Galveston, Texas. Some 8,000 people died.
The extremes are energetic here, as if the subtle interplay of similar and dissimilar sounds in a line like “Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard” were turned into a contest between song and prose. Not many poems sound as flatly informative as “8,000 people died,” the lines avoiding as much echo as the medium allows, and not many poems sound as fecklessly nonsensical as “Trah mah trah-la, la-la-la,” the lines embracing a surfeit of echo with even more appetite than Stevens.
Yet the extremes are deceptive, for as these syllables are repeated throughout the poem, what sounds like nonsense begins increasingly to make sense, trah mah congealing as try my: try my tra, la, la—which is what the New Orleans piano-player Professor Longhair seems to be saying in “Tipitina,” a song that plays apparently nonsensical lyrics against the familiar chord progression of an eight-bar blues. Between refrain-like repetitions of Professor Longhair’s almost indecipherable syl lables, the informational lines of “Gulf Music” veer from the obliteration of Galveston to Pinsky’s great-grandfather Morris Eisenberg (who in 1908 was given his first name by an immigration officer in Galveston and who later took his surname from a rich man in Arkansas) to Professor Longhair himself (whose given name was Henry Roeland Byrd) to Pinsky’s great-grandmother Becky, who abandoned her daughter Pearl (named for the Pearl City of Galveston) to run off with Morris Eisenberg (who had the same surname as Pearl’s father). The poem’s information is revealed increasingly to have been determined by a coincidence of sounds.
This revelation does not challenge the stable ground on which information stands, however, but reminds us that the ground was only ever more or less stable. For while we ought to remember that a devastating hurricane killed 8,000 citizens of Galveston on September 8, 1900, we won’t generally reread “Gulf Music” in order to acquire this kind of knowledge, and, in any case, other sources say that as many as 12,000 people died. As “Gulf Music” also says, “the past is not decent or orderly, it is made-up and devious,” a proposition that the poem’s concluding lines demonstrate.
Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his
Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation
And invention, is this the image of the promised end?
All music haunted by all the music of the dead forever.
Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandoned
For love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.
These lines veer from Shakespeare’s vision of King Lear carrying the dead body of his daughter Cordelia (“Is this the promised end? / Or image of that horror?”), to the apparent nonsense which the poem has repeated multiple times—except that the nonsense now seems more meaningful than ever, just as the information has come to seem driven by sound. “O try my tra-la-la” may be the song of the lover, the panderer, or the dealer, but whatever it is, it is also the song of Orpheus, desperate to raise the dead.
Describing syntax, diction, figuration, and rhythm, I’ve argued that what matters is not simply the presence of Germanic and Latinate diction, paratactic and hypotactic syntax, figurative and literal language, or rhythmically regular and irregular lines. What matters is that the final sentence of Moore’s “My Apish Cousins” moves from Latinate to Germanic diction, that the first stanza of Donne’s “The Canonization” moves from parataxis to hypotaxis, that Shakespeare’s twelfth sonnet moves from conventional to extravagant metaphors, that Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” moves from a rhythmically regular line to an irregular line.
As the juxtapositions of “Gulf Music” make emphatically clear, echo plays out in the same way: our experience of a poem is determined by the way we’re made to move between different degrees of echo as the poem’s language unfolds. The final line of Stevens’s late poem “Of Mere Being” (“The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down”) feels revelatory because it leaps to a density of echo to which the preceding lines do not contribute.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
And the final line of Stevens’s late poem “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” (“A new knowledge of reality”) feels revelatory because it suddenly refuses to participate in the swirling web of similar sounds (precede, sun, surround, still—cry, chorister, choir, colossal) from which it is extruded.
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
Reading lines like “A chorister whose c preceded the choir” or “The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down,” we feel a density of similar sounds, but, more importantly, we feel the poems moving toward or away from that density, just as we may also feel a poem’s rhythm moving toward or away from regularity or a poem’s syntax moving toward or away from the drama of subordination.
This sonic drama may transpire on a small scale (a single line from Shakespeare’s twelfth sonnet) or on a large scale (the juxtaposed couplets of “Gulf Music”), but every poem feels unique because the language of every poem is performing multiple actions at once, creating a repeatable path of discovery—a new knowledge of reality—through the simultaneous ordering of different degrees of echo, different kinds of syntax, different kinds of diction, different levels of figuration, and different degrees of rhythmic regularity.
VII
IMAGE
“The three fundamental colors are red, yellow, blue,” wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo.
The whole chemistry of colors is no more complicated than those simple few fundamentals. And a good understanding of them is worth more than 70 different shades of paint—given that more than 70 tones and strengths can be made with the 3 primary colors and white and black. The colorist is he who on seeing a color in nature is able to analyze it coolly and say, for example, that green-grey is yellow with black and almost no blue, &c.
This is an artist describing his intimacy with his medium. The painter who would replicate the colors in nature must analyze them coolly, and the painting itself is produced through his understanding of how the fundamental elements of the medium may be manipulated.
“Go in fear of abstractions,” said Pound in one of the manifestos associated with the Imagist movement in poetry, which flourished in the second decade of the twentieth century. Pound wanted to encourage poets to emphasize the concrete, generally Germanic diction of the English language, though he himself was not shy about deploying abstractions. “Do not be descriptive,” Pound added: “remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can.” This remark is also borne of an artist’s intimacy with his medium; paintings have colors, poems have words for colors. How then could a poem be described as being made of images? And how could a painting be said to describe a landscape? Pound’s verb suggests that a desire for the scribal, the written, may sneak into our sense of the visual, just as a desire for the visual may infect our sense of the written.
More than once Pound told the story of how he came to write “In a Station of the Metro,” which is a story about translating a visual experience into a verbal experience: exiting from the Concorde station in Paris one day in 1911, he saw a beautiful face, then another and another, then a child’s face, then the face of a beautiful woman.
I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying, and I found, suddenly, the expression . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. . . . I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work “of second intensity.” Six months later I made a poem half that length.
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br /> Thirty lines, fifteen lines: Pound finally produced the two lines of “In a Station of the Metro” after another year of toil. While the visual experience transpired in seconds, the process of finding the right words took eighteen months: “Petals on a wet, black bough.”
A poet might observe in the world a beautiful image, just as a poet might learn an arresting fact or think of a challenging idea. But as Pound’s story suggests, a poem we call imagistic is made of words bound together by a web of sonic patterns. Those words may in turn provoke a mental image, but while brain and cognitive scientists debate the nature of such images, the “pictorialists” arguing that they’re more like pictures, the “descriptionists” maintaining that they’re more like language, both camps agree that their own language is metaphorical: “Brain scientists have found no pictures in the brain,” emphasizes the philosopher Ned Block.
Neither has anyone ever found a picture in a poem, just as no one has ever actually heard a voice; when applied to poetry, the word image is also metaphorical, part of a web of metaphors we use regularly to describe the elusive process of thinking as an instantly apprehensible visual process—we reflect or speculate on things that have brilliance or clarity; we say I see when we understand. It’s understandably seductive to think of poems as being made of images, just as it’s seductive to think of a poem as having a voice; but like what we call the poetic voice, the poetic image is constructed from the more fundamental aspects of the medium—diction, syntax, figure, rhythm, echo.
These free-verse lines by William Carlos Williams—
Her body is not so white as
anemone petals nor so smooth—nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force
—and these metered and rhymed lines by W. H. Auden—
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
—foreground their occasion as an observable event, making us feel intimate with the poet’s act of evoking the visual world in concrete diction: a field of harvest wheat, a field of wild carrot. But both poems deploy this diction as part of a metaphor—the crowds were fields of harvest wheat, her body is a field of wild carrot. How do you picture a body simultaneously as a field? An act of thinking, not an act of description, is required to sustain that simultaneity.
Often the power of poems we tend to call imagistic (whether they’re written before or after Pound) depends on the strategic suppression of such thinking—on the suppression, that is, of figurative language and hypotactic syntax. Ben Jonson, writing in the early seventeenth century.
Ha’ you felt the wool o’ the beaver?
Or swansdown ever?
Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the briar?
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
C. D. Wright, writing in the late twentieth century.
the breath
the trees
the bridge
the road
the rain
the sheen
the breath
the line
the skin
the vineyard
the fences
the leg
the water
the breath
the shift
Both these poems attempt to foreground sensuous experience at the expense of syntactical activity. Verbs in Jonson’s poem serve merely to present a paratactic list of sensuous delights, and in Wright’s poem verbs have fallen away, leaving an even more unmediated juxtaposition of nouns—a poetic structure that, in the wake of the Imagist movement, twentieth-century readers often likened to the visual experience of collage. Since both Wright’s and Jonson’s poems are about erotic delight, the strategy feels cumulatively powerful: we don’t need much why when the tumbling forward of the what is so satisfying.
But the poems can sustain this blissed-out thoughtlessness only for so long. Jonson’s final line makes it clear that he has not simply been cataloguing the delight of swan’s down and honey but making an argument about the beauty of a particular woman: the down and honey are not images but metaphors—“O so sweet is she!” Wright’s final line also leaps to figuration, reinforcing the leap with an unprecedented excess of similar sounds, and making it clear that her poem has all along been building a narrative of dangerously irresistible sexual attraction.
the mouth
the tongue
the eyes
the burn
the burned
the burning
Wright’s poem may seem idiosyncratic, but it’s difficult to find a poet from the last hundred years who remained untouched by the Imagist Pound’s preference for concrete diction and juxtapositional logic. Reinforcing the pronouncements of the Imagist manifestos, the young T. S. Eliot argued even more influentially that poems should be made of what he called “objective correlatives”—which was another way of saying go in fear of abstractions: rather than proclaiming that your body is not only beautiful but seductively assertive in its beauty, a poet might say you are a field of wild carrot taking the field by force, offering the concrete product of a process of thought. Eliot often cited a favorite line by John Donne as an example of such powerfully concrete language—
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone
—and one can sense right away that the vocabulary of “image” and “objective correlative” would allow us to admire poets as different from each other as Shakespeare—
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard
—and Wright.
the burn
the burned
the burning
Yet it’s crucial to notice, as Eliot would not have denied, that each of these is a successful line of poetry because of how it sounds. Each line is rhythmically distinctive, and each line is bound tightly to itself by a web of similar sounds. Crucially, what might be in danger of sounding like an excess of alliteration in each line (bracelet, bright, bone—borne, bier, bristly, beard—burn, burned, burning) is tempered by the way in which each poem delivers us to that excess.
And he that digs it spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone
*
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard
*
the mouth
the tongue
the eyes
the burn
the burned
the burning
In each poem, the poet brings us to a line rich in echo with lines that share none of that richness. As I’ve emphasized, our experience of these poems is shaped not simply by the presence of particular elements of the medium but the order in which those elements appear. And what we call a line made of images would not be successful if the line did not simultaneously, in relationship to other lines, construct and disrupt a dynamically unfolding pattern of sounds.
The same is true of a line made exclusively of abstract language. Even if we recognize that our vocabulary of the poetic image is metaphorical, a way of speaking about linguistic processes as visual processes, the potential danger of the vocabulary is that it might encourage us to assume that poems harnessing abstract diction are automatically less successful than poems made of concrete diction. How do we describe the power of poems by William Blake—
Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor
—or Susan Howe—
Great emptiness as
simple as that went
So straight before
—or the later Eliot—
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
—poems that, different as they are from each other, would never be described as made of images? While the younger Eliot of “Prufrock” and the “objective correla
tive” championed a poetry of concrete images, the later Eliot did not go in fear of abstractions; his best friends were abstractions.
Just as what we call an imagistic poem must pay scrupulous attention to the sonic drama of its syllables unfolding in time, so must the poem of abstract thinking run on the rails of its diction, syntax, rhythm, and echo.
Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;
And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.
He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.
Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Catterpiller and Fly
Feed on the Mystery.
And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.
The Gods of the earth and sea,
Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain.
While only two lines of Blake’s “The Human Abstract” scan effortlessly as iambic trimeters (“And spreads his baits with care”—“Soon spreads the dismal shade”), the remaining twenty-two lines play with this three-beat pattern, offering a tireless variety of variations but never obliterating the metrical pattern’s force: sometimes we’re asked to stress syllables we’d ordinarily demote (“In its thickest shade”), and sometimes we’re asked to suppress syllables we’d ordinarily emphasize (“Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree”). While the poem’s lines are almost exclusively end-stopped, and while these syntactically complete lines veer aggressively toward the epigrammatic, no two consecutive lines are rhythmically identical.
How Poems Get Made Page 6