Figuration enters the poem in the second stanza, personifying the abstract entities (pity, mercy, fear, love, cruelty) that have so far dominated every clause: cruelty knits a snare, spreads his baits, waters the grounds; humility takes its root, spreads dismal shade. Blake strings his figures together with parallel syntax, as he often does, and in “The Human Abstract” this continuity of syntactical procedures encourages us not to notice how the vehicles of the metaphors increasingly take charge of the poem: rather than thinking about the sinister self-congratulation built into acts of pity and mercy, we’re imagining the dense shade of a tree, in which a raven has made his nest.
But if we’re tempted to think of this tree as an image, rather than a metaphor, Blake’s final stanza stops us short: having searched nature for this tree, with its raven, caterpillar, and fly, even the gods must admit that it is a mental construction; unlike the growth of trees, human suffering is not natural or inevitable. The poem’s final line delivers this wisdom almost like a punch line (“There grows one in the Human Brain”), and the punch is rhythmic: like the final line of Byron’s “So, we’ll go no more a roving,” this line deviates so far from the poem’s metrical pattern that we cannot hear it as “There grows one in the human brain.” We need to punch out those monosyllables, which refuse to lie quietly: “There grows one in the human brain.”
What is the wish for poems to be made of images a wish for? At best, like the wish for a poem to have a voice, it is a wish for immediacy, a wish that poems by Jonson, Williams, and Wright repay handsomely. But at worst, it is a wish for the reassuring ground of empirical knowledge rather than the dynamic process of lyric knowledge—a wish that, if it were fulfilled, would make the poem’s language feel disposable rather than inexhaustible. The Imagist Pound suggested that landscape should be left to painters, because of the nature of their medium. But even a Van Gogh painting is not made of images; it is made of minerals ground and mixed with linseed oil, then smeared on canvas and allowed to cure.
VIII
REPETITION
This is the first section of Mark Strand’s “Elevator,” a poem divided into two numbered parts, each part consisting of three end-stopped lines.
The elevator went to the basement. The doors opened.
A man stepped in and asked if I was going up.
“I’m going down,” I said. “I won’t be going up.”
This is the second section.
The elevator went to the basement. The doors opened.
A man stepped in and asked if I was going up.
“I’m going down,” I said. “I won’t be going up.”
If the order in which a poem’s fundamental elements appear is crucial—diction, syntax, figuration, echo—what happens when the poem’s elements are identical?
Any aspect of the medium might be repeated in a poem. Phonemes may be repeated, words may be repeated, entire lines, phrases, or clauses may be repeated. But more crucially, the power of any particular instance of repetition (or any particular instance of variation) may be doubled when it coincides with another instance. We’ve seen that Shakespeare’s twelfth sonnet generates great structural power by reinforcing a pattern of syntactical repetition with a pattern of lineation: the repetitions are synchronized.
When I do count the clock . . .
When I behold the violet . . .
When lofty trees I see . . .
And similarly we’ve seen that the repeated phonemes larding John Donne’s prose sentence (die, light, sight, rise) become much more prominent when those repetitions are synchronized with a pattern of lineation that foregrounds a repeated pattern of syntax.
We die
in the light,
in the sight . . .
and we rise
in the light,
in the sight
Strand’s “Elevator” may seem like a special case, a poem that’s all refrain, no intervening verses, but given that all poems repeat themselves, what’s at issue is the degree to which a poem’s various patterns of repetition are synchronized: in a refrain, every aspect of the medium that might be repeated is repeated at once.
“Is it possible,” begins the first stanza of an exquisite lyric by Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of our masters of refrain. The question also ends the five-line stanza, framing three lines rhymed aaa (a dimeter, then a tetrameter, then a pentameter). Subsequent stanzas follow suit.
Is it possible
That so high debate,
So sharp, so sore, and of such rate,
Should end so soon and was begun so late?
Is it possible?
Is it possible
So cruel intent,
So hasty heat and so soon spent,
From love to hate and thence for to relent?
Is it possible?
Is it possible
That one may find
Within one heart so diverse mind
To change or turn as weather and wind?
Is it possible?
Formally, this poem asserts that nothing changes. Each stanza consists of two questions, the first beginning with the refrain and the second consisting exclusively of the refrain; the adamancy of the first question is reinforced by three lines of steadily increasing length, each concluding rhyme (debate, rate, late) sounding more insistent than the last. But the accumulating effect of the poem is to make us feel that anything might change—that love may all too easily turn to hate. So when the refrain changes in the penultimate stanza to “It is possible” and in the final stanza to “All is possible,” we feel not that the poem is suddenly shifting course but that the shift is confirming the poem’s repeated wish for constancy. By attempting so stalwartly to stand still, the poem moves inexorably forward.
Wyatt’s repetitions of rhyme, line, and syntax are synchronized: what happens when a poem refuses to align its repetitions? Having considered the unfolding drama of Marianne Moore’s diction in “My Apish Cousins,” let’s now examine the repetitions of the poem’s stanza form, which operate independently from the repetitions of its syntax. The six lines of this syllabic stanza contain 15, 16, 10, 10, 15, and 11 syllables respectively, the first line rhyming with the second and the fourth line rhyming with the sixth.
I shall never forget—that Gilgamesh among
the hairy carnivora—that cat with the
wedge-shaped, slate-gray marks on its forelegs and the
resolute tail,
astringently remarking: “They have imposed on us with
their pale,
half fledged protestations, trembling about
in inarticulate frenzy, saying
it is not for all of us to understand art, finding it
all so difficult, examining the thing
as if it were something inconceivably arcanic, as
symmetrically frigid as something carved out of chrysopras
or marble—strict with tension, malignant
in its power over us and deeper
than the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange
for hemp,
rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber and fur.”
Hanging from the initial independent clause (“They have imposed on us”) are four parallel phrases modifying the act of imposition (trembling about, saying it is not, finding it all, examining the thing) followed by an explosion of clauses and phrases describing how the imposed-upon thing is consequently made to appear (inconceivably arcanic, symmetrically frigid, strict with tension, malignant in its power, deeper than the sea). But in contrast to Wyatt’s poem, in which the parallel clauses begin each stanza, Moore’s lineation does not reinforce her syntactical repetition. At the same time, because lines of the same length do not rhyme with each other, and because the lines cut against the syntax at grammatically weak junctures, the poem’s rhymes are nearly inaudible; the echo linking the line “as if it were something inconceivably arcanic, as” with the line “symmetrically frigid as something carved out of chrysopras” is as weak as possible
. “My Apish Cousins” is a highly repetitive poem, but one scheme of repetition diffuses another: the pattern of lines is at odds with the pattern of the syntax, and the pattern of the rhymes is synchronized with neither the pattern of the syntax nor the pattern of the lines.
Does Moore’s stanza seem contrived? Does Wyatt’s? Having written syllabic poems like “My Apish Cousins” during the second decade of the twentieth century, Moore began around 1920 to write poems in free verse—poems that, in some ways, seem desperate never to repeat themselves, just as Wyatt’s poem seems desperate only to repeat itself. But in other ways, these poems are also highly repetitive. “New York,” an unpredictably wayward catalogue of the city’s diverse qualities, consists of a list of clauses dominated by the verb to be; sometimes the verb is elided, as in the movement from the poem’s title to its first line—
New York
the savage’s romance,
accreted where we need the space for commerce—
the center of the wholesale fur trade,
starred with tepees of ermine and peopled with foxes
—and sometimes the verb is emphasized, especially in order to be negated, as in these concluding lines of the poem.
It is not the dime-novel exterior,
Niagara Falls, the calico horses and the war canoe;
it is not that “if the fur is not finer than such as one sees
others wear,
one would rather be without it—”
that estimated in raw meat and berries, we could feed the
universe;
it is not the atmosphere of ingenuity,
the otter, the beaver, the puma skins
without shooting-irons or dogs;
it is not the plunder,
it is the “accessibility to experience.”
“New York” does not capitalize on the repetition of line-lengths, rhymes, or stanzas, but it does foreground the repetition of a syntactical pattern (the reiteration of it is not shifting powerfully back to it is in the poem’s final line). More importantly, it synchronizes this syntactical pattern with the lineation (each new iteration of the repeated clause beginning a new line), as the more obviously repetitive “My Apish Cousins” does not. These repetitions allow us to feel, long before we’ve deduced the poem’s semantic logic, that its catalogue of disparate materials is purposeful, not merely quixotic. And when the poem concludes, the Latinate diction of the phrase “accessibility to experience” (quoted from Henry James) rises from the predominately Germanic diction immediately preceding it (otter, beaver, iron, dog, plunder) as satisfyingly as the words hemp, rye, and flax rise from the predominately Latinate diction of “My Apish Cousins.”
Moore didn’t want the rigor of her free-verse poems to seem any more or less contrived than the rigor of her syllabic poems. Organizing her 1924 book Observations, she began with syllabic poems like “My Apish Cousins,” moved on to list-like free-verse poems such as “New York,” and crowned the book with an over-500-line index that feels like the long poem in which Observations logically culminates—a catalogue of catalogues.
antlet
Antarctica
ape, curling with an
Apish Cousins, My
Apollo
art, arcanic
artichoke
artist and money
artists, fools
What could be more predictable than the repetition of the alphabet, more confirming of our expectations? What could be more unpredictable, more inviting of our curiosity, than the alphabet? It’s enticing to imagine what an antlet might have to do with Antarctica, merely because of abecedarian contiguity. But it’s also enticing, when reading Wyatt, to imagine what the word debate has to do with the words rate and late simply because the words happen to echo one another in a stanza rhymed aaa. It’s enticing to imagine what the question is it possible has to do with the question is it possible when it’s repeated in a new stanza. It’s enticing to imagine what the line A man stepped in and asked if I was going up has to do with the line A man stepped in and asked if I was going up.
“If everything in the world were completely identical,” says Søren Kierkegaard in Repetition, “in reality there would be no repetition, because reality is only in the moment.” But nothing in the world is completely identical: because the repetition of an event happens over time, not in a single moment, the repeated event is altered. This is why the infamously repetitive Gertrude Stein could insist that “there can be no repetition.” This is why the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” can argue with deadpan plausibility that Menard’s word-for-word replication of Don Quixote is “almost infinitely richer” than the original.
Strand’s “Elevator,” a Borgesian extravagance in miniature, seems to be completely static; unavailable to it is the kind of animating shift in diction that distinguishes the conclusions of both “My Apish Cousins” and “New York.” But when the poem is experienced over time, it enacts a progression as much as Wyatt’s poem does. For if “Elevator” consisted merely of one iteration of its three-line stanza, the scene recounted there would seem merely grim; the man riding the elevator is mortal, going down for the last time.
The elevator went to the basement. The doors opened.
A man stepped in and asked if I was going up.
“I’m going down,” I said. “I won’t be going up.”
But once the three-line stanza is repeated, the drama becomes more clearly a reflection of the sensibility of a man who expects every trip to be his last, and, as a result, the second part of the poem becomes comically poignant—an account of how we go on living, not of how we die. The man riding the elevator is mortal, like all of us, but he’s not going down quite as efficiently as he pretends; he reaches the basement, and then he reaches it again. His life consists exclusively of lyric knowledge—of the eager reanimation of what he already knows.
“Elevator” does blatantly what all lyric poems do: it repeats itself so that it might also change, making us feel that our experience of the language of the poem is an event in itself—not merely the recounting of an event that happened in the past but an event we want to experience again in the present. Depending on the degree to which multiple schemes of repetition are synchronized, working either with or against one another, some poems lean more toward the pole of difference (“New York”) while others lean toward the pole of sameness (“Elevator”), but every lyric poem repeats itself; every lyric poem discovers that it is different from itself. As Freud reminds us, there’s something primal about the desire to repeat—as if we couldn’t believe ourselves fully to be existing in the present if we weren’t able to reenact the past, altering ourselves in the process. Memory is not enough.
Strand’s “Elevator” gratifies this desire hyperbolically; but lest such gratification seem more droll than primal, consider two stanzas from the anonymous eighteenth-century ballad known as “The Gypsy Laddie” or “Black Jack Davey.”
Pull off, pull off them high-heeled shoes
All made of Spanish leather.
Get behind me on my horse,
And we’ll ride off together.
We’ll both ride off together.
Well, she pulled off them high-heeled shoes
All made of Spanish leather,
Got behind him on his horse,
And they rode off together.
They both rode off together.
“Black Jack Davey” has been recorded several dozen times, beginning in the 1930s; I’m quoting the version recorded more recently by Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Ballads are distinguished generally by the alternation of tetrameter and trimeter lines and also by the incremental repetition of lines or (in this case) entire stanzas. “Black Jack Davey” moves forward by repeating itself with one small difference, and in this version of the ballad the difference is very small indeed: reiterating the young woman’s acquiescence to Black Jack Davey’s seduction, the verbs of the second stanza shift from the
present imperative (“pull off them shoes”) to the past indicative (“she pulled off them shoes”).
This manner of stanzaic repetition is itself repeated throughout “Black Jack Davey,” the accumulating two-stanza units giving the impression that the ballad’s narrative moves forward only by circling back, telling the story twice. But near the song’s conclusion this pattern is subtly altered. These two stanzas describe the young woman’s unexpected refusal of her husband’s final entreaty.
Pull off, pull off them long blue gloves
All made of the finest leather.
Give to me your lily-white hand
And we’ll both go home together.
We’ll both go home together.
Well, she pulled off them long blue gloves
All made of the finest leather,
Gave to him her lily-white hand
And said good-bye forever,
Bid farewell forever.
In the earlier pair of stanzas, we discover that the young woman’s response to Black Jack Davey’s command is yes when the present imperative shifts to the past indicative: the line “we’ll ride off together” becomes “they rode off together.” In this pair, we discover that the woman’s response to her husband’s command is no: the line “we’ll go home together” becomes “said good-bye forever.” The ballad’s repeated instances of repetition make this pair of stanzas feel particularly surprising, but every such pair of stanzas enacts a discovery of difference through repetition. Having listened to “Black Jack Davey” once, we’ve already listened twice. And because twice is not enough, we listen again.
IX
SONG
“The words must of course determine the music,” said Plato of what we’ve come to call lyric poems. Today, we no longer expect a lyric poem to be sung, though we continue to take pleasure in songs without expecting that their lyrics could necessarily be described as poems. The ear of someone who reads lots of poems might catch an elegant pentameter line in W. C. Handy—
I hate to see de ev’nin’ sun go down
—or in the Rolling Stones—
I met a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis
How Poems Get Made Page 7