He is stark mad.
Or you might ask a question, an aggressive enjambment dividing subject from predicate and throwing extra pressure on the syllable (the first-person pronoun) with which the line both begins and ends, this elegantly balanced sonic decorum tempering the line’s narcissism while also displaying it.
I wonder by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved?
No English-language poet is more thrillingly efficient than John Donne at establishing the illusion of a speaking voice. Shakespeare’s blank verse often generates the illusion as well, but it was Donne’s achievement to have harnessed such dramatic energy within the compass of the lyric poem, and one feels the lasting influence of Donne’s strategies in the opening lines of poets as different from one another as Robert Browning—
But do not let us quarrel any more.
—Marianne Moore—
Why so desolate?
—and D. H. Lawrence.
You tell me I am wrong.
These strategies continue to be crucial for poets writing today, poets as different from one another as Frank Bidart—
What should I have done?
—John Ashbery—
Time, you old miscreant!
—and Ellen Bryant Voigt.
I made a large mistake I left my house
When we say that a poem presents us with a strong sense of voice, what we’re often in fact saying is that the poem sounds like Donne. We’re employing a metaphor, the speaker of the poem, which describes not how poems are destined to sound but how we’ve become accustomed to particular ways of organizing the medium of the English language into particular sonic patterns. Asking someone to write a sentence with a strong voice is like asking a chef to prepare a dish that tastes good. If she’s successful, that chef will be thinking about particular ingredients; syntax and diction are readily at hand, but you can’t reach into the pantry for a cup of voice.
It’s nonetheless seductive to imagine ourselves as intimate listeners, rather than more distant readers; Socrates would have approved of this prejudice, which is nearly as old as western culture itself. But our impulse to employ the metaphor of a speaking voice has more recently been conditioned by the lingering power of the New Criticism, the literary critical movement that, while it flourished from the 1930s through the 1960s, encouraged several generations of readers to distinguish between the author and the speaker of a poem—often by foregrounding the example of Donne.
“Every poem,” said Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in the first edition of their influential anthology, Understanding Poetry, published in 1938, “implies a speaker of the poem.” In part, Brooks and Warren were providing readers with a way of coming to terms with the unfamiliar difficulties of certain modernist poems; it’s initially helpful to think of the disjunctive verbal texture of T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as an utterance spoken by a particular person. But in later editions of Understanding Poetry, expediency hardens into method: “always when we are making acquaintance with a poem,” urged Brooks and Warren, “we must answer these questions: (1) Who is speaking? (2) Why?” These questions ask us to forget that the speaker of the poem is a metaphor; they ask us to define poems as utterances driven by the presence of a speaking subject (which poems may or may not seem to be), rather than strategic deployments of various kinds of syntax and diction (which poems always are).
The Eliot of “Prufrock” and The Waste Land was a poet who, like so many others, had learned from Donne how to establish the illusion of a speaking presence in just a few syllables: “Let us go then, you and I”; “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad.” To borrow the influential language Eliot used to describe Donne’s poems, Eliot’s poems up to The Waste Land are poems of “psychology,” poems that dramatize states of mind “composed of odds and ends in constant flux and manipulated by desire and fear.”
Remarks like these helped to establish Donne’s central place in the New Criticism, but Eliot never set out merely to change taste; he set out to write the best poems he could muster, and as his own aesthetic goals changed, his relationship to Donne changed. In the years following the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, as Eliot accumulated the fragments he would eventually bring together to make The Hollow Men three years later, a different kind of poem began to emerge—a poem that does not encourage us to feel that it is spoken by a discrete human subject with a particular psychology. While the poem feels anguished, it is not self-dramatizing, like “Prufrock”; the utterance feels oracular, dislocated, as if it were emerging not from within but from beyond human experience.
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
The author of these lines has no more use for Donne; he has even less use for the poet of “Prufrock.” While no poem is actually spoken on the page, these lines don’t deploy Donne’s strategies for creating the illusion of spokenness. They encourage us to pay attention not to the perceiving sensibility we might imagine behind the poem but to the world that exists independent of that sensibility.
Such suspicion of psychology, a suspicion not only of the narrow space of the mind but of the lyric’s investment in the illusion of that space, is not in the twentieth century unique to the later Eliot. One feels it in poets of certain strains of the American avant-garde, poets from Louis Zukofsky writing in response to the early Eliot to Susan Howe writing today; the variety of poets who became associated with the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E were more or less united by their desire to write poems that could not be imagined as being spoken, poems that could not be accounted for by New Critical methods of reading. While Eliot’s swerve away from Donne was driven in part by the Christianity he embraced publicly in 1927, the rejection of the possibly pernicious illusion of the self-determining human subject was driven in these poets by the conjunction of Marxism and post-structuralism.
Donne has survived these debates, just as he survived the censure of Pope and Johnson in the eighteenth century, when a preference for classical balance and poise made Donne’s syntactical performances seem garish. But the value of these debates is that they don’t allow us to take for granted the kind of work Donne accomplished; that is, we’re made to consider the precise linguistic mechanisms through which the illusion of a poem’s speaker is constructed, rather than assuming that poems always have speakers, the way people have tongues. How did Donne do it? How, after the shock of his opening lines, did he keep doing it for the duration of the whole poem?
Think back to my discussions of diction and syntax. It may seem that a sentence dominated by highly Latinate diction will tend to sound written, while a sentence dominated by Germanic monosyllables will tend to sound spoken; similarly, it may seem that elaborately hypotactic syntax will sound written, while simpler syntactical constructions sound spoken. But in fact a poem’s sentences will feel increasingly dramatic to the degree that we’re made to attend to the pattern of their syllables unfolding in time; and more precisely constituent of a poem’s degree of spokenness than any particular kind of diction or syntax is the strategic interplay between different kinds of diction and syntax. Especially as this interplay is itself played out over a poem’s lineation, the resulting utterance may feel extruded from the poem’s emerging occasion, as if the voice or self we presume to be driving the utterance were not given but emergent.
We’ve seen that the first stanza of “The Canonization” consists of one sentence, an imperative dominated by parataxis (“For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love”) until its final line (“So you will let me love”). The sixty-seven words in this sentence are overwhelmingly monosyllabic; only eight of the words have more than one syllable, and while Latinate words abound (state, arts, course, place, grace, real, face), they are easily absorbed by the exclusively Germanic diction with which the sentence both begins (“For God’s sake hold your tongue”) and ends (“let me love”). Syntactically, the final line’s shift to subordination is delayed by a long list of si
mple imperatives (hold your tongue, let me love, child my palsy, and so on).
This syntactical shifting continues throughout the poem’s subsequent stanzas, and when we reach its conclusion, a poem that began by frontloading plain diction and paratactic syntax becomes a hypotactic extravaganza littered with egregiously Latinate vocabulary (invoke, reverend, hermitage).
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for love.
And thus invoke us: “you whom reverend love
Made one another’s hermitage,
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage,
Who did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize,
Countries, towns, courts, beg from above
A pattern of your love.”
What has happened here? “The Canonization” begins by commanding the listener to stop talking (“hold your tongue”), but it concludes by transforming its listener into a speaker, who is enjoined to address the poem’s lovers in the second person (“you whom reverend love”). In this final sentence, the listener speaks in the imperative, but the main verb is delayed by a sequence of parallel modifying clauses for so long (“whom reverend love / Made one another’s hermitage”—“to whom love was peace”—“who did the whole world’s soul contract”—“who drove / Into the glasses of your eyes . . . Countries, towns, courts”) that when the verb finally appears (“beg”), it feels so syntactically satisfying that the poem’s forever startling conclusion feels irrefutable: the poem’s haughty speaker has been humbled, enjoined to beg—to “beg from above.” Who could have heard it coming?
This kind of conflict between what feel like different voices, explicit in “The Canonization,” is implicit in any poem that invites us to participate in the dramatized illusion of spokenness.
You tell me I am wrong.
Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?
I am not wrong.
In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek women,
No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate trees in flower,
Oh so red, and such a lot of them.
The diction of these opening lines of D. H. Lawrence’s “Pomegranate” is colloquial, the syntax untroubled by enjambment. But what matters most is that, like Donne, Lawrence enacts shifts in diction and syntax that make the poem feel produced instantly on the page. While the first stanza features hypotactic syntax (“who is anybody to tell me I am”), the syntax of the second stanza avoids subordination, its noun phrases hovering in placid reverie (“rock left bare”—“viciousness of Greek women”—“pomegranate trees in flower”). Then the violence of hypotaxis intrudes.
Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure?
And then the reverie revives itself.
The end cracks open with the beginning:
Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.
But not for long.
Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?
No glittering, compact drops of dawn?
Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument,
shown ruptured?
It’s almost tempting to say that, speaking metaphorically, “Pomegranate” is a dialogue between two voices, but what the poem’s procedures more precisely suggest is that we’re inclined to reach for the metaphor of voice not when we hear one consistent utterance but when we feel different kinds of diction, syntax, and lineation working against one another: something happens in our act of reading the poem, something gets made. “I prefer my heart to be broken. / It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack,” admits Lawrence in the poem’s final stanza, reverie eclipsing confrontation but also justifying its presence in a poem that is itself strategically broken, willfully at odds with itself.
Brokenness in no way implies a dearth of rigor or an acquiescence to chance.
another heavy frost what doesn’t die or fly away
the groundhog for instance the bear is deep in sleep I’m
thinking
a lot about sleep translation I’m not sleeping much
who used to be a champion of sleep
ex-champions are pathetic my inner parent says the world
is full of evil death cruelty degradation not sleeping
scores only 2 out of 10
but a moral sense
is exhausting I am exhausted a coma looks good to me
if only I could be sure there’d still be dreams it’s what I miss
the most
even in terrible dreams at least you feel what you feel not what
you’re supposed to feel your house burns down so what
if you survived you rake the ashes sobbing
In contrast to Lawrence’s “Pomegranate,” in which most of the lines are end-stopped and syntactically complete, almost all the lines of Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Sleep” are enjambed, the lines refusing to allow us to process a completed syntactical phrase or clause without interruption. A clause may appear within a line (“the bear is deep in sleep”; “I am exhausted”), but the poem’s eschewal of punctuation makes it difficult for us to rest within the completed clause. The formal pressure of line does not clar ify the structural work of syntax, as it might even without the assistance of punctuation—
But a moral sense is exhausting
I am exhausted
A coma looks good to me
—but instead forces us to inhabit the onslaught of syntax more precisely as what it is: a rapid concatenation of multiple syntactical patterns carrying multiple tones and, as a result, fostering the illusion of a human being speaking from within the moment of discovering what she is driven to say.
The poem sounds like what we imagine spontaneity to be, but the relinquishment of punctuation no more contributes to freedom from structural and formal restraint than does the relinquishment of meter. The degree to which Voigt’s poem sounds urgently spoken depends on the same procedures as Lawrence or Donne—
you tell me I am wrong who are you who is
anybody to tell me I am wrong I am not wrong
—except that in “Sleep” the torqueing energy of the syntactical shifts has become impossible to ignore.
What is the wish for a poem to have a voice a wish for? At best, it is a wish for visceral immediacy, a wish that poems by Donne, Lawrence, and Voigt repay handsomely. But at worst, it is a wish for the certainty of human presence, rather than the fluctuating work of language—a wish for reliable information rather than the inexhaustible pleasure of lyric knowledge. It may be useful to differentiate the historical author from the fictional speaker of the poem, but it’s also instructive to remember that the Latinate word immediacy means without the intervention of a medium: a poem is nothing without its medium. Because of the disposition of its language, one poem may feel spoken while another may not, but all poems are scrupulously made, forged from the syntax, diction, and figuration at hand.
IV
FIGURE
“The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor,” proclaimed Aristotle. What might he have meant?
For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five grey hairs, or ruined fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve.
Unlike a metonymy, which conflates two logically related things, a metaphor merges two unrelated things: in Donne’s lines, one can no more chide a palsy or hold one’s tongue than one can fall asleep (a spatial metaphor suggesting that human consciousness exists above unconsciousness) or spend one’s time (a mercantile metaphor suggesting that time is a commodity). As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson point out in Metaphors We Live By, the power of these conventional metaphors is enormous: “he sank into a coma”—“budget your time.” Such figures distinguish not only poe
ms but almost every sentence we utter; everyone is a master of metaphor. Yet often we remain unaware of a metaphor’s implications—until a poem asks us to become aware.
We’ve seen that a poem’s characteristic plunge from the front depends on its movement between different levels of diction or between different kinds of syntax; similarly, the way in which a poem orders its metaphors, asking us to inhabit their relationships over time, is more powerful than any particular metaphor, judged in isolation.
For a Tear is an Intellectual thing
And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King
And the bitter groan of the Martyrs woe
Is an Arrow from the Almighties bow.
This quatrain from William Blake’s “The Grey Monk” contains three prominent metaphors: a tear is an intellectual thing, a sigh is a sword, a groan is an arrow. Though the figures are far from conventional (we don’t say that a sigh is a sword in the easy way in which we say that we fall asleep), the paratactic syntax makes the movement from one figure to the next feel rationally considered: a tear is . . . and a sigh is . . . and a groan is. In addition, the second two figures are not only syntactically but conceptually parallel: an inarticulate mode of human expression (a sigh or a groan) is in each case compared to a means of physical violence (a sword or an arrow), and the repeated logic makes the extravagance of the figures seem more reassuringly predictable (a sigh is the sword . . . and the bitter groan . . . is an arrow).
Here is another way in which a poem might order its metaphors.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.
Unlike Blake’s metaphors, the metaphors in this quatrain from Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb” do not reinforce one another, building a sense of parallel significance; instead, they extend one another, pushed by the quatrain’s initially right-branching syntax into increasingly unexpected realms of significance: wrecks passed, the resulting calyx giving back a hieroglyph which was in turn a portent. When the young Crane submitted this poem to Poetry magazine in 1926, Harriet Monroe queried him about this logic: “You ask me how a portent can possibly be wound in a shell,” responded the exasperated but determinedly polite Crane, “I ask you how Blake could possible say that ‘a sigh is a sword of an Angel King.’ ” But while Crane could argue that Blake’s metaphors are as unconventional as his own, and while Crane’s metaphor feels explicable in itself, the relationship of this figure to the figures preceding it feels equivocal, possibly discordant.
How Poems Get Made Page 3