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EXTRATOS DA APOSTILA DA PROFESSORA VERA LIMA CECCON VERSO 2009-1 *************** DISPONVEL APENAS PARA FINS DIDTICOS E ACADMICOS
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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.
4.1. 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.
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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.
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.
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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")
4.5. 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.
4.6. 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.
4.6.1. 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)
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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. ...
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
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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.
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.
4.8.2. 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.
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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.)
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
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.)
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.
5.4.1. 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.
5.4.3. 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.
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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.')
A. B.
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.
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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.
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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."
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.)
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.
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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.
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.
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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
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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
14 To hanker: almejar
speaking in it, Frost's work has the Frostian voice, as Stevens' work speaks in his voice.
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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")
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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")
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.
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.
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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")
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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)
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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.
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
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.
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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
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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
(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.
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 _____
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