misted the hill-top, menacing the ocean. Finally, we must consider briefly some aspects of the technique of modern poetry.

5.9. FREE VERSE (OR VERS LIBRE)


This is verse which obeys no rules as to number of stresses in a line or (where rhyme is used) to regular rhyme-pattern. It is the antithesis of the forms we have just been discussing. There first appears a hint of free verse in the blank verse of Shakespeare's last plays and in the plays of other Jacobean dramatists, where frequently a line cannot be 'scanned' into five beats: the rhythms are as close as possible to those of natural speech, almost, but not quite, suggesting prose. In the Augustan Age, the Pindaric Ode (ostensibly following the example of the Greek poet Pindar) gave great freedom, anticipating modern free verse. (Examine the two great musical odes of Dryden, for example.) Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality Ode exhibits a similar freedom. But the first hints of modern practice are to be found in certain Victorian poets Matthew Arnold, Coventry Patmore and the American Walt Whitman. (Most of the work of this latter poet suggests prose-' cadenced prose rather than verse.) T. S. Eliot's free verse derives from two sources: the break-up of the blank-verse line with the Jacobean dramatists and the break-up of the regular Alexandrine in France (with poets like Jules Laforgue). Because of the lack of restriction, bad free verse is all too easy to write:

36

I look up From my empty tea-cup, At the picture on the wall, a phalanx of grey Victorian faces, they ticking away In their own time, I In mine. And there is no way Ofbridging the gap. They See me as dead, perhaps as I See them.

5.10. EXPERIMENTS IN RHYME


W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden, and others, found the 'full chime' of rhyme too unsubtle, so they deliberately introduced' imperfect rhyme' or' slant rhyme'. Thus Owen rhymes' groined' with' groaned'; 'tigress' with' progress';' escaped' with 'scooped'. Yeats rhymes 'wall' with' soul'; 'one' with' man';' dull' with' school' and' full'.

5.11. SPRUNG RHYTHM


The letter which Hopkins wrote to Robert Bridges, explaining Sprung Rhythm, and printed as the Introduction to his Poems, is the best account of it we have. But some general idea of its nature may be gained from study of the following lines. First, an orthodox four-beat line, which could be scanned easily in the classical way as 'iambic tetrameter': The morn, the noon, the eve, the night. The four stresses (on 'morn', 'noon', 'eve', and 'night') come at regular intervals, as in a bar of music. Thus the essential' beat' of the line remains if we eliminate the unstressed syllables: \ \ \ \ Morn, noon, eve, night and if we increase the number of unstressed syllables to an extent unknown to classical practice: \ \ \ \ Morn, noon, in the evening, during the night. The characteristic flavour of Sprung Rhythm is compounded of musical rhythms and speech-rhythms: two or more strong beats coming together for weighty or harsh effects, a scurrying cluster of unstressed syllables seeming to express excitement, speed, even a stuttering neurosis.

37

6. ELEMENTS OF RHETORIC IN POETRY7


6.1. WORDS AND SENTENCES (SEMANTICS AND SYNTAX)
6.1.1. THE IMPORTANCE OF WORDS
In conversations with friends, our use of language may seem spontaneous to us. But in fact we not only know what we mean but are consciously shaping what we say as we go along. Some people and they are often the ones we most enjoy listening to are able to choose striking and appropriate words to express their thoughts and feelings: they are able to shape their language more effectively and colorfully than we can. Despite all the evidence that poets are especially careful in choosing their words, people often assume that in poetry it is the ideas that matter most. The painter Edgar Degas, who aspired to be a poet as well, found himself perplexed by the difficulties of writing a sonnet, and complained to the poet Stephane Mallarm, "I dont see why I can't finish my little poem; after all, I have plenty of ideas," "But, Degas," Mallarm replied, poetry is not written with ideas but with words. What Mallarm meant was that a poem is not an idea decorated with pretty words; the poem is built of words as a musical composition is built of notes. It does, of course, have an intellectual content that may be rewritten as prose, but in the poem that prose meaning is inseparable from the emotional content which only certain words in a certain order can express. The manner of saying something affects what is being said, just as the limits of the instruments affect the result of scientific experiments.

6.1.3. DENOTATIONS (PLAIN MEANINGS)


Most common English words have, not just one, but a number of plain meanings (or denotations). Even in an abridged dictionary, the word post has a long list of denotations a pole, one's place of work, one's job, or a military bugle call; to mail a letter to mount notices on a bulletin board, to put up bail, to make entries in an accounts ledger, or to move rhythmically while riding a horse; or, as a prefix, "after." But post doesn't carry all these meanings with it every time it is used, as the context usually eliminates all but one of them. In the sentence "I lost my post at the bank post clearly means "job" (one other denotation is possible, "pole, and that seems pretty unlikely). When a word in a particular context can still be taken to mean more than one thing, we call it ambiguous.

AMBIGUITY:
Ambiguity can sometimes be confusing. If someone says, "Be sure to take the right road," does he mean the correct road or the road branching to the right? The right road could be the wrong road, and the left road the right road. Hence, when the aim is to provide clear exposition or instructions, ambiguity is a fault. But writers, and especially poets, sometimes deliberately exploit a word's multiple denotations: My father, who had flown in World War I, Might have continued to invest his life In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife. (Merrill, "The Broken Home") The poem goes on to say that the poet's father became a stockbroker. In these lines, the poem uses two double meanings: invest means "to put money out for financial gain" but also "to surround or envelop," to invest in a target while banks are "financial institutions" but also "piled masses."

6.1.2. EXPRESSIVE RESOURCES OF WORDS (SEMANTICS)


Words are, therefore, the poets medium and the ways they can be meaningfully arranged are his tools. This is why W. H. Auden once said of young poets, As a rule, the sign that a beginner has a genuine original talent is that he is more interested in playing with words than in saying something original." Poets explore and try to use all the expressive resources of wordstheir "plain" meanings, to be sure, but also their emotional associations, and even their sounds.

7 this whole section was extracted from Ellmanns 38

PUNS
When the possible meanings of a word contrast sharply, as they do here, the result is a pun. [=trocadilho]. A pun is often funny but needn't be, as in this example, where the effect is less of a sense of humor than of quick-wittedness and flexibility of mind. In some puns the ambiguity may be between words which have different meanings and are spelled differently but sound the same: The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. (Walcott, "A Far Cry from Africa") Walcott means read in the sense of "interpreted," but the sound is the same as red, the color of blood, and the first meaning, which is almost bland, is made ominous by the second meaning. Upright, too, is ambiguous: man is upright because he stands on two legs rather than four, but the word also means "morally correct," a view of humanity many humans share but which Walcott in the following line seems to question.

For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Genesis 3:19) I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (Eliot, "The Waste Land") Dust has a near synonym that also sounds much the same: dirt. In certain expressions, dust is merely dry dirt: "to shake the dust off one's feet." But substitute one word for the other, and you'll see that dirt has very different connotations: For dirt thou art, and unto dirt shalt thou return. I will show you fear in a handful of dirt. Dirt's meaning in Old English was "excrement" - some people still use it in this sense - and it carries a connotation of intense disapproval or disgust, as in such expressions as: "dirty tricks," "dirty work," dirty movies." Slanderous or derogatory information about someone is "dirt.' One may fear a handful of dirt, but it is defamation rather than death that is threatened. (Dirt also has positive connotations: plants grow in dirt, you can "hit pay dirt." In this sense it means the opposite of dry, sterile dust.)

6.1.4. CONNOTATIONS (EMOTIONAL ASSOCIATIONS)


Poets are concerned - often obsessively concerned - with much more about a word than its denotations, numerous and suggestive as these may be. They are sensitive to a words aura of connotations, what might be called its atmosphere or feel, which it acquires from hundreds of years of use in many different contexts. Connotations give a word much of its flavour and emotional impact. Take the noun dust. Any dictionary will give us its denotation: powdered earth (or other matter), large enough to feel but small enough to be blown about. But poets like the word for its connotations, too. it builds up on furniture; it gets in your eyes; it's useful in phrases like "dry as dust," "dust bowl," "bite the dust." And for hundreds of years it has symbolized disintegration, things wearing away or being ground down to almost nothing. It has also come to stand tor human disintegration, or death

6.1.5. THE SOUND OF WORDS


Though poems as words on the page are visual objects, they are intended to be spoken aloud as well as read, and the full poetic experience involves words soundqualities as well as their meanings.

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SOUNDS AND MEANINGS


The sounds of most words have nothing to do with their meanings: We may say yes but an Italian or Spaniard will say s., a Frenchman oui', a German ja, a Russian da, and a Japanese hai, and all mean exactly the same thing to their compatriots.

ONOMATOPOEIA
Some do sound like their meanings (buzz, /hiss, clickety-clack)', this matching of sound and sense is called onomatopoeia. But even onomatopoeic words vary from language to language. English roosters say Cock-a-doodle-doo, but French roosters say Co-co-ri-co. So, rather than depending on onomatopoeia, poets are likely to interweave the sounds and senses of their words in lines and sentences.

39

6.2. SYNTAX
6.2.1. CORRECTNESS AND PRECISION OF EXPRESSION
Syntax is a set of rules for making understandable sentences. Most people find the subject 'tiresome'' and study it only to avoid criticism for using "bad grammar." In this respect, syntax is about as interesting as spelling. But prescribing correctness is only one function of syntax, and a fairly minor one at that. Far more important in our daily lives are the various ways syntax enables us "to" express ourselves, ways we use without necessarily thinking much about it. She did all the work. It was she who did all the work. She it was who did all the work. All the work was done by her. (A matter-of-fact statement) (Not he or they or I) (Pointing the finger) (Emphasizing how much work)

6.2.2. INVERSION
This word order, which you would probably never hear in ordinary conversation, is called inversion, because it inverts the usual sequence of syntactic unitssubject, verb, objectwithout changing the role each word plays in the sentence. The basic meaning remains unchanged because a grammatical rule: the word she cannot be the object of a verb (though her can). Otherwise, the inversion would not be possible: "Susan saw Tom" is not the same as "Tom saw Susan." "All the work did she" has about the same placement of emphasis as "All the work was done by her," but its effect is quite different. The inversion substitutes for the passive voice (which is a way of speaking we routinely use) an unusual word order that calls attention to itself.

CONSTRUCTIVE USES OF INVERSION


These effects, emphasizing particular words and attracting attention to the way it is being done, are constructive uses of inversion. But poets past and present have often used inversions merely to make their rhythms more even or to get rhyming words to the ends of lines; absorbed in solving these technical problems they may forget about the effect of inversion itself. The technique has consequently acquired a bad reputation in modern poetry. As a young man, W. B. Yeats used inversion in this less rigorous way"And a small cabin build there," for example, from "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"and he later regretted the word order as undesirably stilted for the poem, though the rhythm of the line prevented him from revising to eliminate it. But Yeats and other modern poets have also used inversion to powerful expressive effect. Here is the opening of Dylan Thomas "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London"

The basic information is the same. Each sentence, however, focuses on different words through syntactic variation, and therefore each has subtly different meaning from the others. There are still more ways of varying the basic sentence, for example: All the work did she.

40

Never until the mankind making Bird beast and flower Fathering and all humbling darkness Tells with silence the last light breaking And the still hour Is come of the sea tumbling in harness And I must enter again the round Zion8 of the water bead9 And the synagogue of the ear of corn Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound Or sow my salt seed In the least valley of sackcloth10 to mourn The majesty and burning of the child's death. (Dylan Thomas, A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London) This poem is difficult to understand, partly because the long sentence that stretches across these thirteen lines has been organized so that its parts are out of any usual order. Here it is useful to rearrange them into a more normal prose order:

I shall never let the shadow of a sound pray or sow my salt seed in the least valley of sackcloth to mourn the majesty and burning of the child's death until the darkness that makes mankind that fathers bird beast and flower and humbles all tells with silence the breaking of the last light and the still hour of the sea tumbling in harness is come and I must enter again the round Zion of the water bead and the synagogue of the ear of corn.

Notice that although this paraphrase makes Thomas' sentence easier to follow, and therefore helps us understand him, it also changes our experience of the poem. If Thomas had begun with the word /, as the paraphrase does, he would have immediately focused our attention on the speaker. But he does not. /, the subject of the sentence, is placed by inversion in the middle of the sentence, rhetorically the most 'unobtrusive place for it. and the all-important word which actually begins the sentence is the adverb never. Between these two words Thomas interposes three conditional clauses which taken together imply "until the end of the world"; these clauses not only reinforce the idea of NEVER, but imitate it by making us wait ten lines before we are done with it and finally reach the subject of the sentence.

SUSPENSION
This kind of syntactic delaying action is called SUSPENSION; the reader expects momentarily to come across a grammatically vital word, usually a subject or a verb, but is kept in suspense waiting for it. IMPORTANT: It's worth noticing that Thomas never seems to shift sentence elements around merely to make his rhythms or rhymes more symmetrical. In fact, the syntax is so much in the foreground that you might easily overlook, at least in the first reading, that this poem actually is in rhyme.
8 ZION: Sio, nome de uma colina de Jerusalm; o Reino dos Cus; Utopias 9 BEAD. conta (de colar etc.); gota, baga; bolha (em bebida gaseificada); -to say one's beads: rezar um rosrio 10 SACKCLOTH: vestimenta, hbito de penitncia

41

6.2.3. ELLIPSIS
A third syntactic technique poets often use is ellipsis; leaving out words which prose grammar would require but which need not be there for the poem to make sense: Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean, Came we then to the bounds of deepest water... (Pound, "Canto I") We can add what Pound left out: "When the sun had gone to his slumber, and shadows were o'er (a contraction for over) all the ocean, came we then to the bounds of deepest water." By avoiding routine connectives, Pound creates an effect of decisiveness on the part of the speaker, swiftness of thought, and rhetorical strength.

6.3. TONE
6.3.1. VOICE
Everyone has a personal way of talking. The choice of words, speech, rhythms, breath units, syntax, and all the inflections and signals that go with even the most casual speech, may combine to form a style as distinctive as a fingerprint. Poets, too have individual verbal styles, some so distinctive that we can identify bits of their work by style alone. Here, for example, are snatches from poems by two modern poets: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.' Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: 'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down. ******** Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave12 of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns13 hankering14 for hymns. We agree in principle. That's clear. If you imagine how each of these passages would sound if someone spoke them to you - or, better yet, if you read them aloud - you'll see that each has a specific, strongly marked verbal style that is quite different from the other's, and that both are probably very different from your own style. And as you read more poems by each poet (Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, respectively) you'll find that the sound of each of these short selections is typical of other works by its author. This recognizable typical quality, which we hear in many varied poems by the same poet, is called the poet's voice. No matter what the poem is about, no matter whether its the poet or someone else who seems to be
12 nave: nave de igreja 13 citherns: cidados, habitantes

6.2.4. SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY


Some poets use syntactic ambiguity as they do verbal ambiguity: My stare drank deep beauty that still allures. (Empson, "Villanelle") Deep can be an adjective: "My stare drank deep beauty that still allures11. Or it can be an adverb: My stare drank deep beauty that still allures. The line makes sense both ways, and the context does not exclude either meaning, so we may accept both in reading the line. The effect is to put special stress on the ambiguous word deep, with its connotations of fullness and profundity.

11 ALLURE: postura; fascinao / vt. atrair; enfeitiar; seduzir 42

14 To hanker: almejar

speaking in it, Frost's work has the Frostian voice, as Stevens' work speaks in his voice.

THE SPEAKER, THE AUTHOR AND THE PERSONA


We have used the word speaker, above; critics, and others who read poetry, have found it a useful term, distinguishing the person who "talks" the poem from its author. Generally, it is safe to assume that the speaker is partly or wholly fictional. Even confessional poetry, a mode of recent years in which poets make apparently direct use of autobiographical situations and intense personal feelings, has a certain distance from the experiences it describes. As Diane Wakoski puts it, The Diane whos in my poems is not a real person. Shes a person I would like to be, that I can imagine myself being; even though I put all my faults in my poems, it doesnt mean [Dianes] not a fantasy or imagined person. This relationship between poet and the speaker has led to the speaker sometimes being called a persona Persona is the Greek word for mask, such as actors wore in performances of Classical Greek drama. The term expresses the fact that while the poet may be considered to inhabit the poem, he is there as a voice heard through a mask, creating a character other than himself. It is that character who engages our attention. There are, of course, times when the poetic mask through which the writer speaks is little more artful or invented than the masks we turn to each other in the ordinary way we go about our lives with other people. In such cases, it may then be a convenient shorthand to call the speaker "the poet" or "Frost" (if that happens to be the case). For clarity's sake, however, we avoid that shorthand in these discussions, for the distinction is a meaningful one.

6.3.2. THE SPEAKER


WHO SPEAKS?
But, just because we can recognize Frost's voice in so many of his poems, does that mean that he is always speaking personally and directly in them? Let's look back at the lines by Frost, from "Mending Wall" (above). The situation of the poem suggests that the speaker is a farmer who does his own work. Hes not a generalized, abstract farmer, but a distinct personality, articulate (at least as compared with his laconic neighbor), talking in a manner countrified and playful and ironic by turns, with diction that appears rougher than it is, for it contains rather elegant usages such as "to whom* and "spring is the mischief in me." The poem uses a speaker who has characteristics of Frost himself, but he does not have all of Frost's characteristics; he is somewhat idealized from the intractable and selfcentered man that we know Frost sometimes was. So, since the portrait of Frost as the poem speaker is a highly selective or stylized one, it is a mistake to identify the two exactly. Let's look at another example: I am afraid, this morning, of my face. It looks at me From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate, The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look Of gray discovery Repeats to me: "You're old." That's all, I'm old. (Jarrell, "Next Day) This might well be a "confessional" poem, with the author recounting a sudden onset of self-loathing and the sense that the best of life has already passed. Heading other poems by the same poet, we'd recognize the same voice in many of them. And theres nothing improbable about the feelings expressed, while the way they they are expressed seems authentic enough. Surely the poet must have gone through this experience; surely the poem is autobiographical. But the rest of the poem identifies the speaker as a woman, while the author, Randall Jarrell, was a man.

43

6.3.3. THE LISTENER


Speech is a means of communication: if there is a speaker, there must be at least one listener. Often the speaker in a poem may seem to be addressing us directly, as in Mending Wall, which is like a story told to anyone who cares to listen. But we must bear in mind that poet and persona are never precisely the same, so the listener may not be the same as the reader. Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' Let us go and make our visit. (Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock") Prufrock must be speaking to someone. He uses the words "us" and you"; he invites someone-to accompany him on a journey and even forestalls a question. But is he speaking to us? How could we, outside the poem, enter it to join him on his visit or ask him a question he could possibly hear? There must be a fictional listener in the poem itself, whose presence influences strongly what Prufrock says and how he says it and whose reaction (though we cant see or hear it) makes him break off in the middle of a thought.

Thy great protruding head-light fix'd in front, Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple, The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smokestack... (Whitman, "To a Locomotive in Winter")

Thirtyfive years I lived with my husband. T he plumtree is white today with masses of flowers. (Williams, "The Widow's Lament in Springtime")

"The World" is a love poem, which may or may not have been an actual communication from the poet to a woman he loved; to us, strangers to speaker and listener, both are inside the poem, the speaker seeking a particular response from his beloved. "Daddy," however, is addressed to a dead man who "could hardly be expected to hear or respond to what the speaker is saying; and Whitman's poem actually addresses a locomotive as though it were able to understand him.

APOSTROPHE
This rhetorical device of speaking to an absent or dead person or to an object or an abstraction, as though it were present, could hear and understand is called, is called apostrophe. It expresses an attitude more directly and vividly than if the object spoken to were merely spoken about.

DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE
Eliots poem is a DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE, a form which traditionally assumes a listener in the poem with whom the speaker seems to be in conversation. But many other kinds of poems include particular listeners within them: I wanted so ably to reassure you, I wanted the man you took to be me, to comfort you . . . ..Creeley, 'The World") Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time . . Plath, "Daddy")

SOLILOQUY (INTERIOR MONOLOGUE)


In Williams' poem, on the other hand, the widow does not seem to be speaking to anyone in the poem or to the readers. She is speaking to herself, a form of inner conversation called a soliloquy. The poem, as a poem, is addressed by the poet to the reader, but within the poem a character who is not the poet muses aloud, caught up in a dream of the past, oblivious to the audience of readers who overhear her thoughts.

44

6.4. VARIETIES OF TONE


Suppose you were to receive a love letter that began, "This is to inform you that the state of my feelings toward you as affective object has evolved in a markedly positive direction." It would be hard to believe that your friend loved you more than ever, even though that is what the words say. Suppose that you go to an undertaker about the burial of a beloved relative, and his first remark is, "Where d'yuh wanna dump the stiff?" Once again, it would be hard to believe in the undertaker's concern, even though his question is one that has to be asked and answered before the funeral plans can go forward.

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. (Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats")

I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face, It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been the same. (Eliot, "The Waste Land")

6.4.1. THE USE OF APPROPRIATE WORDS


The point must be obvious; in order to communicate successfully, we try to make sure that our words are appropriate, not only to the subject at hand, but also to the situation to our listeners. Choosing words whose denotations and connotations express the intended meaning is important, but is only the basic, atomic level of organization. Poets in particular take great pains to make their choices consistent so that sentences and whole poems may appropriately express attitudes and feelings. This expressive quality is called tone. cool-cool is so cool he was un-cooled by other niggers' cool cool-cool ultracool was bop-cool/ice box cool so cool cold cool his wine didn't have to be cooled, him was air conditioned cool cool-cool so cool him nick-named refrigerator. (Lee, "But He Was Cool")

ELEVATED DICTION
Crane's diction is what has been called formal or elevated; by it we know that he aspires to present a grand subject in appropriate language.

6.4.2. LEVELS OF DICTION


The broadest and most immediately striking component of tone is the level of diction, the degree of formality. There are some passages at different levels of diction: And obscure as that heaven of the Jews, Thy guerdon15 . . . Accolade16 thou dost bestow17. Of anonymity time cannot raise: Vibrant reprieve18 and pardon thou dost show. (Crane, "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge")

STANDARD OR MIDDLE DICTION


Auden writes in what we might describe as standard or middle diction; the style in which most modern poetry, and indeed much prose is written.

INFORMAL OR COLLOQUIAL DICTION


Eliot, in this example, seeks to present the way ordinary people ordinarily talk, which is called informal or colloquial diction (these are two Cockney women in a pub talking about an abortion).

DIALECT
15 GUERDON: guerrilha, guerrilheiro 16 ACCOLADE: prmio, louvor 17 TO BESTOW: conferir, no sentido de distribuir 18 TO REPRIEVE: comutar (ou suspender) uma pena capital

Lee writes in what linguists call dialect, specifically Black English. In each case, the poet has sought a level of diction generally suitable to his subject.

45

6.4.3. VARIATIONS IN SAME THE LEVEL OF DICTION


Within each of these rather large areas of the language, poets modulate tone so as to convey particular kinds of feeling: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself. (Roethke, "My Papa's Waltz")

These poems are all written at about the middle level of diction, Hayden's a bit more elevated and Plath's less so, yet the tone of each is quite distinctive. The distinctions result largely from the effect of certain specific words. The son in Roethke's poem speaks to "papa," the daughter in Plath's to "daddy," and the son in Hayden's of my father," and each of these forms of address affects and agrees with the emotional perspective of its poem. "Papa" and "daddy" suggest an intimacy which "my father" does not; and indeed the tone of Hayden's poem is rather detached and even chilly, an effect reinforced by the word "labor" (instead of "work") and the slightly rhetorical "weekday weather." It's as though the speaker were asserting his adulthood, his independence of his father, by using grown-up words. Papa, however, is just right to Roethke's poem, which recalls a boisterous occasion in childhood; the warmer tone comes also from words like "hung on" and "romped" which evoke physical closeness and hilarious play. (Mother, on the other hand, is not ''mama," and the formality of countenance" and "unfrown itself reveals the son's cooler feelings toward her.) The title of Sylvia Plath's poem, "Daddy," accords with the speaker's simple vocabulary, which might suggest a certain childishness, while the slurring epithets "fat" and "black" contribute to the effect of a tantrum, the way in which the speaker of the poem expresses her anger. In these poems and many others, tone rather than description tells us the speaker's (and indeed the poet's) attitude.

Sundays too my father got up early And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. (Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays")

There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. (Plath, "Daddy")

46

6.4.4. IRONY
There are many kinds of irony. Often irony is a manner of speaking a special tone as when a friend says to you sarcastically, That was just great, when both of you know that whatever it was was dreadful. But irony is more than mere sarcasm: verbally it may be far more subtle, and it may also inform actions, situations, and even a view of the universe. Irony always involves two levels of meaning. On the surface, there are the actual words. Here, for example, is part of a poem by A. E. Housman: Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay . . . Now you Of lads Runners And the will that whom name not swell the rout19 wore their honours out, renown outran died before the man. (Housman, "To an Athlete Dying Young") The speaker's tone is congratulatory: "smart lad." But the athlete has not retired, he has died, and the occasion for this poem is his funeral: the speaker's words belie the emotions which, as pallbearer20 and eulogist21, he may be presumed to feel, and which are perceptible in the rest of the poem below its ironic surface. At this deeper level, the real meaning of the speaker's words contradicts their apparent meaning. The irony is in the knowing of both meanings, in the double perspective that sees both levels of meaning and the discrepancy between them. Often an ironic twist may be at the heart of a poem's meaning, as in these lines from Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem, "Mr. Flood's Party": . . . He raised up to the light The jug that he had gone so far to fill . . . Alone, as if enduring to the end A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn, He stood there in the middle of the road Like Roland's ghost winding a silent horn. To compare Mr. Flood, a tipsy, elderly, insignificant New Englander, with the heroic knight Roland of the medieval French epic, is unexpected, even startling. Roland, defending the rear of the Emperor Charlemagne's army against an enemy vastly superior in numbers, refused to sound his horn for help until mortally wounded; Mr. Flood, climbing up from town to his hilly retreat, has merely stopped to have a drink. But the ironic comparison offers us a double perspective in which to see Mr. Flood. Next to Roland he seems even smaller and less important than before; yet, for a moment, we are invited to regard his independence of the common herd and his grace in defeat as heroic qualities, worthy of poetic celebration as were those of Roland himself. Situations and events may be no less ironic than words. The death of an athlete, as in Housmans poem is ironic because it involves a contradiction between appearances and reality. Athletes in their prime "symbolize health, physical vigor, youthfulness all the qualities that we associate with irrepressible life and the denial of death-yet death will not, finally, be denied, and even youth and beauty may fall victim to accident, murder, suicide. Another poem that presents an ironic view of the universe is Hardy's poem about the sinking of the Titanic, "The Convergence of the Twain": And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The Intimate welding on their later history. (The Convergence of the Twain, by Thomas Hardy) The speaker points up the irony of the situation: while the English were building and fitting out the worlds most luxurious and unsinkable ocean liner, nature (guided, Hardy, believed, by a supernatural force he calls the Immanent Will) was rearing the iceberg to smash the ship on her first voyage.

19 ROUT: turba, multido 20 PALLVEARER: a person who helps to carry the coffin at a funeral; also : a member of the escort or honor guard of the coffin who does not actually help to carry it 21 EULOGIST: one who eulogizes (=to speak or write in high praise of : extol)

47

6.5. IMAGERY
6.5.1. NONVERBAL SENSATIONS
In poetry, an image is a presentation in words of something the poet has perceived. Imagery is the collective word we use for a group of images. The description may be of an object seen, or of a sound, a smell, a taste, a touch or other physical sensation, or the feeling of tensions and movements in one's own body. All of these are nonverbal sensations; to put them into words is to transform them. it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high, crisp in the running sand, some breakthroughs of sun (Ammons, "Corsons Inlet") A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands, They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun hark22 to the musical clank, Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to drink, Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the negligent rest on the saddles, Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford 23 while Scarlet and blue and snowy white, The guidon 24flags flutter gayly in the wind. (Whitman, A Calvary Crossing a Ford) . . . the squeal and the blare and the tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles (Williams, "The Dance")

But poets are not limited to the direct presentation of concrete detail in their effort to transform a perception into words. They may also compare that perception with something else, often quite different. They do this by employing figurative language.

... a sudden sharp hot stink of fox (Hughes, "The Thought-Fox")

my massive buttocks slipping like oiled parts with each light step. (Levine, "Animals Are Passing from Our Lives")

None of these images lists all the sensations you might feel if you were suddenly to change places with the poet. They are details, chosen to evoke the essence of each perception in your imagination. Some poems seem mainly descriptive:

22 TO HARK: to pay close attention : listen 23 FORD: vau, parte rasa do rio; cruz-la 24 GUIDON: estandarte 48

6.5.2. FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE (FIGURES OF SPEECH)


CLICHS
Figurative language is far from being the exclusive property of poets. Everybody uses it all the time, in order to give freshness and spice they say. Slang expressions like "to background another writer25, and so is much of the jargon people use in their work, like the Watergate conspirators' "to stonewall it. We also use comparisons to make our point; sometimes it isn't enough to say, "He's happy," you want to say something like "He's happy as a possum up an old gum tree" or "He's happy as a bee in clover." Often images that come to mind most quickly when we speak figuratively have had their freshness worn away from overuse. Take the phrase "puppet government." When you think about it, this is a very sharp figure: it suggests that the government is an inert mechanism incapable of action except when someone else "pulls the strings." This expression is so useful that in fact people no longer need to think about it, they know so well the situation it describes. Such worn figures arc called clichs (Still other figures have completely lost the power to evoke comparisonsfor example, the "legs" of a chair though a hundred years ago members of genteel society used to substitute the word "limbs" as somehow less sexually suggestive.)

METAPHOR
Another form of figurative comparison, because it does without like or as, suggests that the thing compared and the thing its compared with are not merely similar but, for the purposes of the poem, somehow identical. This is called metaphor: ... a flower stand Above which hovers an exploding rose Fired from a long-necked crystal vase ... (Wilbur, "Playboy")

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautififul and have comfortable minds (Cummings, the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls)

SIMILE
The simplest form of comparison declares itself by using words such as like, as, as if, and is called simile: What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow . . . ? ..( Yeats, "No Second Troy" ) And life is too much like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs Broken across it, and one eye is weeping From a twig's having lashed across it open. ..(Frost, "Birches") Picking up change, hands like a walrus, and a face like a barndoors . . . (Crceley, "Wicker Basket")

The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs . . . ( Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats")

PERSONIFICATION
That form of figurative language in which an object is given human attributes is called personification:. Earth can not count the sons she bore: The wounded lynx, the wounded man Come trailing blood unto her door; She shelters both as best she can (Milay, The Return)

SYNECHDOCHE
The figure of speech in which a part of a thing or an action stands for the whole is synecdoche: The hand that signed the paper felled a city; Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath, Doubled the glove of dead and halved a country ... (D. Thomas, The Hand that signed the Paper)

25 "Backgrounding another writer" is slang used by graffiti artists ("writers") in New York City. To "background" another writer is to write a new piece of graffiti over his work, reducing it to a background; if you respect his work, you don't do it.

49

METONYMY
There is also a figure in which a thing or action is replaced by one of its attributes or by something closely associated with it; it is called metonymy. It is rarely found in modern poems, but its fairly common in contemporary usage, as when we speak of a king or queen as the crown.

6.6. CLASSICAL RHETORICAL ELEMENTS: TROPE AND SCHEME, TEXTURE AND STRUCTURE 26
For the tasks imposed by the rhetorical approach some of the most important tools inherited from antiquity are the figures of speech: for example, the metaphor, or comparison between two ostensibly dissimilar phenomena, as in the famous comparison by the 17th-century English poet John Donne of his soul and his mistress's to the legs on a geometer's compass in his A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. Another is the allegory, the extended metaphor, as in John Bunyan's classic of English prose Pilgrim's Progress (1678, 1684), wherein man's method of earning Christian salvation is compared to a road on which he journeys, and the comparison is maintained to such an extent that it becomes the entral structural principle of the entire work. Such figures may be said to pertain either to the texture of the discourse, the local colour or details, or to the structure, the shape of the total argument. Ancient rhetoricians made a functional distinction between trope (like metaphor, a textural effect) and scheme (like allegory, a structural principle). To the former category (trope) belong such figures as: metaphor, simile (a comparison announced by like or as), personification (attributing human qualities to a nonhuman being or object), irony (a discrepancy between a speaker's literal statement and his attitude or intent), hyperbole (overstatement or exaggeration) or understatement, and metonymy (substituting one word for another which it suggests or to which it is in some way relatedas part to whole, sometimes known as synecdoche). To the latter category (scheme) belonged such figures as: allegory parallelism (constructing sentences or phrases that resemble one another syntactically), antithesis (combining opposites into one statementTo be or not to be, that is the question), congeries (an accumulation of statements or phrases that say essentially the same thing), apostrophe (a turning from one's immediate audience to address another, who may be present only in the imagination), enthymeme (a loosely syllogistic form of reasoning in which the speaker assumes that any missing premises will be supplied by the audience), interrogatio (the rhetorical question, which is posed for argumentative effect and requires no answer), and gradatio (a progressive advance from one statement to another until a climax is achieved).
26 topic extracted from Perelmans

EXTENDED METAPHOR (ALLEGORY)


When a metaphor is carried beyond the first flash of correspondence and the comparison is explored in detail, we call the result an extended metaphor: The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the windowpanes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. (Eliot, "The Love Song of ]. Alfred Prufrock") Eliot never says that the fog is like a cat; he never uses the word cat at all. But he makes the fog behave in so catlike a way that we know with certainty what is being compared to what. This nightmarish imageimagine a cat large enough to curl about a househelps to characterize the speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock, who has set forth to make a visit he dreads, and who elsewhere in the poem sees the evening as "spread out . . . like a patient etherised upon a table." A metaphor can be a whole poem: Whirl up, seawhirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our rocks, hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir. (H. D., Oread )

50

However, a certain slippage in the categories trope and scheme became inevitable, not simply because rhetoricians were inconsistent in their use of terms but because wellconstructed discourse reflects a fusion of structure and texture. One is virtually indistinguishable from the other. Donne's compass comparison, for example, creates a texture that is not isolable from other effects in the poem; rather, it is consonant with a structural principle that makes the comparison both appropriate and coherent. Above all, a modern rhetorician would insist that the figures, like all elements of rhetoric, reflect and determine not only the conceptualizing processes of the speaker's mind but also an audience's potential response. For all these reasons figures of speech are crucial means of examining the transactional nature of discourse.

Adrienne Richs "Diving into the Wreck" (p. 435, too long to be reprinted here). Most of the poem seems to be a more or less straightforward account of a scuba dive after sunken treasure. But the very first line is surprising: what has a "book of myths" to do with diving into the wreck? And the ladder hanging over the side of the schooner: why is it hanging innocently and wherefore the ominous remark, We know what it is for, we who have used it? And toward the end, the speaker makes an unexpected identification: we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass we are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear. The metaphorical likening between the "we" in this passage and nautical instruments that measure speed, distance, and direction, obliges us to consider that the sunken ship toward which the speaker dives is not merely a sunken ship. Likewise, the observation that it requires "cowardice or courage," not merely curiosity, to "find our way back to this scene, " suggests that in "diving into the wreck" the speaker feels an emotional risk. The sunken ship, the schooner on the surface, and the ladder and the water between them seem symbolic of a particular kind of human experience , of going back into one's memories. The surface coherence of the narrative is so strong that one might easily overlook this symbolic meaning altogetherbut to do so would he to read a "different" poem than the one the poet wrote. Some poets have invented private symbologies, or systems of symbols and their associations, that are almost a philosophy or religion. Robert Graves' book The White Goddess sets forth a complex interrelationship of supernatural and natural personages, events, and symbols which, he maintains, are inevitably the inspiration of "all true poetry"; "To Juan at the Winter Solstice" (p. 226) is among other things an abstract of Graves's system. William Butler Yeats invented several symbologies, each of which often makes unexpected use of familiar symbols, and adds new ones as well: Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days! Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways . . . . . . thine own sadness, whereof stars, grown old In dancing silver sandalled on the sea, Sing in their high and lonely melody. Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way. 51

6.7. CULTURAL REFERENCES


6.7.1. SYMBOL
Symbols, like metaphors, can extend the range of a poems association. But a symbol is not simply another kind of figurative language: put most simply, a symbol is an object or an action which both represents itself and at the same time has a larger meaning than it ordinarily has; a meaning which can often be multiple or ambiguous. Symbols are more suggestive than figures of speech, usually more complex, and often harder to interpret. Let's start simply, with an example of symbols outside poetry. The American flag is a symbol. Physically, it is nothing but a rectangle of colored cloth, but it "means" all that Americans have in common and everything they, as a nation, have done or hope to do. Obviously, this symbol draws forth powerful emotions of love, hate, or both, and not only from Americans. How one responds depends on what particular qualities or actions one happens to associate most vividly with the idea of the United States, as well as ones attitude toward them. A more universal symbol, the cross, is a simple geometric form, but for billions of Christians it stands for Christs crucifixion itself a symbolic event which represents the attitude of the Christian God toward humanity and, conversely, Christians attitudes toward God, the cosmos, and themselves. That two intersecting lines can somehow embody a view of the Universe gives some ideal of the power symbols have. A national flag and the cross are conventional symbols, in that while people and nations may fight over the validity of the concepts they symbolize, most or all know, in general, what the symbols mean. (Not all flags or crosses are symbolic: the white flag, which means only one thing -"truce" - and the crosses you use in answering a multiple-choice test are not symbols but signs.) Many other symbols have come to be nearly as well-known through their repeated use in literature. The color green, for example, often stands for the time of fresh leaves and grass, the spring, and therefore indirectly for youth and love. In older poems it may have been easier for a poet to use a symbol like the cross or green with some confidence that his readers would understand its implications. Nowadays, however, poets are likely to trust their own private symbols (from whatever depths in the poet they may come) as more directly expressing their meaning. This can sometimes make for a problem in reading, as the poet's symbols may be hard to identify. The only clue to a poem's symbolic level of meaning may be that some object in it doesn't act quite naturally, or that the speaker seems interested in it in an odd way. For an example, read

(Yeats, "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time") Yeats's pervasive use of symbols was one of the needs of his way of thinking; he once wrote, A Symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame. For him the rose was a symbol of transfiguration and fulfillment, as it has been for many religious writers. Here, however, Yeats infuses this traditional symbol with new meaning by imagining it as flowering from the Rod (Christs cross) itself a symbol of time and suffering, which the rose transfigures into beauty. The rose is not allowed to behave as roses ordinarily do, nor do any of its attributes except its beauty really apply to the things it stands for.

6.7.2. MYTH AND ARCHETYPE


A myth is like a symbol but involves an extended, plot: its a story which symbolizes something. Myths once "explained" the origins and qualifies of natural forces, the characteristic situations of human life and history, and social customs and observances, through the lives and actions of immortal beings. Such beings are usually imagined in human form, with human passions and ambitions, but exempt from mortal conditions and possessing energies and skills far above our own. Some of these immortals personify natural forces (fertility, the sea); others personify abstract human qualities (love, wisdom). In some mythologies (for example, the American Indian), the idea-beings are associated with animals such as the eagle or the wolf, or actually are those animals. A mythology (that is, a collection of myths), it is now generally agreed, was not merely a series of fictions. It embodied the actual beliefs of a particular culture at a particular time; moreover, most myths were apparently connected with the performance of religious rituals. We, who no longer believe them, may view myths as quaint old stories or as obsolete explanations for phenomena about which we know better. But for many poets over the centuries, and for poets writing today, myths have had an undeniable attraction, because they remain powerful symbols for certain kinds of feeling and experience. Among the mythologies most commonly used by poets have been the Greek, the Roman and the Germanic. Poets have also used the stories in the Old and New Testaments in the same way, and even those who disbelieve the literal truth in the Bible may still find it one of the most compelling mythologies. Other, less familiar mythologies have also been drawn on in contemporary poetry, among them the Egyptian, the Irish, the Hindu and the American Indian. Within the past hundred years, scholars have compared the mythologies of widely different societies a different times and different places and found that each has many stories, themes, and personages in common with the others. Naturally enough, few mythologies are without a creation myth, giving the physical universe a supernatural origin; but many also have in common a story about the murder and resurrection of a god or king, such as the Nordic god Balder, Osiris in Egyptian religion, and indeed Christ. Another common motif is the quest, a gods or heros long and dangerous journey to achieve a desired goal. Among the most famous quest stories are Orpheus descent to the underworld to bring his dead wife Eurydice back to life; Odysseys epic journey home from the Trojan War; and the quest of King Arthurs knights of the Round Table for the Holy Grail. A basil book of comparative mythology, Sir James Frazers The Golden Bought,

provided T. S. Eliot with much raw material for The Waste Land27, among whose mythical motifs is the theme of the quest. Some literary critics call these common mythical elements archetypes, from a Greek word meaning ancient patterns. The term, which the psychologist Carl Jung was the first to apply in this sense, is used to describe such patterns as they occur not only in myths and works of literature but also in ordinary peoples dreams and in psychotic fantasies. Literary critics interested in archetypes find them in themes and characters and also in images and even in literary forms and kinds. Perhaps because these ancient patterns appear to be so pervasive in religion, literature, and our own mind, they enable us to share deep common human experiences. Because of this power, then, myths and archetypes have been much used by poets. Rarely, however, will a poet simply retell one of the old stories; more often than not myths will be used fleetingly and by allusion, and the archetypal situation will be buried deep and expressed through seemingly ordinary surface narratives. Yeatss Leda and the Swan 28 sets a myth in the foreground. Lawrences The Ship of Death uses archetypal elements as part of its underpinning.

6.7.3. ALLUSION
An allusion is a passing, indirect reference to anything outside the poem a form of words, a work of art, an actual event which is not precisely identified but which the writer, in most cases, expects or hopes the reader will recognize. Most poetic allusions are meant to bring some aspect of the original context into the poem, and to establish connections between the poem itself and a world outside it. If I think of a king at nightfall, Of three men, and more, on the scaffold ... And of one who died blind and quiet, Why should we celebrate These dead men more than the dying? (Eliot, Little Gidding) Little Gidding29 is a meditative poem, in which Eliot permits the village of Little Gidding, once an Anglican religious community, to evoke its historical associations: of King Charles I, who came there after his final defeat in the English Civil War to fortify his spirit; of his execution with his two chief aides in 1649; and of the blind poet John Milton, who had taken Oliver Cromwells side against the King. The poem was written during the Second World War, and the dying are Eliots contemporaries who were victims of the conflict. ****** UNFINISHED SECTION ****

27 a seminal poem by T.S.Eliot to be studied; found on page ____ 28 to be studied; found on page ____ 29 to be studied; found on page _____

52

You might also like