How Poems Get Made
Page 9
The most obvious answer is typography, to which I’ve been resorting throughout this discussion; by highlighting a particular syllable or word, italic or bold type can signal the intonation of a particular word or phrase. Especially in his earlier poems, Frank Bidart does this with bracing accuracy.
youchip of the incommensurate
closed worldAngel
The idiosyncratic use of punctuation, especially ungrammatical punctuation, can also score the intonation of a phrase, as we’ve seen in the poems of Emily Dickinson.
Deals—One—imperial—Thunderbolt—
But Dickinson’s procedures are almost impossible to imitate without seeming merely to be an imitator. And when deployed without Bidart’s precision, typographical indications of rhythm may inadvertently highlight a poem’s lack of intrinsic rhythmic vitality.
Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel—below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel—there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.
Here, the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wants us to feel that, among the five stressed syllables in the line “As light, of what we think we feel—there flows,” the greatest emphasis falls on think, making it the tonic syllable: “As light, of what we think we feel—there flows.” A poem’s tone may be ambiguous, and certainly part of a poem’s allure may be due to our inability to describe its tone unequivocally. But Arnold’s use of italics threatens to seem like compensation for an inability to control the intonation of his lines by poetic means, as if the strategic variation of the syntax within an ongoing metrical pattern were not enough.
Such control is precisely what we’ve heard Shakespeare muster in lines from his twelfth sonnet.
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard
Four of these stressed syllables are linked by similar sounds (borne, bier, bristly, beard). But because white stands apart, we’re liable to hear this syllable as the most emphatically emphasized of the five, giving the entire line a particular intonation: not Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard or Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard but
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard.
Similarly, because four of the five stressed syllables in the following line share similar sounds (loft, trees, see, leaves)—
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
—we’re liable to hear the first syllable of barren as the most emphatically emphasized of the five, especially because this intrusion of an alien phoneme is reinforced by rhythmical variation. The line scans easily as an iambic pentameter, but the fourth iamb is flipped into a trochee (barren), throwing extra emphasis on the syllable that already stands apart, so we hear the line not as When lofty trees I see barren of leaves or as When lofty trees I see barren of leaves but as
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves.
Working together in this way, echo and metrical variation determine the precise intonation not only of these pentameters from Shakespeare but of pentameters by Keats—
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
—in which fruit stands apart from sea, mist, mel-, and -ness, the extra emphasis on the syllable fruit enhanced by the way in which the three-syllable word fruitfulness makes the line’s final stressed syllable fall away—
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
—and also of pentameters by Stevens—
On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls
—in which vulgar stands apart from old, shore, ocean, and rolls, the extra emphasis on the syllable vul- enhanced by the adjacency of the echoing syllables old and shore before the caesura preceding it.
On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls
Such synchronizations of echo and rhythm determine the intonation of innumerable metrical lines; there are as many possible variations of these procedures as there are lines to enact them.
How would a free-verse poem exert such control?
They taste good to her
This sentence from William Carlos Williams’s “To a Poor Old Woman” is, like the sentence you said that, flat on the page. Linguists might say that there is no indication of the tonic syllable in this intonational unit; neither is there a metrical pattern that might be varied in order to throw emphasis on any particular syllable. Every poem chooses either explicitly or implicitly to do something at the expense of something else, however, and having relinquished the power of meter in this free-verse poem, Williams capitalizes on the power of line as a way to control the intonation of his syntax.
To a Poor Old Woman
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Following the first stanza’s run-on syntax and enjambed lines, the second stanza’s first line (“They taste good to her”) feels whole and complete, a moment of stability. Subsequent lines animate this sentence by reintroducing enjambment to the poem’s lineation, asking us to hear the sentence first as they taste good to her and then as they taste good to her. Each of these shifts in the placement of the tonic syllable adjusts the meaning of the sentence, but ultimately more provocative than the individual adjustments is the sequence of adjustments, which makes the poem feel purposefully thoughtful: it suggests that no one way of hearing the sentence will do complete justice to the rich experience of savoring the plum. “You can see it,” says the poem’s next line, but actually we’ve heard it, not seen it, the poem’s lineation creating a sequence of rhythms that in turn generate what we call the poem’s tone—the quietly rapt attentiveness it brings to even the most ordinary human pleasure.
Consider the lineation of Ellen Bryant Voigt’s free-verse poem “Sleep,” a poem whose unpunctuated syntax I examined earlier. This is not the way Voigt lineates her syntax.
I flung myself into the car
I drove like a fiend to the nearest store
I asked unthinking for unfiltered Luckies
oh brand of my girlhood
I paid the price
I took my prize to the car
I slit the cellophane
I tapped out one perfect white cylinder
I brought to my face the smell of the barns
This, in contrast, is how Voigt actually lineates her syntax.
I flung myself into the car I drove like a fiend
to the nearest store I asked unthinkingly for unfiltered
Luckies oh
brand of my girlhood I paid the price I took my prize to the
car I slit
the cellophane I tapped out one perfect white cylinder I
brought to my face
the smell of the barns the fires cooking it golden brown smell
of my father
my uncles my grandfather’s tin of loose tobacco his packet of
delicate paper
the deliberate way he rolled and licked and tapped and lit
and drew in
and relished it the smell of the wild girls behind the gym
the boys
in pickup trucks I sat in my car as the other cars crept by
I looked like a pervert it was perverse
a Lucky under my nose
What precisely do we mean if we say that these two lineations of the poem’s syntax have very different tones? Why, given that the words are in each case identical, does the second arrangement sound fiercely self-aware, rueful yet comical, while the first sounds self-satisfied?
Most of Voigt’s clauses are linked paratactically, laid side by side without subordination, and most of the clauses are simply declarative as well. My imposed lineation pre
serves the integrity of these clauses, resulting in a sequence of lines beginning with the first person pronoun and a monosyllabic verb (I flung, I drove, I asked, I paid, I took, I slit, I tapped, I brought), and this fully synchronized repetition encourages us to hear the tonic syllable in the same position in each line, producing a consistent rhythm: I flung myself into the car, I drove like a fiend, I asked unthinking. As a result, the poem seems like a record of considered thought (I came, I saw, I conquered), rather than a volatile act of thinking. A similar synchronization of end-stopped lines and paratactic syntax in Donne’s “The Canonization”—
For God’s sake hold your tongue
And let me love,
Or chide my palsy,
Or my gout
—similarly alters the tone, exasperation reduced to reason.
In contrast, Voigt’s actual lineation of “Sleep” avoids any consistent alignment of syntax and line (“I slit / the cellophane”), violating the strong grammatical integrity of the clauses with enjambment and thereby disrupting the regular rhythm of the parallel syntax. At the same time, her lineation emphasizes the weaker grammatical links between the clauses by running them together (“I looked like a pervert it was perverse”), thereby creating variable rhythms within the lines.
It is not the lack of punctuation alone that produces this rhythmic vitality, for whether punctuated or not, each of Voigt’s brief clauses is (like each of Donne’s) easily understood, and the lack of punctuation accentuates the work that the syntax is already doing in relationship to the lines: the poem refuses to synchronize syntactical closure with linear closure, and these disjunctions between brief clauses and long lines deflate the already weak organizational power of the parataxis. The poem sounds like the work not of the reliable witness but of the raconteur, someone who doesn’t realize “it was perverse” until the words “I looked like a pervert” provoke the insight. The tone is not predictably consistent, as it is in my relineated version of the poem, but rather consistently shifting, as it is in Williams’s little poem.
Tone, says Voigt herself in what seems to me our finest available exploration of the topic, “is lodged primarily in the poem’s nondiscursive elements, especially in its music. Music is meant here to include both the broad units of repetition, sentence structure, and lineation and the small units of syllable, vowel, and consonant.” Voigt uses the metaphor of a poem’s music carefully here, making it clear that poetic tone is produced not by musical but by linguistic devices—by the way in which the elements of the medium are arranged in order to produce what we recognize as tone, just as those elements are arranged to produce what we recognize as voice or image.
Contextual information may help us to determine the tone of a particular utterance, but unlike daily conversation, lyric poems are often short on context, and some have none at all. Because tone, however equivocal, may be deduced most reliably from the sonic properties of the language, we may be guided by tone long before we’ve had a chance to determine what the poem is about; rereading a poem, we may remain captivated by its tone long after we’ve understood the poem so well we know it by heart.
XI
PROSE
Lyric, epic, dramatic: this tripartite division has been a commonplace in western aesthetics since the eighteenth century, and while ancient precedents were invoked to justify it, Plato and Aristotle in fact had almost nothing to say about the poetry they called melic rather than lyric. The word lyric, as I’ve mentioned, was not coined until after the third century BCE, when the librarians of Alexandria began collecting the remaining fragments of Pindar, Sappho, and Anacreon. “Imagine,” says the classicist W. R. Johnson, “all of English literature from Chaucer to Tennyson, long circulated in manuscripts indifferent and bad, suddenly dumped helter-skelter in your lap. The task that confronted the Alexandrian scholar-librarians was herculean.”
Today there is of course an enormous body of lyric poems in English to look back on, from before Chaucer to after Tennyson, and if our long-term investment in the epic has seemed to dwindle, it’s because the narrative energies of the epic poem have since the eighteenth century been subsumed by the novel. With the rise of the novel’s prestige, poetry became increasingly synonymous with lyric poetry, and tensions between narrative and lyric modes came to seem increasingly fraught. Novelists told stories; poets offered fleeting glimpses. At the same time, poets coveted the worldliness that seemed to come naturally to prose writers, and prose writers coveted the interiority that had come to seem the special province of the lyric. Not coincidentally, the prose-poem’s equivocal status became increasingly pressing, and in certain circumstances the words lyric and narrative could each describe writing that was not to be admired. This continues to be the case even today.
Yet the medium from which both poems and prose are made is the same medium: one can as easily describe the diction, syntax, rhythm, or tone of a prose narrative as of a lyric poem, as my brief description of Donne’s prose suggests. I’ve been emphasizing that any lyric poem is forged from these primary elements, just as a painting is forged from a manipulation of the primary colors; but what might be the difference between a passage of prose we’re tempted to call lyrical and a passage of prose that actually inhabits a lyric structure?
Consider a passage from Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (“senta” is an Italian command, meaning “listen”).
Rinaldi lay still in the sun breathing with difficulty. “You and me we’ve made a separate peace. Senta. Senta Rinaldi.” Nick turned his head carefully and looked at Rinaldi. Stretcher bearers would be along any time now. It was going well. Things were getting forward in the town. Up the street were other dead. Two Austrian dead lay in the rubble in the shade of the house. The pink wall of the house opposite had fallen out from the roof, and an iron bedstead hung twisted toward the street. Nick looked straight ahead brilliantly. Rinaldi, big backed, his equipment sprawling, lay face downward against the wall. The day was very hot. The sun shone on his face. His face was sweaty and dirty. He had been hit in the spine.
Here, I’ve arranged Hemingway’s sentences backwards: because the syntax is exclusively paratactic, the passage makes as much sense as when arranged forwards. But like my rearranged versions of “Western Wind” or “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters,” this rearranged passage has a very different effect, despite the fact that its information is unchanged. Observation follows observation, and we are left to deduce whatever elements of causation determine their order—or, more provocatively, we are left to feel that the order has determined whatever sense of causation we’ve deduced.
Arranged forwards or backwards, this passage does not foreground the construction of narrative time, but especially when arranged backwards, its sentences build a structure familiar from lyric poems because we do not begin with foundational information (“He had been hit in the spine”) that is then elaborated upon, spine leading by contiguity to face and then to sun. Instead, the same information appears not as foundation but as discovery, for after we move through the same associative chain in reverse (sun, face, spine), the shift from the simple past (“His face was sweaty”) to the past perfect (“He had been hit in the spine”) feels revelatory. If these sentences were lineated as complete syntactical units—
The day was very hot.
The sun shone on his face.
His face was sweaty and dirty.
He had been hit in the spine.
—we’d feel that the additional function words required to enact the shift to the past perfect (had been) also enact a rhythmic shift, a movement from three-beat lines to a two-beat line larded with extra unstressed syllables. If these sentences were lineated in the order in which they actually appear—
He had been hit in the spine.
His face was sweaty and dirty.
The sun shone on his face.
The day was very hot.
—their tone would recall the tone of my relineation of Voigt’s “Sleep,” the rhythm of the parallel syntax settli
ng into a relentless predictability. While the forward version of this passage does reach for the rich verbal texture we associate with lyric poems, the backward version harnesses the revelatory power of lyric structure.
“Karintha,” from Jean Toomer’s Cane, harnesses that power self-consciously. This hybrid construction opens with a quatrain that is subsequently repeated between short passages of prose. This refrain also repeats itself internally.
Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon,
O cant you see it, O cant you see it,
Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon
. . . When the sun goes down.
We’ve seen, reading Wyatt, that a refrain embodies the wish that something might stay the same while also reinvigorating our knowledge that everything will change: “Her skin is like dusk . . . Her skin is like dusk.” Following the first iteration of this refrain is a brief prose narrative describing the preternaturally seductive Karintha as a child: predictably, hypotactic syntax dominates the narrative.
At dusk, during the hush just after the sawmill had closed down, and before any of the women had started their supper-getting-ready songs, her voice, high-pitched, shrill, would put one’s ears to itching.
But as “Karintha” moves forward, the lyric impulse of the refrain enters the syntax of the prose. After the second iteration of the refrain comes a brief prose passage in the present tense: Karintha has grown up, and the sentences shift from hypotaxis to parataxis.
Karintha is a woman. Young men run stills to make her money. Young men go to the big cities and run on the road. Young men go away to college. They all want to bring her money.