How Poems Get Made

by James Longenbach

  —but our enjoyment of these songs is not contingent upon such recognitions, even if in the case of “Honky Tonk Woman” our pleasure does depend on the fact that, while the syncopated rhythm of the melody emphasizes the stressed syllables gin and bar, the unstressed syllables soaked and room, with their prominently long vowel sounds, refuse to lie down quietly. The vitality of great poems depends on such effects all the time, and precisely because we no longer imagine poems as songs, we expect the language of a poem to marshal complicated rhythmic effects on its own, unbolstered by a musical setting. Today, the music of poetry could not be other than a metaphor.

  “The great lyric age lasted while Campion made his own music,” said Pound, who lamented the fact that the ancient marriage of words and music had hit the rocks in the seventeenth century. The Renaissance composer-poet Thomas Campion stands apart for having set his own poems to music brilliantly; he is as important to the history of English music as he is to the history of English poetry. But the very word lyric tells a more complicated story than Pound’s remark suggests. Plato described a sung poem not as lyric but as melic, and the word lyric was not employed until after the third century BCE, when the scholars of the Alexandrian library set out to preserve the remaining poems of ancient Greek poets such as Sappho and Anacreon. By this time, the musical settings of these poems had been lost or disregarded, and, as the classicist Glenn Most reminds us, the word lyric was coined to refer not to the experience of a sung poem but to the experience of a poem on the page. From its first usages, the word commemorates the fraught relationship of words and music, not their happy marriage.

  Any of Campion’s poetic contemporaries might have expected their poems to be set to music; many of Campion’s musical contemporaries wrote beautiful settings of poems, as the songs of the Renaissance composer John Dowland testify. But like most of the lyrics set to music by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the lyrics set to music by Dowland do not always sustain much interest outside the musical setting.

  The more secure, the more the stroke we feele.

  Campion offered this line in his “Observations in the Art of English Poesie” as what he called, without enthusiasm, a line of pure iambics: ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum. Because all but one of the unstressed syllables are function words, and because the natural rhythm of the one multisyllabic word consorts easily with the ongoing metrical pattern, the line sounds straightforwardly iambic. The line “I met a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis” is more rhythmically complicated than that, and so is virtually every line that Campion wrote. The lines “Follow your Saint, follow with accents sweet” and “Follow thy faire sun, unhappy shadow” are both iambic pentameters, rich with echoing syllables, but the relationship of stressed to unstressed syllables is in each line unique.

  Follow your Saint, follow with accents sweet

  Follow thy faire sunne, unhappy shaddowe

  Campion’s great achievement lies not simply in the fact that he composed exquisite music for his own poems, but in the fact that his poems sustain the most subtle rhythmic effects on their own, effects that may challenge his musical settings.

  Composing his ayres, as he called them, Campion often employed a six-line stanza (rhymed ababcc) that had long been a mainstay of the native tradition of English song, and typically he limited his ayres to two stanzas, making each stanza feel like one half of a strategically bivalve structure: like the two parts of Mark Strand’s “Elevator,” the two stanzas are the same but different, and the ayre refuses the resolution that a third iteration of the stanzaic pattern (much less a fourth or fifth) might provide. Campion covets this uneasy balance, for the life of his ayres inheres in the tension between their form (registered in the repetition of an identical stanza) and their structure (registered in the shape of the changing syntax that moves through the stanzas).

  In itself, this tension is unremarkable. We’ve heard it in Shakespeare, in Moore, and in the anonymous lyric “Western Wind,” which consists of three sentences that do not reinforce the formal symmetry of its single stanza (alternating tetrameters and trimeters rhymed xaxa). What happens if you add a second iteration of this same form?

  My life closed twice before its close—

  It yet remains to see

  If Immortality unveil

  A third event to me

  So huge, so hopeless to conceive

  As these that twice befell.

  Parting is all we know of heaven,

  And all we need of hell.

  The two stanzas of this poem by Emily Dickinson share the form of “Western Wind,” but while the two stanzas suggest that the poem will break into equal parts of four lines each, the syntax breaks into two unequal parts: when the first stanza concludes, the syntax of its sentence continues (“A third event to me / So huge, so hopeless”), making a six-line unit that is followed by the final epigrammatic two-line unit: “Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell.” As Dickinson suggests of her life, her poem closes twice, and without the resistance provided by the completed form of her first stanza, the poem’s first sentence could not throw us so determinedly into the final two lines.

  Campion’s two-stanza ayres are designed to take full advantage of that resistance. The ababcc rhyme scheme of “When thou must home to shades of under ground” suggests that each stanza will break into a four-line unit (the abab quatrain) followed by a two-line unit (the couplet); this arrangement suggests in turn that something will be concluded at the end of the stanza, just as the final couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet makes us feel that something ought to be concluded. But as in Dickinson’s poem, the ayre’s first sentence does not end when the first stanza ends: this six-line adverbial clause is left hanging, its structural energy overriding the formal integrity of the couplet and throwing us into the second stanza.

  When thou must home to shades of under ground,

  And there ariv’d, a newe admired guest,

  The beauteous spirits do ingirt thee round

  White Iope, blith Helen, and the rest,

  To heare the stories of thy finisht love,

  From that smoothe toong whose musicke hell can move . . .

  Then the first four lines of the second stanza complete the sentence.

  Then wilt thou speake of banqueting delights,

  Of masks and revels which sweete youth did make,

  Of Turnies and great challenges of knights,

  And all these triumphs for thy beauties sake.

  Here, in the second stanza, the syntax has finally come to rest where the abab quatrain gives way to the final couplet, preparing us for the big finish. But when we turn to the couplet, the syntactical structure of the first ten lines of the poem (When . . . then) is repeated in two lines.

  When thou hast told these honours done to thee,

  Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me.

  The ayre consists of two sentences that repeat the same structure, but this syntactical repetition is not synchronized with the formal repetition of the stanza. What’s more, the final couplet’s repetition of the poem’s initial adverbial clause, reduced from six lines to one, divides the concluding couplet against itself, throwing much more weight on its revelatory second line: “Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me.”

  What happens to this animating tension when the poem is set to music? The fashion for the kind of songs Campion wrote, songs for a solo voice accompanied by a lute, was driven by the conviction that music should serve the text, making its sense intelligible rather than treating its syllables as opportunities for the sonic adventures that distinguished the polyphonic madrigal. Like many of his musical contemporaries, Campion was influenced by the Camerata, a group of Florentine musicians and theorists who championed a vocal line embodying the natural rhythms of syntax, and also by the Académie de Musique et de Poésie, whose members championed musical settings embodying the contrived rhythms of prosody. In my terms, the Italians wanted the musical setting of a poem to serve the po
em’s structure, while the French wanted the setting to serve the poem’s form. So while the French tradition asks us to hear form at the expense of structure, the Italian asks us to hear structure at the expense of form: both traditions were motivated by the notion of serving the text, highlighting its intelligibility, but either tradition might be accused of diminishing the verbal life of the poem. Giulio Caccini, an influential composer associated with the Camerata, called polyphony a “laceration” of poetry, but poetry is already a laceration of itself, form and structure acting out tensions we experience as pleasure.

  Campion did not use metaphors of violence, like laceration, to describe the proper relationship of text and music; on the contrary, like his French and Italian contemporaries, he spoke of his desire to “couple my Words and Notes lovingly together.” At issue here is the nature of words. For if one imagines that the words of poems are at peace with one another, then it would be (as it were) loving to set them peacefully; however, if one understands that the words of a poem are constantly performing multiple tasks at once—the words broken into syllables that are commandeered by the poem’s form, the words conjoined into clauses and phrases that are commandeered by the poem’s structure—then it would be loving to set those words to music that may seem to resist the words.

  Campion set his poems strophically; that is, each stanza is set to the same music, just as every stanza of “Black Jack Davey” is set to the same music. Listening to Bob Dylan sing this ballad, we first hear the setting of the lines in which the husband entreats his wife to come home with him.

  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.

  Then we hear the lines describing the wife’s refusal set to the same music.

  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.

  While the language of these two stanzas is almost identical until the fourth line, the musical setting of the two stanzas continues to be identical even as the language of the fourth line changes. The discovery of the wife’s refusal is wrenching enough on the page, since the lyric’s repetitions have led us to expect the line in the second stanza to be not “And said good-bye forever” but “And they went home together.” The fact that the music doesn’t change as the words change makes the discovery even more wrenching.

  In Campion’s strophic setting of “When thou must home to shades of under ground,” the music repeats itself not only from stanza to stanza but within each stanza: the musical phrases setting the stanza’s first five lines all begin with the same rhythm—three half notes followed by a dotted half note. And because the ayre is set in triple time, extra weight is thrown on the dotted half note, since it is always the downbeat of a new measure. As a result, the musical rhythm trumps the generally iambic rhythms of the lines: not ti tum ti tum (“When thou must home”) but ti ti ti tum (“When thou must home”—“Then wilt thou speak”—“When thou hast told”). This rhythmic continuity makes the first five lines of each stanza feel wedded to one another, despite the fact that the first four lines are tied together by the abab rhyme scheme and consequently distinct from the fifth line, which is part of the concluding cc couplet.

  What happens in the setting of the sixth line, which in the second stanza is so shockingly revelatory (“Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me”)? After teaching us to expect a continuing rhythmic pattern (ti ti ti tum), Campion distinguishes the stanza’s final line with a new rhythm (a half note rest followed by a half note, then two whole notes), a rhythm that throws the triple time off kilter by de-emphasizing the downbeat and making the song suddenly feel as if it were counted not in three but in two.

  This manipulation of the musical meter, called a hemiola, may be most familiar from West Side Story, in which Leonard Bernstein’s music makes us hear the dactylic line “I like to be in America” not as “I like to be in America” but as “I like to be in Amer—ic—a.” In Campion’s song, the hemiola makes us hear the final line of the second stanza not as “Then tell, O tell,” as the previous musical phrases had led us to expect, but as “Then tell—O—tell.” Even on the page, that plangent “O” asked to be stressed, disrupting the more placid iambics of the previous line, and Campion’s setting makes us hear the line’s rhythm in exactly that way, creating a moment of dramatic tension perfectly suited to the way in which the poem’s syntax throws us into the shocking conclusion of the second stanza: “Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me.”

  The same music cannot serve different words equally, however, and because both stanzas of the poem are set to the same music, the hemiola also occurs at the end of the first stanza, which (given the shape of its incomplete syntax) arrives at no conclusion whatsoever. But the way in which Campion’s strophic settings alternately confirm or resist his syntax reinforces his decision to write poems that avoid an easy confluence of form and structure in the first place. It makes sense that a composer who was also a great poet would think this way; Campion was not setting prose sentences, after all, but a poem whose repetitive syntax is already at odds with its repetition of a stanza form. His poems are in tension with the music because they are productively in tension with themselves—which is why his poems remain gripping, independent of their musical settings, as many song lyrics do not.

  Since the advent of recorded music, many of us have listened to songs we love over and over again; more recently, since the invention of the iPod, with its repeat function, many of us have done so obsessively—not because we can’t remember the song’s information as such, but because we enjoy the feeling of experiencing the song again, its musical and linguistic phrases moving forward in time. People who love poems, I’ve been arguing, similarly reread them not to acquire new knowledge but to reinhabit the enactment of what they already know, that enactment growing richer to the degree that they’re seduced by the movement of the medium.

  “Allow me to erect a straw man,” says the musicologist Elizabeth Margulis in On Repeat, her study of musical repetition: “the notion that music is communicative, in the sense that it conveys information.” The rhythmic and harmonic repetition crucial to musical structure, she continues, skewering her straw man, show that the transmission of information “cannot be music’s primary function”: the repetitive nature of music itself seduces us to repeat it. Syntactical, rhythmic, and phonological repetition, on which all poetic structure depends, suggests the same thing about poetry—even though the medium of poetry is inevitably communicative, as good for parking tickets as it is for poems. A poem’s insight or information may be shockingly relevant, even after hundreds of years, but speaking metaphorically (because what we refer to easily as the music of poetry is in no strict sense musical), a permanently compelling poem is one that has already set itself to music.

  X

  TONE

  What are poets talking about when they talk about tone? Ancient Greek rhetoricians used the word tonos (meaning, literally, a tightening or stretching, as a string on a lute might be stretched) to characterize the quality of an orator’s performance of a speech; they were interested in describing the sounds produced by a particular human throat on a particular occasion. Predictably, our now more common sense of tone as the general quality of a written text, rather than the quality of a particular oratorical performance, began to prevail with the rise of print culture in the seventeenth century, and in the early years of the twentieth century the influential literary critic I. A. Richards defined poetic tone as a speaker’s “attitude to his listener.”

  But it’s important to remember that Richards uses the words speaker and listener metaphorically; he’s talking about a written text, not an oratorical performance. Given that our sense of a poem’s speaker is produced by the more fundamental characteristics of a poem’s diction, synt
ax, and rhythm, how might we say that tone is produced similarly on the page? How are syllables, words, and phrases manipulated in order to produce the qualities we want to describe with the word tone?

  Consider a simple sentence, three words, three syllables.

  You said that

  Depending on how we understand the syntax of this sentence, it might be a statement (You said that), a question (You said that?), or an exclamation (You said that!), and each one of these three sentences sounds a little different from the other two. One feels one’s voice rising in the final syllable of the question, falling in the final syllable of the statement, and falling more dramatically in the final syllable of the exclamation.

  Using the word intonation differently from the way musicians do, linguists would say that the statement, question, and exclamation are distinguished by three different intonations of the simple sentence. But the possibilities don’t end there, for each of these three intonations will in turn sound different from itself, depending on which of the three syllables we emphasize; linguists refer to the emphasized syllable as the tonic syllable of an intonational unit (which is often but not necessarily a grammatical clause or phrase).

  You said that?

  You said that?

  You said that?

  In real life or on the stage, the context of an ongoing conversation might indicate these differences instantly, though often in real life we make mistakes about context, and sometimes we intentionally violate the decorum of a particular context; a child who asks You said that? at the wrong moment might be told sharply to watch your tone—a reprimand that deploys a visual metaphor to assert control over a sonic quality. How do you watch a tone?

  The child might not know what to do if he were enjoined to shift the emphasis from the second syllable of the question to the first, but such adjustments are more precisely what we’re responding to when we talk about the tone of a particular utterance: given the three available syntactical options (statement, question, exclamation), along with the three available placements of the tonic syllable (first, second, or third syllable emphasized), we could say that the sentence you said that might be uttered in nine different ways. A musical setting may emphasize the intonation of a particular line, as we’ve seen, but how exactly do poets make such discriminations clear on the page—as clear as they are when we’re actually listening to a particular person at a particular time? Punctuation may of course distinguish a statement from a question, but how do we know that we’re supposed to hear the question You said that? as You said that? and not as You said that?