The Fourth Dimension of a Poem

by M H Abrams

  So throughout the poem: an expressive utterance manifests a counter-rhythm that plays with and against the underlying metric pulse. And as recurrently earlier, so at the very end, the metrical and the intonational stresses coincide; the poem thus concludes with a plangent double emphasis on the sentient center of all this suspenseful longing—“me.”

  Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

  Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;

  Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.

  The firefly wakens; waken thou with me.

  5 Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,

  And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

  Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,

  And all thy heart lies open unto me.

  Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves

  10 A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

  Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

  And slips into the bosom of the lake.

  So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

  Into my bosom and be lost in me.

  5.

  Ernest Dowson, “Cynara” (1891)

  I have been inordinately fond of Ernest Dowson’s “Cynara” ever since, as a susceptible college sophomore, I came across it in a survey course in English literature. I like it not despite, but because of, its extravagance. The subject of the poem is outrageous, deliberately intended, in 1891, to shock the late-Victorian reader. The lyric speaker, during a long night of dissipation, and while lying in the arms of a prostitute (note in the second stanza “her bought red mouth”), is obsessed with the memory of an earlier love, and asserts that this obsession, in these circumstances, proves his fidelity to that loved one. I find appealing the candor with which Dowson flaunts his poem’s high artifice. He begins with an epigraph from a Latin ode, in which the poet Horace, referring to a former love, declares, “I am not as I used to be, under the reign of the good Cynara”; Dowson then appropriates the name of Horace’s mistress for his own lost love. The artifice is highlighted by the intricacy of the six-line stanza, in which five of the lines are written in iambic hexameter—a six-stress meter that is rare and difficult to sustain in English without monotony. The poet, however, interpolates in each stanza a fifth line, which is shortened from six to five stresses, and is made additionally plangent because it intersects the two-line refrain and its resounding rhyme of “passion” with “fashion.”

  Dowson is really a masterful metrist. Take, for example, in the opening line of the second stanza, the sequence of six stressed syllables—“Í félt hér wárm héart béat.” The effect of uttering these words is to make you feel each individual throb of her warm heart. And immediately following, we get the two strong sequential stresses in the phrase “Níght lóng”; here, the effect of the act of utterance is to convey, by mimicry, the length of that night of love.

  To mention one more example of Dowson’s exploitation of the enunciative dimension of language: in the second and third lines of stanza 3, note the suspension in the juncture between those two lines, forced by the need to re-form the vocal organs from the ng to the d, in the adjacent stressed syllables “throng” and “dancing.” We must move from the back of the tongue at the roof of the mouth, to the front of the tongue just above the teeth. The suspension, effort, and release in the enunciative action mimics the bodily action when we dance—

  Flung roses, roses riotously with the thróng,

  Dáncing. . . .

  That dance, by the way, was very likely a Viennese waltz, a somewhat scandalous dance that was all the rage in 1891, when Dowson wrote “Cynara.” And what about this possibility? Immediately after the word “dancing” we find a succession of four l’s, each formed by the pressure and quick release of the blade of the tongue against the roof of the mouth—

  Dancing, to put thy pale lost lilies out of mind.

  The final l in “pale,” however, merges with the initial l in “lost,” and also gives it added emphasis. The result, in the act of utterance, is a sequence of three syllables beginning with l: “lost lilies—ló li li—1-2-3. The enunciated syllables mimic the triple beat and swing of the Viennese waltz.

  If someone were to object that, in this instance, I claim too much for the fourth dimension of Dowson’s language, I would have to confess that I half agree with him. But be that as it may, I am confident that the riotous dance Dowson had in mind was a Viennese waltz. It is significant that in 1885, six years before “Cynara,” Dowson’s friend and fellow poet Oscar Wilde had published “The Harlot’s House.” The setting of this poem is an upper-class bordello in which the patrons are dancing wildly to an orchestra playing what the poem explicitly identifies as a waltz by Johann Strauss.

  Prominent throughout Dowson’s “Cynara” is the unabashed theatricality—even staginess—of its high rhetoric and broad gestures, which would be at home in a lush Victorian melodrama: “Last night, ah, yesternight”; “Yea, I was desolate.” And in the third stanza, “I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind. . . .” Yes, that’s where Margaret Mitchell got the title for her Civil War novel. Incidentally, from this poem derives also the recurrent phrase in verses by that very literate songwriter, Cole Porter. Do you remember?

  I’m always true to you, darling, in my fashion,

  I’m always true to you, darling, in my way.

  Such literary echoes reassure me that I’m not the only reader to have been beguiled by Dowson’s flamboyant poem.

  Despite its patent contrivances, “Cynara,” it seems to me, escapes being meretricious or insincere; instead, the very candor of its artifice generates a kind of authenticity, building up to the outcry in the fifth, shortened line of the last stanza: “Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire.” In rendering this line, as in the rest of the poem, the reader is licensed—indeed, required—to be histrionic, but must take care not to slip into self-parody. Such restraint is made easier—and the poem is also made much more interesting—by the teasing phrase that closes each stanza, and lingers in memory when the poem ends: “in my fashion.” How is one to take those words? Clearly, they indicate the speaker’s awareness of the extravagance of his claim; but do they suggest also a touch of self-mockery? Well, that depends on the interpretation by the individual reader, as that interpretation is expressed by the intonation the reader gives to the phrase, especially at the close of the final stanza.

  Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

  Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine

  There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed

  Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

  And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

  5 Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

  All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,

  Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;

  Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;

  10 But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

  When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

  I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

  Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

  15 Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;

  But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

  Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

  I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,

  20 But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,

  Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;

&nb
sp; And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,

  Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

  The poem is quite wonderful, isn’t it?—in its fashion.

  6.

  A. R. Ammons, “Mansion” (1963)

  We come, in closing, to a poem by the late A. R. Ammons—Archie Ammons—who was a longtime professor here at Cornell, and a major American poet.

  You couldn’t get farther from the conspicuous complexity and artifice of Dowson’s “Cynara” than the conspicuous simplicity and artlessness of Ammons’ “Mansion.” Ammons renounces almost all the traditional resources that mark the distinction between poetry and ordinary speech. He gives up meter and rhyme for free verse. He avoids the use of words and phrasing that, through the nineteenth century and later, were the standard parlance of poetry. How many noticed, for example, the number of poems we have considered that said “thou,” “thee,” and “thy” instead of “you” and “your”? “But how could I forget thee”; “waken thou with me”; “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara.” The use of that archaic pronoun is an index to other locutions that we take for granted in traditional poems, although written at a time when they were rarely used in ordinary talk. In Ammons’ “Mansion” we hear instead a forthright, everyday American vernacular—with a slight North Carolina accent; the kind of plain talk that has no scruple about ending both of the first two sentences with a preposition: “to be delivered to”; “to show its motions with.”

  “Mansion” turns out to deal with a deeply human issue: What are we to make of life, knowing that we are mortal? But it begins with the utmost casualness—

  So it came time / for me to cede myself—

  as if death were the most natural thing in the world. (Ammons uses the word “cede” in the sense: “to officially turn myself over to.”) The setting of the poem is the southwestern American desert, where the speaker addresses himself to the wind. So had many earlier poets. Shelley, for example, apostrophized the wind grandly—“O wild West Wind!”—at the beginning of his great “Ode to the West Wind.” In “Mansion,” however, the poetic speaker, with no rhetorical ceremony, engages the desert wind in a friendly chat. He offers his body to the wind—dust to dust—and by doing so, tacitly accepts his own participation in the natural cycle of life and death. (That’s the rationale, in the fourth stanza, for the startling figure, “When the tree of my bones / rises from my skin”; the point is, that when he returns to dust, his sun-bleached rib cage will be as natural a part of the landscape as a desert tree.) For his offer the wind is grateful; because, it remarks, in playing its role in the natural cycle, it needs dust in order to make its motions visible. It then asks what it can do in return. In the lyric speaker’s response, the colloquialism rises in stylistic pitch; the poet even introduces two quite unprosaic neologisms:

  come and whirlwinding / stroll my dust. . . .

  “Whirlwind” is a noun, but it is used here as the present participle of a verb. “Stroll” is an even bolder invention, because it is an intransitive verb used transitively—“stroll my dust.” As such, it presses us to recognize that it is what Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty called a portmanteau term; that is, it fuses the word “stroll” (to move casually) with the word “strew” (“strew my dust”). In “Mansion,” however, this momentary heightening of the speech is whimsical; it serves only to remind us of the traditional high lyric style that this poem tacitly plays against, in order to achieve its distinctive countertraditional effects.

  One last reference to the role of the fourth dimension—enunciation—in a poem. The word “whirlwinding” contains two prominent w’s. It is notable how often the speech-sound indicated by a w is foregrounded in other poetic references to the wind—in Shelley’s “O wild west wind”; Shakespeare’s “Blow, blow, thou winter wind”; A. E. Housman’s

  The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers

  Stream from the hawthorn in the wind away. . . .

  And for that matter, in Ammons’ own very short wind-poem:

  The reeds give

  way to the

  wind and give

  the wind away.

  That recurrent w is no accident. We form the speech-sound by compressing our lips and forcing air through them. That is, we blow the wind through our lips in the act of uttering poetic lines that signify the blowing wind: “whirlwinding.”

  The speaker, then, requests the obliging wind to blow his dust to a place where he can see the ocotillo (a cactus tree) and the desert wren. The phrasing is odd—deliberately odd, in order to suggest what it doesn’t explicitly say. He asks the wind to strew his dust where

  I can see

  how the ocotillo does

  And how saguaro-wren is. . . .

  These phrases serve, tacitly, to humanize the relations of the lyric speaker to the ocotillo and the wren. They do so by echoing the two standard greetings between human beings—“How do you do?” and “How are you?”—but converting the second-person interrogative mode to the third-person declarative mode—“how do you do?”; “how the ocotillo does”; “how are you?”; “how saguaro-wren is.” In this way the tree and wren, like that other natural object the wind, are humanized, made companionable with the human observer, at the same time that all four are represented as fellow participants in the processes of nature.

  In the last stanza, the speaker requests that, at nightfall, the wind drop his dust “here.” I had read the poem a number of times before I recognized the significance of that simple locative adverb. The speaker asks that, after he dies, the wind deposit him here; that is, at the very place he is standing while he is talking to the wind, in order that, after death, he may continue to do—what? Exactly what he is doing at this place while alive.

  Ammons’ poem anticipating his mortality thus concludes in a tacit celebration of life, in such elemental enjoyments as looking at a desert tree, observing a desert wren, and finally, watching the dusk and anticipating the dawn. In its tone, furthermore, the closing segment of the poem also conveys, without saying so, an affirmation of life in this world. How does it manage this feat of communicating an essential point that it doesn’t express?

  For one thing, the speaker ends his request to the wind at nightfall, yet looks forward to daybreak; the poem concludes—in a stanza that is one line shorter than the preceding stanzas—with the emphatic present tense of the verb, “breaks.” And notice the slight surprise in the phrasing of the concluding line. Where we would expect the simple statement “and see the day break,” we get instead “and think how morning breaks.” “And think”; that is, he will ponder the possible significance of the fact that night gives way to day. By this phrasing, Ammons achieves also a subtle effect. At the end of the earlier stanzas of the poem, the free verse has tended to become metrical. Now, at the end of the entire poem, through all three of its closing lines, the irregular free-verse rhythms modulate into the assured, steady beat of an entirely regular iambic meter:

  whĕre wé căn wátch

  thĕ clósĭng úp ŏf dáy

  ănd thínk hŏw mórnĭng bréaks

  Whatever Ammons may lose by not using a regular meter, he recuperates, in this and other poems, by resorting to that meter for special, unspoken purposes. By this and other means Ammons, without saying so, writes a poem about dying that celebrates the values in living. To put it the other way: The poet tacitly affirms life while tacitly acquiescing to the fact of his mortality.

  I said earlier that the poem was conspicuously simple and artless. The statement is, I think, true, but can be misleading. For in this, as in others of his lyric poems, in his individual—at times idiosyncratic—way, Ammons is a meticulous craftsman. It might be less misleading to put it this way: the effects of “Mansion” are produced by an art that hides its art, co
nspicuously. That is, Ammons intends his reader to be aware of what the poem does not say—of what it resists saying—and to be aware also of the standard artfulness of traditional poems in this lyric mode that this poem silently plays against.

  An extreme instance of Ammons’ reliance on what he doesn’t tell you occurs at the very beginning of the poem, in the baffling title, “Mansion.” What does a mansion have to do with the austere desert setting of this poem?

  The answer was provided to me by Roger Gilbert, my colleague at Cornell, who is writing what will be an indispensable book about Archie Ammons and his poetry: Roger showed me a statement Ammons wrote in 1987, in which he said that he was especially influenced as a poet “by the only poetry I knew as a child, hymns.” To illustrate this influence, Ammons quoted the opening lines of a hymn. That hymn is called “An Empty Mansion,” and Roger Gilbert found that it was included in a songbook that belonged to Archie’s family. The first stanza (from which, remember, Archie quoted the opening lines in his listing of poetic influences), reads:

  Here I labor and toil as I look for a home,

  Just a humble abode among men,

  While in heaven a mansion is waiting for me

  And a gentle voice pleading “come in.”

  (The hymn is in turn a commentary on the biblical text of John 14:2: “In my father’s house are many mansions.”) There can be little doubt that, by naming it “Mansion,” Ammons deliberately counterposes his poem against the purport of the hymn. That is: in choosing the wind to cede himself to, Ammons implicitly chooses, in preference to a mansion in the sky, what the hymn derogated as “just a humble abode”—an abode here amid the simplicities of the desert where, conjoined in a natural fellowship, and as fellow participant in the natural cycle of life and death, he can observe the ocotillo and the wren, watch the nightfall, and await the sunrise.

  By relying throughout on indirection, suggestion, understatement, and nonstatement, Ammons accepted the risk that his spare and powerful little poem might slip by a casual reader as pleasant, perhaps, but inconsequential. By the same token “Mansion” sets anyone who undertakes to read it aloud with a daunting challenge: How do you read what the poem says in such a way as to convey the many other things, essential to the range and depth of its meaning, that the poem, conspicuously, does not say?