The Language of Contemporary Poetry: A Framework for Poetic Analysis (Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style) 3031097483, 9783031097485

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
Abbreviations
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Contemporary Poetry and Textual Meaning
1.1 Introduction to Contemporary Poetry and the Scope of the Book
1.1.1 What is Textual Meaning?
1.1.2 What Do I Mean by Contemporary Poetry?
1.1.3 What Am I not Going to Cover in This Book?
1.2 Introduction to the Textual Meaning Framework
1.2.1 What is the Critical Stylistic Framework?
1.2.2 Why Widen It? (to Poetry)
1.2.3 Existing Textual-Conceptual Functions
1.2.4 What’s Missing?
1.2.5 Core vs. Periphery?
1.3 Research Questions and Methods
1.3.1 Aims of the Research
1.3.2 Research Questions
1.3.3 Methodology
1.3.4 Questions of Research Quality: Rigour, Significance and Originality
1.4 How Textual Meaning Links to Stylistics
1.5 The Poems
1.6 Guide to the Rest of the Book
References
Part I Core Features of Textual Meaning
2 Naming and Describing: People, Places and Things in Poems
2.1 Why Naming?
2.2 How People and Things Are Named
2.3 The Effects of Naming—Conjuring Up and Populating
2.3.1 Making the Reader See Anew
2.3.2 The Thrill of Recognition
2.3.3 Naming and Creating
2.4 The Names in a Poem—Patterns and Developments
2.4.1 Prayer
2.4.2 Summer Evening
2.4.3 Men on Allotments
2.5 Overlaps with Other Textual Effects
2.5.1 Semantically Separate but Adjacent/Co-Occurring/Embedded TCFs
2.5.2 TCFs Contributing to a Single Effect Jointly
2.6 Naming as Poetic Technique
References
3 Representing Processes: Actions, States and Events in Poetry
3.1 How We Represent Processes
3.2 Foregrounded Verb Choices (External Deviation)
3.3 Verbal Choices in Creating the Conditions for Internal Deviation
3.4 Overlaps with Other Textual Effects
3.5 Verb Choices in Poetry
References
4 Prioritising: Subordination and Information Structure in Poems
4.1 How Syntax Prioritises and Why
4.1.1 Main Versus Subordinate Clauses
4.1.2 Focus and Marked Clause Structures
4.1.3 Unwieldy Syntax in Contemporary Poetry
4.2 How Priorities Work in Poetry
4.3 Prioritising as Poetic Technique
References
5 Representing Time, Space and Society: Constructing the World of the Poem
5.1 Deixis and Text Worlds
5.2 Time in Poems
5.3 Space in Poems
5.4 Person in Poems
5.5 The Space–time-Person Envelope in Contemporary Poetry
References
Part II Intermittent Features of Textual Meaning
6 Equating and Contrasting: Constructing Equivalence and Opposition in Poems
6.1 Equating
6.1.1 Producing Equivalence Through Similes
6.1.2 Equating by Intensive Relational Process
6.1.3 Equating by Apposition
6.1.4 Equating in Conjunction with Other TCFs
6.2 Contrasting
6.2.1 Reimagining or Unpicking of Conventional Opposites
6.2.2 Unconventional Uses of Conventional Opposites
6.2.3 Auto-Evocation of Opposites
6.2.4 Whole Poems Based on Oppositional Strands
6.3 Equating and Contrasting in Poems
References
7 Enumerating and Equating: Lists and Open Meaning in Poems
7.1 Lists of 2
7.2 List or Apposition?
7.3 Symbolic Lists of Three (and More)
7.4 Lists of 4
7.5 Poems Made of Lists—and Embedded Lists
7.6 Lists in Contemporary Poetry
References
8 Negating: Poetic Construction of What is Not
8.1 Grammatical Negation in Contemporary Poetry
8.2 Morphological Negation in Contemporary Poetry
8.3 Lexical Negators
8.4 Thematic Negation
8.5 Negating in Contemporary Poetry
References
9 Hypothesising: Possible Worlds, Hypothetical Scenarios and Wish Fulfilment in Poems
9.1 Deontic and Boulomaic Modality
9.2 Epistemic and Perception Modality
9.2.1 Present Reference
9.2.2 Future Reference
9.2.3 Past Reference
9.2.4 Habitual Modality
9.2.5 Asking Modal Questions
9.3 Hypothesising in Poetry
References
10 Alluding: Implying and Assuming in Poems
10.1 Presupposition and Implicature
10.2 Nominal and Logical Presupposition in Poems
10.3 Alluding Through Implying: Conventional and Conversational Implicature
10.4 Alluding in Contemporary Poetry
References
11 Presenting Others’ Speech and Thought: Multiple Voices in Poems
11.1 Speech and Thought Presentation—A Model
11.2 Speech and Thought Presentation in Poems
11.2.1 Direct Speech
11.2.2 Indirect Speech
11.2.3 Narrative Presentation of Speech Acts
11.2.4 Narrative Presentation of Voice
11.3 Thought Presentation in Poetry
11.3.1 Direct Thought
11.3.2 Free Indirect Thought
11.3.3 Indirect Thought
11.3.4 Narrative Presentation of a Thought Act
11.4 Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in Poetry
References
12 Evoking: Experiencing the Poem’s World
12.1 Iconicity
12.2 Direct and Indirect Evocation by Sound and Image
12.3 Evocation Through Manipulation of Poetic Form
12.4 EVOCATION Through Syntax
12.5 Evocation in Contemporary Poetry
References
Part III Conclusions
13 Putting It All Together: Integrated Analysis of Poems
13.1 Jimmy Knight (David Constantine 2021)
13.2 Important People (Gina Wilson 2020)
13.3 A Square of Sunlight (Meg Cox 2021)
13.4 Victoria Avenue (Alan Payne 2020)
13.5 Dai (Stephen Payne 2019)
13.6 I Was Na’amah (Shash Trevett 2021)
13.7 Approaching New Poems
References
14 Textual Meaning, Linguistic Theory and the Stylistics of Poetry
14.1 What Have We Learnt About Linguistic Theory?
14.1.1 Textual Meaning
14.1.2 Tripartite Structure of Language
14.1.3 Learning from Descriptive Linguistics
14.2 What Have We Learnt About Textual Meaning in Relation to Poetry?
14.3 What Have We Learnt About Style in Contemporary Poetry?
14.3.1 Observations from the TCFs
14.3.2 Poetry in the Round
14.4 More Work to Do
14.4.1 Work on the Model
14.4.2 Work on Theory
14.4.3 Work on Poetry
References
Appendix
10K
3 Victoria Avenue
Port of Spain
A Hairline Fracture
A Square of Sunlight
Baking
Blackberry Picking
Crafty
Dai
Doorsteps
Figs
Greenhouse
Household
Important People
Pandemic, 2020
I Was Na’amah
Ironing
‘It Wasn't Snowing’
Jimmy Knight
Litany
Marble
Men on Allotments
Platform Piece
Pond Dipping
Prayer
Prospero’s Gifts
Summer Evening
After Stanley Cook
The Unprofessionals
Up on the Moors with Keeper
References
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND STYLE

The Language of Contemporary Poetry A Framework for Poetic Analysis Lesley Jeffries

Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style

Series Editors Rocío Montoro, Department of English and German Philology, University of Granada, Granada, Spain Paul Simpson, Department of English, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

This series offers rigorous and informative treatments of particular writers, genres and literary periods and provides in-depth examination of their key stylistic tropes. Every volume in the series is intended to serve as a key reference point for undergraduate and post-graduate students and as an investigative resource for more experienced researchers. The last twenty years have witnessed a huge transformation in the analytic tools and methods of modern stylistics. By harnessing the talent of a growing body of researchers in the field, this series of books seeks both to capture these developments and transformations and to establish and elaborate new analytic models and paradigms.

Lesley Jeffries

The Language of Contemporary Poetry A Framework for Poetic Analysis

Lesley Jeffries Leeds, UK

ISSN 2731-8265 ISSN 2731-8273 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style ISBN 978-3-031-09748-5 ISBN 978-3-031-09749-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Peter Verdonk, whose generosity of spirit and wisdom regarding the stylistics of poetry will be sorely missed.

Preface

Since I wrote my first book (The Language of Twentieth Century Poetry, Palgrave 1993), I have been on a long journey which took me to many superficially unrelated fields including the nature of oppositional meaning, corpus stylistic analysis and the study of language and ideology in news and political texts. However, the nature of my work has been consistently concerned with how texts make meaning and has led me to think long and hard about some of the most challenging questions in our field, such as whether texts have meaning at all, to what extent this meaning (if it exists) is shared by the community of readers and whether all textual meaning is made in similar ways, irrespective of genre or text type, author, readers and time period. It was therefore natural that, having written a great deal about non-literary texts in recent years, I would return to my first love, poetry, to see whether my thinking about the language of poetry has moved on in the years since I first applied linguistic analysis to that genre. The good news (I hope) is that there is some consistency here with what I thought then and yet there is also much new thinking about how the poems I analyse work in practice. What remains from those earlier, simpler times is the conviction that there has to be some kind of underlying linguistic system, albeit an evolving one, on which the creativity and ingenuity of poetic meaning can be built. I do not subscribe to the idea that creativity in language requires the writer to completely dispense with all that we know of how everyday language works. That view, in my opinion, fails to explain how we communicate at all. However, since 1993 I have developed a view of textual meaning which I see as a layer of meaning hovering somewhere between the underlying linguistic meaning of formal approaches and the personal and infinitely variable meaning of individual producers and recipients of language. This is a layer of meaning, which, I argue, can be found in every use of language, spoken and written, and in all genres. In this book, I have therefore tested out my ideas on a genre as

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PREFACE

far from news reporting and political texts as I can imagine, the contemporary lyric poem. I look forward to hearing what my readers think of these ideas. Leeds, UK 2022

Lesley Jeffries

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the following poets (or their estates) and their publishers for permission to reproduce their poems: 1. “10k” by Jane Aspinall from The Result is What You See Today. Poems about Running. Ed. Paul Deaton, Kim Moore and Ben Wilkinson. Smith Doorstop 2019:58. 2. “3 Victoria Avenue” by Alan Payne from The North Issue 64. Smith Doorstop 2020. 3. “A Hairline Fracture” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF AMY CLAMPITT by Amy Clampitt, copyright © 1997 by the Estate of Amy Clampitt. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 4. “A Square of Sunlight” by Meg Cox from A Square of Sunlight. Smith Doorstop 2021. 5. “Baking” by Lucy Newlyn from Ginnel Carcanet 2005:54. 6. “Blackberry Picking” by Seamus Heaney from Death of a Naturalist. Faber and Faber. 1966. (World rights, excluding U.S.) 7. “Blackberry Picking” by Seamus Heaney from Opened Ground. Poems 1966–1996. Faber and Faber 2002. (U.S. territory) 8. “Crafty” by Maureen Duffy from Oxford Poetry Vol. 13 No 1. 2009. 9. “Dai” by Stephen Payne from The North Issue 62. Smith Doorstop 2019. 10. “Doorsteps” by Pamela Gillilan from Sixty Women Poets (1993 p. 143) Newcastle: Bloodaxe. By kind permission of her daughter, Lesley Gillilan. 11. “Figs” by Mario Petrucci from Smiths Knoll No 9 (1995 p. 29) and Shrapnel and Sheets (1996) Headland.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

12. “Greenhouse” by Simon Armitage from Zoom! Bloodaxe Books 1989:13 13. “Household” by Henry Shukman from New Welsh Review No 76 (Summer 2007). 14. “Important People” by Gina Wilson from The North Issue 64. Smith Doorstop 2020. 15. “I was Na’amah” by Shash Trevett from A Borrowed Land. Smith Doorstop 2021. 16. “Ironing” by Vicki Feaver from The Handless Maiden Jonathan Cape. 1994. Reproduced by permission of the author. 17. “It Wasn’t Snowing ” by Michael Schmidt from The North No 1. Smith Doorstop. 1986. 18. “Jimmy Knight” by David Constantine from The North Issue 65 Smith Doorstop 2021. 19. “Prayer” and “Litany” from Mean Time by Carol Ann Duffy. (1989). Copyright © Carol Ann Duffy. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. 20. “Marble” by Frances Corkey Thompson from MsLexia 2012 Issue 55:30. 21. “Men on Allotments” by U. A. Fanthorpe from Collected Poems Peterloo Poets 2005:54–5. Reproduced by kind permission of Dr. R. V. Bailey. 22. “Platform Piece” by Glyn Maxwell from Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990– 1995. Bloodaxe 2000. 23. “Pond Dipping” by Sarah Wardle from Fields Away Bloodaxe 2003:60 24. “Prospero’s Gifts” by James Nash from A Bench for Billie Holiday Valley Press 2018:22. 25. “Summer Evening” by Peter Sansom from Point of Sale. Carcanet. 2000:17. 26. “The Unprofessionals” by U A Fanthorpe from Safe as houses. Calstock: Peterloo Poets 1995. By kind permission of Dr. R. V. Bailey. 27. “Up on the Moors with Keeper” by Maura Dooley from Sound Barrier: Poems 1982–2002. Bloodaxe Books 2002. I would also like to thank my colleagues far and wide for their support and patience while I wrote this book. In particular, the support of Dan McIntyre, Louise Nuttall, Jim O’Driscoll and Matt Evans have been much appreciated. The wider stylistics community, including the wonderful PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association) has been my intellectual happy place for as long as I can remember. I have been influenced and challenged in equal measure by the people making up this field which can take credit for anything good in this book, leaving me responsible for anything wrong-headed or ill-informed.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xi

Special thanks go to Peter Sansom (of The Poetry Business) for choosing some wonderful poems for me to test out my ideas. Also invaluable was the first reading of the manuscript by Eleanor Field, who got me past that moment of not wanting to share and gave me some very helpful feedback. Finally, of course, my family has helped me get through not just the pandemic but the writing. I would be nothing without them. Dave, Sam, Ella, Cristiana, Tav, Giorgia and Franceso thanks.

Contents

1

Contemporary Poetry and Textual Meaning 1.1 Introduction to Contemporary Poetry and the Scope of the Book 1.1.1 What is Textual Meaning? 1.1.2 What Do I Mean by Contemporary Poetry? 1.1.3 What Am I not Going to Cover in This Book? 1.2 Introduction to the Textual Meaning Framework 1.2.1 What is the Critical Stylistic Framework? 1.2.2 Why Widen It? (to Poetry) 1.2.3 Existing Textual-Conceptual Functions 1.2.4 What’s Missing? 1.2.5 Core vs. Periphery? 1.3 Research Questions and Methods 1.3.1 Aims of the Research 1.3.2 Research Questions 1.3.3 Methodology 1.3.4 Questions of Research Quality: Rigour, Significance and Originality 1.4 How Textual Meaning Links to Stylistics 1.5 The Poems 1.6 Guide to the Rest of the Book References

1 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 12 13 13 14 14 15 16 17 22 24

Part I Core Features of Textual Meaning 2

Naming and Describing: People, Places and Things in Poems 2.1 Why Naming? 2.2 How People and Things Are Named

29 29 32

xiii

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CONTENTS

2.3

The Effects of Naming—Conjuring Up and Populating 2.3.1 Making the Reader See Anew 2.3.2 The Thrill of Recognition 2.3.3 Naming and Creating 2.4 The Names in a Poem—Patterns and Developments 2.4.1 Prayer 2.4.2 Summer Evening 2.4.3 Men on Allotments 2.5 Overlaps with Other Textual Effects 2.5.1 Semantically Separate but Adjacent/Co-Occurring/Embedded TCFs 2.5.2 TCFs Contributing to a Single Effect Jointly 2.6 Naming as Poetic Technique References 3

4

5

Representing Processes: Actions, States and Events in Poetry 3.1 How We Represent Processes 3.2 Foregrounded Verb Choices (External Deviation) 3.3 Verbal Choices in Creating the Conditions for Internal Deviation 3.4 Overlaps with Other Textual Effects 3.5 Verb Choices in Poetry References Prioritising: Subordination and Information Structure in Poems 4.1 How Syntax Prioritises and Why 4.1.1 Main Versus Subordinate Clauses 4.1.2 Focus and Marked Clause Structures 4.1.3 Unwieldy Syntax in Contemporary Poetry 4.2 How Priorities Work in Poetry 4.3 Prioritising as Poetic Technique References Representing Time, Space and Society: Constructing the World of the Poem 5.1 Deixis and Text Worlds 5.2 Time in Poems 5.3 Space in Poems 5.4 Person in Poems 5.5 The Space–time-Person Envelope in Contemporary Poetry References

35 36 38 40 41 42 43 45 47

48 51 53 54 55 56 62 67 72 74 75 77 78 78 79 82 83 88 89 91 92 94 96 99 100 100

CONTENTS

xv

Part II Intermittent Features of Textual Meaning 6

7

Equating and Contrasting: Constructing Equivalence and Opposition in Poems 6.1 Equating 6.1.1 Producing Equivalence Through Similes 6.1.2 Equating by Intensive Relational Process 6.1.3 Equating by Apposition 6.1.4 Equating in Conjunction with Other TCFs 6.2 Contrasting 6.2.1 Reimagining or Unpicking of Conventional Opposites 6.2.2 Unconventional Uses of Conventional Opposites 6.2.3 Auto-Evocation of Opposites 6.2.4 Whole Poems Based on Oppositional Strands 6.3 Equating and Contrasting in Poems References

103 104 105 109 111 113 115 118 119 121 122 123 124

Enumerating and Equating: Lists and Open Meaning in Poems 7.1 Lists of 2 7.2 List or Apposition? 7.3 Symbolic Lists of Three (and More) 7.4 Lists of 4 7.5 Poems Made of Lists—and Embedded Lists 7.6 Lists in Contemporary Poetry References

125 128 130 132 134 137 139 139

8

Negating: Poetic Construction of What is Not 8.1 Grammatical Negation in Contemporary Poetry 8.2 Morphological Negation in Contemporary Poetry 8.3 Lexical Negators 8.4 Thematic Negation 8.5 Negating in Contemporary Poetry References

141 144 147 149 150 153 153

9

Hypothesising: Possible Worlds, Hypothetical Scenarios and Wish Fulfilment in Poems 9.1 Deontic and Boulomaic Modality 9.2 Epistemic and Perception Modality 9.2.1 Present Reference 9.2.2 Future Reference 9.2.3 Past Reference 9.2.4 Habitual Modality 9.2.5 Asking Modal Questions 9.3 Hypothesising in Poetry References

155 160 161 161 163 163 166 167 168 168

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CONTENTS

10

Alluding: Implying and Assuming in Poems 10.1 Presupposition and Implicature 10.2 Nominal and Logical Presupposition in Poems 10.3 Alluding Through Implying: Conventional and Conversational Implicature 10.4 Alluding in Contemporary Poetry References

11

12

169 170 174 177 180 181

Presenting Others’ Speech and Thought: Multiple Voices in Poems 11.1 Speech and Thought Presentation—A Model 11.2 Speech and Thought Presentation in Poems 11.2.1 Direct Speech 11.2.2 Indirect Speech 11.2.3 Narrative Presentation of Speech Acts 11.2.4 Narrative Presentation of Voice 11.3 Thought Presentation in Poetry 11.3.1 Direct Thought 11.3.2 Free Indirect Thought 11.3.3 Indirect Thought 11.3.4 Narrative Presentation of a Thought Act 11.4 Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in Poetry References

183 185 186 186 189 189 191 193 193 194 195 196 197 198

Evoking: Experiencing the Poem’s World 12.1 Iconicity 12.2 Direct and Indirect Evocation by Sound and Image 12.3 Evocation Through Manipulation of Poetic Form 12.4 EVOCATION Through Syntax 12.5 Evocation in Contemporary Poetry References

199 200 205 209 213 218 218

Part III Conclusions 13

Putting It All Together: Integrated Analysis of Poems 13.1 Jimmy Knight (David Constantine 2021) 13.2 Important People (Gina Wilson 2020) 13.3 A Square of Sunlight (Meg Cox 2021) 13.4 Victoria Avenue (Alan Payne 2020) 13.5 Dai (Stephen Payne 2019) 13.6 I Was Na’amah (Shash Trevett 2021) 13.7 Approaching New Poems References

223 223 227 229 233 236 240 242 242

CONTENTS

14

Textual Meaning, Linguistic Theory and the Stylistics of Poetry 14.1 What Have We Learnt About Linguistic Theory? 14.1.1 Textual Meaning 14.1.2 Tripartite Structure of Language 14.1.3 Learning from Descriptive Linguistics 14.2 What Have We Learnt About Textual Meaning in Relation to Poetry? 14.3 What Have We Learnt About Style in Contemporary Poetry? 14.3.1 Observations from the TCFs 14.3.2 Poetry in the Round 14.4 More Work to Do 14.4.1 Work on the Model 14.4.2 Work on Theory 14.4.3 Work on Poetry References

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243 245 245 246 246 246 247 247 251 252 252 253 253 253

Appendix

255

References

273

Index

279

Abbreviations

AE AI aj AU BNC CDA cj CS det DS DT E FDS FDT FIS FIT h IC II IP IR IS IT m MC ME MP n NP NPSA NPTA NPV

Action Event Action Intentional adjective Action Unintentional British National Corpus Critical Discourse Analysis conjunction Critical stylistics determiner Direct Speech Direct Thought Existential Free Direct Speech Free Direct Thought Free Indirect Speech Free Indirect Thought head (noun) Intensive Circumstantial Intensive Influential Intensive Possessive Intensive Relational Indirect Speech Indirect Thought modifier (pre-modifier) Mental Cognition Mental Emotive Mental Perceptual noun Noun phrase Narrative Presentation of Speech Act Narrative Presentation of Thought Act Narrative Presentation of Voice xix

xx

ABBREVIATIONS

p pm poss POV PP SFL SPOCA TCF V

preposition post-modifier possessive adjective Point of view prepositional phrase Systemic Functional Linguistics Subject, Predicator, Object, Complement, Adverbial Textual-Conceptual Function Verbal

List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Structure of a noun phrase in ‘A Hairline Fracture’ Structure of a noun phrase in ‘Baking’ The main types of transitivity Main types of transitivity illustrated Semantic dimensions of verbs Verb choices in ‘Pond Dipping’ Verb choices in ‘Baking’ and their analysis

34 50 59 60 62 71 73

xxi

List of Tables

Table Table Table Table

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Table 1.5 Table 6.1 Table 8.1 Table 8.2 Table 9.1 Table 9.2 Table 9.3 Table 11.1 Table 13.1

Textual-Conceptual Functions in critical stylistics Initial set of familiar poems Secondary set of poems new to the author Further set of poems new to the author and chosen by Peter Sansom Textual-Conceptual Functions in Textual Stylistics The main syntactic opposition triggers in English Outline of the range of textual vehicles for negation (from Nahajec, 2021: 52) Negating in ‘A Hairline Fracture’ Examples of modality types Comparing modal frequency (per million words) with BNC sub-corpora Modality in ‘A Hairline Fracture’ Speech presentation categories and prototypical examples Deictic analysis of ‘A Square of Sunlight’

11 18 20 21 23 117 146 152 156 157 165 185 233

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CHAPTER 1

Contemporary Poetry and Textual Meaning

This book aims to contribute to our knowledge about language and specifically about the language of a specific kind of text, the lyric poem. I have chosen to look specifically at contemporary poetry in English (see below for a definition) but I am not claiming to cover the whole of that category, nor to exclude the possibility that what is proposed in this book would also provide insights into poetry in other languages and poetry in English from earlier times or wider geographical spread. The poetry examined in this book perhaps inevitably reflects my own preferences and reading habits, but I have tried to mitigate this by analysing some poems not chosen by me (see Chapter 13) as a kind of control to test out my ideas more widely. The time-consuming nature of qualitative analysis of this kind precludes coverage of a wide range or large number of poems, so the book proposes and tests an analytical framework, set within a theory of textual meaning, with the hope that others will take it up and test it more widely in the future.

1.1 Introduction to Contemporary Poetry and the Scope of the Book In this section I will delimit the scope and aims of this book with the intention of confirming what it will and what it will not be able to cover. This should help the reader in working out whether or to what extent it is worth reading on for their own purposes, though I hope that many will read on anyway.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2_1

1

2

L. JEFFRIES

1.1.1

What is Textual Meaning?

To some extent, the answer to this question is answered by the whole of the book, but I will try to define it here in brief, as a shorthand way of thinking about what I mean by textual meaning. I will use what I hope is a very clear single example to illustrate as a touchstone with which to compare other putative examples as the work progresses. What I mean by textual meaning is the way in which the language chosen by a writer or speaker (this is not limited to written language) constructs the events, context, actions, artefacts and so on within the world of the text.1 Whilst we can explore the linguistic meaning of a text at its most fundamental level using core concepts from descriptive linguistics, at levels from phonetic to semantic, via phonological, morphological and syntactic layers, I see textual meaning as being overlaid on this basic semantic-syntactic meaning whilst simultaneously being produced by the choices within it. Let us consider an example which I can then use to explain further why the concept of textual meaning is needed. One of the poems I analyse in this book is called ‘Doorsteps’2 and concerns the memory of a person (maybe a mother or grandmother) cutting bread and butter for the tea table. The manner of cutting (towards the body), the nature of the bread (white) and the fineness of the slices contrasts with the narrator’s own less refined practice of sawing away at stoneground wholemeal bread: Each slice falling forward into the crumbs to be spread with butter’s counterfeit is as thick as three of hers.

There are many features of the language in this poem worthy of notice, but here I want to comment specifically on the construction of a world in which butter and other kinds of spread (e.g. margarine) are contrasted to the extent that they become oppositional (Jeffries, 2010a). Whilst the reality of the world is that there are many kinds of butter and ever more kinds of quasi-butter or semi-buttery spreads, this poem creates a strong oppositional meaning between the world of white bread and real butter on the one hand and the healthier, but possibly no better, world of wholemeal bread and butter substitute on the other. I will examine the construction of opposition in poems in greater detail in Chapter 6, but for now I want to use this example to explain why I think there is a layer of meaning, that sits somewhere between the semantico-syntactic and the entirely contextual or pragmatic, which I call textual meaning.

1 Note I am not working within what has been called Text World Theory for some time now (see Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007) but I am using the fundamental metaphor of the text world as a useful analytical concept here and throughout. 2 I use the same poems repeatedly throughout this book and they are all reproduced complete in the Appendix together with their references.

1

CONTEMPORARY POETRY AND TEXTUAL MEANING

3

The basic linguistic meaning of this sentence extracted from the poem is that the slices the narrator cuts fall into the crumbs on the bread board and are spread with a butter substitute whilst being three times as thick as the slices cut by the person remembered. I am paraphrasing here, to avoid just repeating the sentence itself, but we can agree that there is just one propositional meaning here, based on the one main clause, which is that the slices (which happen to be falling / are there to be spread) are very thick. This is the source of the title, Doorsteps , a description often used in the days before sliced bread to criticise those apparently incapable of slicing bread thinly. What the propositional meaning in this extract tells us is not the whole story, however, since the sentence also constructs the idea of butter’s counterfeit in one of its noun phrases. Thus, the poem simultaneously tells us directly that the slices are thick and indirectly that this world is one in which butter is genuine and the alternatives are fake. Note that the opposition is not conventional; asking ‘What is the opposite of butter?’ does not bring unanimous answers like asking ‘What is the opposite of hot?’. However, in explaining it, I have resorted to just such a conventional opposite (genuine vs. fake) which is a common experience in interpreting constructed or creative oppositions. Returning to the question of textual meaning, I would argue that this example demonstrates the simultaneous creation of linguistic (i.e. semanticsyntactic, propositional) meaning and textual meaning. In this case, the assertion of the main clause relates to the thickness of the slices of bread and in addition, the textual meaning takes it for granted that this is a world in which butter is opposed to all its alternatives and is seen in some sense as better, counterfeit usually bringing a negative evaluation to the thing it describes. Having established the claim that there is a layer of meaning between linguistic and pragmatic meaning, in the next section, I will say something about the poems I have analysed for this book and to what extent they can be seen as representing contemporary poetry. 1.1.2

What Do I Mean by Contemporary Poetry?

I have already explained my reasons for not providing a stylistic account of the whole of contemporary poetry in this book. The nature of stylistic analysis is slow and painstaking and poetry does not lend itself to even those aspects of corpus analysis that work for stylistics and could theoretically bring out patterns of style across a large amount of data (McIntyre & Walker, 2019). In order not to mislead readers who were hoping for something more of an overview, I want to explain early on that contemporary poems are the vehicle I am using to explain how textual meaning works in literature, rather than being the whole raison d’e ◝ tre of the work itself. However, poetry and poetic language is absolutely central to the conception of the book which aims to take a framework first developed for political and factual language as critical stylistics (Jeffries, 2010b, 2013) and apply it to a text type as different as possible from the original material it was tested upon.

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Although I can see the initial attraction of a book that describes the stylistics of the whole of contemporary poetry, the reality is that the range of styles within any period and particularly the one we are living through does not lend itself to such a short account. The point of poetry, at least in part, is that the style is different for each poet and so instead of trying to summarise the features that mark out poetry in the contemporary period, which would require a quite different project, what is intended here is to give readers a systematic and replicable method for considering which features are present in poems that they read and to interpret those features in the light of the specific text under scrutiny. Though fashions and what is sometimes called poetics inevitably vary through time and with geography, as well as with language, I will not be attempting to capture the style of contemporary poetry in any complete way. Instead, this book will introduce an approach to describing, interpreting and indeed celebrating the rich textures and variation of style that is found in contemporary poetry. 1.1.3

What Am I not Going to Cover in This Book?

As I stated in the previous section, this book starts from the framework, called critical stylistics (Jeffries, 2010b, 2013), which I developed as a systematic way to approach ideation in non-literary texts, specifically texts relating to politics and political reporting. I use the term ideation, borrowed from Halliday (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), but I am using it slightly differently from him and his followers to refer to the construction of a particular view of the world through textual choices. In the case of political language, I was particularly interested in ideation with specifically ideological import but although this can also be present in poems, I am less concerned with ideological use of poetry here. Instead, I want to see whether the particular view of ideation through textual choice I developed in that work can be extended to become a more generalised theory of textual meaning which encompasses literary and aesthetic effects as well as ideological ones. The label ‘critical stylistics’, therefore, no longer applies to the wider application of the framework, and the term textual meaning has largely taken over from it in this book. As well as taking a break from ideological meaning, at the other extreme, I am not attempting to build into the framework those aspects of poetry which are more to do with music than meaning (Jeffries, 1993). This includes any generalised consideration of poetic form, rhyme schemes, metre or purely musical sound patterning such as alliteration and assonance (traditional terms which I would replace with consonance and assonance to be consistent). There is a place for proper linguistic discussion of these aspects of the poetic genre which largely distinguish it from other genres and text types. However, except where the sound patterning or manipulation of formal structures creates one of the kinds of textual meaning I am concerned with (see Chapter 12), I will not describe those aspects of the poems analysed here (though see Fabb & Halle, 2008 and Tsur, 2017 for work in this area).

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Another cut-off point comes between textual and pragmatic, or contextual, elements of meaning. Whilst there is no clear boundary between these, as between most, linguistic categories, it is nevertheless helpful to make a theoretical distinction between meanings that are triggered by some aspect of textual choice and those which are entirely a product of the context, including the background and experience of the reader. These contextual meanings may be a very real part of a response to a poem, but that does not make them integral to the poem itself or its style. Acknowledging the fuzzy boundary between these kinds of meaning or response (Jeffries, 2014) does not undermine the practical benefits of making such distinctions, nor deny that there is a distinction, any more than the interaction of morphology and phonology at their boundaries denies their existence or usefulness. Personal responses, based on individual experience, aside, this is also the case where a sound pattern has intertextual reference, rather than intra-textual meaning. Whilst there may be an echo of childhood poetry, for example, in the regular metre of a poem about childhood, this kind of meaning will only be treated here if it can be seen as constructing the ideational world of the poem. The final caveat in this section is that I am not going to attempt to deal with what may (or may not) be a rather different poetics of the poetry of the very contemporary—slam, dub, rap, etc. There are two reasons for excluding this kind of performance poetry. The first is that its distinctiveness, as far as I am aware, is largely musical. The rhythms, rhymes and other sound patterns that make this kind of poetry pleasant to listen to and inventive are largely musical and to that extent not part of the textual meaning I am attempting to outline here. They are meaningful in relation to the sub-genre they belong to, in the same way that there is intertextual meaning in the choice of a sonnet form for a love poem or a limerick form for light-hearted comic verse. These are contextual issues that clearly contribute to the reader’s or hearer’s response but are not part of the textual meaning as defined here. It is very likely that these poems are using language in all of the ways I outline here in addition to their musicality, but the second reason for excluding them is that the scope of the book is very wide already, and this is one way to limit its further expansion.

1.2

Introduction to the Textual Meaning Framework

In Sect. 1.1.1 I briefly introduced the idea of textual meaning, using the constructed opposition between butter and its alternatives (its counterfeit ) to illustrate. In this section, I will outline the original Critical Stylistic framework, examine its potential as a wider framework for stylistic analysis and consider what adaptations might be needed to deal with the language of poetry as well as the language of politics.

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1.2.1

What is the Critical Stylistic Framework?

Critical stylistics was my response to the development of a specifically critical form of discourse analysis (see van Dijk, 2015 for overview) which both attracted me as someone interested in political language and frustrated me in its defiant determination to use whatever tools of analysis seemed useful, rather than developing a coherent model of textual meaning that could be applied systematically and was both rigorous and replicable. Fairclough (1989: 110) is explicit about the incomplete nature of his analytical advice: The present chapter is written at an introductory level for people who do not have extensive backgrounds in language study…The set of textual features included is highly selective, containing only those which tend to be most significant for critical analysis.

What is missing here is any explanation of how one might decide what is ‘significant for critical analysis’, which is one of the reasons that reasons that Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been criticised for circularity or worse in the past (see, for example, Widdowson, 1998). CDA remains an important political project using linguistics amongst other disciplines, rather than a contribution to linguistics itself and that is fine, but it leaves a gap for the consideration of how all the diverse observations of this field can be built into something more coherent which will also produce new insights about language as well as the social use of language which appears to be the main concern of CDA. I have explained some of the differences between my approach and CDA in other places (e.g. Jeffries, 2007: 4–10, based on arguments by Widdowson, 1998: 142–143, 150; Toolan, 1996: 6; Simpson, 1993: 111ff), for example, but the summary of differences is as follows: ● Although I may personally share some of the political outlook of CDA practitioners, professionally, I am concerned with building a potentially neutral framework which can be used to analyse texts of all kinds and with any ideological basis. The general analysis of power relations between the media, politicians and the public which I share with many CDA authors does not affect this model which can be used in pursuit of the avowed political agenda of CDA practitioners as well as by those with different aims. I think this makes the analysis stronger as a result. ● Although it is often claimed, with some justification, that all text is ideological, this view invalidates the concept of ideology as a useful basis for critique, so I find it helpful to make a distinction between ideation as the process of building a particular viewpoint in texts and ideology as the attaching of values to ideation in texts. If we don’t make this distinction, ideology is in danger of becoming synonymous with meaning itself.

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● I am influenced, as CDA is more widely, by the descriptive apparatus arising from Systemic Functional Linguistics initiated by Halliday (see Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). However, I have attempted to use insights from his approach to inform my framework rather than adopting it wholesale. This is largely because I retain the view that it is of more use to tease apart strands of linguistic structure and meaning than to try and deal with them all in one single model. ● I see eclecticism as a theoretical necessity (Jeffries, 2000a, 2000b) but only within a principled and coherent approach. The danger of simply following one’s nose, rather than building different approaches into a larger rationale is that one may lose the rigour and replicability that I see as having been the hallmark of the incredible achievements of modern linguistics in its first 100 years (as measured from the posthumous publication in 1916 of Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale). The Critical Stylistic framework takes its inspiration from the work I carried out on the textual construction of opposition (Jeffries, 2010a) which alerted me to the idea that some meanings are created, as it were, dynamically, within a text, as a result of the interplay between the choices made by producers of texts and the content of that text. Whilst I would argue that core linguistic meaning is clearly foundational to all textual meaning, there is, nevertheless, a layer of additional meaning which is non-propositional, but extremely powerful, which creates the world of the text, often at a relatively subliminal level for the reader. This, of course, is very helpful for text producers who wish to actively normalise certain ideologies in the hope that they may be adopted by the readers of their texts, but it is also the background to all texts of all genres since the same linguistic apparatus is employed in each case. So, rather than being simply a means to deliberately manipulate the unwary reader, this textual layer of meaning may be one of the main ways in which language creates a view of the world, whether it is fictional, historical or actual. The detail of the Critical Stylistic (CS) framework has been laid out a number of times (Jeffries, 2010b, 2013, 2014, 2015a, 2015b) but here I will attempt to summarise its main characteristics as it was initially devised. The remainder of this book will then test and adapt the framework to make it suitable for the wider remit of describing and interpreting literary as well as intentionally ideological uses of language. The CS framework is based on the question ‘What is the text doing?’ and that question is broken down into more specific questions, such as ‘What is the text naming?’ and ‘What is the text contrasting?’ (see Sect. 1.2.3 for details). Each of these questions refers to what I have labelled ‘Textual-Conceptual Functions’ or TCFs for short. The reason for this rather unwieldy label is that I wanted to emphasise the bridging role that I see them playing. Each TCF refers to a feature of the text which is evident in the lexis and grammar (thus textual) but performs a specific type of role in building the world of the text (hence conceptual). To take textually constructed opposition as our example

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again, if a text portrays a world in which, for example, wizards exist (as in the Harry Potter books), then their very existence will produce the need for a name for the ordinary mortals who are not wizards. Rowling comes up with an invented word, muggles, to plug that gap. The words themselves are thereby textual, but the divided world of muggles and wizards in which the action takes place is conceptual and informs the narrative. The TCFs, then, are form-meaning dyads in a general sense, but there is no one-to-one relationship between form and meaning because the mechanisms which deliver the TCF are often made up of a range of forms, sometimes with a prototypical form at the centre and fuzzy boundaries. I will explain in more detail how this works for each TCF in Sect. 1.2.3, but to illustrate the principle here, let us look at the TCF of negating. This TCF answers the question ‘What is the text negating?’ and the answer is delivered by means of a wide range of forms, including the core or prototypical forms no and not; pronominal negation (e.g. none, no one); morphological negators (e.g. dis-, un-, an-) and lexical negation (e.g. miss, fail, lose) to marginal cases such as almost and nearly. Whilst the detailed meaning of these forms may differ in some ways, there is a core idea of negating which is present in them all (see Nahajec, 2021) and as we shall see, there is a common textual meaning arising from the negating, whatever form it takes. The final general point to make about the TCFs in this framework is that they are typical of stylistic features in that they can be meaningful individually and/or make meaning through their patterning across a text or part of a text. I will show in the analysis of poetry in Chapters 2–12 that the effects of these TCFs are sometimes momentary and yet may also often be cumulative. The framework itself is not built on either of these assumptions, which allows it some flexibility in application, though this produces challenges for the methodology (see Sect. 1.3.3). This aspect of the framework differs from Simpson’s (1993) modal grammar for example, which was part of the inspiration for the CS framework and the closest I had seen to a consistent systematic treatment of modality in texts at that point. However, the categories of Simpson’s model depend primarily on patterning across a text or part of a text to be meaningful, which I would argue makes it less useful for shorter texts, such as poems and also limits its explanatory value in relation to individual examples of modality. 1.2.2

Why Widen It? (to Poetry)

Before I introduce the individual TCFs of the original CS framework, I will address the question of why I decided to extend its application beyond the ideological and political, to encompass literary work, and in particular poetry. In working on political and other non-literary texts, it became ever clearer that there is no absolute cut-off between the intentional manipulation of readers through normalisation of ideology that you might find in propaganda and the everyday assumption of certain ideas and ideologies that are widespread

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and largely uncontested in most modern societies (e.g. murder is bad) and which underlie many uses of language. Whilst one could argue, as some do (e.g. van Leeuwen, 2009) or take as given (e.g. Mulyani, 2014) that all language is ideological, if unwittingly, the much-defined term ideology then becomes almost empty of meaning, or at least less able to distinguish between different aspects of social meaning such as intentional/unintentional or selfaware/subconscious ideological underpinnings of society. It therefore seemed more helpful to me to see the basis of all textual meaning as ideational, borrowing a term from Halliday, but using it slightly differently (more on this below) with ideology being reserved for the more evaluative end of the spectrum. Thus, a text that introduces a man, a dog and a chair will be seen as primarily producing an ideation of the scene in which, perhaps, the man sits in a chair and pats the dog. One could, of course, also comment on the everyday ideological value of dogs as pets in contemporary Western society as opposed to their working value in earlier societies, but the point is that these two types of textual meaning can be distinguished on the basis that ideology implies evaluation whereas ideation is neutral. Nevertheless, they are delivered by the same mechanisms, namely the TCFs of my model. The logical consequence of this train of thought is that whilst I started out interested in the ideological behaviour of text producers of political and news texts, there is no theoretical reason why the same mechanisms that produce the ideation underlying this ideology shouldn’t also underlie the aesthetic or literary effects of, for example, contemporary poetry. This book is the attempt to see whether what started out as a framework to systematise the textual analytical side of CDA could be adapted to become a more general theory of textual meaning. 1.2.3

Existing Textual-Conceptual Functions

I have introduced two of the TCFs already (contrasting and negating) but in this section I will explain and illustrate the whole list of TCFs as they were in the first version of CS. I have never claimed that this list is exhaustive, and we will see in this book that there is a need to expand the list a little to accommodate poetic language, but it seems to me that generally speaking this model3 only works if there is a relatively stable and not very long list of TCFs in the model. Otherwise, there is a danger that every slight nuance of meaning (e.g. all the different kinds of negating) could be used to argue for a new TCF. This is not to suggest that work on the detail of negation (e.g. Hidalgo-Downing, 2000; Nahajec, 2021) is not worthwhile or insightful. It is, rather, to limit our consideration of what texts do to a particular layer of meaning which hovers somewhere above the basic linguistic meaning and short of the full contextual, pragmatic meaning inherent in an occasion of reading or communication. 3

I am moving from using ‘framework’ to model on the basis that there is now an increased level of theoretical underpinning for the model which was missing in the first versions of my work.

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Here is the list of TCFs as first devised. Where TCFs are paired, this is because they share the structural space in a text (Naming and Describing) or some semantic connection (Equating and Contrasting) or have overlapping meaning (Enumerating and Exemplifying). We can therefore see them as ten (groups of) TCFs rather than fourteen separate ones. 1. Naming and Describing 2. Representing processes 3. Equating and contrasting 4. Enumerating and exemplifying 5. Prioritising 6. Implying and assuming 7. Negating 8. Hypothesising 9. Presenting others’ speech and thought 10. Representing time, space and society. Before I consider the challenges in applying these analytical tools to poetry, here is a brief summary of how each of the existing TCFs can be seen (Table 1.1): This table presents a necessarily truncated account of the TCFs of the original CS framework and they will each be explored in more detail in their relevant chapters below when their applicability to poetic language will also be assessed. But first, I will introduce the current project in general terms, starting with an examination of what aspects of poetic language might seem to be missing from the model as described so far. 1.2.4

What’s Missing?

Before embarking on the main work of this project, to apply the CS model to poetry, and on the basis of my previous experience of analysing poetry (Jeffries, 1993, 2000a, 2008, 2009, 2010c), I considered which aspects of poetic language might be overlooked by applying the TCFs in their existing form. I anticipated that the purely musical aspects of poetic form would not feature in any general account of textual meaning, and discounted this aspect of the material nature of poems as being outside the scope of this work. This is not in any sense to deny the appeal and central role that musicality often plays in poetry, but to deem it not meaningful in the way that TCFs would account for. Nevertheless, my earlier work on poetry (Jeffries, 1993) had convinced me that in the contemporary period in particular, the soundscape of poems is often as meaningful as other linguistic levels and that this should not be excluded from consideration where it contributes to the textual meaning. Thus, we will see in Chapter 12 that where the phonological choices of a poet make meaning, they will be considered, but where they are purely musical, they will be set aside.

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Table 1.1 Textual-Conceptual Functions in critical stylistics TCF

Meaning

Form(s)

1. Naming and describing

Labels the people and things (concrete and abstract) in the world of the text Presents the events, actions and states in the world of the text and how they relate to the people and things named and described Presents aspects of the world of the text as similar (equating) or in an oppositional relationship (contrasting)

Noun phrases, including adjectival modification Adjectival phrases Choice of main (lexical) verb transitivity types

2. Representing processes

3. Equating and contrasting

4. Enumerating and exemplifying

5. Prioritising

6. Implying and assuming

Lists all the items in a category (enumerating) or some of the items that illustrate a category (exemplifying) Provides information on the more or less significant participants (or artefacts) in a scene Makes non-propositional meaning available to reader/hearer

7. Negating

Denyies, refuses or otherwise negates some aspect of the text

8. Hypothesising

Presents potential scenarios

9. Presenting others’ speech and thought

Presents the prior (or imagined) speech or thought of other speakers Creates a scenario in time, space and with social structures in which there is a specific point of view which the reader/hearer is invited to take up

10. Representing time, space and society

Intensive relational structures and apposition (equating) Syntactic and semantic triggers including, for example, Not X but Y frame Lists of words, phrases or clauses which perform the same function in the higher level structure Placement in syntactic structure (e.g. subordination or fronting) Definite noun phrases and triggers of logical presuppositions (assuming). Triggers (e.g. and) of conventional implicatures Core negators (no, not), pronouns (none), morphemes (de-), lexical items (deny) Modality from modal verbs through modal adverbs (probably) and adjectives (probable) to lexical verbs of opinion (e.g. suspect) Direct, indirect and free direct reporting mechanisms Deixis

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The other aspects of poetry that I was concerned might be excluded by the framework as it stood—or needed additional thought—were those figurative uses of language which are particularly common in the genre and often thought of as the mainstay of poetic language. I had been asked about metaphor a number of times in relation to critical stylistics, but it always seemed to me to be working at a tangent to the TCFs of my model. However, in analysing poetry there was no escaping the need to think harder about how metaphor and other figurative uses might—or might not—be linked to the model itself. I was less worried about the more abstract meaning that poems are often said to embody, somewhat at a distance from the words on the page. Where the text triggers deeper meanings that the apparently mundane account of an event or a memory, these are inevitably more socially produced and less linguistic than the meaning I am concerned with. I have written about this in relation to poems before (Jeffries, 2001, 2008, 2010c) and am satisfied that the integrated experience of the reader who reacts both to a poem both personally and as a member of the speech community nevertheless can be teased into different strands for the purpose of identifying the textual elements of meaning as contrasted with the experiential or intertextual aspects. Having argued for this separation of analysis into strands, however, we shall also see that the textual meaning when adequately described can provide a launch pad for interpreting the poem at a deeper level. 1.2.5

Core vs. Periphery?

Since the first version of CS was developed (Jeffries, 2007, 2010b) I have become increasingly aware that the TCFs are not all equally present in texts and that this ought, perhaps, to be signalled in the model itself.4 Whilst there is a range, even amongst the less frequent TCFs, between those that are relatively common (e.g. Hypothesising) and those which are relatively rare (e.g. Enumerating and Exemplifying), nevertheless there seems to be a more serious case to be made for distinguishing those which cannot be avoided in almost every acceptable utterance or text and those which are by their nature, optional. The former group, which I will label ‘core’ TCFs from now on, are as follows: (1) Naming and Describing (2) Representing processes (3) Prioritising (4) Representing time, space and society

4 I am grateful to my PhD students, Manal Abeed, Shatha Khuzaee, Mahmood Baban and Soran Fadhil, for their insights and contributions to this debate.

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Their inevitability in any text arises from their close link to the grammar of the language. There can be no texts without noun phrases (1), verb choices (2), structure (3) or situatedness through tense, person, etc. (4) and they are thus ubiquitous. By contrast, not every sentence or text will include Hypothesising, Negating, Equating and Contrasting, Enumerating and Exemplifying, Presenting others’ speech and thought or Implying and Assuming. These more peripheral TCFs, nevertheless, can be the most interesting cases in analysing the ideation of a text, so their peripheral nature is quantitative rather than qualitative and they will be treated equally alongside the more core features here. The main difference between the two groups is that the former (the core TCFs) have been examined in more detail by major theories and frameworks and they are also somewhat more complex in nature than the peripheral ones. The analytical chapters of this book will be organised into two sections corresponding to the core and peripheral TCFs, to help the reader navigate the breadth of the model being presented here. I will complete the introductory chapter by setting out the aims, research questions and methodology of this work and address some questions of research integrity as well as making explicit the links between this project and stylistics as a sub-discipline of linguistics. I will then introduce the poems which are analysed in this book (though their full texts are to be found in the Appendix). Finally, I will summarise the structure and content of the rest of the book.

1.3

Research Questions and Methods

This section will set out the scope of the research being reported here and explain how the task was approached. 1.3.1

Aims of the Research

As I have already explained in the opening paragraph of this chapter, the aim of the research underpinning this book was to ascertain to what extent a framework developed initially for practical and pedagogical reasons (Jeffries, 2010b) and later developed into a wider theory of ideational meaning (Jeffries, 2013, 2014, 2015a, 2015b) might be widened still further to encompass textual meaning more generally, to include poetry as a genre quite different from the non-literary texts previously examined. Whilst this theoretical aim is at the centre of the account given here, the complementary aim of producing an approach to studying poetic language is nevertheless also a core aim and although the work here is based on a small number of poems, the wider aim is to encourage other researchers to use this approach as a way of producing comparable accounts of the poetics of different poems, poets or schools of poetry in due course. The advantage of using a consistent model and applying it systematically is that it will produce accounts of poetic language which can

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be replicated as well as compared across sets of data. Such comparability has not been available in traditional literary approaches to poetry, beyond the technical description of poetic form and the less technical (and thus less replicable) discussion of figurative language. The aim here is to produce not only a systematic method of analysis but also a comprehensive one (with the caveats around musicality and form already given). 1.3.2

Research Questions

The research questions which I attempt to answer in this book, then, are rather broad and this presents some problems of methodology, rigour and significance that I will address below. However, in order to be clear about the intention of the work, here are the research questions I had at the outset: RQ1:

RQ2:

RQ3:

To what extent (if at all) does the framework of TCFs developed for Critical Stylistic purposes produce analysis with descriptive and explanatory adequacy (Chomsky 1965: 18–37) for the language of a sample of contemporary poems? What additional amendments to the model of textual meaning and the consequent TCF framework need to be made to provide any shortfall in the adequacy described in RQ1? What does the development of this model for the wider purpose described in RQ2 tell us about textual meaning more generally?

It was clear from the outset that there could be no method of sampling the whole of contemporary poetry in English, even if such a category could be effectively defined. The aim was anyway not to account for the style of contemporary poetry as a whole, but to provide a way to approach the style of any contemporary poems that a researcher might wish to analyse. In the next section, the method of analysis and the overall structure of the project is explained. 1.3.3

Methodology

The project had three analytical stages. The first stage was based on a limited number (13) of poems familiar to me as the first batch of test cases against which to judge the approach I was developing. The second stage was to choose an additional set of poems (7) which were new to me as a way of making certain that my first choices were not skewing the findings simply because of my personal preferences and familiarity with certain poems. This second group of poems were chosen on an initial reading only and with nothing in mind other than an interest in trying out the analysis on them. These two sets of poems are reported on together in the analysis that follows in Chapters 2–12. As both sets of poems were chosen by me, even though I was less familiar with the second set, I added a third stage of analysis where I was sent a set of (6)

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poems by the editor of a poetry magazine (The North), Peter Sansom, and I approached these poems in exactly the same way as the first two sets. The analysis in this case is reported as a ‘whole poem’ analysis in Chapter 13, though insights from this stage of the analysis are also threaded through the other analytical Chapters (2–12). Beyond the general information that I wanted to ‘try out’ a new approach, I did not inform Peter of the details of my study. The analysis of each poem was the same. I produced templates for each of the TCFs into which I copied and pasted those extracts of the poem that were relevant to that TCF. For the core TCFs, I therefore copied each NP into the Naming and Describing table, each verb into the transitivity table and so on. I made notes on the specific nature of each feature, including the form(s) used and the poetic effect as I saw it in the context of the poem. See the relevant chapters for examples of this process. These tables of analysis and commentary were completed before I took each TCF in turn to see how they were behaving in the dataset I had chosen. I wrote each chapter based on any patterning I saw in the data, so this part of the process was inductive, since I had no prior expectations about how the TCFs would operate in poetic data. 1.3.4

Questions of Research Quality: Rigour, Significance and Originality5

This research project has been challenging in a number of ways, not least because of its scope and theoretical abstractness. However, I will try to set out here the ways in which I attempted to ensure that the research is original, rigorous and significant. The originality of any research is usually relatively easy to establish at a trivial level, especially if it is based on earlier work of the researcher, as is the case here. However, it is also important to make sure that the research links in useful and insightful ways to the body of work that comes before it. In the next section, I will attempt to show how this work links to my main disciplinary ‘home’, stylistics, earlier development of CS (e.g. Jeffries, 2007, 2010b) having already shown its links and indebtedness to CDA and to Systemic Functional Linguistics. Some of the ideas and concepts are, therefore, developed and borrowed from these fields, and the basics of descriptive syntax needed to define some of the structures in the data are certainly not my own. However, what I would claim as original here is the concept of textual meaning, so far only theorised to any extent in Jeffries (2015b), and its application for the first time in published work to the language of poetry.

5 I include this section because it seems to me that too often research in our field is not explicit about how it has been carried out and what the compromises were. I hope this will be helpful to the reader, particularly, but not only, when they are early career researchers or new to the field. Understanding how a new or unfamiliar field interprets questions of research quality is often a challenge, so it seems a politeness to make it as clear as I can here.

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Originality on its own is not a guarantee of excellence in research of course, as it needs to go hand-in-hand with significance to have any lasting value. I am working towards a more detailed theoretical account (Jeffries, in prep) of the importance of textual meaning in a theory of human language and the current book provides an extended testing ground for the theoretical arguments that I will make there. It is therefore important for the wider discipline of linguistics, as it will contribute to the debate about where meaning resides, how code and usage interact and to what extent you can describe linguistic meaning in relation to text. The final research principle which is of great importance to the evaluation of this work is rigour. There are a range of ways of testing rigour in relation to the kind of qualitative work presented here, including asking: ● whether the work is replicable (e.g. can the reader tell how it gets from A to B?); ● how systematic it is (e.g. is all data treated the same?); ● whether the logic of the argumentation is flawless and accessible (e.g. do conclusions follow clearly and explicitly from results of analysis?). In relation to this project, I have explained that the data cannot be a representative sample of a population, given that the definition of contemporary poetry is variable; the question of whether to limit the data to British poetry or to include all poetry written in English (and what varieties of English) is difficult to resolve; the sub-categories of such a population would be hard to define clearly to produce anything like full coverage and stylistic analysis is very time-consuming. So, the rigour in data-selection here is presented as a process of iteratively testing my model on poems that are increasingly unfamiliar to me as a reader. The implied consequence of this is that I, or other researchers, could repeat the process many times over, with different, and possibly different kinds of poetry. This is perfectly within the ambition I have for this work and I would love to see such projects arising from it, together with the suggestions for revision to the model and its underlying theory of textual meaning. Such is the nature of research—all conclusions being always only provisional and open to further testing.

1.4

How Textual Meaning Links to Stylistics

I take for granted that any approach to textual meaning, including this one, should be linked to the field of stylistics. The field of stylistics takes it as axiomatic that choice is intrinsic to the creation of texts, and that the term ‘text’ itself should include all language use, formal and informal, written and spoken, public and private. As well as assuming that choice is the basis of textual meaning, it is also vital to recognise the unique contribution that stylistics has made to our understanding of how texts work. Perhaps the most important of these contributions

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is the theory of foregrounding, based on internal and external deviation and parallelism, which has its origins in Russian Formalism, but has developed into a fuller theory of those aspects of texts which we are most likely to take notice of. Foregrounding will, therefore, be referred to throughout this book, as will other contributions of stylistics such as speech presentation, deixis and so on. Many of the poems analysed here provide ample evidence that the background, as well as the foreground, of a text is a vital part of its meaning and in some cases creates the conditions for foregrounding. We will therefore be looking at the text holistically to describe these interdependencies.

1.5

The Poems6

In this section, I will introduce the poems analysed in the three phases and give an overview of their narrative (if any) and their surface meaning, according to the propositional content alone. All deeper analysis and interpretation will arise from the chapters that follow. Table 1.2 lists the initial set of poems (and their authors) analysed to test the model of textual meaning and see whether it provided a systematic way of describing and interpreting the language of contemporary poems. It also contains my initial superficial summary of each poem’s content. As I have explained above, these poems were already well-known to me. They range from Canada to Ireland, but are mainly by British poets. They are also varied in their time of origin, from the mid-twentieth century (which some might discount as contemporary now) to much more recent poems. The poets are a mixture of very high profile and less well-known. This is not a sample of anything except my own taste in poetry as I explained earlier. Table 1.3 sets out the poems that I chose to use in the second stage of the research, to test out my ideas. Whilst I also chose them for their appeal to me as a reader, I did not take a lot of time to do so and chose the first 7 poems I read which I enjoyed, whether or not I had a clear understanding or interpretation of them immediately. Table 1.4 sets out the poems suggested to me by Peter Sansom as a test of whether my approach works for poems chosen by someone else.

6

The poems and their full references can be found in the Appendix.

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Table 1.2 Initial set of familiar poems Poem title

Author

Summary

A Hairline Fracture

Amy Clampitt

Baking

Lucy Newlyn

Blackberry Picking

Seamus Heaney

Doorsteps

Pamela Gillilan

Greenhouse

Simon Armitage

Ironing

Vicki Feaver

Litany

Carol Ann Duffy

A couple from elsewhere arrive in London during a heatwave, suffer from hay fever, argue and gradually realise they are splitting up The memory of a childhood home becomes vivid as it is visited by a long-lost relative (mother?) Happy memory of childhood outings to pick blackberries is overshadowed by the knowledge that the berries will not keep and will turn sour or rot Comparison of the way in which a remembered person (mother/grandmother?) used to cut bread, finely, compared with the thick slices produced by the narrator Memory of a father and son, told through the voice of the son, building a greenhouse and the father coming home late and picking tomatoes in the light of his car. The greenhouse being now in dilapidated state implies the father is no longer alive A narrative told through the ironing activity of the narrator who resented her domestic role during which she ironed everything, gave up ironing altogether when she was first alone (divorced?) and finally becomes at ease with her situation and starts ironing her clothes again A group of housewives (in the 1950s/60s?) sit together gossiping, observed by the narrator, a young girl who is daughter of the hostess. She decides to shock them with a story of her day at school and gets into trouble

(continued)

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Table 1.2 (continued) Poem title

Author

Summary

Men on Allotments

U. A, Fanthorpe

Platform Piece

Glyn Maxwell

Pond Dipping

Sarah Wardle

Prayer

Carol Ann Duffy

Summer Evening

Peter Sansom

The Unprofessionals

U. A. Fanthorpe

Up on the Moors with Keeper

Maura Dooley

A portrait of the men who grow vegetables on their allotments, describing the different parts of the process, from seeds to mature plants A description of how it feels to say goodbye to a lover as you are separated by a train journey and end up in different cities The description of an outing to a pond by a group of children and their teachers (or nursery workers), observed by the narrator who has no child, but clearly wishes for one A series of cameos of people in a town who are suddenly transported by a sound or a sight to an emotion of longing, nostalgia or fear The description of a shopping trip to a garden centre on a summer evening and the surrounding scene as the narrator makes their way home An account of how people behave when something awful happens and they turn up at your house and try to help A portrait of the Bronte sisters enjoying the fresh air and freedom they find out on the moors, compared with their relative lack of freedom and joy in the house with their father and brother

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Table 1.3 Secondary set of poems new to the author Poem title

Author

Summary

10k

Jane Aspinall

Crafty

Maureen Duffy

Figs

Mario Petrucci

Household

Henry Shukman

It Wasn’t Snowing

Michael Schmidt

Marble

Frances Corkey Thompson

Prospero’s Gifts

James Nash

Two people go running in the evening when everyone else is indoors, doing normal things The narrator remembers her mother and all her craft skills with the language which she is beginning to forget. The mother is better at craft than baking The figs in a suburban garden are surviving despite the lack of warm weather The poem lists all the materials that go to make up a house and then pronounces all this to be the mass of love The narrator remembers a visit from a poet to his school and the lines he spoke. The narrator admires the poet’s achievements. They share a country of origin which the narrator imagines The narrator is watching her partner go in to the theatre for heart surgery and compares him with Michelangelo’s David, thinking of how the apprentices would cover up mistakes in the process of sculpting the marble The narrator alludes to childhood trauma which affects him through his life and uses analogy of Prospero’s Gifts to explain that recovery is not a magical process, but a long hard process which finally reaps some rewards

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Table 1.4 Further set of poems new to the author and chosen by Peter Sansom Poem title

Author

Summary

3 Victoria Avenue

Alan Payne

A Square of Sunlight

Meg Cox

Dai

Stephen Payne

I was Na’amah

Shash Trevett

Important People

Gina Wilson

Jimmy Knight

David Constantine

The narrator and another person turn up where a house used to be that they lived in and they see it so vividly that when they are challenged they said this is where we live A girl makes her way home from school through a cathedral town in the UK, first of all hanging about with friends and gradually leaving them behind at various shops or on different routes home. Finally alone she rushes home through the garden and the house to the kitchen where her father is found on the floor in some distress in a square of sunlight A driver in an empty car transporter drives across Wales, enjoying the lack of load on the truck, the empty road, the starlit sky and remembering similar, but less peaceful journeys in war zones where he served as a tank driver The narrator lists all the names she has gone by throughout history and legend, and describes the countries in which she was so-named, finally stating that she is no longer known by these names, but as the wife of Noah The narrator is in a hospital waiting room, reading a book lent by her daughter about famous women and thinking about the other people in the waiting room, and the nurses, and what makes people important A story of childhood where the narrator remembers Jimmy Knight, a poor child whose poverty caused him to be ostracised by the other children, suddenly being asked to sing by the teacher. The singing is beautiful, but when it ends he remains the same unfortunate boy

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1.6

Guide to the Rest of the Book

The following analytical chapters are split into two sections. Part I deals with the core TCFs as described in Sect. 1.2.5. Chapter 2 looks at Naming, Chapter 3 at Representing processes, Chapter 4 considers Prioritising and Chapter 5 looks at Representing time, space and society. Part II contains 7 more chapters, each dealing with one TCF or pair of TCFs as follows: Chapter 6 explores Equating and Contrasting, Chapter 7 considers Enumerating and exemplifying under the joint new heading of Listing, Chapter 8 focusses on Negating, Chapter 9 on Hypothesising, Chapter 10 brings together Assuming and Implying under the new heading of Alluding, Chapter 11 considers Presenting of others’ speech and thought and Chapter 12 introduces a new TCF, Evoking, which explores a phenomenon I have long noticed, but not integrated into the model before, and which I have previously thought of as a version of iconicity. Here is a table to remind readers of the TCFs, their order in the remainder of the book and how some of the original TCFs have been renamed for consistency (Table 1.5): Part III brings together the TCFs and the theoretical implications of textual meaning first by analysing some new poems using all of the TCFs together (Chapter 13) and then by considering what we have learned about linguistic theory, stylistics and poetic style (Chapter 14). The Appendix contains the poems analysed.

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Table 1.5 Textual-Conceptual Functions in Textual Stylistics Chapter and TCF label

Meaning

Form(s)

2. Naming and Describing

Labels the people and things (concrete and abstract) in the world of the text Presents the events, actions and states in the world of the text and how they relate to the people and things named and described Provides information on the more or less significant participants (or artefacts) in a scene Creates a scenario in time, space and with social structures in which there is a specific point of view which the reader/hearer is invited to take up Presents aspects of the world of the text as similar (equating) or in an oppositional relationship (contrasting)

Noun phrases, including adjectival modification Adjectival phrases Choice of main (lexical) verb transitivity types

3. Representing processes

4. Prioritising

5. Representing time, space and society

6. Equating and contrasting

7. Listing (formerly Enumerating and exemplifying)

8. Alluding (formerly Implying and assuming)

Lists all the items in a category (enumerating) or some of the items that illustrate a category (exemplifying) Makes non-propositional meaning available to reader/hearer

9. Negating

Denyies, refuses or otherwise negates some aspect of the text

10. Hypothesising

Presents potential scenarios

11. Presenting others’ speech and thought

Presents the prior (or imagined) speech or thought of other speakers

Placement in syntactic structure (e.g. subordination or fronting) Deixis

Intensive relational structures and apposition (equating) Syntactic and semantic triggers including, for example, Not X but Y frame Lists of words, phrases or clauses which perform the same function in the higher level structure Definite noun phrases and triggers of logical presuppositions (assuming). Triggers (e.g. and) of conventional implicatures Core negators (no, not), pronouns (none), morphemes (de-), lexical items (deny) Modality from modal verbs through modal adverbs (probably) and adjectives (probable) to lexical verbs of opinion (e.g. suspect) Direct, indirect and free direct reporting mechanisms

(continued)

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Table 1.5 (continued) Chapter and TCF label

Meaning

Form(s)

12. Evoking

Produces a response in the reader directly linked to the linguistic choices and relevant to the poem’s content

Onomatopoeia (sound) Layout (image) Line-breaks and stanzas (form) Long, delayed or extended clause elements (structure) Minor sentences (structure)

References Fabb, N., & Halle, M. (2008). Meter in poetry. A new theory. CUP. Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. Longman. Gavins, J. (2007). Text world theory: An introduction. Edinburgh University Press. Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar. Edward Arnold. Hidalgo-Downing, L. (2000). Negation, text worlds and discourse: The pragmatics of fiction. Ablex Publishing Corporation. Jeffries, L. (1993). The language of twentieth century poetry. Macmillan. Jeffries, L. (2000a). Point of view and the reader in the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy. In L. Jeffries & P. Sansom (Eds.), Contemporary poems: Some critical approaches (pp. 54–68). Smith Doorstop Books. Jeffries, L. (2000b). Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater: in defence of theoretical eclecticism in stylistics. Occasional Papers No. 12. Poetics and Linguistics Association. Jeffries, L. (2001). Schema affirmation and White Asparagus: Cultural multilingualism among readers of texts. Language and Literature, 10(4), 325–343. Jeffries, L. (2007). Textual construction of the female body: A critical discourse approach. Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffries, L. (2008). The role of style in reader-involvement: Deictic shifting in contemporary poems. Journal of Literary Semantics, 37 (2008), 69–85. Jeffries, L. (2009). The language of poems for children: A stylistic case study. In J. Maybin, & N. Watson (Eds.), Children’s literature. Approaches and territories (pp. 218–235). Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffries, L. (2010a). Opposition in discourse. Continuum Books. Jeffries, L. (2010b). Critical stylistics: The power of English. Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffries, L. (2010c). ‘The Unprofessionals’: Syntactic iconicity and reader interpretation in contemporary poems. In D. McIntyre & B. Busse (Eds.), Language and style (pp. 95–115). Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffries, L. (2013). Critical stylistics. In M. Burke (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics (pp. 408–420). Routledge. Jeffries, L. (2014). Interpretation. In P. Stockwell & S. Whiteley (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of stylistics (pp. 469–486). CUP. Jeffries, L. (2015a). Critical and cultural stylistics. In V. Sotirova (Ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics (pp. 157–176). Bloomsbury.

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Jeffries, L. (2015b). Language and Ideology. In N. Braber, L. Cummings, & L. Morrish (Eds.), Introducing language and linguistics (pp. 379–405). CUP. McIntyre, D., & Walker, B. (2019). Corpus stylistics. Edinburgh University Press. Mulyani, E. R. (2014). A Critical Discourse Analysis of a text entitled “Pakistani girl shot by Taliban claims triumph over terrorists” Using van Leeuwen’s 2009 Method. ELTIN Journal, 2/II , 82–87. Nahajec, L. (2021). Negation, expectation and ideology in written texts: A textual and communicative perspective. John Benjamins. Simpson, P. (1993). Language, ideology and point of view. Routledge. Toolan, M. (1996). Total speech: An integrational linguistic approach to language. Duke University Press. Tsur, R. (2017). Metre, rhythm and emotion in poetry. A cognitive approach. Studia Metrica Et Poetica, 4(1), 7. https://doi.org/10.12697/smp.2017.4.1.01 van Dijk, T. (2015). Critical discourse analysis. In D. Tannen, H. E. Hamilton, & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 466–485). John Wiley and Sons Inc. van Leeuwen, T. (2009). Discourse as recontextualization of social practice: A guide. In R. Wodak, & M. Meyer (Eds.). Methods of critical discourse analysis (2nd ed.). Sage. Werth, P. (1999). Text worlds: Representing conceptual space in discourse. Longman. Widdowson, H. G. (1998). The theory and practice of critical discourse analysis. Applied Linguistics, 19(1), 136–151.

PART I

Core Features of Textual Meaning

In this part, four of the Textual-Conceptual Functions (TCFs) are introduced and used to demonstrate the core textual meaning of the poems in my dataset. These four TCFs are those which are evident in each and every text, since they arise from the key components of linguistic structure. Their ubiquity creates the conditions for them to produce significant textual effects and yet not all occurrences of each of these TCFs will do so, producing a challenge for the analyst in judging the textual significance of each case.

CHAPTER 2

Naming and Describing: People, Places and Things in Poems

In addition to simply referring to people, creatures and things, the noun phrase also has the textual power to create and characterise them. This structural element of grammar is the basis of the first analytical chapter in this book and in it I will investigate how the worlds of poetic texts are furnished and populated by the processes of Naming and Describing. The TCF of describing can be linked particularly to adjectives, which can occur within the noun phrase as premodifiers to the head (this stale cake) or as complements in the clause (This cake is stale). The latter is part of the propositional meaning1 of the text and can therefore be accounted for by the descriptive apparatus already available in linguistics. But premodifying adjectives are more typical of the textual meaning I am concerned with here, since they add information which is non-propositional and provide, in effect, one aspect of the naming in the text. Describing, then, will be treated as an aspect of naming in this chapter.

2.1

Why Naming?

When I started developing my ideas on textual meaning, I noticed that a lot of attention had been paid by CDA scholars to the verb aspect of texts through the Hallidayan system of transitivity analysis. Related to case grammar (e.g. Fillmore, 1968) and thematic role analysis (e.g. Jackendoff, 1987), transitivity shares with them the virtue of hovering somewhere between syntax and 1 I have so far referred to the surface meaning of sentences and clauses as semanticosyntax, but it may be simpler to use this term, which I take to include both the explicit proposition of a clause and any entailments that are stable, irrespective of context. See Simpson (1993: 111–128) for a clear account of these terms.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2_2

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semantics, observing, as it does, that the grammatical role of a participant (usually a noun phrase functioning as a Subject, Object or Complement2 ) is not a straightforward predictor of its semantic role, which depends to some extent on the choice of lexical verb playing the role of Predicator.3 Thus, for example, the grammatical Subjects (underlined) in these two poetic extracts have different relationships with the processes described by the verbal element: Someone Down the Terrace is mowing their lawn [Newlyn: ‘Baking’] Grade I Piano Scales console the lodger [Duffy: ‘Prayer’]

Whilst the Someone of Newlyn’s childhood memory is clearly the Actor in a Material Action process (mowing ), it would be harder to see the Grade 1 piano scales as an Actor in the same sense, even though consoling can be seen as an intentional action when the Subject is a human being as in the (invented) clause, she consoled me. The basis of the transitivity approach is that we need a separate terminology to distinguish phrases which share the same grammatical label (Subject in this case) but perform different semantic functions. In Chapter 3 I will explore how transitivity analysis can help us to map out such roles—and where the limitations of the approach may lie—but here I want to point out that irrespective of the larger role played by a noun phrase in the clause, there is still much to say about the internal choices that go to make up the naming practices in a text. Whilst many CDA scholars comment in their analyses on naming practices in the texts they are analysing (e.g. Fairclough, 2013: 184), there is little systematic discussion of the nature and function of naming beyond the extensive interest in nominalisation of verbs (e.g. Fowler et al., 1979: chapter 10; Fowler, 1991: 80). My textbook (Jeffries, 2010: chapter 2) considers the role of noun phrases in naming as well as nominalisation and lexical choice of nouns. Here, I build on that initial exploration. In my work on ideology in non-literary texts, I identified three aspects of naming that seemed to be important in terms of their effects on textual 2 Throughout this book I will be using grammatical terminology taken from A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, a descriptive grammar of English written by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik, first published by Longman in 1985. It is the dominant model of basic grammatical description used by stylisticians, partly because of its comprehensive nature, and is often popularly called the ‘SPOCA’ grammar in stylistics, based on the five basic clause elements in that description. Note that stylistics also draws heavily on Systemic Functional Grammar for certain purposes (e.g. modality and transitivity) but SPOCA remains the base line for relatively uncontentious aspects of surface grammatical description. 3 Note that languages other than English, and particularly those with explicit case grammar morphology, may present these aspects of textual meaning rather differently.

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meaning. The first of these is the choice of head noun to apply to a particular referent. I will illustrate these options from the poem ‘Ironing’. This may be a pronoun as in I used to iron everything; a neutral, mid-level vocabulary item that draws no attention to itself as in my iron flying over sheets and towels; a choice of noun that is foregrounded by its contrast with the surrounding co-text (internally deviant) as in until the sheath frayed, exposing/wires like nerves or a choice of noun that is foregrounded by its contrast with expected vocabulary in the wider context (externally deviant) as in I converted to crumpledness where the derived noun stands out. These foregrounded choices can be identified along the dimensions of formality, dialect, collocation or connotation and provide a relatively straightforward linguistic choice to both identify and interpret. We will see examples later in the chapter where the choice of pronouns or nouns can have a specific effect in a poem, though much of the discussion of pronouns specifically will take place in Chapter 5 which deals with deictic elements of texts. In addition to the choice of head noun or pronoun, the main feature of naming that has been discussed by CDA is the nominalised process, or nominalisation. The reason that CDA has been so interested in this is that for texts which aim to reinforce ideologies, the option to avoid using a verb in its natural state and to make it into the name of something instead, is a powerful way to avoid mentioning those responsible for a process; those affected by a process and to presuppose its existence, rather than asserting the process as a proposition. Thus, for example, in a major speech in 2021, the then Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, commented on the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic then underway: there will be, sadly, more hospitalisations and sadly there will be more deaths. In a situation such as the pandemic, certain nominalisations tend to become shorthand and are used frequently by politicians, commentators and the public. It could be argued that this is purely out of a need for economy, as the equivalent full clauses would be lengthy by comparison: Sadly, more people will end up in hospital and more people will die. Notice, however, that the people are deleted from the nominalised version and this can have consequences for how society sees the human cost of policies in relation to public health emergencies such as this if, as happened in this period, it is repeated frequently and in the absence of full clauses of the kind I have created here. Of course, many examples of nominalisation in everyday life are no more than economical ways of referring to common processes (e.g. condensation; discussion; disagreement ) so there is in principle no reason to assume that poems wouldn’t make use of nominalisation, given that economy of expression is one of the features of the poetic genre, even if there is no ideological motivation to do so. Nevertheless, they are actually quite rare in my core set of poems. The last line of ‘The Unprofessionals’ by Fanthorpe, Until the blunting of time demonstrates a textual effect of nominalisations which has not been discussed in CDA (including by me) as much as their ability to avoid

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mentioning the participants (e.g. Actor, Goal) in a process. This other difference between using a verb and a nominalisation is that a finite verb phrase requires the first auxiliary or main verb in the phrase to be marked for present or past tense. One effect of the nominalised process, as with non-finite verb phrases, is to stop time passing by avoiding the need to add a tense. In the case of the Fanthorpe poem, the lack of anchoring in past or present partly undermines the poem’s ending, which implies the ‘time heals’ cliché. This effect is enhanced by the fact that the poem ends with a comma, which implies that the healing is anyway not a completed process. That time does make pain less extreme, but not quickly, and possibly never completely, is captured by the combination of the tenseless nominalisation (blunting ), the final comma and the description of the time that ticks away during extremis as the immortality of all the seconds where the nominalisation of an adjective (immortal ) also makes more tangible the ephemeral quality of being endless, since nouns seem more concrete than adjectives. There will be little more said on nominalisation in poetry in this chapter, though we will see that there are different ways in which poems create timelessness and that it is a common feature of this kind of poem. The final aspect of Naming and Describing considered in my work on critical stylistics is the contribution to naming made by the noun phrase as a whole. This is something that seems to be rarely mentioned by CDA scholars, though it seems to me that the capacity to name a complex referent such as a complete amnesty for army veterans who were involved in deaths in Northern Ireland or increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events is not only a useful way to be economical, but also allows those who control media and other powerful text producers to define what is, by naming it. In the remainder of this chapter, this final aspect of naming, the capacity to encapsulate a great deal of information in a noun phrase, will be explored in relation not to ideology, but to poetic effect.

2.2

How People and Things Are Named

We have already seen that nominalisation is rare in the poems of my dataset, and the choice of head noun or pronoun is self-explanatory in structural terms, though they may require interpretation in relation to the lexical options available to the poet. In this section, therefore, I will spend some time describing the noun phrase in English with the aim of introducing the terminology and structural labels used in the remainder of the chapter. Whilst some readers may prefer different grammatical terminology based on their favoured grammatical theory, I hope that most can accept that the basics of the structures in which nouns participate are pretty much agreed upon, whatever the underlying theories about how they come about. As explained earlier, the terms are taken from the Quirk et al. (1985) descriptive grammar of English. I use phrases from

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poems to illustrate the structures here, some of them in my dataset,4 though some of them are from other poems not included there. At this point, I have chosen the simplest possible examples for this stage of the exposition and will not be commenting on the poetic/aesthetic effect of the noun phrases chosen to illustrate the default structure for English. More complex and non-standard or deviant examples will be discussed later in this chapter once the terminology has been set out. First, a noun phrase at its simplest is made up of the head noun alone. The poem ‘Hardly Worth Mentioning’ (Samson, 1994: 56) opens with a line which continues the sentence started in the title: except there was blood, where the noun phrase following the verb (was ) is a single word, blood. In English, this can only work where the noun is non-count or mass, like sugar, air, or water. Countable nouns in the singular must be preceded by a determiner such as a definite or indefinite article. The narrator of ‘Education for Leisure’ (Duffy, 1985), for example, self-defines in the line: I am a genius, where the noun phrase a genius, with indefinite article as determiner, is the simplest possible noun phrase for a count noun such as genius. Alternatively, count nouns in the plural can occur without any determiner: till rails tear you blinking from that city. Here (‘Platform Piece’) the Subject of the clause is the single count noun, rails. The next level of complexity in a noun phrase is where there are other premodifiers before the head noun and these may be made up of one or more adjectives as in: The terrible marriages (‘Litany’) or noun premodifiers as in: the carriage window (‘Platform Piece’ ) or both: my new black leather phone book (‘Long Distance’ Harrison) where the three adjectives are followed by a noun (phone) before the head noun (book).5 Other items occurring before the head noun include enumerators: as two dreams walking (‘A city seems…’ Riding) and pre-determiners: stars on all our brows (‘Shooting Stars’ Duffy, 1985). After the head noun, but still within the noun phrase, there are a number of possible postmodifiers. The simplest is the prepositional phrase, which consists of a preposition and another noun phrase: the smell of broken rubber (‘The Tyre’ Armitage) where the whole noun phrase has smell as its head noun and the postmodifying prepositional phrase includes the embedded noun phrase broken rubber. Note that despite its apparent simplicity, this kind of postmodification has the capacity to be reduplicated, with no strict limit as to how many times the embedded noun can in turn be postmodified: a shoddy streak in the fabric of the air of London (‘A Hairline Fracture’) for example, has a number 4 Note that, in order to keep the text relatively clean and easy to read, I am not repeating the reference details of those poems that are included in my dataset. The references for these are included in the Appendix where they are included as whole texts. Other poems are referenced here normally. 5

You might argue that this core phrase, phone book, is really a compound noun, despite not being hyphenated, because of its probable stress-pattern (the main stress on book alone), but these grammatical conundrums are for other contexts.

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of levels of embedding that can best be demonstrated using a tree diagram (Fig. 2.1): We will see later in this chapter why the reduplication of postmodifying prepositional phrases could be of interest in analysing poetic language. The other main type of post modification of the head noun is the relative clause: Puce curses that are sounds not words (‘Havisham’ Duffy, 1993: 40) is a minor sentence in this poem which describes the language used by the jilted Miss Havisham character from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. This noun phrase, then, is made up of a premodifying adjective (puce), the head noun (curses ) and the relative clause starting with the relative pronoun, that. Although this is a common structure in poetry as in other kinds of language use, there is a very common tendency in poetry in particular to omit the relative pronoun as in: swans on a river/disprove the moon they paddle through (‘Summer Evening’) where the noun phrase the moon they paddle through includes the relative clause they paddle through with an ellipted that or which implied. Even more common than this is the kind of post modification that might be interpreted grammatically as a reduced relative clause but could also be seen more as an adjectival complement to the noun phrase: the half-attended paddock wall/scribbled with blackthorn and broke-wool (‘The

Fig. 2.1 Structure of a noun phrase in ‘A Hairline Fracture’

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Fielder’ Hollis). Here, although it would be possible to imagine that there is an elliptical intervening relative pronoun and verb (i.e. which is scribbled, etc.), it is less clearly a recoverable ellipsis as in the former case. One of the reasons for this is that the auxiliary verb (is ) is needed in addition to the relative pronoun (which) and since both -en and -ing participles of verbs can be used in premodifying positions in noun phrases, they can very easily be seen as adjectival, rather than verbal.6 In very many poetic noun phrases, the adjectival postmodification of the head noun is not convincing as a reduced relative clause. In this section, I have tried to illustrate the basics of noun phrase structure using examples from poetry in order to establish a shared vocabulary for discussing the structure of naming in poetry. However, I have not commented in detail so far on the poetic effect of these choices as would be required in a stylistic approach to textual description. In the rest of this chapter, I will explore how the naming of people and things in poetry contributes to the literary and aesthetic effects of poems, why this matters and how it contributes to our understanding of textual meaning.

2.3

The Effects of Naming---Conjuring Up and Populating

In Sect. 2.1 I explained how naming can work in the ‘real’ world and why it is such an important part of the critical stylistic approach to ideology in texts. Poems, of course, can also be ideological, but as mentioned in Chapter 1, the purpose of this book is to test the concept of textual meaning more widely, to see whether the textual-conceptual functions of the critical stylistics framework might be used to analyse not only ideological meaning, but textual meaning, including its potential literary/aesthetic effects. In this section, I will demonstrate how the power of naming can be used in contemporary poetry in English to conjure up the people, places and things that form part of the world of the poem. Although there are similarities between them, I have separated the effects of naming into three categories here. The first is the use of noun phrases to defamiliarise referents which are familiar to the reader and not especially exotic, such as potatoes, blackberries or margarine. The second category contains those noun phrases which bring to mind something the reader may have encountered subliminally, but whose existence they may never have been consciously aware of. The third category is the use of noun phrases to create people, ideas and things in the world of the poem by virtue of their very naming. This is normally specific to that poem’s context, though there may be more general referents implied too. These categories arise from the data, rather than preceding it, and if more poems were to

6 This is another case where the grammar is contested and theoretically interesting, but it is not the main concern of this work and so I will leave it for others to debate.

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be analysed, it is likely that more literary effects of naming would be discovered, though probably not an unlimited number. The approach this project took to the analysis of the data (i.e. the poems) was to use the CS model to explore the texts, which was a deductive (or top-down) process. The consideration of any patterning across all the analysis which gave rise to the categories here and in other chapters was an inductive (bottom-up) process which looked for similarities across the analysis and grouped similar cases together. The three categories of naming (noun choice, nominalisation and noun phrase structure) were used in the analytical stage of the project, but are not used as the structuring device for the results in the remainder of the chapter. 2.3.1

Making the Reader See Anew

The influential lexicographer, H. W. Fowler and his brother and co-author F. G. Fowler (1906: 175–179), introduced the term ‘elegant variation’ to refer to what they saw as one of the great errors of style in English; the attempt to avoid direct repetition of words and phrases by finding different ways to denote the same thing. Whilst this tendency might indeed be a fault in most functional and even in some creative writing, poetry is the genre where such variation is not only tolerated but applauded. As we saw in Chapter 1, since the Russian formalists part of the purpose of poetry, and indeed literature more generally, has been seen as to defamiliarise those things that we think we know well so that we consider them anew (see Miall & Kuiken, 1994). Finding a new way to refer to the everyday or familiar, then, is surely one of the main techniques for doing so and unlike the examples that the Fowlers were arguing against, this is not for a trivial reason connected to the writer’s ego, but in order to make the reader think more carefully about the world around them. The noun phrase is the grammatical unit that most obviously makes reference to things in the world, so the textual practice of naming is therefore one of the places to seek poetry’s ability to make the world anew. U. A. Fanthorpe’s poem, ‘Men on Allotments’, will be discussed in various places in this book because it illustrates so many of the textual practices I am interested in. Here it allows us to see a prime example of what we could call ‘poetic variation’, to avoid the negative stigma of ‘elegant variation’, where her description of the potatoes being harvested by the allotment keepers is threefold: When tenderly with fork and hand they grope To life potatoes, and the round, flushed globes Tumble like pearls

As well as using their straightforward name (potatoes ), the text produces an image of the pink and white colour (flushed, pearls ), shape (globes ) and value as well as the pleasure of seeing them emerge from their dark hiding place (pearls ). Note that here, the naming is achieved mostly through the judicious choice of particular head nouns, rather than through the content of an

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extended noun phrase. The poetic version of elegant variation, then, is seen to add meaning and depth rather than simply finding rather forced and awkward ways to refer to the same thing. It is also worth considering that this practice, which is common in poetry, runs completely counter to the Gricean7 maxim of quantity, since three or more phrases can be used for the same referent, some of them unnecessarily lengthy in pure referential terms. We will look at the overlap between naming, equating and implying later, but here simply note that the pragmatics of poems may differ from everyday communication. Poetic variation often provides a vivid description of the referent which appeals to the visual or other senses. Heaney’s ‘Blackberry Picking’ for example, starts with straightforward ‘the blackberries’ in line two but soon starts referring to the blackberries in terms that would not naturally spring to mind: a glossy purple clot; big dark blobs and finally a plate of eyes. These noun phrases produce images which are superficially effective in conjuring up the visual aspect of the berries but are also far less comfortable than the innocent-sounding activity of blackberry-picking implies. The reader may subconsciously respond to the darker undertones of death and decay in clot or the slightly negative evaluation of blob long before we realise that these berries are doomed to rot. A final example in this section demonstrates the second category of naming in my model; the choice of head noun. This is a relatively common practice in poetry, where the straightforward way of referencing something is replaced by a more indirect label or one with different connotations, including evaluations. The poem ‘Doorsteps’, for example, contrasts the bread-cutting and butter-spreading of a remembered friend or relative (a grandmother?) with the narrator’s own less refined cutting of wholemeal bread which falls onto its face on the breadboard and is spread not with butter but with butter’s counterfeit. This choice of butter’s counterfeit instead of, say, margarine, adds to the perspective of the poem which compares the narrator’s own bread-related habits unfavourably to those of the person being memorialised in the poem. The practice of naming in poetry, then, has the potential to provide new perspectives on everyday or familiar referents, and to make deeper links with other aspects of the poem at the same time as creating referential cohesion across the text. In the next section, we will see how naming also calls to mind referents we weren’t even quite aware we knew.

7 Grice (1975) is the earliest source of the maxims of communication referred to here, which encapsulate what he saw as the default understanding of participants in conversation who would expect their interlocutors to adhere to the maxims of quantity (how much we speak), quality (do not say what you believe to be false), relation (be relevant) and manner (speak clearly, briefly and in an orderly manner). The maxims will be violated and/or flouted, but the default expectation provides the addressee with a baseline against which to judge the reasons for these flouts and violations.

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2.3.2

The Thrill of Recognition

Early cognitive stylistics drew on a number of psychological theories of how human beings store and use their experience and information about the world in communicating with each other. One such theory is schema theory (Schank & Abelson, 1977), which attempts to explain how we store our experience in such a way that language can be economical and enable successful communication to take place. The idea is that human beings store up a series of schemata about how the world works (e.g. the processes involved in a transaction in a shop) which may vary to some extent from community to community, but are largely shared by the people with whom we communicate on a daily basis. Connecting to the earliest (Russian formalist) stylistics, some scholars, such as Cook (1994) have attempted to argue that the main function of literature in society is schema refreshment which causes readers to revise their stored schemata about the world whereas other, more functional texts, such as news articles or textbooks, are mainly concerned with schema-reinforcement: In some discourses, in other words, language has a function not accounted for in the functional theories referred to above: the function of changing mental representations. (1994: 44)

Other researchers (e.g. Jeffries, 2001; Semino, 2001) have debated the extent to which literature is any different from other texts, some of which clearly aim to change schemata (e.g. pedagogical texts) and in Jeffries (2001) I argued specifically that poetry not only refreshes schemata, but at times has the ability to cause readers to recognise more consciously something they have experienced but perhaps have not put a name to. The phrase I used at the time for this was the ‘thrill of recognition’ and it seems to me now that this describes a separate category of naming in poetry which goes a step further than finding a new way to describe, for example, potatoes, and names something we might not have consciously noticed before, but which is very likely to be familiar once we have a name for it. A poem called ‘Ironing’ might not promise much at first sight, but in it, the narrator takes the reader on a journey through what sounds like an unhappy marriage, divorce and loneliness and finally a new start, though none of these life stages is explicitly referenced. At each stage the ironing is present, as a chore in the first place, then ignored in the wilderness years and finally embraced for personal well-being. At this last, happy-ending, stage, there is an extended noun phrase that sums up this new relationship with the iron: the sweet heated smell/hot metal draws from newly-washed/cloth. This noun phrase centres on a relatively mundane head noun, smell, which is both premodified by two adjectives (sweet and heated) and also postmodified by a (reduced) relative clause. The thrill of recognition here for any reader who has ever relished the ironing of a favourite item for their personal use is created by the complex naming in the noun phrase. We might also argue that the length

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of the postmodification leads to something directly evocative (see Chapter 12) in the experience of reading the phrase, as the breathing in and relishing of the activity and its smell is evoked in the lengthy description of it. It may or may not be a coincidence that the other main example of this schema-recognition aspect of naming which was foregrounded in my core set of poems also refers to a smell, in Newlyn’s lovely poem ‘Baking’ about the house where she grew up.8 The other possibility, of course, is that my own preferences for poems are demonstrated in my attraction to poems about homely activities like ironing and baking. These personal preferences could also have skewed my initial choice of poems, which risk provides the rationale for Chapter 13 where I test out the framework on poems chosen by someone else. In this poem, the childhood of the narrator is evoked through many noun phrases, including the warm layered scent/of syringa, bonfires, mown grass which is sensed through an open window. The postmodification here is a prepositional phrase (starting with of ) and contains a three-part list of noun phrases which at a textual (rather than a discourse) level, works in the same way as in political and other persuasive texts, to symbolise everything that might be covered by the list9 in three exemplars. In this case, it comprehends everything that might have been smelt on such an autumn day. We will see other similar examples in Chapter 6 where listing is examined in more detail. Perhaps more foregrounded here is the way in which the scent is described not only as warm (just like the heated smell of the iron before) but also layered. This transfer from the concrete physical realm (layered) to the more ephemeral sense of smell is particularly effective in evoking (see Chapter 12) the attention that might be paid to the different parts of a complex olfactory stimulus, one by one. In this section we have seen how the practice of naming may bring to the reader’s attention a concept or experience that they have no name for but recognise when they encounter it in an appropriate noun phrase. Jeffries (2001) explores two poems which focus on such experiences and are recognisable to women in particular but taboo or subliminal in the context of a patriarchal society. These experiences are sexual desire in pregnancy (‘White Asparagus’ Bhatt in France, 1993: 62) and lack of it in (some) long-term heterosexual relationships (‘Against Coupling’ Adock in France, 1993: 21). In the next section, looking at the nature and effects of individual examples of naming, we can see that noun phrases can not only make us see referents anew and recognise referents we were previously only dimly aware of, but they can also call referents into being. 8 This house happens to be just down the road from where I live in Leeds. This is not relevant to my research, but it might be the reason I happened upon Newlyn’s work in the first place. 9 Note that there is some overlap here with listing (enumerating and exemplifying) which is explored in more depth in Chapter 7.

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2.3.3

Naming and Creating

If some noun phrases make us think differently about what they describe and others make us recognise referents we didn’t have a name for, still others can actually conjure up their referents. The textual effect is similar to that in political reporting where a noun phrase such as the toxicity of the party leader is allowed to create the very existence of this toxicity whatever the reality in the world itself. Similarly, many noun phrases in poems presuppose—and by doing so create—the referents themselves. What we might call the discourse effect, whether literary, aesthetic or ideological is a question of context and can vary according to producer and reader as well as time or situation of reading. However, I would argue that there is always a textual effect which is affected by the stylistic choices of naming and that it is worthwhile teasing out this textual meaning so that discourse effects can clearly be linked to these stylistic choices. In ‘Men on Allotments’, the men are called into being not only by the title, but also by their description in this lengthy noun phrase which closes the first stanza: these Drab solitary men who spend their time Kneeling, or fetching water, soberly, Or walking softly down a row of beans.

We will return to this extract in relation to direct evocation of meaning in Chapter 12, but here it is worth noting that, depending on the reader’s experience, this noun phrase may create a ‘new’ referent they haven’t encountered before or it may provide the thrill of recognition of something familiar, but as yet unnamed, as we saw in the previous section. It is not the intention of this framework to provide inflexible interpretative categories into which all poetic language will fit once and for all, but to provide a vocabulary of reference points which can be used to account for perceived poetic effects, whether these are stable for all readers or might vary according to the reader’s experience and background. The three sections interpreting the naming practices in my poetic dataset attempt to group the interpretative effects of naming, and these are more closely linked than the TCFs themselves to the contextual aspects of reading poems, such as who the reader is and what their experience (e.g. of allotments) brings to the interpretation. Note again that there is a listing effect here with the three-part list in the relative clause (kneeling, fetching or walking ) which sums up the kinds of activity these men engage in on their allotments. See Chapter 7 for more on listing. A rather different case is seen in ‘Pond Dipping’ where the narrator is watching a class of school children on a nature outing where they are examining the flora and fauna of their local pond. There are many ways in which this poem evokes a heart-aching sadness, though the assumed event causing this is never mentioned explicitly. The first-person narrator watches the children

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and searches their faces for the son I don’t yet have and this absence of a child is confirmed as not anticipation (i.e. pregnancy), but sadness, as it is echoed in much of the remaining poem where semantically negated words such as absence, wombs and gone belie the otherwise cheerful scene of the excited children on their day out (see Chapter 8 for more on negating). The difference between this example and the previous one is the specificity of the child here, which despite not existing, nevertheless receives a definite article and is thus made more real—and more upsetting as a result. The logical presupposition created by the iterative yet is partly responsible for this effect. This son has to exist, even if not right now, we are encouraged to think. We are brought to understand that this is a very specific child that is so desired by the narrator as to make us feel how strongly her desire is being embodied in her mind’s eye. So far, we have considered the local effects of naming and the ways in which they can make new, bring to recognition or even create their referents. In the next section, we will see how patterns of naming across a whole poem might contribute to the textual meaning of the poem as a group.

2.4

The Names in a Poem---Patterns and Developments

As we saw in Sect. 2.3, how individual referents are named can provide the reader with a new perspective, alert them to previously unrecognised referents and create referents by the act of naming itself. In addition to these individualised effects of Naming and Describing, poems, may also show patterns of naming across their text that can create a particular scene, take the reader on a journey through a landscape and/or tell a story by the patterning of the names alone. Thus, for example, in ‘Pond Dipping’, which we already encountered in this chapter, the narrator names a number of water creatures whilst watching the children dipping their nets into the pond: nymph dragonflies; pond skaters; freshwater shrimps, a water boatman, a hog louse. Whilst these names, and those of the pond dipping equipment (nets, glass jars, trays ) are not in themselves so deviant as to foreground their style, but simply set the scene physically and literally, their juxtaposition with the other main semantic field of procreation (life; children; pregnant; son; baby blond heads ) allows for the reader to make a link between the water creatures and early forms of human life (e.g. embryo, foetus) which develop in liquid surroundings and initially at least don’t resemble human beings very much. Once you add the presence of a relatively large set of negated vocabulary (don’t yet have; empty; gone; absence), the topic of fertility and its difficulties (miscarriage, difficulties in conceiving) come to the fore, without once being directly referenced. See Chapter 8 for more on negating. In the next three sections, I will illustrate three different ways in which the Naming and Describing across a single poem contributes to the textual meaning—and I would argue the poetic effect—of that work. There are, no doubt, many other ways in which the combined naming practice of a poem

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can work, but my aim here is to show that naming is a contributor to the literary effect of a poem which can be separately identified from the other textual-conceptual functions, though it may well also work alongside these. 2.4.1

Prayer

We have already encountered Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, ‘Prayer’ in this chapter. It is a wistful poem overlooking an urban scene almost from above, as if from a camera drone flying over the city. It captures the individual lives of those living side by side and the different ways in which the world around them causes a moment of reflection or prayer, irrespective of actual religious faith, and portrays the impulse to pray in the context of everyday secular sounds. This poem is peopled in each verse by the first-person plural pronoun we (plus our and us ) which appears to refer to everyone and each verse also names some people (a woman; a man; the lodger; someone), using the plainest possible noun phrase structure (determiner plus head noun or pronoun) and very common choice of nouns to indicate the generic nature of these people who are there to represent us all. We will see later that the poem has a range of stylistic ways to imply stillness and lack of activity, but even in the patterning of the noun phrases referring to people, the effect of stasis is produced by the lack of change as the poem progresses. Each stanza is patterned around the narrator (plus audience) we, which provides the point of view of the poem and each stanza also includes one or more generic human beings (woman, man, lodger, someone) so there is no development in terms of the characters in the story. Similarly, the noun phrases in the poem which reference the everyday sounds as prayers are spread throughout the structure: a. the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift b. the distant Latin chanting of a train c. Grade 1 piano scales d. a child’s name e. Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre. Like the noun phrases naming people, some of these are straightforward and relatively simply structured (c,d) and the final one (d) is a direct quoting of the list of sea areas in the UK shipping forecast which is broadcast on UK national radio every day (though in reality they would be interspersed with weather descriptions). The first two, however, are more ‘poetic’ in the sense that we talked about earlier (2.3) with (a) using a metaphor to bring both the look and the sounds of the birds in the tree into the scene by the use of the word minims which can be seen on music manuscript paper as well as heard in performance. The noun phrase in (b) is more direct, using a simile to compare the sound of a train going by with the sounds of monks or priests singing in plain song.

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So, we have a naming structure here which overlays the specifics of the propositional content with a kind of stasis through the lack of significant change in the naming patterns of the poem. In the next two sections, we will see poems where the naming pattern conveys not stasis but change. 2.4.2

Summer Evening

We will keep returning to certain poems in this first part of the book, so that by the time you have read most of it, you will have a complete sense of how their style works. I have written about one of these core poems, ‘Summer Evening’ (Samson 1994) before and like all the best poems it rewards repeated reading and repeated analysis. Like so many of the poems in my choice of core data, this poem is also wistful,10 and has a dark undertone which we will see emerge from the analysis over several chapters. It often makes sense to start by accounting for the people (if any) named in a poem. This means considering who they are, how they are named and how their mentions are spread throughout the text. In the case of ‘Summer Evening’, there is mention of you/one which seems to provide the poem’s point of view, but not until line 17 out of 22 lines, so this is quite late in the poem (see Chapter 5 for more on personal deixis). As with ‘Prayer’, the scene is filmic, almost like drone camera footage of a small town, and the narratorial voice of the poem is therefore semi-hidden until you appears in line 17, in a relative clause postmodifying the head noun, temptation: The rowing boat moored there is a temptation you decline

The second-person pronoun (and indeed all the English pronouns) has a range of potential referents (Wales, 1996: Chapter 3) and in poems it is often the case that more than one of these can be relevant. Here, for example, the level of detail implies that it has the equivalent of a first-person referent (i.e. the narrator, I ), but the use of the second-person pronoun, and also the use of present tense verbs, generalises it to potentially refer to ‘one’—i.e. anyone who has had a similar experience. One effect of this choice of pronoun is that the reader is more likely to take up the poem’s point of view and imagine themselves in the narrator’s shoes. This is a good example of how contemporary poetry often manages to be both specific and universal at the same time. The other people who appear earlier in the poem are not identified (lads ) and are presented as distant figures indistinguishable from each other (couples ) or the implied occupants of pushchairs or pubs and tables. There are also missing but implied people in the agentless passive (are unloaded) 10 I fear this tendency to choose wistful or dark poems probably reflects on my taste more than anything, so it will be interesting to see how the analysis works in Chapter 13 where I analyse poems that are new to me and not chosen by me. However, since they are chosen by the poet who wrote Summer Evening, Peter Sansom, the poems in Chapter 13 might continue the dark theme.

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and metonym (offices undress ) which adds to the lack of identified population despite the crowded scene being described. The result is a sense of alienation on the part of the poem’s voice, which is drowned out by the dominance of things in the naming of the poem where the large majority of the text is engaged in Naming and Describing inanimate but concrete things:

Summer Evening Every summer comes an opaque evening before the beach is photos and the leaves let go to relight autumn. It’s brisk in Wickes and the garden centre’s scented colours are loaded in the backs of estates. In parks that saw offices undress for lunch lads career in the wake of the World Cup and wood after deliberate wood finds a path in its own curve to the jack. Everywhere is couples, and pushchairs that make sense of last year or last but one, till pubs overflow round continental tables on main roads, laughing like it might last. Sooner or later, swans on a river disprove the moon they paddle through, cameod by willows. The rowing boat moored there is a temptation you decline, though all the time you walk, taking the long cut to the car park, you imagine being out on that water, the drag and viscous ripples as you pull, then shipping oars and just letting it drift. This visualisation of the poem with all of the Naming and Describing highlighted (people in white text on black and non-human and inanimate references in black text on grey) demonstrates the power of naming and the dominance of the non-human world in this scene. There are very few main verbs which are not part of a noun phrase, lending a static sense of nothing happening despite the apparent busyness of the anonymous people

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(It’s brisk in Wickes ) and this provides the tension of the poem in which all the activity appears to be irrelevant to the persona of the poem’s voice at least. Notice, too, that the second-person pronoun (which we will see has a range of potential referents) is often subordinate to the inanimate participants, which backgrounds the human participants still further. It is worth reiterating that there is a great deal more to say about the style and meaning of this poem, including features that I haven’t yet introduced in this book, but in this section I have been concentrating on the patterns of naming across this text. There are also many noun phrases here that could have featured in earlier sections, including the garden centre’s scented colours which is clearly poetic variation (Sect. 2.3.1) for a relatively everyday referent; flowers. Likewise with pushchairs/that make sense of last year or last but one which could be seen as showing us something we may not have recognised before—how we tell ourselves stories about the people we see, in this case rewinding their lives to the point when the babies or toddlers in the pushchairs were born (Sect. 2.3.2). We will see a rather different effect in the naming across another poem in the next section, where the ‘Men on Allotments’ of the title begin to be overtaken by the luxuriant growth of the plants they nurture. 2.4.3

Men on Allotments

In earlier sections, we saw how the individual Naming and Describing practices in U. A. Fanthorpe’s poem ‘Men on Allotments’ showed a range of poetic effects, from making us see potatoes anew to constructing the whole concept of the drab solitary men who are the apparent topic of the poem. There are many other noun phrases worth attention in this poem, but if we also look at the way in which the Naming and Describing of the poem patterns in relation to referents, we can see that there is a very dramatic move from the men (black text on grey) to plants (white text on black):

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Men on Allotments As mute as monks, tidy as bachelors, They manicure their little plots of earth. Pop music from the council estate Counterpoints with the Sunday-morning bells, But neither siren voice has power for these Drab solitary men who spend their time Kneeling, or fetching water, soberly, Or walking softly down a row of beans. Like drill-seargeants, they measure their recruits. The infant sprig receives the proper space The manly fullgrown cauliflower will need. And all must toe the line here; stem and leaf, As well as root, obey the rule of string. Domesticated tilth aligns itself In sweet conformity; but head in air Soars the unruly loveliness of beans. They visit hidden places of the earth When tenderly with fork and hand they grope To life potatoes, and the round, flushed globes Tumble like pearls out of the moving soil. They share strange intuitions, know how much Patience and energy and sense of poise It takes to be an onion; and they share The subtle benediction of the beans. They see the casual holiness that spreads Along obedient furrows. Cabbages Unfurl their veined and rounded fans in joy, And buds of sprouts rejoice along their stalks. The ferny tops of carrots, stout red stems Of beetroot, zany sunflowers with blond hair And bloodshot faces, shine like seraphim Under the long, flat fingers of the beans. Apart from these two main sets of referents, there is also the urban context of the council estate and the church (dark grey text on black) and the earth/land/soil of the allotment itself (white text on grey). What we see, then, if we squint and look only at the colours, is the men (black text on grey)

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engaging with the earth (white text on grey) and ignoring their community (dark grey on black) in the first stanza. In the second and third stanzas, the men continue to engage with the earth, but their own naming becomes ever more minimal (reduced to the pronoun, they) as their (already humble) egos are sublimated to the power of the plants they are growing. The last we see of these men is in the first line of stanza four, and after this only the plants are in evidence, having grown to cover every inch of soil so that green (in this visualisation, white on black) is the only colour left. This visualisation of the referencing pattern of the noun phrases in a poem11 demonstrates graphically a textual effect which it is difficult to pin down otherwise. The poem is superficially uncomplimentary about the men on allotments, with the negative adjectives (drab, solitary) implying that they are insignificant. However, their real power is demonstrated in their ability to write themselves out of their own creation, not unlike a good poet. Their disappearing act as their interaction with the earth produces the abundance of green growth is celebrated by the effusive and exultant Naming and Describing of the plants, in, for example, the cabbages that unfurl their veined and rounded fans or the long, flat fingers of the beans. We will return to some of the other effects of this poem, including the personification, in later chapters. In this section, we saw how naming practices can not only be effective individually, but their combination can also provide a textual layer that is not necessarily evident if we try to analyse the poem’s text in conventional linguistic terms, sentence by sentence. I have the impression that it is often this layer of textual meaning which literary scholars commenting on the language of a poem feel their way towards, but with no systematic method for uncovering it, relying instead on a range of skills honed through extensive reading. The problem with such an approach is that it can become very personal to the individual scholar, rather than being a replicable assessment of how the language of the poem is working (see Jeffries, 2014 for a discussion of the difference between interpretation and reading). In the next section, we look in a little more detail at the ways in which Naming and Describing often produces poetic effects in conjunction with the other TCFs in the framework.

2.5

Overlaps with Other Textual Effects

This section of the Naming and Describing chapter will, to some extent, preview the later chapters in the rest of this book. This circularity is inevitable when you are, as here, teasing out strands of a complex interlocking set of features to discuss them one by one. This section, then, may act incidentally as an introduction to, rather than a comprehensive treatment of, several TCFs 11

The visualisation works even better in colour, which was not practical here. The accumulation of plants, if highlighted in green is visibly overwhelming as the poem—and the growing season—progresses.

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which interact with naming in some way, but its main point is to demonstrate that these TCFs can be identified and examined separately whilst also recognising that they work in tandem with other textual features. We have seen that noun phrases working individually can contribute to the reader’s understanding of who and what is present in the poem’s scenario, and that together the names and their accompanying descriptions can also stake out the main players in the narrative, and how they relate to the poet’s vision and to each other, even before we have considered the actions, states and other processes added in by the verbal elements in the text. These names and descriptions, however, do not work in isolation from the other textual features and in the next two sections we will see examples of how the juxtaposition of two TCFs can work both where their effects are separable and where they are contributing jointly to a unified effect. Further examples will be included in later chapters for a fuller account of these overlaps between TCFs. 2.5.1

Semantically Separate but Adjacent/Co-Occurring/Embedded TCFs

In many cases, we can see that the textual effects of stylistic choices work independently for the different TCFs, though they also often form a vital part of the co-text and thus influence the realisation of adjacent or overlapping TCFs of a different kind. The core TCFs of naming and transitivity, for example, inevitably work together because many of the noun phrases producing the Naming and Describing effects also function either directly or indirectly as the participants in the process captured in the verbal element of the clause. In ‘Greenhouse’, for example, the greenhouse itself (it ) features as the first participant in the narrative, though it is hardly active, occurring as it does with an Intensive Relational verb (It’s gone to seed) and its description also including a sequence of elided IR verbs (e.g. each loose pane is pitted with lichen). Thereafter, the Actors of the mainly Material Action Intentional (MAI) verbs are mostly human, starting with the I -narrator who burst in, kicked the door and stood and thought followed by a series of first-person plural pronouns (we) where the narrator is remembering the day when he and his father (or other family member) built the greenhouse. Finally there is a return to the I -narrator who is much more static this time (wait; straining; guessing ) as he waits for the return of the father, who is named—or rather addressed—in the second person (you), despite the implication that he is no longer in the world (your perfect ghost ). The pattern here, then, is of human beings acting on the world, and the inanimate goals or circumstances of their actions forming the longer, marginally more elaborate noun phrases (e.g. the sound of the hasp) whereas Actors are mainly named in pronoun form, producing a more intimate effect as only I , you and we are involved and we are supposed to know who the referents are. These interacting choices, to use (often elided) pronouns for the Actors paired with actions that have an effect on—or occur in the context of—inanimate elements of the garden, the car, the house and the greenhouse

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are a combination of naming and transitivity, though their contribution to the textual meaning can be described separately as well as in collaboration. By contrast with ‘Greenhouse’ where the people are introduced early in the poem, though named only through pronouns, we saw above (Sect. 2.4.2) in ‘Summer Evening’ that the people were backgrounded to the extent that they hardly featured on the radar of the narrator/reader/point of view until near the end of the poem. We also saw that the naming seemed to imply a lack of progress or action, despite evidence of hustle and bustle in the scene being described. Significantly, for example, It’s brisk in Wickes does not provide a sense of activity through the verb choice, but through an adjective, using an intensive relational verb (’s ) to describe a busy, but essentially unchanging scene. The transitivity analysis confirms this impression; though most of the verbs are Material Actions, the Actors in many of the early ones are not humans but personified inanimates (e.g. offices undress for lunch) where the verb implies a human actor but the actor specified is not human. As in the naming itself, there is a tension between the choice of verb and the choice of actor, resulting in the impression of only shadowy human activity. Later in the poem, the narrator/addressee (you) becomes the repeated Actor in another series of Material Action verbs, but rather than demonstrating a determination to act, the fact that many of them are subordinate to the main clause you imagine (being out on that water; shipping oars; letting it drift ) adds to the slightly unnerving atmosphere of this poem’s ending. There are many ways in which naming contributes to other TCFs more straightforwardly, as, for example, in prepositional phrases (PPs) where the noun phrase making up most of the PP in turn contributes some deictic positioning to the perspective of the poem. In ‘Baking’, for example, many of the noun phrases work together to position the reader’s point of view in relation to a particular house on a terrace (the terrace from the road ; the house a long way off down the garden; rooms deepening through the hall). Each of these phrases contains a PP (in bold here) which is partly made up of a noun phrase and between them they set not only the scene but also the narrator’s (and thereby also the reader’s) perspective on that scene. Noun phrases also participate in TCFs such as listing, where the norm is for a list to be made up of two or more NPs. Individually, they each have Naming and Describing potential of their own, but together they add the textual meaning provided by lists, such as the implied completeness of the three-part list (see Chapter 7; Jeffries, 2010: 67–71) as in the last line of Maura Dooley’s poem ‘Up on the Moors with Keeper’, where the three Bronte sisters enjoy their freedom on the moors, away from the dark house, father and duty. Whilst it is possible to imagine that there are other things that could feasibly have been listed here, the three noun phrases in the list (in bold) sum up their drab lives as women of the period where their freedom is curtailed by their surroundings (the dark house), their relatives (father) and social mores (duty). In this way, a list of three noun phrases imply a complete picture between them of the dimensions along which the young women were restricted at the time.

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Newlyn’s poem ‘Baking’ also uses a number of lists which we will explore more thoroughly in Chapter 7. Here, though, we can see in its opening stanza the interplay between the TCFs of Equating, Prioritising and naming: Strange, her knack for turning up these thirty odd years when I least expect her:

In addition to the fronting (see Sect. 4.1.3) of the adjectival complement (Strange), and the missing main verb (is strange…) we have a long noun phrase which iconically enacts, or evokes (see Chapter 12) the long period of time in which the woman in question has not been seen as well as placing her actual appearance at the lowest level of embedding within this noun phrase (Fig. 2.2):

Fig. 2.2 Structure of a noun phrase in ‘Baking’

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This structure adds to the iconic effect of the length of the NP by making the appearance of the missing family member not only delayed but also low in the embedding so that she is seen almost as an afterthought or out of the corner of one’s eye, like a ghost. As we will see in the remainder of this book, and particularly in Chapter 13, such interactions between two or more TCFs are a common and important aspect of the textual meaning in poems, and though they may be independent to some extent of the Naming and Describing in individual noun phrases, the stylistic choices work together for the overall poetic effect. The final example of TCFs working in tandem here is from ‘Doorsteps’, where the doorsteps in question actually refer to thick slices of bread, but the reason for this equivalence is given in the last line, where the literal doorsteps of the narrator’s childhood are described as glaring in the sun, like new-dried tennis shoes. The noun phrase itself evokes an artefact of twentieth century sports footwear, before trainers were ubiquitous, when it was common to whiten plimsolls (tennis shoes) with a product which needed to dry after application to the canvas. These tennis shoes, then, are evoked vividly on their own account, but in the context of the comparator, like, they also provide textual equivalence in the form of a simile to the (white) finely cut bread slices that are the topic of the poem. In the following section, we will see examples where it is harder to differentiate the separate meaning contributions of TCFs working together in a poem. 2.5.2

TCFs Contributing to a Single Effect Jointly

Whilst there may not always be clear dividing lines between those cases (in Sect. 2.5.1) where TCFs work independently and this section, where TCFs co-construct an effect, I would argue (as I did in Sect. 1.3.4 of Chapter 1) that teasing out strands of linguistic structure and meaning is the most productive and rigorous way to approach our task. Here, then, I will introduce a few examples where the effect of a naming process is precisely to deliver the textual meaning that we might also identify under a different TCF heading, so that the mapping between TCFs is exact, rather than overlapping. One of the most obvious ways in which naming works is to produce existential presuppositions, usually by the inclusion of definite determiners before the head noun. In ‘Prayer’, for example, although the people being observed across a Midlands town are generic and identified as such by indefinite articles or generic pronouns (a woman, a man, someone), other referents in the poem are presupposed to exist by the addition of definite articles: the minims sung by a tree; the truth; the distant Latin chanting of a train. This combination of generic people referents and specific (presupposed) referents allows the reader to place themselves in one or more of the situations of the people mentioned, and to imagine engaging with the consolations which Duffy recategorises as prayers; birdsong, love (if that is a good interpretation of the truth

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here) and familiar sounds, such as trains passing by. This effect, of presupposing the existence of the referent of a noun phrase, links to the different ways in which individual noun phrases were said to work in the early part of this chapter. Thus, the presupposition could make us see something anew, or make us recognise something we had previously only encountered at a subliminal level or bring about a new referent by its very naming. Compared to simile, where noun phrases are clearly participating in a larger structure to produce the equating effect, metaphor is often delivered within the noun phrase itself and this can be seen in the light of the discussion of poetic variation in Sect. 2.3.1. ‘Summer Evening’, for example, portrays a scene where lads play football in the park in the wake of the World Cup, using a boating metaphor to describe the continuing effect of such a large sporting event and also prefiguring the riverside scene that ends the poem. This is not a wholly new metaphor (wake is almost always metaphorical in the British National Corpus12 for example) but it is foregrounded as unusual in relation to a sporting event and is pulled back to its literal meaning retrospectively at the end of the poem when the narrator contemplates drifting down river on a boat. We will look more closely at the metaphorical effects of equating in Chapter 6, but for now we will consider one last example of naming operating in conjunction with another TCF. Unlike clear examples of listing, there is another structure where noun phrases follow each other and yet where the referent is the same for each noun phrase, rather than referring to a list of different referents. This structure is known as apposition and is familiar to all language users, since it is used regularly to identify the roles as well as the names of people in public life (e.g. The President, Joe Biden) in the context of news reporting. We will see in Chapter 7 that the dividing line between listing and apposition is somewhat blurry, particularly in poems, but here I am concerned to show a clear example of apposition to demonstrate the link between this TCF and naming. It comes from the poem ‘Blackberry Picking’ by Seamus Heaney, which we have seen already in this chapter. The narrator gives an account of how the blackberries they collected went mouldy once they had been picked and how they found a fur,/A rat-grey fungus on the fruit afterwards. Whilst the two noun phrases are rather different, they both refer to the same referent here, which is the fungus itself. Apposition is another way to achieve poetic variation, then, by renaming the same referent a number of times, to show its different characteristics. Here, a fur creates a visual image of what +undisturbed fungus might look like, and this potentially positive image is rapidly undermined by the less pleasant-sounding rat-grey fungus.

12 The British National Corpus (BNC) was originally created by Oxford University press in the 1980s–90s, and contains 100 million words of text from a wide range of genres (e.g. spoken, fiction, magazines, newspapers, and academic). It can be searched from the platform provided at Brigham Young University: https://www.english-corpora. org/bnc/.

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In these two sections, we have begun to see the ways in which TCFs work together to form textual meaning. Much of the remainder of the book will tease out the various TCFs to look at them independently, though each chapter will attempt to demonstrate the synergies between the textual features and Chapter 13 will integrate the TCF analysis to demonstrate how full poem analysis might work on a range of poems.

2.6

Naming as Poetic Technique

We have seen in this chapter that Naming and Describing is vitally important in poems which are often made up of more than 70% of noun phrases. The effect on textual meaning of naming can be found in individual noun phrases or in patterns across the text as a whole. In the case of individual noun phrases, they can defamiliarise the referents (such as potatoes or blackberries) so that the reader can see them differently; they can produce what I have called the ‘thrill of recognition’ in relation to a familiar but perhaps unnamed experience (e.g. the smell and sensation of the process of ironing a personal item of clothing to put on) and they can conjure up referents we may not have encountered by their very naming (e.g. the phenomenon of men on allotments). In poems as whole texts, the analysis has shown that Naming and Describing provides a non-propositional way to create the people, things and abstract referents that furnish the world of the text and can evoke emotion or atmosphere by statis or change in the referential pattern across the poem. As naming is ubiquitous, both in language generally and in poems in particular, this TCF interacts in numerous ways with other TCFs which the following chapters will be exploring. We have seen that the TCFs may overlap in relation to the extract of the text in which they feature, but they can independently contribute to the textual meaning, for example when noun phrases appear in appositional structures and thereby produce not only names but also equivalences. We have also seen that in some cases the TCFs work in a more integrated way to produce an effect, as in the case of definite noun phrases which as well as naming something produce a presupposition that the referent exists. I have introduced here the range of choices a poet makes in Naming and Describing the referents in a poem. These include the use of straightforward vocabulary which does not draw attention to itself; poetic variation which does and pronouns which are not only economical replacements for longer noun phrases but also have a role to play in constructing point of view, through deixis (see Chapter 5). One of the main contributions to poetic effects of noun phrases is in their capacity to be extended in various parts of their structure with the result that they are foregrounded against a perceived norm. These changes to the expected length and structure of noun phrases can produce a direct evocation of meaning, for example, to symbolise waiting or delay, and this iconicity,

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though also found in other texts (e.g. novels) is particularly common in poetry. This phenomenon will be explored in detail in Chapter 12 but first the other established TCFs of the CS model will be examined in turn in relation to contemporary poems.

References Cook, G. (1994). Discourse and literature: The interplay of form and mind. Oxford. Duffy, C. A. (1985). Standing female nude. Anvil Press Poetry. Duffy, C. A. (1993). Mean time. Anvil Press Poetry. Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language (2nd ed.). Routledge. Fillmore, C. J. (1968). The case for case. In E. Bach, & R. T. Harms (Eds.), Universals in linguistic theory (pp. 1–88). Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Fowler, R. (1991). Language in the news: Discourse and ideology in the press. Routledge. Fowler, H. W., & Fowler F. G. (1906). The King’s English. Oxford University Press. Fowler, R., Hodge, R., Kress, G., & Trew, T. (1979). Language and control. Routledge and Kegan Paul. France, L. (1993). Sixty women poets. Bloodaxe. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Studies in syntax and semantics III: Speech acts (pp. 183–198). Academic Press. Jackendoff, R. (1987). The status of thematic relations in linguistic theory. Linguistic Inquiry, 18(3), 369–411. Jeffries, L. (2001). Schema affirmation and White Asparagus: Cultural multilingualism among readers of texts. Language and Literature, 10(4), 325–343. Jeffries, L. (2014). Interpretation. In P. Stockwell & S. Whiteley (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of stylistics (pp. 469–486). CUP. Jeffries, L. (2010). Critical stylistics: The power of English. Palgrave Macmillan. Miall, D. S., & Kuiken, D. (1994). Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories. Poetics, 22(1994), 389–407. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Pearson Longman. Schank, R. C., & Abelson, R. P. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures. Lawrence Erlbaum. Simpson, P. (1993). Language, ideology and point of view. Routledge. Semino, E. (2001). On readings, literariness and schema theory: A reply to Jeffries. Language and Literature, 10(4), 345–355. Wales, K. (1996). Personal pronouns in present-day English. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Representing Processes: Actions, States and Events in Poetry

This chapter will examine how poetry uses textual choice to represent processes through the verbal element of their clauses. Whilst we might want to comment on individual lexical verb choices in poems, particularly in relation to their immediately surrounding text,1 there are two ways in which the choice of a verb in a clause has wider repercussions in a text such as a poem. First of all, it may be representative of a particular syntactic or semantic class of verbs, and that will have an effect on how the process being represented is perceived by the reader. Secondly, the text as a whole may contain a pattern of choices that underscore the trajectory and/or point of view being presented. These local and text-wide effects of verb choice will be illustrated and explored in detail in this chapter. In order to examine these wider effects of verb choice, we need one or more frameworks to use in analysing and comparing the verb choices in contemporary poems. The main framework I will use here is a version of the transitivity system from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (see Halliday & Mattiessen, 2004; Thompson, 2013) and in Sect. 3.1, this framework will be outlined with illustrations from poems. In addition, the limitations of transitivity as the sole framework to analyse verb choice will be explored and some additional approaches will be introduced to supplement the main transitivity analysis. In Sect. 3.2 the poetic effects of verb choice will be explored from the perspective of external deviation, to demonstrate how poets make use 1 There is no space here to explore the differences between these options and how they might apply to transitivity, but these are ideas that would benefit from further examination.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2_3

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of the reader’s expectations to produce foregrounding. In addition, the links between this textual-conceptual function and some common literary concepts will be demonstrated. Section 3.3 will consider the role of verb choice in creating the background of a poem’s world thereby producing the conditions for internal deviation. Section 3.4 will examine the place of verb choice amongst other TCFs to show how their synergies and overlaps work together to produce textual meaning in poems. Finally, Sect. 3.5 will summarise the role of transitivity in poetic meaning and draw some conclusions about the nature and value of the transitivity model.

3.1

How We Represent Processes

What Halliday’s transitivity function attempts to capture is the textual representation of processes primarily through verb choice and its effects on surrounding structure. Though Halliday’s SFL system does not emphasise this aspect, the concept of choice here is crucial as it confirms that transitivity choices are fundamentally stylistic. If a speaker or writer had only one way to present the meaning they are aiming at, then there is nothing of interest to us. However, as there are always different ways of configuring events and actions through language choices, the results of those choices are inevitably ideational; that is, they present a specific view of the world under consideration. And ideation can have different effects. It might be persuasive, manipulative, ideologically loaded or benign, but it can also be artistic, aesthetically pleasing or surprising and so on. Whilst these two lists of types of effect may appear to link to propaganda and advertising on the one hand and literary work on the other, there is in fact more crossover between these genres than such a simplistic account would suggest. Halliday’s transitivity system is named after the traditional grammatical distinction between those verbs that take (i.e. need to be followed by) Objects (He ate the banana) and those which do not (He laughed). However, the SFL system aims to capture the fact that languages have more than two types of verbal meaning, and that these are both linked to and also semi-independent of their syntactic behaviour. Thus, two clauses which may have the same surface structure of Subject + Predicator + Object (SPO) may represent very different kinds of process: (1) Juan killed the spider. (2) Amelia saw the burglar. Thus, although we may all agree that Juan ‘did’ something that had an effect on its Object (the spider), it is less clear that Amelia did anything and she certainly didn’t have any effect on the Object (the burglar) unless she then went on to perform a citizen’s arrest or phone the police, which would be separate processes. Transitivity analysis thus concludes that the verbal element

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in each case represents a different kind of process in which the grammatical Subject and Object have different semantic roles as a result. In (1) the choice of an action verb (kill ) dictates that the Subject (assuming the clause is not in the passive) will be an Actor (sometimes called Agent) and that the Object will be the Goal (or Affected) of the action itself. In (2), by contrast, the choice of a Mental Perception verb (see) implies that the grammatical Subject will be a Senser and the Object is a Phenomenon, since it is clearly not affected by the verb process. This kind of insight is helpful to the text analyst as it provides more subtle ways to chart the meaning of our data than merely considering the surface syntax and the semantics of individual words, though these can also be useful of course (see Jeffries, 1993). However, problems arise when the analyst tries to apply the framework systematically to the data only to find that everything is not as neat as it seems when you are dealing with invented examples as in 3.1 and 3.2. One of the results of analysts attempting to apply transitivity to real data is a proliferation of models developed to account for process types observed. For example, Bartley (2018) compares the two main models of transitivity that have developed from Halliday’s work (the Sydney model) and from work by Fawcett (1980) and Neale (2002) and labelled the Cardiff Grammar model. Bartley’s article raises a variety of issues with the application of both transitivity systems in text analysis, including the variability in meaning of verbs; the relationship between main and subordinate clause verbs; the dual aspect of some semantic roles (e.g. Agent-Affected) and the difference between verbs themselves and their nominalisations. In dealing with these problems, there is a tendency for semantic roles to proliferate and it becomes difficult to know how they might be recognised in the analysis of texts. Whilst I do not have space for a more detailed theoretical discussion of the problems of transitivity in this chapter, I will try to indicate some of the practical issues and some potential solutions in the outline below. The most general proposal, which may be wise advice in all linguistic analysis, is to treat transitivity types and their related semantic roles as ‘reference points’ on a series of continua rather than bounded categories. This allows for definition of prototypes whilst allowing for real-text examples which do not fit neatly into those definitions. This approach allows us to use the labels as a vocabulary with which to discuss examples whilst not having to agonise over unambiguously allocating examples to one category. I will first summarise the version of transitivity that I am using in this book, which is based on the core Hallidayan model, but adapted to take account of my own and others’ observations where I find it helpful. There is, and can be, no single and definitive model of the transitivity choices available to language users, because the categories labelled in any model are not uniquely identifiable from surface textual features, for the reasons seen above; that surface features can obscure semantic differences. However, the framework I am trying to develop here, of textual meaning based on textual-conceptual

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functions, relies on there being some link, however tenuous, to the structure of the text. Therefore, unlike in some treatments of transitivity, where the semantic patterns dominate and tend to proliferate transitivity categories or semantic roles, the model I use here will be based partly on the structure observed in the data. This helps to mitigate the danger of wanting to create a new category for every small nuance of meaning and instead highlights the similarities of a wider range of lexical choices rather than over-emphasising individual lexical difference, important though this may be in other ways. As suggested above, if we employ a transitivity model with a smallish number of relatively high-level labels, these can helpfully be thought of as idealised reference points on a series of continua rather than bounded categories as such. Alternatively, they could be conceptualised as overlapping prototypical or fuzzy categories.We will explore how these ideas work in relation to poetic meaning more fully later, but here I will set out the model as though it were entirely watertight and unambiguous. The reason transitivity is ideally suited as a textual-conceptual function in the framework I am developing here is precisely because it sits somewhere between the structural and the meaningful aspects of language, and this is what makes it also more malleable than a simple categorisation. In this chapter, then, I will identify transitivity through five main types of process: Action, Relational, Mental, Verbal, and Existential. Although this division reflects Halliday’s version (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), I have chosen to use the label Action rather than Material Action for the first type, to reflect the fact that many of the actions we take in the world are not concrete physical actions like eating or hitting but could be social actions such as chairing a meeting or publishing a report (Neale, 2002: 80). Though these processes can also be thought of as on the border of other process types such as Verbal (chairing and publishing both involve language), I would argue that they are being treated as actions which have consequences, much like material actions. We will consider the borders between transitivity types more later. Some of the main types of transitivity are subdivided in the version I am using here. Figure 3.1 summarises them and provides labels for the main participant roles that may be found in clauses alongside them. In the interests of clarity, I will first illustrate these transitivity types with invented examples below, but with the caveat that we will see they are not so easily applied to actual texts when it comes to analysis, as we will see in later sections of this chapter. Figure 3.2 provides these illustrative examples, with syntactic patterns2 notated to demonstrate the link between structure and meaning as mentioned above. Where alternative structures are available, optional parts are in brackets or more than one illustration is provided. The range of Verbal processes represented in Fig. 3.2 covers most of the likely options that will turn up in a standard clause in English texts. However, 2 Note that the syntactic patterns are notated using the SPOCA framework (see Quirk et al., 1985).

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Fig. 3.1 The main types of transitivity

as we shall see in considering poetic examples, the unexpected can happen and it is not always easy to decide which process is in play in context. Notice that we already have one potential anomaly which raises questions about whether transitivity is a property of verbs themselves, as it would be seen in traditional grammatical approaches, or whether it attaches only to verbs in their contexts of use. In examples 4, 13 and 14, for example, we see the verb make being used as the main verb of the clause. In each case, as well as the grammatical Subject, John, (the Actor or Agent), there are two additional semantic roles. In each case me is the first one and depending on what follows it (a cake, sad or a writer), we will interpret the verb as an action (in the first case) or an intensive influence on the speaker (in the second and third cases). Thus, a following adjective (sad) clearly marks the verb out as being used intensively, whereas a following noun phrase (a cake or a writer) requires the hearer to make some semantic judgements about the referential identity or difference between these and the speaker (me). Whereas a cake clearly refers to something separate from the speaker (me), the default interpretation of a writer is that this is the

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Fig. 3.2 Main types of transitivity illustrated

very same person as the speaker. If we were going to examine these examples from the point of view of linguistic (specifically semantic) theory, we may have to debate the extent to which these three uses of make represent different polysemous senses of the word, evidenced in part by their different uses in such contexts. This analysis (polysemous senses being linked to transitivity labelling)

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would seem to espouse a view of language as being based on a core of relatively stable lexical items whose description includes information about the kind of transitivity patterning they take part in. An alternative view might be that the transitivity of a verb is only enacted when it is being used in a text, and there is thus no intrinsic transitivity attached to the verb itself. Although this is not the place for a detailed theoretical discussion of these options, I would argue that somewhere between these two positions is probably closest to the truth. This is the only way to explain the creative use of verbs outside their default transitivity contexts, which we will see in Sect. 3.2 is one way of producing a foregrounded effect. Before we proceed to considering the transitivity choices in poems and their potential effects, there is another dimension to the semantic potential of verb choices which can supplement transitivity analysis in useful ways. One of the consistent sub-categorisations of the Action (or, in Hallidayan versions, Material Action) category is to differentiate the intentional actions, such as eating, from the unintentional actions, such as falling. Whilst these two different kinds of actions are of interest, we can see from Fig. 3.2 that they can occur in the same syntactic contexts and they are therefore semantically distinguishable only because of their definitions in the lexicon. There is a similar distinction that we could draw between those actions that are relatively dynamic, such as jumping, and those which are more static, though nonetheless consciously and intentionally carried out, such as standing or holding. When analysing the Verbal processes in any text, including poems, the argument for looking at transitivity analysis is that it can show whether the participants are construed as being in control of their destiny or not. Many CDA analyses rely, for example, on demonstrating that the oppressed or less powerful participants tend to take on the role of Goal rather than Actor. However, it can also be illuminating to map out the cooccurrence of participants or participant types with dynamic or stative verbs. In fact, attempting to use transitivity analysis with poems made me aware that this dimension of meaning was particularly relevant to poetic meaning and it led me to conclude that mapping Verbal processes onto the intentional/unintentional and dynamic/static dimensions concurrently, as well as possibly allowing for there to be an interim position between the extremes on each of these dimensions might help in our efforts to capture the textual meaning inherent in poems. Figure 3.3 demonstrates these interlocking dimensions with examples of verbs to illustrate. What is clear from trying to exemplify this cross-cutting set of characteristics is that we need context to see how a verb is behaving at any one time. The examples here attempt to nail down the particular combination of features, but there is always the possibility of the wider context moving them to another category. For example, showing one’s teeth may well be static and neutral as to intention by default, but it does not take a lot of imagination to make this both intentional and dynamic: She flashed him a smile, showing the whiteness of her teeth. If these cross-cutting features are to be useful, they also need to work across other verb types as well as actions. It may also be helpful

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+Dynamic +/Dynamic Static

+Intentional kick (he kicked the cat) hold (they held hands) stand (she stood still)

+/- Intentional bump (I bumped the kerb) arrive (Mum arrived early) show (she showed her teeth)

Unintentional drop (he dropped the ball) swell (her ankle swelled up) hear (they heard the cuckoo)

Fig. 3.3 Semantic dimensions of verbs

to add concrete/abstract to this set of features, which begin to look like a paradigm of distinctive features. However, they are almost entirely based in the lexical semantic identity of the verbs themselves, which makes identification and description more difficult than analysis based on something identifiable in the structure, as it sometimes is for transitivity.

3.2 Foregrounded Verb Choices (External Deviation) As we might expect in poetry, one of the main effects of a verbal choice is to create foregrounding, where the choice of a particular verb seems surprising or out of place. Foregrounding, as we saw in Chapter 2, is a significant effect in poetry and can be created by either external or internal deviation. Whilst conventional stylistic analysis may examine foregrounding in relation to the specific lexis and grammar of a particular poetic extract, the approach I am trying to build here takes account of wider patterns of textual meaning, based on the TCFs introduced in Chapter 1. Thus, even when looking at a single verb in a poem, the question is broader than ‘what is the effect of this particular verb in this specific context?’ but rather ‘what kind of process is indicated by this verb choice and what effect does this choice have?’. In asking these questions, we are also implicitly asking what other options the poet could have had, though describing in any detail these would be a time-consuming task. I will examine internal deviation in relation to the textual background in the next section, but here I will focus on externally deviant cases which are largely based on individual verb choices, though they may recur throughout a poem on occasion, giving rise to the kind of background patterning that can then be disrupted by internal deviation. For now, though, let us consider individual clauses and their verb choices, where external deviation can take two forms. First, the verb may be paired with semantic classes of participants that would not normally be expected, such as inanimate Actors being paired with verbs normally requiring animate Actors. This pairing often causes the Actor, rather than the verb, to be reinterpreted, as we will see below. Secondly, the verb may be put into a context which creates the conditions for the verb itself to be reinterpreted as presenting a different process type from its expected

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default. In describing all such cases, we could choose from a range of terminology, depending on our larger theoretical framework, to describe the nature and effects of these stylistic choices. I will largely use transitivity vocabulary here, supplemented by some semantic terms where helpful, as introduced in Sect. 3.1. Together, these provide explanatory value as well as a descriptive framework that can be applied systematically. Nevertheless, irrespective of the larger theoretical framework, and the models used, we should take note that, theoretically speaking, all such examples of external deviation oblige us to accept that there is a core and abstract code (albeit a shifting and partially variable one) against which creative and innovative uses are interpreted. As we will see from all the analytical chapters in this book, I am using the TCFs as our framework to trace the mechanisms that deliver all sorts of effects in poetry. Some of these effects have traditional labels in literary studies. These include all the figurative possibilities of personification, metaphor, metonymy, meronymy, etc., and this traditional terminology will be employed where relevant to demonstrate the link between textual analysis and poetic meaning. It is worth noting, too, that many of these figurative effects can be delivered by a range of TCFs, sometimes alone but more often working together. They exist, therefore, at a layer of abstraction from the text more distant than the TCFs, which are already one step removed compared to the nuts and bolts of core semantico-syntax. Returning to the first of two types of external deviation in verb choice mentioned above, much contemporary poetry mismatches participants with verb choices to produce personification and other similar effects. In ‘Blackberry Picking’, for example, Heaney evokes the vivid imagination of childhood by making an everyday bodily craving seem to have human characteristics, whilst being separate from the body in which it functions: that hunger / sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots. Here, the verb chosen, sent, is one that would normally be classed as an intentional action verb (AI) and thus would require an animate—and in this case a human—Actor. Instead, we have the abstract bodily experience of hunger as Actor, dictating, as it were, what the children would do, as they are powerless to resist and reminding the adult reader how strong the desire for food is in growing children. Another line in the same poem takes this to a creepier level when the blackberries go mouldy: we found a fur, / a rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. Though there are no creatures eating the carefully collected harvest, nevertheless, the mould is made animate not only by being characterised as fur and as rat-grey, but also by the notion that it has the capacity to glut. This choice of verb, then, is one that expects an animate, though not necessarily human, Actor. Like send it implies intentional action and this apparent free will to act is transferred to the fungus which, though alive, is normally not seen as having intentionality. Fanthorpe’s ‘Men on allotments’ uses a similar technique to personify the vegetables being grown by the men, which are required to toe the line and obey

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the rule of string in their early days and later the beans soar, a verb expecting animate Actors with the ability to move intentionally, and the buds of sprouts rejoice, an activity associated with not only animate but human Actors. In the next section I will use this poem to demonstrate the patterning of such choices across a whole text. However, even in these few examples we can see that the choice of AI verbs to combine with plants produces the context in which vegetables can be seen as having animate and sometimes even human characteristics. One common literary technique often used to show a human being who is not in control of their situation is to give their body parts some level of animation, independently of the body they belong to. We saw something similar with the more abstract bodily desire, hunger, in Heaney’s poem, but when the concrete parts of people’s bodies are paired with AI verbs, the helplessness of the owner of those body parts is particularly underlined. Simpson (1993: 104) examines this phenomenon in relation to prose fiction in the form of Pincher Martin, a novel by William Golding where the eponymous protagonist is drowning and loses control of his body in the process: The text, in fact, abounds in such ‘body-part’ ACTORS, a brief sample of which is: …the lips came together and parted, the tongue arched, the brain lit a neon track, (p. 8)

In my data, ‘Pond Dipping’, for example, has the narrator watching children fishing at a pond and she recounts how My eyes search their faces for / the son I don’t yet have. The poem’s affectionate portrait of a class outing to a pond is overlaid with the narrator’s sadness at not having or having lost babies of her own and this dissociation from her body parts (eyes ) by giving them a will of their own is one way to evoke the effect of strong emotions on the human mind. Whilst body parts clearly belong to animate beings (whether human or animal), on their own they might be seen rather as inanimate objects, but here they are imbued with something closer to human animation, making them perhaps semi-animate, rather than fully personified. In this particular case, a body part is acting intentionally, as we see from the choice of an AI verb (search) but apparently independently of the speaker. Thus, in addition to being somewhere between animate and inanimate, the resulting process also ends up being halfway between intention and unintentional. The effect is not only disorientation, and dissociation from body parts but also a sense that although there is some intentionality in the search, it is not within the body part owner’s control. Another poem in the data, ‘Platform Piece’, also focusses on a body part, this time the hand, but rather than it being animated, here it is the abstract emotion, love, which is made concrete by being associated with the hand. This

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effect is achieved by making the hand the Goal of a number of passive AI verbs (in bold here): Love, which is the hand at the carriage window taken, stroked, touched, held and then held on to until it has to wave with every stranger waving also, writes letters in a café now.

Initially, then, love becomes concrete by its role as Goal of AI verbs, but later this version of love, envisaged as a hand, is also animated by becoming the Actor in two AI processes (wave and writes ) which, like the eyes in ‘Pond Dipping’, seems to be personified independently of its owner. The potential effect of such separation between the actions of a body part and its owner is similar in each case, implying some kind of emotional distance. However, it is also affected by the specifics of the context in which it occurs. In this case, the hand, which symbolises love, does not clearly belong to any particular person since throughout the poem until the last two lines it is referred to by the impersonal pronoun, it. The details of what this hand is doing and where it is going imply a personal involvement in the story, but it is only in the final two lines that we become aware that there is a specific you: and nothing keeps you riffling through those postcards till rails tear you blinking from that city

This shift from it to you brings a persona into the story for the first time, but the nature of the second-person pronoun in English is such that its referent, as in so many poems, could be the reader; a specific second person whom we have not officially met in the poem; the speaker, through its interpretation as ‘one’ or anyone, again through its interpretation as ‘one’. This convenient ambiguity of reference in English pronouns (see Wales, 1996: Chapter 3) is exploited time and again in poetry and we will return to this topic, having encountered it briefly here and in Chapter 1, in Chapter 5. Whilst many contemporary poems will use similar techniques to produce personification, this label used so readily in traditional literary analysis belies a rich variety of effects, as we have seen, some of them producing animation, but not human animation and some imputing intentionality to abstract or inanimate referents. However, in addition to these two dimensions of animacy and intentionality, there are many other semantic changes that can be triggered by the choice of a particular verb type. In Newlin’s ‘Baking’ for example, there is a filmic effect achieved as the present-day house becomes the house of childhood memory: How readily the present folds away: everything standing back from itself, unchanged –

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Whilst the use of the AI verb standing back produces animation of the structure and contents of the house, the choice of folds away makes an abstract concept, the present, concrete. Later, the poem provides even the concrete home itself with a kind of dynamism: rooms deepening through the hall; home lengthens. Whilst these static, concrete referents (rooms, home) are being animated here, there is nevertheless no indication of intentionality, since deepen and lengthen are AI verbs that are regularly used with inanimate Actors (e.g. shadows can both deepen and lengthen). What is clear from this discussion is that transitivity analysis alone does not capture the full effects of verb choice in poetry and that other semantic dimensions such as intentionality, static/dynamic and concrete/abstract also help to account for the effects of the choices made. Note that it is also very difficult to talk about verb choice alone, since the surrounding participants (and circumstances) are usually linked closely to that choice. Nevertheless, it is generally considered that the verb choice causes other choices to be made and this is why the transitivity and other systems of analysis focus on the verb choice. Though we have seen that a common way to create poetic meaning is to deviate from expectations about the kind of participant a verb is likely to pair with, it is also common to come across examples where the context makes clear that the verb is being interpreted as portraying a different kind of process from its default. Thus, though verbs are often strong in persuading their participants to change (e.g. in personification), there is also some flexibility between transitivity types that are related to each other, as for example in actions, where intentionality can be present or absent for some verbs and animacy which can make the difference between an event and an action, depending on the nature of the Actor. In ‘Marble’, for example, an analogy is made between the first and second stanzas, where the work of Michelangelo is compared to a patient awaiting heart surgery. The initial, superficial comparison is between the cold marble of Michelangelo’s sculptures and the cold body of someone suffering heart failure, but though the body in the second stanza is celebrated as perfect, the first one imagines the great artist making mistakes: Even Michelangelo made, maybe, the odd slip. Many general verbs in English, like make, have such a broad potential meaning that they can be persuaded to belong to different types of transitivity in context. Here, though making things might by default be seen as an intentional action, the goal (the odd slip) indicates that it is, on the contrary, an accidental action that is being thought of. So, his chisel might accidentally take out some marble he hadn’t intended to remove and the poem explains how such mistakes were remedied by student apprentices by a fingertip of beeswax. This interpretation of make as accidental or unintentional is confirmed in the next line by the choice of the verb chip (To chip, say, a cheek) where the default would be to see this action as accidental. The anxiety of a partner waiting for their beloved to return from the theatre where heart surgeons were saving their life is captured by the contrast with someone working in marble where even a great artist might make a mistake. The unspoken counter to this assertion is that the sculptors of bypass and artery

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cannot afford to make a mistake as the person under the knife cannot be mended with some wax and a little marble dust.

3.3 Verbal Choices in Creating the Conditions for Internal Deviation In the previous section we saw how the choice of a particular kind of verb can create the conditions for reinterpreting the nature of the participants in the rest of the clause. We also saw that some kinds of structural context can cause the verb itself to change transitivity type in context. Both of these were cases of external deviation caused by something happening locally in a text that is not normally expected in the language. This kind of foregrounding through stretching or breaking the norms of language use is one that has been muchdiscussed in stylistics, though the definition of norms has proven difficult to achieve: There is no simple linguistic model of deviation, but understood informally, as the basis of surprising and creative manipulations of the language in literature, its role in stylistics is a useful if not indispensable one. (Leech, 2008: 56). Leech here acknowledges that difficulty and concedes too that the distinction between external and internal deviation is probably also indeterminate. However, it is helpful to use these labels as a way of discussing the nature of deviation and its creation of foregrounding. The other major way in which verb choices affect poetic meaning is in the creation of local norms within the poem, which may produce a particular atmosphere even though each individual verb choice is entirely standard within its clause. Thus, a poem which is made up entirely of AI verbs with animate or human Actors will feel busy and active, whereas a poem with nothing but intensive relational verbs would seem static by comparison.3 Of course, the reality is that on the whole no poem is made up of entirely one type of transitivity, but instead there are often patterns or movements from one type to another reflecting the development of the ideas in the poem. This local norm can also provide the background against which internal deviation can occur. At one extreme, there are poems where there are so few verbs, or main verbs, that the question of transitivity barely arises. For example, ‘Household’ is a short poem of 9 lines, the first seven of which are made up of a list of items making up the house. It begins: The tons of brick and stone, the yards of piping, the sinks and china basins, three toilets, the tiles,

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Note that the choice of verb forms can have similar effects, with repeated -ing (continuous) participles producing a sense of activity whilst repeated -ed (perfective) participles may produce a less busy effect since the actions are completed in each case.

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Although there is one relative clause in this list, there are no other verbs until the first main clause is arrived at (what would it all weigh?) in line 7. This lack of verbs causes an effect not just of stillness, which can also be achieved by the use of stative and intensive verbs, but of complete lack of time and indeed a lack of process. Even then, when the question is posed, it is a modalised question (what would it all weigh?) and is thus not anchored in any particular timeframe either. When there are no main verbs, there are no tenses, and this causes a deeper sense of timelessness even than a series of stative verbs. Another poem with a similarly deep stillness at its core is ‘Figs’ where the first four of the six three-line stanzas are also constructed of a series of noun phrases (e.g. Expatriate fruit / surviving out in the cold) and the figs are repeatedly described, as here, in non-finite postmodifying clauses, many of which are reduced relative clauses (e.g. scarred by wasps ). Whilst these proto-clauses bring a little life into the otherwise still scene, by implying earlier processes, they are a long way from creating active processes and being non-finite, they are not anchored to any particular timeframe. The poem only introduces a main verb in stanza five, when the figs are harvested, brought inside and then split under their own sagging weight. The transition from tranquillity when the figs are on the tree to something more transient once they are brought inside is made stark by this sudden transition from static description to an active process. Most poems have more main verbs than these two poems, though many include strings of non-finite verb phrases to create a uniform background of transitivity type which lends the poem a particular atmosphere. In ‘The Unprofessionals’, for example, after an initial unspecific tragic event which is introduced by the choice of two Action Event (AE) verbs (happens, uproots ), the person suffering this nameless misfortune is the Actor in only one clause: that you must live for every hour of your future. After these three verb choices, the first two introducing the tragedy and the third one using the modal (must ) to show how unavoidable the consequences of the event are for the protagonist, the remainder of the poem has a sequence of intentional actions (AI) which are out of the control of the sufferer. In each of the following twelve AI clauses, the people who come to support the person struck by misfortune (i.e. the unprofessionals ) are the Actors and there are no further changes of transitivity type. The ‘you’ of the poem, who has suffered the tragic event, is relegated to the periphery of one clause, in a prepositional phrase (sit with you) and not mentioned again in any role whilst the unprofessionals continue their activity (talking, dealing with Kleenex and kettles, doing the washing up, etc.). The unsettling feeling that the arrival and activity of these people may be both comforting and a nuisance4 is captured in the helplessness of the 4 I have taught this poem to undergraduates and had each of these reactions from them as readers, sometimes combined. The initial negativity of the neologism, unprofessionals and its link to the evaluatively negative unprofessional pre-dispose them to see the people first of all as a nuisance and only on reflection as a more positive force.

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protagonist to act, whilst the determined and continuous activity of the unprofessionals becomes almost soothing in its rhythm, which is intensified by the repeated use of the non-finite -ing continuous form of the verbs. This dual positive/negative reaction to the people at the centre of this poem is, therefore, delivered not only by the invented noun of the title (Unprofessionals) as discussed in Jeffries, 2010c: 107), but also by the verb types that form the major part of the poem. Whereas ‘The Unprofessionals’ largely relies on a consistent choice of verb types to portray the intense activity in a home struck by tragedy, in ‘Men on Allotments’, Fanthorpe’s verb choices reflect a general movement in the poem which was also a feature of the naming analysed in Chapter 2, from a scene where the men are in control of their little plots of earth to the point near the end of the poem where the men are all but invisible amongst the long, flat fingers of the beans. Alongside the vivid descriptions, then, there is a change going on in the poem, from the point where the careful and tidy men manicure their little plots of earth through the growing season where the gradual disappearance of the men from the poem as it progresses is observed not only in the naming patterns (see Sect. 2.4.3), but also in the dominant transitivity patterns. The poem begins with the men’s actions (manicure, spend, kneeling, fetching, walking, measure) and then in the second line of stanza two, the infant sprig receives enough space to become the manly fullgrown cauliflower. This relatively passive verb (in semantic, not syntactic, terms) is nevertheless a turning point in the poem as the actions become more the actions of the animated crops and earth. This point, then, is foregrounded by being internally deviant from the local patterning of verb choices that is set up in stanza one. Though the men are implicitly still present in stanza two, as the drill-sergeants who are making the crops toe the line and obey the rule of string whilst the tilth aligns itself , they are not named after the first line because the choice of verbs (toe the line, obey, align itself ) does not insist on the presence of an Agent (i.e. those who make the crops do these things) in the clause. However, we are conscious of the guiding hand of the men by the fact that someone must set the rules that are obeyed and create the line that is toed. By the end of this stanza, though, there is another moment of internal deviation when the men begin to lose control. Here, the verb choice works alongside the Naming and Describing of the beans to create a sense that they have taken over: but head in air Soars the unruly loveliness of beans

Here, halfway through the poem (which can be seen as echoing the growing season), the beans are described as unruly and they also have the role of Actor in an action process (soar) which is normally associated with animate beings (mostly birds), animating the beans which seem to have the capacity for intentional action. At this point in the poem we begin to see that what the men have been working towards is to be eclipsed by their crops. To recap, the poem sets up an expectation of normal activity in the first stanza with the men carrying out actions and in line two of stanza

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two, the infant sprig is animated or personified not only by its adjective, infant, but also in having the capacity to receive. This first moment of animation/personification is internally as well as externally deviant because it changes the pattern and is followed by a string of verbs where the crops take on the Actor role, again creating foregrounding through both internal and external deviation. This culminates in the line where the beans soar, a moment when the men become irrelevant to the activity on their plots. As we saw in Chapter 2, through the poem the men increasingly become named only by the pronoun they and in stanza 3 they are back in the limelight, though after a couple of actions (visit and grope) at ground level as they dig up their potatoes, they take up the more cerebral role of Senser in a series of clauses where the verb types are Mental Cognition (share, know) and perception (see), rather than action. The men, at this stage, are becoming more and more like the priests or gods in some kind of holy ritual, no longer rigidly dominating, but allowing their subjects free will within certain constraints. In stanza 4, after the first two lines remind us of the gods (the allotment keepers) who see their work (the holiness ) that spreads / Along obedient furrows like the straight and narrow path of biblical metaphors, the remainder of the stanza develops into a glorious and unruly abundance in the growth of the crops via their personified activity (unfurl, rejoice, shine). This anarchy is even previewed, not only at the end of stanza 2 (soars / unruly loveliness ) but also within the first two lines of stanza 4 where the holiness itself is casual. The verb choices in this poem create a series of patterns, each breaking the internal logic of the previous pattern and thus causing a series of internally deviant foregrounding which builds to a crescendo in the final stanza. This effect is enhanced by the naming patterns we saw in Chapter 2 and the poem achieves not only a vivid evocation of a vegetable garden through the season, but a more philosophical comparison of the men, who think they are in charge, with the natural world which turns out to have free will. As we saw in Sect. 3.2, ‘Pond Dipping’ foregrounds certain combinations of transitivity choice with externally deviant participant type when the narrator’s eyes seem to be searching outside her control. If, instead of looking only at individual verb choices, we consider the overall shape of this poem from the point of view of verb types, there appears to be something of a rise and fall of activity level which reflects both the dynamics of the visit to the pond by the children and also, perhaps, the rising hope and fading dreams of the narrator. Figure 3.4 is a schematic representation of most of the poem, using the clauses and their verbs as the focal point, but also listing the participants (noun phrases) and the transitivity labels that we might use to characterise the verbs chosen. The poem starts out in a relatively static mode, with the first main verb showing the children standing and in the following subordinate clauses, they are shown being passively told (V) how to go about their pond dipping itself (AI) represented by a non-finite to-clause. The first sentence, then, produces a static impression, which evokes the concentration of the children being given

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verb stand being told to dip search don’t (yet) have overflows empty take prisoner settng free are gone lean draining

Actor/Senser Children (teachers?) (children) My eyes I The lake Small hands (small hands) (small hands) Excited shrieks and baby blond heads Nets (nets)

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Goal/Circ How to dip Their nets into water Their faces The son With life Trawled nets Each catch them

Against the wooden rail absence

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Trans label AI (stative) V (passive) AI AI RP AE AI AI AI RI AE (stative) AE (stative)

Fig. 3.4 Verb choices in ‘Pond Dipping’

their instructions and the stillness of the scene. Note that the transitivity label for stand is not very helpful here as it is an intentional action and thus indistinguishable from more dynamic actions such as jump or run. We therefore find ourselves supplementing this label with the semantic label ‘stative’ to demonstrate the lack of activity by the pond at this point. The poem continues with the verb choice we saw in Sect. 3.2 (search) which animates the narrator’s eyes and seems to alienate them from the narrator’s control. The pivot point in the poem is in the relative clause (the son I don’t yet have) where we learn that the narrator is yearning for her own son (see Chapter 8 on negating) and thereafter the activity levels rise in the next four clauses where the lake is seemingly busy overflowing and the children are suddenly busy with actions (empty, take prisoner, set free). Note that, like the narrator, the children are represented by their body parts (small hands ). This is from the narrator’s point of view, so it has a slightly different effect from the narrator’s eyes searching and doesn’t evoke the children’s alienation from their own hands. Rather, it shows the hubbub of activity amongst the children from the narrator’s viewpoint where body parts are anonymous as the children are not hers and she may not distinguish them individually from the composite scene where there is a flurry of activity. The poem ends by returning to a static scene once the children are gone where the choice of an intensive relational (IR) verb (was ) with an adjectival representation of their absence (gone) promotes the stillness of the scene over any alternative choice (e.g. have gone). Note that again, the children are represented by their body parts (baby blond heads ) which evokes the view of children from an adult’s perspective and continues the theme of the narrator seeing them as an anonymous mass of body parts, rather than individual children. After this, all that is left behind are their nets which become the Actors in two event type verbs; lean and drain. Note that although these are actions,

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they are stative, thus lending more support for the stative/dynamic distinction to be used alongside transitivity analysis. The topography of the activity levels in the poem through stative actions, to a flurry of dynamic activity and back to a stative scene where the only actors are inanimate, echoes the rising and falling hope of the prospective mother as she contemplates (yet?) another disappointment symbolised by the nets draining absence. ‘Summer evening’ takes a different trajectory to the poems I have examined so far in this section. In this poem, there’s a gradual movement from the flurry of activity of inanimate participants, often personified (e.g. that saw offices undress for lunch) and unnamed people (everywhere is couples ) towards the last six lines where eight of the final nine verbs have the second-person form you performing the function of Actor (5 times) and Speaker, Carrier, Senser in the remaining three. Note that in these cases, the referent of the pronoun is unlikely to be an addressee and more likely to be interpreted as ‘one’, or even ‘I’. The move from extensive activity of strangers seen from afar, to the (mental and physical) activity of the narrator (you) is paralleled by a move from the cityscape to the river. Notably, the final three of these actions (pull, shipping oars, letting it drift ) are not actually carried out in the narrative, but are imagined by the narrator. This lends the poem’s end a wistful tone bordering on something even darker. In the next section, I will illustrate one way in which the TCF of concern in this chapter (summarised as verb choice) interacts with another TCF, that of prioritising.

3.4

Overlaps with Other Textual Effects

As we have seen, the TCFs are one way to tease out the strands of textual meaning that in practice weave together in intricate ways to make the rich tapestry of language. This interplay is perhaps even more complex in poetry than other texts, but this is all the more reason for separating out the effects in order to understand how meaning is composed, before considering how the TCFs work together. In this section, I will use a single poem to demonstrate some of this interplay as it works between transitivity and other TCFs. There will therefore inevitably be some anticipation of the TCFs still to be explored in Chapters 4–11, but this section will give a flavour of how they work together. Figure 3.5 shows all the verbs to be found in the poem ‘Baking’, their transitivity type and the participants that occur in the same clause as them. The analysis carried out on all the poems looked something like this: This poem, strongly evocative of the narrator’s past, is, perhaps surprisingly, written almost all in present tense, because the past is conjured up through a series of visions of a person, probably a mother, and a home, as if they were in the present. This use of verb tenses to create a proximal deictic place and time works in synergy with the syntactic structure of the sentences in the poem (indicated between the bold lines in Fig. 3.5) where the main verbs

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Verb ellipted copula turning up expect ironing folding baking stop to consider are comes

Actor/Carrier Her knack (she) I (she) (she) (she) I

Goal/Circ/Attribute Strange

Sounds etc Warm, layered scent

Habits etc Through a half-open window

folds away standing back deepening falling stands baking is mowing is lengthens making is

The present everything rooms light she (she) someone Our side of the street home (home) what

Her The sheets cakes How…

From itself Through the hall In its usual place… where cakes Their lawn In cool, quiet shadow Front to back What is familiar past… familiar

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Trans label RI AI MC AI AI AI MC RI AE AE AI/E? AE AE AI (stative) AI AI IC AE II RI

Fig. 3.5 Verb choices in ‘Baking’ and their analysis

(highlighted in Fig. 3.5) are not the activities of the busy mother or the home itself, but mostly represent the people (someone), places (home) and experiences (scent ) of the present moment. By contrast, the mother is assigned her AI verbs mostly in the non-finite continuous form (ironing, folding, baking ) and occasionally in the present tense (stands ) but always in subordinate clauses, which are thus less clearly anchored to the present moment. We can see these through the lens of Prioritising (see Chapter 4) as representing that subtle shift between reality and the slightly distanced visions of past times and places, even though all the verb forms are in the present. The main activity (AI verbs) occurs in this liminal space between present reality of someone looking at their childhood home from the outside (the terrace from the road) and the past where the busy mother is the central point in the narrator’s childhood world (the kitchen window / where she stands, baking cakes ). As we will see in later chapters, this poem, as others, has features which can be described through the remaining TCFs not mentioned here. Not all of them interact directly with the transitivity and semantic verb choices which are the topic of this chapter. Here, however, we have seen that the interaction of syntactic structure (Chapter 4) and deixis (Chapter 5) with verbal choice can have a direct effect on the textual meaning and effects of a poem.

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3.5

Verb Choices in Poetry

This chapter has attempted to apply transitivity analysis to poems to see whether the choice of verbs can capture the representation of actions, events and states in contemporary poetry and provide a basis for discussing the literary effects of such choices. The first observation to be made is that there is no settled approach to transitivity analysis and this is because, in English at least, the transitivity categories are mostly not directly reflected in the grammatical form of texts. The result is that it is possible to devise an ever-finer discrimination of semantic roles and their relation to verbs that can start to undermine the advantage of a functional approach by producing too many categories to make sense of the patterning. My solution to this is to use a relatively small number of high-level transitivity labels which provide a vocabulary with which to discuss the nature of verb choice and semantic roles, allowing for the likelihood that more than one label may be relevant to particular examples, without undermining the value of being able to discuss the examples through the lens of transitivity. Having opted for a relatively broad set of labels, I nevertheless found that the poems I was analysing produced effects that were not being captured by the transitivity analysis alone. The cross-cutting distinctions of intentional/unintentional and stative/dynamic were suggested as potential supplementary labels which may have intervening values, where neither intentional nor unintentional and neither stative nor dynamic could be used to identify those processes where these features are not particularly evident. These additional features, it appeared, would be applicable across the range of transitivity labels, though some synergy (e.g. between relational intensive verbs and stative) is likely. As with all the TCFs investigated in this book, the verb choices can have an effect locally in a poem or in conjunction with other choices to form either a uniform or a changing pattern of effects. It also became clear that one of the main links between TCFs is between verb choice and Prioritising, where the positioning of Predicators in the syntactic structure may be significant in relation to their transitivity, dynamism and intentionality. The capacity of verb choices to produce not just ideological but also ideational textual meaning with literary effect is demonstrated even in the small number of poems analysed here. In the next chapter, we will consider the role of syntax and the TCF of Prioritising in producing further aspects of textual meaning.

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References Bartley, L. V. (2018). Putting transitivity to the text: A review of the Sydney and Cardiff models. Functional Linguistics, 5(4). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40554018-0056-x Fawcett, R. P. (1980). Cognitive linguistics and social interaction: Towards an integrated model of a systemic functional grammar and the other components of a communicating mind. Exeter Linguistic Studies. Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar. Edward Arnold. Jeffries, L. (1993). The language of twentieth century poetry. Macmillan. Leech, G. (2008). Language in literature: Style and foregrounding. Longman. Neale, A. C. (2002). More delicate transitivity: Extending the process type system networks for English to include full semantic classifications. PhD thesis, University of Cardiff. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Pearson Longman. Simpson, P. (1993). Language, ideology and point of view. Routledge. Thompson, G. (2013). Introducing functional grammar. Taylor & Francis Group. Wales, K. (1996). Personal pronouns in present-day English. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Prioritising: Subordination and Information Structure in Poems

This chapter addresses the question of why syntactic structure is important in poems and how the TCF of Prioritising encapsulates this part of a poem’s textual meaning. Like naming, describing and choice of verb types, this TCF is ubiquitous. It is therefore important that in trying to describe and interpret the language of a poem we should engage with the syntactic structures it uses. So far, I have investigated the nominal (Chapter 2) and verbal (Chapter 3) aspects of the clauses making up poems in separate strands of analysis, but here the two are brought together with other clause elements to consider the structure of whole clauses and we will see that these three core TCFs work together to create a significant part of the textual meaning—and thus the poetic effects—in contemporary poems. The syntactic composition of a poem is an integral part of its construction and as well as interacting with the nominal and verbal aspects of the textual meaning, it has the potential to interact in harmony or in tension with the poetic form, including the metre, layout, rhyme scheme as well as the overall form of the poem. Whilst this chapter explores the syntactic choices made in poems which can be seen as purely relating to what is prioritised and what is backgrounded, some of the interactions between poetic form and syntactic structure will also be discussed in Chapter 12 in relation to their direct evocation of meaning.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2_4

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4.1

How Syntax Prioritises and Why

The approach to textual (poetic) meaning being developed in this book cuts across conventional aspects of grammar (from morphology to syntax) because it is focussed not solely on the structural production of meaning, but on the way in which a text works to create its view of the subject under consideration. So, we have seen that some aspects of nominal structure contribute to Naming and Describing, but they also supply the semantic roles for states, actions and other processes to represent the participants and circumstances following from verb choices. Likewise, though verbal types are at the core of considering the way in which processes are represented, verbs themselves, through tense, voice and aspect, contribute to the deictic shape of the poetic landscape. Thus what might be the usual logic of a grammatical approach to meaning creation is here serving the broader question of the types of textual meaning being delivered. As a result, grammatical units and structures turn up at various points throughout the book. 4.1.1

Main Versus Subordinate Clauses

Perhaps the most obvious way in which syntax provides light and shade or, in stylistic terms, foregrounding and backgrounding, is through the positioning of some information in main clauses and of other information in subordinate clauses. As we will see later in this chapter, poetry has a way of making the parsing of its syntax quite complex, or even impossible to pin down, so for this section we will simplify the potential structures in order to provide a vocabulary with which to discuss the messier reality of poetic syntax. However, where possible, these structures will be illustrated by examples from the poems I am examining. The positioning of information in main clauses, whilst not necessarily deviant, and therefore not necessarily foregrounded, is nevertheless prominent when compared with the information in subordinate clauses. ‘It Wasn’t Snowing’ for example, begins with the following sentence containing two coordinated clauses: It wasn’t snowing, but it should have been. We will see later that this poem uses syntax in various ways to produce textual meaning, but here it is simply setting out the scene (through a negation, see Chapter 8) and a converse imagined scene using the modal should (see Chapter 9). Being coordinated, the two scenes are equivalent in terms of their prominence in the sentence and the reader is thus able to read the rest of the poem with either ‘snowing’ or ‘not snowing’ as their default background. Subordinate clauses have a range of potential roles in the wider sentence, but in summary, they can either take the place of one of the main clause elements (Subject, Adverbial, Object, Complement, but not Predicator) or they occur within noun phrases as relative clauses or reduced relative clauses postmodifying the head noun. We have already seen that in ‘Pond Dipping’ the narrator is wishing for a baby: My eyes search their faces for the son/I

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don’t yet have. Here, the main clause (in bold) is giving priority to the anxious activity of the narrator, whereas the relative clause, [that] I don’t yet have, embodies the sad truth of her situation at a lower level of structure. Once there is an understanding of the placing of information into main or subordinate clauses in this way, we may interpret this as demonstrating the visible (her actions) versus invisible (her thoughts) or see the relative clause as putting her desires almost beyond her consciousness, though ever-present in the background, as a result of its positioning in the structure. These interpretative functions are those which may be thought of as literary responses, but they are nevertheless reliant on a prior accurate description of the textual meaning. Though prominence in a main clause might seem to indicate importance, it is worth noting too that this straightforward conferring of significance to the highest level of structure is in tension with other mechanisms such as presupposition (see Chapter 7) some of which can be delivered by subordination. For example, though we may agree that the son I don’t yet have is syntactically backgrounded, the noun phrase, including relative clause, that delivers this concept also presupposes the child’s existence, despite the negation of the verb (see Chapter 8). The strength of presupposition in definite noun phrases like this is precisely because the existence of its referent is taken for granted, by being backgrounded. As we see in other genres, such as advertising (e.g. ‘the climax of style’), the strength of presupposition is to be quietly persistent in the background of a text, meaning that prominence and strength are not necessarily the same. Similarly in poetry, the strength of suggestion in backgrounded textual features, such as subordinate phrases or clauses may be at odds with the upfront prominence of main clause structures, but the two work together for the final effect. 4.1.2

Focus and Marked Clause Structures

So far, this section has introduced the idea of main versus subordinate clauses within higher level sentences. However, the distribution of information within each clause is also a rich source of textual meaning. English grammar is relatively lacking in options for internal clause structure as there is a strong default way that sentences are put together, but this means that taking those options can have a significant foregrounding effect, by the process of external deviation. English clauses have a limited set of patterns which can be summarised as1 : SP

the excited shrieks/and baby blond heads + are gone (Pond Dipping)

1 The examples here come from the poems I have analysed for this book, with one exception where I could not find a poetic example. In other cases, I had to exclude an optional Adverbial to keep to the simple structure. The plus signs (+) indicate the boundary between the clause elements in each case.

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SPO SPA SPC SPOO SPOC SPOA

swans on a river/+disprove + the moon they paddle through (Summer Evening) She + dawdled + home (A Square of Sunlight) its flesh + was + sweet (Blackberry Picking) you + gave + me + a dog (invented example) [home]/+making + what is familiar/+ past, particular, necessary, strange. (Baking) I + put + the iron + in a high cupboard. (Ironing)

Though any of these patterns may be elaborated with optional Adverbials and many of them may either consist of or contain subordinate phrases and clauses, most clauses can be reduced to one of these seven patterns. The Adverbials included here (as A) are only those which are obligatory in the clause concerned. So, for example, some verbs require adverbials for completeness as in I went to Boston (SPA) or I took my daughter to school (SPOA) where the deletion of the A is only possible through ellipsis when there is a fully recoverable location in the (textual or social) context. Thus, I went or I took my daughter both presuppose that the hearer knows where to. The default clause patterns above involve a distribution of information between the clause elements which lends emphasis—called focus—to the last (obligatory) clause element in the structure. In ‘Marble’, the opening line has the basic SPO structure: Even Michelangelo made, maybe, the odd slip. It includes some additional Adverbials (even, maybe) but the focus remains on the last obligatory clause element, the odd slip. In such cases, poems use default English clause patterns and normal information structure to focus on the topic of the upcoming poem. Given the default pattern of English clauses, there is an inevitability about the focus being on the Predicator (verb element) or, if the verb is not the final clause element, one of the following elements, such as Object, Adverbial or Complement. The expectation is that the early part of the clause will contain information that is already, in some sense, known. Thus, Subjects tend to be shorter on average than later clause elements and in continuous text are often simply pronouns. However, in addition to the focus of a clause, where the new information usually resides, the first element usually identifies the Topic or Theme (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) so that the hearer/reader knows what the clause is about. This is not focal, but it is key to understanding what is going on. These two information points in clauses have some potential to be manipulated ways that are entirely grammatical, but are nevertheless foregrounded through external deviation because they are not the default pattern. A common way of achieving a different effect from the default is known as ‘fronting’ (Quirk et al., 1985: 1377) in which one of the clause elements normally found after the verb is brought to the start of the clause. In ‘Baking’,

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for example, the Complement (Strange) is fronted and the copula verb is elided altogether: Strange, her knack for turning up/these thirty odd years/when I least expect her. A more standard version of this sentence would have this situation reversed (e.g. her knack for turning up is strange) though fitting in the two adverbials (these thirty odd years and when I least expect her) would be more difficult with this ordering, so the fronting could be seen as partly a practical matter. However, the fronting achieves the impact that is needed and the strangeness is thereby thematically marked. A similar use of fronting can be seen in ‘Doorsteps’ where the title noun is fronted later in the poem, though in this case it is the syntactic Object of the clause: Doorsteps/she’d have called them. The effect of fronting, then, is to separate out one of the clause elements that would normally be towards the end of the clause for special attention. It becomes the theme of the sentence, whilst also carrying some focal strength because of its unusual placing in a separate phrase at the start. Whilst optional Adverbials are by their nature more mobile than other clause elements, there is nevertheless a default position for them in most sentences which, when disrupted, can also cause some foregrounding and the resulting thematic or focal prominence which follows. In ‘Marble’, for example, where the partner awaiting heart surgery in hospital is likened to the marble of Michelangelo’s statue of David, the fronting of the time adverb creates the emphatic context for the emotion that follows: Never was a foot so beautiful, or sincerity so chill,/my warming, healing love. The fronting here also causes the Subject (a foot ) to be delayed after the verb (was ) so that Never stands out as the theme, and the whole of the remainder of the clause becomes the focus of what has not happened before. A slightly different way to achieve a similar result in English is to use cleft sentence or pseudo-cleft sentences, to isolate a clause element and give it additional prominence (Quirk et al., 1985: 1384). For example, ‘Litany’ uses a cleft sentence structure to enable the whole of the clause to be in focal position: This was the code I learnt at my mother’s knee. In this line, the main clause structure SPC has an empty Subject position (This ) and a copula verb (was ) so that all of the content of the sentence is incorporated into the Complement noun phrase with relative clause (the code I learnt at my mother’s knee). The effect is to place importance on the whole noun phrase as the explanation of what the child was hearing from the women at the same time as using the naming of a definite noun phrase structure to both create and presuppose the existence of such a code. Similar effects can be achieved by delaying some of the new information, using a generic pronoun (it ) as a placeholder in the main structure. This is related to what Quirk et al., (1985: 1416) call reinforcement, “whereby some item is repeated (either completely or by pronoun substitution) for purposes of emphasis, focus, or thematic arrangement”. The poem ‘Household’ provides a good example of placing the focus on its final noun phrase: One kiss, one breathed declaration, and there it is: the mass of love.

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This final statement of the poem follows a long list of all the materials that make up a house (e.g. The tons of brick and stone) and a question: what would it all weigh? The answer is in the final two lines of the poem and to make the transition from the materiality of the household to the emotional value of it, the poet has separated out the essence of this emotional value (the mass of love) from the rest of the structure, leaving a pronoun in its place. The effect is to put all the focus on this final phrase, producing an emphasis which would not have been possible in the default ordering of the sentence: One kiss, one breathed declaration, and there is the mass of love.

This is not different in terms of propositional meaning from what is actually in the poem (nor would another variant be: and the mass of love is there) but it is different in what I term textual meaning, in this case the prioritising of the phrase which makes sense of the long list of material items that precedes it by placing it right at the end as an appositional phrase to the pronoun. 4.1.3

Unwieldy Syntax in Contemporary Poetry

The final example of how English syntax can provide the basis of textual meaning in poetry is the exploitation of the reduplicative and catenative patterns of the language to produce particular poetic effects. This topic will be picked up again in Chapter 12 where we can see its potential for directly evoking meaning, but here I will illustrate with a couple of examples how syntax can be pushed to extremes to create particular effects of Prioritising. In the last section, we saw the end of the poem ‘Household’, and I have mentioned already the fact that the rest of the poem until these last lines is a list. Here is the list in its entirety: The tons of brick and stone, the yards of piping, the sinks and china basins, three toilets, the tiles, and the tons of wood in floors, chairs, tables, the yards of flex and cable that wrap the house like a net, the heavy glassed front door, the gate onto the street, the rippled sheets of window, the yew tree by the back, the pictures, books, piano:

We will see in Chapter 7 that the list is a very useful feature of textual meaning exploited not just by politicians and advertisers, but also by poets. This list is particularly long, and there is nothing in the rules of English syntax that prevent this, though the reader’s memory and processing capacity may be strained by such a long list. When confronted by noun phrases, even complex ones with relative clause postmodification (e.g. the yards of flex and cable that wrap the house/like a net), the reader will question what role the referents are playing in the larger picture and this search for the semantic roles they are playing intensifies where the list of names continues as long and this one.

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There can be no focus or theme and thus the prioritisation of any particular referent is suspended until the point where the syntax is resolved. This is different from the case of minor sentences made up of simple noun phrase, but where the implied clause structure is retrievable from the context. Examples of such minor sentences are explored later in this chapter. Other consequences of pushing the syntax to extremes can be to create structures which are very difficult to pin down as a whole, though their individual parts make perfect sense. This is rather like the syntax of spoken language where the speaker moves from one point to another rapidly and sometimes without tying up all the loose ends. ‘A Hairline Fracture’ is one such poem, where the first 21 lines of the poem (in three stanzas) form one long sentence, made up of a series of images loosely connected through their syntax, but defying a single simple description. Here is the middle of the three stanzas: where the Underground’s upper reaches have the character, almost, of a Roman ruin—from one crannied arcade a dustmop of yellow blossom hung with the stubborn insolence of the unintended, shaking still other mischief from its hair onto the platform, the pneumatic haste of missed trains, the closing barrier—

Each of the phrases and clauses of this breathless list of experiences in a hot and pollen-filled London is a vivid image, and the parenthetical dashes appear to mark out this section of the poem from the rest, which provides anchor points for the reader. We might expect this section to elaborate on the Roman ruin analogy and to start with it does, but then it becomes a list of features of the Underground which are unrelated to the analogy. The result of such structures for prioritisation is that there is a shifting sense of theme and focus as you read the poem so that the effect here is something like a cinematic one with the camera focussing on different aspects of the scene. We will return to this kind of syntactic excess in Chapter 12 where the direct evocation of meaning is discussed.

4.2

How Priorities Work in Poetry

We have seen so far in this chapter that the normal properties of English syntax provide a number of ways in which highlighting or prioritising of information can be achieved. This is so for any text type which uses these techniques, and in poems too the effects can be significant. In this section, I will set out some of the main ways in which we can see why structural alterations away from some notional norm or default can be considered stylistic. The fact that there are a number of alternative ways of wording pretty much the same basic (propositional) meaning allows us to consider the effects of choice on the textual meaning. Often this produces some kind of foregrounding, usually through deviation. In the case of ‘Household’, which we saw in the last section, this

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is external deviation as the delayed Subject (the mass of love) contrasts with a normal position at the start of a clause. Other poems may set up an internal norm, which can then produce internal deviation if that norm is varied. For example, ‘Crafty’ has a pattern of repeated clause structure with the same second-person grammatical Subject or Actor, probably a mother, which is specified once (You) and then a recoverable ellipsis. These are set out as a list below, not in the format of the poem: ● You made handbags out of milk bottle tops/bound in raffia ● (you) Machined rugs out of rags/and odd balls of wool ● (you) Sewed cami-knickers/from parachute silk, satchel/handkerchiefs from flourbags ● (you) Cooked up bread poultices/sheepshead brawn ● (you) Crocheted cuffs and collars ● (you) Smocked, pleated, piped, cable and moss stitched.

my

first

When this list of skills runs out, there is a sudden change of structure, with the product of a different skill (baking) brought into Thematic position as grammatical Subject: Cakes though weren’t your forte. There is a change of verb type from Action Intentional to Intensive Relation and from dynamic to stative as well as a change of theme from You to Cakes and a change of focus from the skill or products to the (negated) evaluation (your forte). All of these changes foreground the lack of cake-making skills in the adult concerned, which we might take to be one of the regrets of the child (now adult) narrator. Whilst the poem ends on a note which values all the other skills and regrets that the narrator does not have them and scarcely remembers their terminology, the foregrounded lack of cake-making provides an emphasis on the one thing that a child might really have appreciated. Whilst the poem as a whole might be read as a homage to the multi-skilled person being remembered, this highlighted moment also tells us something (non-propositionally) about the downside of having this person as your mother. In the example just examined, we see Prioritising working alongside negation and presentation of processes (i.e. verb choice) to deliver the effects concerned. In other poems, there is a congruence of effect between Prioritising and the new TCF I am proposing in this book, that of direct and indirect evocation. We will see more examples of this TCF in Chapter 12 but will touch upon it in discussing another example of Prioritising here. In ‘Marble’, a comparison is made between the sculpture of David by Michelangelo and the partner who is taken into hospital with an urgent heart condition and whose skin is therefore pale and cold like marble. The opening stanza is made up of three sentences, one short and simple in form: the second much longer and more complex and the third a one-word minor sentence: Even Michelangelo made, maybe, the odd slip. To chip, say, a cheek, brought some student girl or boy with a fingertip of beeswax, smoothing it in,

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soothing with marble dust, but a work perfect in completion without wax, was sine cera. Sincere.

The first line here is made up of only one main clause with an SPO structure, plus a couple of optional Adverbials (Even, maybe). The theme, Michelangelo, is clear and the focus is on the fact that even he probably made mistakes (the odd slip). In the following sentence, which lasts for nearly five lines, the difference between making a mistake and covering it up is not only present in the propositional content which describes the artist’s assistant using beeswax and marble dust to gloss over the chipped part of the sculpture. The structure itself also presents us with a much more complex reading experience as there are two main clauses, coordinated by but, the first being superficially simple SPO structure, but with a subordinate nominal clause (to chip a cheek) as grammatical Subject and two adverb clauses (smoothing it in, soothing with marble dust ) all delaying the beginning of the final clause. The final clause itself is relatively straightforward in structure, though the grammatical Subject is long (a work perfect in completion/without wax) which adds to the feeling of delay already caused by the first clause. As we will see in Chapter 12, such deviation from norms of English grammar (e.g. a tendency to have short grammatical Subjects) can themselves evoke something of the meaning of the text in the reading process. Here, the comparison between the simplicity of making a mistake (the first sentence) and the complexity of covering it up (the second sentence) are reflected directly in the syntax. Note that the second clause in the second sentence ends on a focal point written in Italian: sine cera. This is followed by what might be seen as an adjective in apposition to this phrase: Sincere. Putting this word in a separate sentence allows it to take the full impact of being both theme and focus. At the same time, as we will see in Chapter 6, apposition can fulfil an explanatory function, in this case providing the origin of the word sincere in Italian. These three sentences, then, provide an example of how syntax positions elements of the text in thematic or focal positions and how complexity and simplicity of syntax may work to highlight the textual meaning symbolically. English offers other variants of sentence structure with potential for producing some kind of prioritisation. The passive voice, for example, is famous for allowing the writer to avoid specifying the Actor (often called agentless passive). This possibility has been much remarked upon in relation to political and news texts (e.g. McArthur et al., 2018) but less so in relation to literary work. The effect of choosing a passive, particularly without an explicit Actor, provides an ideal structure in which to prioritise the action itself, and the Goal where there is one. ‘Prospero’s Gifts’ uses the passive to skirt around the painful memories of an abusive childhood without mentioning the perpetrator or the victim: what was done. This nominal clause employs the very bland and general main verb do to refer to something unmentionable that began around the age of three. By using the passive voice, we are not told who was responsible. It is noticeable too that this choice of verb allows the victim

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to remain implicit and this semi-hidden persona, the narrator of the poem, remains unspecified to near the end of the poem where the solution of the problems arising from the abuse are discovered: Prospero’s gifts buried deep in the sea Had to be dived for

The metaphor at the centre of the poem is introduced here, and whilst the lines that follow mention the first-person narrator at this point, nevertheless, the passive voice allows the victim to continue to hide away by being the unmentioned Actor in an agentless passive. This poem is notable for the number of ways in which the first-person narrator is backgrounded or semihidden, whilst also clearly being the consciousness at the centre of the poem. For example, the opening quatrain, which is formed from a single sentence, only explicitly mentions the narrator in the final word: A lifetime spent mending this damaged heart For what began around the age of three, Not the best way for a child’s life to start, Thinking it was happening just to me.

There is the hint of a first-person voice in the first line produced by the deictic demonstrative (this damaged heart ) but the first explicit reference to the narrator is in the subordinate clause in line four, which is a nominal clause in apposition with the noun phrase in the previous line. So, although the second quatrain begins by identifying the first-person narrator (Many years I mourned for what was done), the process (mourning) allocated to them is not one of empowerment and they are not prioritised or given the power of an Actor until very much later, when they have found a way to deal with the damage. Even then, as we have seen, the metaphorical diving to find the solution (i.e. Prospero’s Gifts) also fails to identify the narrator, except indirectly in a coordinated clause: And I swim badly. To sum up, the prioritising of information in the sentences of this poem produce the textual meaning that the first-person narrator is not significant, even though the whole poem is about them, until right at the end, when the protagonist has some luck: Then with one chance hook I found they were caught.

Although the narrator finally becomes the Actor in this line, it is notable that even then the transitivity is not an intentional material action but what some transitivity systems would label Supervention (i.e. unintended). Both good and bad experiences, then, were out of the control of the protagonist who is at the mercy of larger forces and is embedded in the syntax to match this. Whilst subordination, information structure changes and passivisation are three ways to produce prioritisation, some of which can be symbolic as well as simply highlighting, the use of minor sentences where there is no finite main verb is another ubiquitous feature of contemporary poetry which can affect the priorities given to different participants in the narrative.

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A significant number of such minor sentences, usually taking the form of simple or more complex noun phrases, occur in my sample of poems. The usual relationship between theme and focus cannot apply in such cases and the lack of a finite main verb phrase means that these sentences are not located in time by means of tense. However, the strength of the process of naming comes to the fore where there is no relationship with a verb nor with other participants. This is seen most strongly in cases like the opening stanza of ‘Up on the Moors with Keeper’ where the three Brontë sisters are introduced in a noun phrase with a long tail of postmodification: Three girls under the sun’s rare brilliance out on the moors, hitching their skirts over bog-myrtle and bilberry.

The lack of a tensed main verb phrase does not mean this image of the sisters is without movement or action. The subordinate clause (from hitching ) sees them moving across the moors in their unsuitable long skirts and freeing them from getting caught on the low shrubs that cover the ground. Nevertheless, they are not Actors in any significant process and the minor sentence provides us with a typical snapshot of them at their happiest (rare brilliance implying that these occasions were infrequent). This opening of a poem puts the sisters in their element at the forefront of the reader’s mind though it goes on to show how they have to rebel (They’ve kicked up their heels ) against the personal and social constraints of their lives in order to achieve the freedom represented in this first stanza. Whilst this poem uses a minor sentence at the outset to place the Brontë sisters in both thematic and focal positions by not providing a broader clause structure, other uses of minor sentences can have the effect of reinforcing something mentioned in an earlier (often fully structured) sentence. For example, ‘Doorsteps’ opens with a mention of the hands of the remembered person: Cutting bread brings her hands back to me -

After the end of this sentence in line 2, there is a new minor sentence which elaborates on the hands in both the distant and more recent past: Small plump hands before age shirred and speckled them

Whilst the opening sentence establishes the poem in the present (see Chapter 5), but remembering the past, the minor sentence that follows it dispenses with time and becomes a vivid snapshot of the hands that were mentioned in the first line. This evokes the process of memory which draws us into a reverie where time appears to stand still (see Chapter 12). Some poems are made up almost entirely of minor sentences and these non-clauses

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produce a purely descriptive image of their topic, as in ‘Figs’ where the first four of six three-line stanzas are made up of noun phrases describing the figs in a suburban setting. Here is the first one: Foreign bodies snuck among broad-leaved green a shade too deep for suburbia.

The naming aspects of this description and those that follow are hard to miss as they provide an example of what I called poetic deviation in Chapter 2. The figs are also called ‘expatriate fruit’ and ‘blind snouts of avocado’ (stanza 3) which continue the metaphorical list of equivalences from the first stanza. Note here, then, that the prioritising effect of making a text out of noun phrases is to dispense with the distinction between theme and focus, and place all of the priority onto the referent of the noun phrase itself.

4.3

Prioritising as Poetic Technique

Prioritising through syntax can affect poetic meaning in many ways, but it would need a whole book to examine in every detail. However, this chapter has explored those effects of structure which turned up in my poetry dataset and these were grouped to demonstrate the range of potential effects of Prioritising in poems. First, the effects of placing some referents into lower levels of subordination were explored and it was shown that the higher, propositional, level of structure provides the theme and focus of the clause, but that the placing of some referents into the subordinate structures can reinforce the meaning of the poem by demonstrating their relative lack of prominence in the narrative. The next aspect of Prioritising examined here was the use and manipulation of theme and focus in clause structure, to achieve particular effects. The changing of default structures to front a particular clause element or the use of cleft structures to place the focus on a whole clause were explored in relation to poetic effect. Finally, the effect of Prioritising across whole poems was investigated to demonstrate that, like the other TCFs, this one works in local areas of a text and also as the basis of patterning across a text. It also works alongside the other TCFs to produce the complex poetic effects that mark out contemporary poetry.

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References Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, M. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold. McArthur, T., Lam-McArthur, J. & Fontaine, L. (Eds.). (2018). Agentless passive. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Pearson Longman.

CHAPTER 5

Representing Time, Space and Society: Constructing the World of the Poem

The final chapter in this first analytical section of the book considers the other core, and ubiquitous, TCF, which concerns the contribution of deixis, of person, place and time, to the textual meaning in my poetic dataset. This aims to show how the space, time and person aspects of the poem’s world are created and how the reader positions him/herself in relation to this world. Like the TCFs explored in Chapters 2–4, this one is dependent on previous work in linguistics and stylistics relating to the grammar and textual effects of the features described. In particular, this topic, which started out labelled ‘indexical expressions’, has a long history in philosophy and pragmatics (Bar-Hillel, 1954; Levinson, 1983; Yule, 1996) but is also claimed by core linguistics (Lyons, 1977) and stylistics in the context of Text World Theory (Werth, 1999) which has become one of the major cognitive stylistic approaches to reader’s meaning in recent years (see also Gavins, 2007). Here, though, I want to incorporate deixis into the model of textual meaning I am proposing, not primarily in relation to Text World Theory, but drawing on another strong theme in stylistic work, that of point of view. McIntyre (2006) demonstrates the applicability of deictic concepts such as deictic centres and deictic shifting to the analysis of literature (in his case, dramatic texts) and this is one element of the meaning of texts which, like naming and representing processes, is central to textual meaning in English (see also Stockwell, 2020, Chapter 4, for more on deictic centre and deictic shifts).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2_5

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5.1

Deixis and Text Worlds

A text is read (or heard) in space and time. Sometimes this is at a different place and time from when and where it is written or spoken. The people involved in the communication may be in the same place and time (e.g. in face-toface communication) or be at a distance in space and time. The relationship between them may be close, distant or only hypothetical (e.g. in the case of readers of fiction and poetry who don’t know the author). Deixis is the term which brings together those aspects of language which help the recipient disentangle who is speaking to whom, where they are speaking from, in what time period and to what extent s/he (the recipient) is located in the communicative event or has some other role, such as observer or overhearer. The fundamental feature of deictic language is that it has shifting reference. Thus, today refers to the day on which I say/write it, but refers to a different day if I say/write it tomorrow or next week (or indeed yesterday). Deixis could be seen as fundamentally a phenomenon of the here and now, face-to-face language that characterises most of the history of—and much of the everyday use of—human communication. It works well when we meet someone in the street and tell them how to get to the post office or when we come home to the camp fire and try to explain where we saw the wild boar we might go and hunt the next day. Once you separate the communicative event from the here and now, though, deixis becomes more complex. Thus, if you are trying to explain to someone on the phone or in a note, how to get to the post office, you need to make some assumptions that are not necessary in the face-to-face situation. Thus, you will need to know where they are starting from, which is self-evident when you are in the street with them. This ability of human beings to imagine themselves in a different place in order to communicate is known as deictic shift and it is fundamental to much of modern communication, though it is also not new. A poem is as different from everyday face-to-face communication as it is possible to have. It is usually displaced in space (even with all the different kinds of performance poetry, they are written in advance and not communicated in a personal way to a particular addressee) and in time. The time difference between writer and reader might be short (e.g. a poem written and read immediately) or very long (e.g. a poem from another century) but the same principles apply to the reading process—the reader needs to work out the relative timeframe of the world within the poem. Literary work in general, and poetry in particular, requires the reader to find their place in the world that is being created. This is not qualitatively different with other types of text, where we also have to find our place, but it is perhaps the prototypical situation where the stylistic concept of point of view (see McIntyre, 2006; Simpson, 1993) is relevant. The point of view of a text is the way in which the world and events of the text are seen and from what angle. It is most likely the same place that the reader will place themselves imaginatively in relation to the scene and events playing out, though

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this is a projection into the cognition of the reader which I don’t feel text analysis alone can establish one way or another and is one of the reasons that I personally find the concept of ‘cognitive stylistics’ unscientific and therefore eschew it as a term, though much of the work carried out under that banner is perfectly good text analysis providing real insight into linguistic and textual meaning. Returning to deixis itself, we can identify many of the forms and features that make up the time/space/person envelope of a text, though as with most of the other textual features in this book, there are more and less prototypical forms which shade off to a fuzzy boundary. Deixis is simple in its basis but complicated in its enactment, so in this section I will review the core features that one might look for in analysing poems and in the following sections we will see how they work in co-text. Beginning with space, there are a number of core deictic terms which indicate the text’s point of view in relation to features of the physical environment. These include the demonstrative adjectives pronouns which can be divided into the proximal (this, these) and distal (that, those) categories. Much of the rest of spatial deixis is delivered by spatial adverbs (here, there), prepositions (in, on) and directional verbs (come/go, bring/take) all of which provide evidence for the deictic centre of the text and some of which also show orientation (direction of travel/facing). Temporal deixis is conveyed in a number of ways, and like space, it can indicate distal (far off) or proximal (nearby) time, though this duality is an over-simplistic representation of the situation. Most straightforwardly, the adverbs of time (e.g. now, then) and various temporal nouns (today, yesterday, tomorrow) as well as phrasal time references (last week, this time tomorrow, that week) clearly point to a time in relation to a notional current time which is the point in time where the reader is likely to place the deictic centre of the text. More complex and yet ubiquitous is the time reference provided by each verb phrase, whether it is finite or not. Time is a very complex feature of verbs in English, which I don’t have space (or time!) to explore in detail here. However, by focussing on the tense (past/present) and aspect (continuous/perfective) of verbs in the poems we are analysing, it is possible to see that there are certain patterns and habits in poetry which we can interpret in relation to the remainder of the text. Personal deixis is another deceptively simple feature of English which becomes still more complicated when viewed in poems. The simplest account is that there are three different personal pronoun types: first person, second person and third person. Like other types of deixis, this is prototypically straightforward in face-to-face interaction where the speaker (and anyone they are speaking for) is first person, the person/people they are speaking to are referred to in second person and anyone else referred to is third person. As Wales (1996: 44) points out, however, there are already complexities in this picture, since third-person pronouns are more typically endophoric in reference (i.e. refer to people and things identified in the text, rather than

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the situation) whereas first and second-person pronouns are prototypically exophoric (i.e. refer to the speaker and addressee) in face-to-face interaction. Deixis only comes into play when the pronoun is exophoric in reference, so the co-text requires some scrutiny to establish which kind of reference is in play for individual cases. In addition, the first-person plural (we) has the capacity to include or exclude the audience and the second person (you) can refer to either singular or plural addressees as well as sometimes meaning one—i.e. referring to a generic referent meaning anyone and often also being an indirect way of self-referral (i.e. to the first person). All of this complexity transfers to poetry, as we will see below, and in some ways it lends itself to the tendency for poems to provide room for interpretative variants. There is a further category of deixis which is often termed ‘social deixis’ (Stockwell, 2020: 54) and refers to those terms which indicate relationships between people in the social context. This would include, for example, relationship terms (e.g. father, sister, etc.) as well as markers of intimacy or social distance which are seen in many languages (e.g. tu, vous in French) but are rare in modern English. This aspect of deixis occurs in contemporary poems, but relatively rarely and usually where there is a complex narrative building up and the social relationships of the characters matter. It is not something I have found in my poem sample.1

5.2

Time in Poems

In ‘Baking’, much of the poem is a dreamlike memory of someone (maybe a mother) and a house (childhood home) which is both distant and close in time. This is achieved through deictic means. The introduction of the figure in the opening lines is as a noun phrase (underlined here): Strange, her knack for turning up these thirty odd years when I least expect her:

The implied underlying clause here is that X is strange, with X standing for the whole underlined section. English does not favour long Subjects of this kind and the fronting of the adjective complement (see Chapter 4 on prioritising), strange, has its own benefits for the text here with the copula verb (is ) elided as it is entirely recoverable from the context. The poem, therefore, starts off with temporal deixis indicating the narrator’s present, a proximal presentation of time, which invites the reader to take up that viewing position too. However, the person referred to, who has a knack for turning up, has been doing so for thirty odd years, which gives a new perspective on this habitual 1 Note that Stockwell’s view of social deixis includes much that would be seen as sociolinguistic, register and style variation (see Stockwell, 2020) but since there are no examples in my data, I have kept this account fairly simple. With the possible exception of dub and slam poetry, this genre is rarely situated in face-to-face communication and the relationship between the poet and the reader is inevitably distant as a result.

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action as taking place over a long period of time, mostly in the past. This sense of distal time is nevertheless brought up to the present both by the present tense of the main clause (it is strange that…) and by the proximal demonstrative adjective (these) which together make clear that these appearances are still happening. Although the poem remains entirely in the present tense, the ghost of the mother figure is first characterised by non-finite continuous verbs (ironing, folding the sheets,/or most often baking cakes ) and later in a subordinate clause (by the kitchen window/where she stands, baking cakes ) which itself is subordinate to other subordinate clauses (light falling in its usual place), itself part of a list of clauses subordinate to the main clause: How readily the present folds away. So, although this person appears in the present, it is not the same present as the narrator, but is a present that is rediscovered down a long tunnel of memory which the hierarchy of subordinated constructions (see Chapter 4). The deictic centre, then, in temporal terms, is the past, but it is presented, through continuous and present tense verbs, as being more proximal than distal. It is striking when looking separately at temporal deixis that repeated actions, habits and tendencies are very common in the poems in my sample. As we saw in ‘Baking’ the present timeframe creates a past timeframe within it so that what is a repeated experience over time is also proximal in the way it is presented. In ‘Blackberry Picking’ much of the narrative of the childhood blackberrying is presented through the past tense, but it is combined with modality (e.g. would ripen, would keep; see Chapter 9) to create a repeated sequence of actions and experiences cemented by the Adverbials indicating habitual events and processes (late August, always, each year). This story of a repeated narrative contains within it a temporal development which is indicated by other time adverbs (at first, then) which operate within the repeated cycles. In ‘Doorsteps’ the temporal deictic centre is the present (brings, saw away) but there is a past narrative which is embedded in the present one. Unlike ‘Baking’, then, the memory is left clearly in the past by the use of past tense verbs (bought, were hinted at, used, came) though there is some use of spatial deixis to bring the two time zones, and two kinds of bread and butter, together (back to me, came). In ‘Greenhouse’ the temporal deixis starts in the present (it’s gone to seed now) and then creates two types of past narrative, one a specific and quite recent one (I burst in the other day) and the other a more distant one (thought back to the morning we built it ). The second stanza changes to a habitual narrative, using the modal form (I’d watch, you’d emerge) and adverbs referencing repeated occasions (some nights ). We could see this second stanza, by contrast with the first, as internally deviant as it changes the nature of the narrative thread to something closer to the memories that we saw in ‘Baking’ and ‘Blackberry Picking’. Thus, the earlier memories of a child watching his

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father come home in the evening and enter the greenhouse to pick tomatoes are foregrounded against the present of the narrator who sees that the greenhouse has gone to seed now. The poem overall is clearly based in a present time (the speaker’s) and then steps back in time in three different ways: once to the recent past (re-entering the greenhouse), further back to the building of the greenhouse and then to a longer past timeframe after the building of the greenhouse when habitual events took place. This final repeated sequence is what we are left with at the end, and the ‘ghost’ father is an indication that in the speaker’s mind at least, the repetitions are still happening. This ending gives the poem its poignancy— both because of the repeated sequence and the ‘ghost’ which is a reimagining of the younger version of the narrator who is behind the father when they build the greenhouse. Another poem that creates a habitual and repetitive sense of time in my sample is ‘Ironing’ which divides the life of the protagonist (the I narrator) into three periods. The time she ironed everything and the time she ironed nothing are represented by simple past tense verbs (stood, ironed, put, converted) and their chronology indicated by the adverbs (Then for years ). The final period, the present is introduced with another adverb (now) and the present tense (iron). This is, therefore, a straightforwardly chronological narrative which traces the history of the narrator through a distal set of verb tenses whilst the deictic centre stays firmly in the narrator’s present, where the poem ends up (And now I iron again; the sweet heated smell /hot metal draws; until my blouse dries ). Note that unlike some of the other examples in the sample, this poem does not foreground the time sequence by any particularly evident deviation. There is certainly no external deviation and only the setting up of the past tense narrative allows us to see the final (present tense) period as internally deviant to some extent. This brings the focus to the happy outcome of the narrative, where the narrator appears to have found contentment, as reflected in the right amount, and right kind of ironing. Time deixis in poems is, as this section has shown, a complex matter in which there are interwoven strands of narrative in which the participants are featured and which the reader may access through the deictic centre of the text, which will inevitably not coincide with the time of reading.

5.3

Space in Poems

Inevitably, the deixis of time, space and person work together in many cases to provide the point of view of the poem and indicate the deictic centre that the reader may take as their vantage point. As with every TCF in this book, I am teasing out the strands separately so that we can see what contribution is being made by every textual feature in a poem. Much of the spatial deixis in the poems I have been analysing relates to the first-person narrator’s point of view, and thus the deictic centre of the poem. In ‘Hairline Fracture’, for example, the narrator and partner are moving

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around London in a past narrative which is thus distal for the time of reading in temporal terms. However, the spatial deixis is able to place the deictic centre physically by means of directional verb (and came charging down) oriented towards the narrator and partner. This helps to place the point of view in the place (if not the time) of the events being recounted. Many poems use deixis to produce the textual equivalent of a tour of a particular place. ‘Baking’ in my selection of poems is ostensibly about an activity (baking) and the remembered person doing it, but much of the poem is actually about the house where these remembered activities took place; presumably a childhood home. The deictic centre of the poem remains with the first-person narrator throughout, though it is difficult to know when the imagined place switches to the remembered house. The first line uses a directional verb (turning up) which incorporates the narrator’s deictic centre as the place to which the remembered person turns up. Then the scent of greenery (syringa), smoke and mown grass comes through a half-open window. The directional verb again treats the narrator as the deictic centre, but it is not until the next stanza that this deictic centre appears to be inside the old house itself, once the present folds itself away. At this point, and from here to the end, all the spatial deictic expressions lay out the garden and house of memory in relation to the position of viewing, which is the deictic centre of the poem. Thus, the terrace is first seen from the road and the house itself is picked out a long way off down the garden with rooms deepening through the hall and finally the light falling in its usual place by the kitchen window/where she stands, baking cakes. In this string of noun phrases, the prepositional phrases each take the deictic centre further into the garden and house, with the result that the poem has a filmlike quality panning from a distance ever closer to the person in the kitchen. This series of images, as we saw also with the temporal deixis, is both a memory and also very vivid and present. The way that the temporal and spatial deixis work together to achieve this is one of the poetic achievements of the poem. Notice, however, that there is nothing externally deviant in the language choices being made here. Instead, it is the change from the first half of the poem where the narrator is the deictic centre of the poem in the present to the second half of the poem, where the house and surroundings is the centre, which produces a mild foregrounding effect through internal deviation. A similar effect is achieved in ‘Doorsteps’ where the memory of another domestic figure (grandmother?) is centred on the narrator: Cutting bread brings her hands back to me. The directionality of the prepositional phrase as well as the first-person deixis places the POV firmly with the narrator, which is the position the reader is invited to take up in the poem.2 Even when the poem moves into a past tense memory of the remembered person bringing plates of bread and butter to the table, the narrator remains at the spatial 2 Note that I make no assumptions about whether any/all readers will do so, but simply that the text invites this as the most likely deictic positioning for the reader.

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centre as the soft/halfmoon half-slices came to the tea table, with the directional verb (came) showing that the narrator/deictic centre is at the table, awaiting the meal. We have already seen how ‘Greenhouse’ sets up a three-part timeframe, consisting of the present, the recent past and the more distal past. These three timeframes are reflected to some extent in the spatial deixis. The present (It’s gone to seed now) has the directional verb gone reflecting the disappearing of a rotting build as receding from the narrator’s deictic centre, but the recent past (I burst in the other day; stood in the green light ) is located inside the greenhouse and the more distant past traces the journey of the panes of glass from the house, down the path and with the narrator behind the addressee: you out in front… and me behind. The fact that this poem is first person but has an addressee (albeit one we suspect is no longer alive) complicates the potential point of view for the reader, but I will discuss this in the next section. The final point of view in the habitual scenes of the second stanza is seen From my bedroom window and all of the orientation is towards the house and the narrator, with the directional verbs of movement, arrived and emerge both oriented towards the narrator and the prepositional phrases (into the black of the garden; into the beam of light ) describe movement away from and towards the narrator too. The narrator’s point of view, therefore, is dominant in the poem and an invitation for the reader to take up its position as their vantage point. Most of the poems discussed in relation to deixis so far have been in firstperson mode, but deixis is not restricted to the first-person voice. ‘Up on the Moors with Keeper’ is one example of a third-person narrative whose very title has a deictic feature. The preposition up here indicates a distal relationship between the moors and some other place, which we discover in the poem is the Bronte sisters’ home with their father and brother. The title, then, reflects what we learn of their lives in the poem, which is that they are obliged by duty to be in the house much of the time, but their desire is to be up on the moors. The poem repeats this idea in different words in the phrase out on the moors, which again has the perspective from the house as does the final phrase away from the dark house, father and duty. If the spatial deixis pushes us towards the conclusion that this poem is ultimately embedded in the dark house, there are moments of light relief even in this aspect of the text’s construction. For example, the dog, Keeper, is given a moment in which his point of view is prioritised: Emily’s dog stares at these/three girls. Here, the proximal demonstrative adjective (these) shifts the deictic centre to the moors and the dog’s point of view. The distal demonstrative that in the same sentence shows the juggling larks in relation to the dog and girls on the ground: pausing to catch that song on a hesitant wind. The final stanza also places the deictic centre on the moors with the girls and the dog: What could there be to match this glory? The proximal this produces a point of view close to the scene, though we are not told who’s asking this question, so it could be the omniscient narrator,

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though the answer hints that it may be attributed to the girls themselves. The final line, as we have already seen, places them away from the dark house, father and duty but in doing so, returns the deictic centre to the house itself.

5.4

Person in Poems

The use of person deixis in poetry is complex as a result of a number of generic expectations and stylistic habits that inform the way the reader is likely to interpret pronouns in addition to the fluidity of reference inherent in the English pronoun system itself. The simple version of the pronoun system would see the first-person singular as referring to the narrative voice, but in lyric poems there is also a default tendency to align this voice with the poet him/herself. Some poems, written in the voice of someone clearly separate from the poet, avoid this ambiguity, but many do not. An anecdote can illustrate this point. Peter Sansom, a poet I know personally, has a poem about someone who lost their finger in an accident at work. Although I was fairly certain it was not autobiographical, I did check his finger count the first time I saw him after reading the poem. This is because nothing in the poem identified the narrative voice as having different features (e.g. of age, gender, ethnic identity) from Peter. Many first-person poems have no second-person direct addressee, but those which do produce an additional potential ambiguity between an identified character present in the narrative or an unidentified referent in the poet’s world on the one hand and the reader as addressee on the other hand. This is convenient where the poem might be addressed to someone but with the possibility that the reader will identify with that addressee. A love poem, for example, may be written for a real or imagined referent, but the reader has the option of placing themselves in the role of lover (poet/narrative voice) or beloved (addressee). This is one aspect of the complexity that the genre of poetry produces, on top of the natural complexity of pronoun reference in English. The person deixis in ‘Greenhouse’ is patterned across the text in such a way that it gradually eclipses the first-person narrator in favour of the father figure who is memorialised in the poem. The first three lines mention only the greenhouse itself, though the time deixis (It’s gone to seed now) locates the deictic centre that soon becomes that of the narrator. This narratorial voice is introduced in the next line (I burst in) and repeated (I remember; and me behind) in the rest of the first stanza which also introduces the father in both second person (you/your) and inclusive first-person plural (we/our) form. Thus, the first stanza celebrates the addressee and the narrator’s relationship. The second stanza, though it includes two more mentions of the narrator (I’d watch; I’d wait ) shows a distance between the two, as the narrator (as a child) watches the adult from afar. The eight mentions of the father (you; your) in this stanza focus the attention on him, rather than the narrator, though the perfect ghost of the last line implies that the narrator is following in the father’s footsteps

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(through life) metaphorically as well as having followed them literally when they built the greenhouse.

5.5 The Space–time-Person Envelope in Contemporary Poetry Deixis is a feature of human language that enables us to talk about events, people and things that are not in the immediate surroundings we find ourselves in. This capacity for communicating about things that are distant in time, space and society (i.e. person) also enables literature to create worlds apart from the ones we live in so that we can experience vicariously many others’ lives and times. Contemporary poetry inherits some of the expectations of the poetic tradition whereby we may infer that a first-person narrator is identical with the poet unless there is evidence to the contrary. We do not, however, assume that the second-person addressee, if there is one, is the reader by default. In fact, the default expectation may be that there is an addressee in the world of the poem, though the reader may find themselves adopting the point of view of either narrator or addressee according to other features of the text and/or personal experience. As this chapter has shown, the deictic world of the poem is often complex, even in very short texts, and can use the indexical reference of the deictic elements to create time envelopes in which the present brings the past into focus and distance between protagonists can be symbolically represented by patterning of pronouns. The deixis of space allows for movement through imagined places which are almost filmic in their effects and can create merged worlds of past and present in the same space. In the next section of the book, the TCFs explored are less widespread throughout all texts, but in some ways their contribution to the textual meaning of poems is all the more significant as a result.

References Bar-Hillel, Y. (1954). Indexical expressions. Mind, 62(251), 359–379. Gavins, J. (2007). Text world theory: An introduction. Edinburgh University Press Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press. Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics: Volumes 1 and 2. Cambridge University Press. McIntyre, D. (2006). Point of view in plays: A cognitive stylistic approach to viewpoint in drama and other text-types. J. Benjamins. Simpson, P. (1993). Language, ideology and point of view. Routledge. Stockwell, P. (2020). Cognitive poetics: An introduction (2nd ed.). Routledge. Wales, K. (1996). Personal pronouns in present-day English. Cambridge University Press. Werth, P. (1999) Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse Longman Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. Oxford University Press.

PART II

Intermittent Features of Textual Meaning

Whilst Chapters 2–5 examined those features of textual meaning which are ubiquitous and to some extent unavoidable in any text, this section will introduce the more peripheral features (TCFs) which by their nature are intermittent. This intermittent nature effectively makes the choice to use them more significant and their power to create textual meaning is thus at least as important as the core TCFs when they are used.

CHAPTER 6

Equating and Contrasting: Constructing Equivalence and Opposition in Poems

Texts have the power to present a version of their world which creates equivalences and contrasts between things (people, items, concepts, social constructs, etc.) which are not conventionally seen in that way in the world outside the text. This TCF, though not as ubiquitous as the four core TCFs we have met so far, is nevertheless a powerful way for text producers to present their views to the reader or hearer. The strength of this TCF for poetry is that it can insinuate new ways of looking at things into the text without the need to break the basic rules of grammar and often without even challenging semantic norms in textual terms. Thus, the world view being offered is not necessarily foregrounded stylistically, though the text uses linguistic features to create a kind of conceptual deviation. The textual construction of novel oppositions (see Jeffries, 2010a) was one of the driving forces behind my development of critical stylistics, as it provided the clearest evidence I could find of the textual layer of meaning identifiably separate from the propositional and pragmatic layers of meaning. It was also the TCF which provided significant support for the notion of there being a de-contextual ‘code’ underlying the use of language, albeit one that is not set in stone and is clearly subject to change, as evidenced by the historical changes in all languages. There has been a tendency in recent years to reject this view of the code/usage duality (langue/parole and competence/performance are related ideas) but my research on this topic leads me to conclude that our ability to understand and interpret new oppositions in texts must be based on a general understanding that words (and phrases) can be oppositional and the specific knowledge of conventional opposition pairings (e.g. hot/cold) in any language. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2_6

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There has been extensive foundational work on lexical semanticsin which the sense relations of antonymy and synonymywere recognised and described (e.g. Cruse, 1986, 2004; Lyons, 1977; Murphy, 2003). Following this, and with the rise of corpus linguistics, the opportunities to examine conventional opposites in more detail were taken up (e.g. Jones, 2002) and used, amongst other things, to investigate the acquisition of conventional antonyms (Jones & Murphy, 2003, 2005). Whilst the potential for new oppositions arising in texts was recognised by some, such as Mettinger, the opportunity was not taken up: It might be noted that non-systemic semantic opposition1 has not attracted the attention of many structural semanticists. It would, however, be a profitable field of research for any kind of conceptual approach towards the study of meaningrelations. (Mettinger, 1994: 74)

I had first noticed this textual phenomenon in both politics and poetry (see Jeffries, 2010a: Sect. 1.1) and the rest of that book explored the extent and nature of textually constructed opposition, though this was later extended and deepened by the work of Davies (2012, 2013). Whilst most of the work in this area has focussed on oppositional relationships between lexical items, a similar case can be made for the textual construction of synonymyor equivalence. I included this in Jeffries (2010b) and outlined the likely syntactic triggers for such new sense relations, though there has been no further work on this aspect of the TCF as there has been for opposition. In this chapter, the power of creating novel equivalences and contrasts in poems is demonstrated. It will also become clear that this TCF is one of the mechanisms for delivering some of the conventionally named literary devices, such as simile and metaphor, though these are not limited to this TCF nor is this TCF limited to constructing figurative equivalences and contrasts.

6.1

Equating

It is one of the functions of poetry to allow the reader to make connections that they might not have made before or which they may recognise but not have been consciously aware of before (see Sect. 2.3.2). These connections can be of many kinds but constructing some kind of equivalence or opposition which is not obviously conventional is a significant part of the poetic toolbox. In this section I will focus on the creation of equivalences in poetry and examine groups of examples whose effects bear some resemblance to each other and were assembled inductively as a result of the analysis of my poetry 1 Note that what Mettinger (1994) calls non-systemic semantic opposition is also called non-canonical antonyms by Murphy (2003: 11) and also by Davies (2008: 80). I use (textually) constructed opposites, created opposites or unconventional opposites interchangeably, but all of these terms refer to the same phenomenon; the invention of a new oppositional sense relation between two items in a text.

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dataset. The first of these is what we could call explicit equivalence, but since there is a standard literary term for it, ‘simile, I will use this term as shorthand. We will see that explicit equating is typically delivered by simile and that there are a range of more or less prototypical structural ways to create similes. This is a point I have already made more generally about the TCFs; they are a meaning-form combination to some extent, but the potential forms they take usually vary from most to least prototypical. In the case of equating, as well as the simile forms, there are three main mechanisms which can create equivalence where it might not otherwise be expected. These three mechanisms are the equating caused by the copula verb in an Intensive Relational process clause (She is my sister); the placing of phrases (usually noun phrases) in an appositional structure (e.g. Sue, my sister) and the combination of unlikely concepts in noun phrases, adjective phrases and clauses which create new equivalences, often leading to metaphors. These will each be examined in detail in the sections which follow and where they overlap with other TCFs, such as naming, describing and transitivity, this combination of effects will be commented upon. 6.1.1

Producing Equivalence Through Similes

Though traditionally the simile was seen as the poor relation of metaphor, recent work in stylistics has assembled evidence that there is a growing consensus that they are distinct and that “simile need not be ‘uncreative’, unimaginative, impoverished in its effects at all” (Vandelanotte, 2018) and there have been significant studies of the extent of structural and semantic variation in similes, including a typology in Harding (2017). The most explicit types of equivalence which I am grouping under this heading, are actually delivered through a relatively small number of textual features which are used extensively in contemporary poetry. There are three common ways to construct similes in English and these are used very commonly in contemporary poetry. The first is the useof conjunctions as if and as though to introduce subordinate clauses (or sometimes phrases) which present the comparison scene which is being compared to the actual scene in the poem. In ‘A Hairline Fracture, for example, the narrator compares the breakdown in the relationship to geological shifts explicitly, so that the figurative aspect of the comparison is made plain from the start of what turns out to be a stanza-long imaginary scene of devastation: it was as though we watched the hairline fracture of the quotidian widen to a geomorphic fissure

One frequently mentioned feature of similes, as compared to metaphors, is that the reader is often left in no doubt what the basis of the comparison is. Here, for example, the development of the image from fracture, through fissure to canyon is clearly a visual representation of the increasing distance

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between the couple. The use of the conjunction + subordinate clause structure here allows for this relatively long development of an idea, though they are not always so extended and do not always make the basis of the comparison so clear. In ‘Prayer, for example, Duffy sets up two ideas in two adjacent clauses and depicts a relationship of equivalence between the two with devastating effect: Then dusk, and someone calls / a child’s name as though they named their loss. Unlike the previous example which sets out a rather obvious, if effective, parallel between the separating couple and geographical features of the landscape, here the basis of comparison is much less explicit, though its power is if anything strengthened by this. Because of the poem’s homely context, where trains go by in the distance and people can be heard practising their scales on the piano, the reader may be led to assume that hearing someone calling a child’s name out is another normal part of the end of the day in this suburban setting rather than a full-blown hunt for a missing child. However, each of these everyday events also contains the seed of some kind of existential anguish. The woman in the first stanza is cheered by the birds in a tree and lifts her head out of her hands, which indicates that she may have been in despair until that moment. The man in the second stanza is reminded of his youth by the rhythm of the train, producing at the least a wistful reflection on the passing of time. When the reader comes to the calling of a child’s name, they will therefore be primed (Emmott, 1997) to see the haunting equivalence between a child’s name and their loss which brings to mind the abject terror at the heart of the parent–child relationship; the fear of losing each other. The second main way to construct similes in English is more common than these subordinate clause similes and is based on prepositional phrases introduced by like. These phrases almost exclusively function either as adverbials, modifying the Predicator (verb) or as adjectival complements in adjective phrases, rather than postmodifying nouns as prepositional phrases most often do in English. These prepositional phrases may be simple adverbial additions to the verb as in ‘Ironing’ where the narrator describes her days of anger and frustration with: Stood like a horse with a smoking hoof. Here, the iron’s similarity to the shape of a hoof is a strong visual image but also brings to mind the wildness of a horse which is pawing the ground to get away? In ‘Men on Allotments’, the men harvest their potato crops and the round, flushed globes / Tumble like pearls out of the moving soil. This simile, again, modifies the process captured in the Predicator (tumble) where the visual image of the whiteness of the potatoes against the background of the soil is the primary effect of comparing them to pearls, though the implied equivalence here goes beyond the visual and evokes the high value of each of these precious items. The other main grammatical function of these phrases is as adjective complement, as in the opening of ‘Greenhouse’ where the old greenhouse has panes of glass that are pitted / with lichen like the walls of a fish tank. Here, the adjective pitted is complemented by two prepositional phrases, one literal (with lichen) and the other causing us to see the visual effect of the lichen on the panes of glass as though we are under water. This effect is confirmed a few

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lines later when the narrator tells how he kicked the door open and stood in the green light. Similes can quite often be found in a poem’s closing lines, as in ‘Doorsteps’ where the poem suddenly pivots on the dual meaning of the title word and although the poem is largely focussed on the thickness of bread, instead of concluding with thick slices of bread, it takes a different turn down memory lane, remembering how white the literal doorsteps of childhood had been, so that they glared in the sun / like new-dried tennis shoes. The effect is to link together the physical objects of memory (thinly sliced bread; doorsteps of a house; tennis shoes that you whitened) via a chain of connections, the last one simply through the colour (though note that the bread is also white). Similes in the closing lines of a poem may function rather like the final couplet in a sonnet, to sum up or complete the topic in some way. In ‘Pond Dipping’, the final sentence has this effect, both closing the narrative of the children’s day out and at the same time reminding us that the narrator is mourning lost or unconceived children: The nets lean against the wooden rail, like wombs, draining absence.

Here, the simile (like wombs ) is a short adverbial addition to an otherwise almost entirely literal sentence about the scene by the pond once the children have left. The effect is foregrounded in this case because of the disjunction between the referents of the literal nouns (nets, rail ) on the one hand and wombs on the other. We are made aware that despite the earlier activity of the children, catching all the pond creatures, the nets no longer contain any life (draining absence) with this final phrase using a combination of negation (absence) and mismatching of Goal and verb choice (the verb draining requires a concrete Goal—cf. draining peas) to achieve its aim. We therefore begin to see how the TCFs work closely together to produce poetic effect. The third mechanism for delivery of similes in English is the as…as structure, which produces equivalence between two items in relation to a characteristic identified by an adjective. ‘Men on Allotments’, for example, opens with a line that describes the men using two of these as…as structures: As mute as monks, tidy as bachelors. Note that here the second phrase uses only the second as, because the first is clearly implied by the parallel structure and can therefore be seen as ellipsis. In fact, in both everyday and literary English, this first as is entirely recoverable as long as the rest of the structure is in place, as we can see in the following lines from stanza two of Duffy’s poem ‘Litany: The Lounge would seem to bristle with eyes, hard as the bright stones in engagement rings,

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The italicised part here is the simile which describes the (literal) eyes of the women in the lounge in relation to the look and strength of diamonds. We are invited to interpret the eyes as being not just bright but judgemental and harsh. Though the diamonds mentioned are hypothetical, we assume too that these women all wear such engagement rings, adding a visual image to the conceptual one. These are women whose status is marked by their marriages (terrible marriages ) and who judge each other and the children by harsh standards. ‘Litany’ uses a series of different similes to sum up the tense atmosphere in the lounge where the narrator’s mother and friends gossiped and competed for status. The ladder that runs up Mrs Barr’s stockings (or tights) is sly like a rumour, indicating that the child is already aware of the viciousness of the conversation and links it to the secret aspects of the scene that only she is privy to, being at a lower level (at my mother’s knee) than the women. We have already seen the comparison between diamonds and eyes, and later in the poem when a taboo word is spelled out rather than spoken, it tensed the air like an accident. The equating of the use of a taboo word (possibly cancer, or leukaemia, which are introduced later) with an accident provides the reader with a basis of comparison in which mentioning illness is seen as equivalent to being run down by a car or falling downstairs. The very use of the word is dangerous and makes the women tense. The final simile in the poem refers to the child’s use of a different taboo word (fuck off ) when the shock felt in the room is compared to the change in barometric pressure sometimes almost tangible before a storm: a thrilled, malicious pause salted my tongue like an imminent storm.

Here, the basis of comparison is not between two nominals, but between the verb (salted) and the imminent storm. There is an elliptical end to the clause (like an imminent storm would do), which shows that equating can be used to compare processes just as easily as nominals. Some of the poems I am analysing make extensive use of similes to construct the view of a single referent in their world. We saw in Chapter 2 that ‘Men on Allotments’ named potatoes in a number of ways (metaphorically). The long first stanza in ‘Blackberry Picking’ uses simile to produce a variety of comparisons regarding the main referent, the blackberries. It compares the berries by their texture (hard as a knot ); their taste (like thickened wine); their visual effect (big dark blobs burned / like a plate of eyes ) and their effect on the children’s hands (our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s ). Whilst the first two of these are relatively innocuous and straightforward, the latter two begin to undermine the carefree atmosphere of this innocent childhood activity by producing first a disturbing image of a plate of eyes and secondly referring to a notorious

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murderer from a French folktale. These darker references pre-empt the loss of the berries to rot later in the poem and the disappointment (in life) that the repeated experience symbolises. There are more similes in my set of poems than I have space to examine here, though one more example is worth considering as it demonstrates a different use of simile from those we have seen so far.In ‘It Wasn’t Snowing’, the narrator contemplates how it must feel for the famous poet who visited his school to see his words take on a life of their own as they were published and became part of the language: It must have been like freeing doves And watching them go off to neighbouring cotes Or into the low clouds of your New Hampshire Knowing they’ll meet no harm, that they’ll survive Long after the hand that freed them has decayed

Whilst the comparison between the poet’s words and doves is relatively simple, the continuing narrative of what might happen to the doves (words) makes this simile complex and provides support for the view that similes are not simply impoverished metaphors. The words, it seems will go and live with different ‘owners’ (neighbouring cotes ) but will continue to be looked after when the poet is no longer alive. 6.1.2

Equating by Intensive Relational Process

Apart from equating by simile, one of the main ways to signal equivalence or similarity in texts is through the placing of the concepts we wish to equate either side of an intensive relational process; in English this is usually the copula verb, BE. As we will see below, this placing into positions of equivalence confers neither absolute identity nor metaphorical status on the two referents, though each of these is a possibility, depending on the context. In ‘A Hairline Fracture’, for example, the opening line uses an intensive relational sentence (X is Y) to make an equivalence between the grammatical Subject, which is a nominal clause (whatever went wrong ) and the grammatical Complement, a noun phrase (more than weather). Whilst the remainder of the poem is a kind of expansion of the question of what more than weather refers to, this opening equivalence, between a slightly underspecified problem (whatever) and an equally unspecific reference to the problem’s scope as exceeding the oppressive weather, sets the tone for the rest of the poem. This equivalence is not metaphorical or foregrounded through deviation but informs the reader that they should see the upcoming problems as being hard to pin down, though not a trivial matter like the weather. By contrast, the opening line of ‘Litany’, though using the same basic form, is doubly metaphorical:

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The soundtrack then was a litany

Though the childhood of the narrator in this poem is not a film, the use of soundtrack to refer to the background chatter coming from the women meeting in her home sets it up as though we are watching the action on a screen. The distance in time which adds to this filmic effect is indicated not just by then but by the dated nature of the referents in the list that the child hears her mother’s friends naming (candlewick / bedspread three piece suite display cabinet ). The equating caused by the intensive relational clause is between the soundtrack and a litany, which is a form of words that is used in religious ceremonies—particularly Christianity—usually made up of a list of prayers or supplications to the deity. Thus, the term soundtrack, which doesn’t specify what is to be heard in the background becomes equated to a long, monotonous and possibly also incomprehensible list of items. Here, they are items that relate to the materialism of the housewife of that era, who we see here as being deprived of other interests so that the latest acquisition is all they can discuss. This opening clause sets the scene of the bored child hearing the woman talking about boring items of furniture and furnishings by the means of two metaphorical references, which are equated by their position either side of the verb. Another example of Intensive Relational equating comes from ‘Baking’ where the narrator is thinking of a long-lost relative (probably a mother) and imagines her turning up unexpectedly. She is imagined ironing, folding sheets and baking cakes, and the narrator reflects: I stop to consider how, involuntarily, sounds, thoughts, smells, shapes are habits arranged around her face.

Here, then, the equivalence is between the list of cognitive and sensory impressions (sounds, thoughts, smells, shapes ) and a phrase (habits arranged around her face) which sums up how she relates all the experiences of life to this beloved person. This is a new way to think of the kinds of sensory memory that she is describing which brings all the apparently unrelated experiences of life into a pattern which the face of the person makes sense of. Equating here could be seen as producing a strong visual image, making concrete these cognitive and bodily sensations. What these examples show is that metaphor is not coterminous with any particular structure or form. The Intensive Relational clauses we have seen here may produce metaphors, or may not, and the individual naming (e.g. soundtrack) can produce metaphor by the simple choice of a deviant head noun in relation to the referent. Thus, though metaphor is a very important topic in stylistics and other fields of linguistics, it is not at the same level of analysis as the TCFs I include in the model of textual meaning but is rather an

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interpretative consequence of some of their effects. There is scope for a longer study to investigate the relationship between textual meaning and metaphor which explores which of the TCFs can deliver metaphorical meaning and how. This is not the remit of the current project which comments in passing on metaphorical consequences of some of the TCFs when they arise. 6.1.3

Equating by Apposition

The other main way in which equating is specifically delivered by the structure of a text is through apposition. Apposition describes the situation of having more than one phrase or clause fulfil the same function in a higher level structure. The most common form that apposition takes is where two or more noun phrases are placed side by side and perform the same function in a clause. For example, in the sentence My sister, the art teacher, taught me to paint, the two noun phrases forming the grammatical Subject (My sister, the art teacher) each refer to the same person and are therefore seen as equivalent. Depending on what the reader/hearer already knows, this equivalence may be news (I knew you had a sister but didn’t know she was an art teacher or I knew there was an art teacher who taught you to paint, but I didn’t realise it was your sister). Or, depending on context, it may be that the speaker is pointing out which of their many sisters had taught them to paint. In the latter case, the equivalence may not be so surprising, though it can identify the right person. Many examples of apposition in poetry precisely perform the function of telling the reader more about the referent of both phrases. In ‘Doorsteps’, for example, we learn that the knife used to cut the bread was bought from: a shop in the Edgware Road, an Aladdin’s cave of cast-offs from good houses earls and countesses were hinted at.

Typically, poetry does not adhere tothe Gricean maxims (Grice, 1975; Levinson, 1983), or perhaps one could say that the maxims simply don’t apply in a communication situation such as poetry, which is essentially unnecessary, so that the question of how much information is enough, but not too much, is not even relevant. In strict terms, we do not need to know where the knife came from, and once we have been told that it was a shop in the Edgware Road, this information could suffice, though the additional appositional phrase brings so much more detail and visual images into the description that it provides more information about the person than the way she cut bread. Another effect of apposition is to present the same referent from different perspectives. In ‘Ironing’ for example, ironing started out for the narrator as a family chore, then (presumably after a break-up) is rejected entirely and finally becomes something they do simply for themselves. At this final stage, there is a description of the blouse that is being ironed:

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my blouse dries to a shining, creaseless blue, an airy shape with room to push my arms, breasts, lungs, heart into.

This sequence of two noun phrases, a shining creaseless blue and an airy shape with room to push/my arms, breasts, lungs, heart into, is structurally indistinguishable from a list (see Chapter 7) but clearly both noun phrases refer to the same item, the blouse, and we are invited to see this clothing item first in terms of its colour and texture and then in terms of its function (to wear). These noun phrases create equivalence between the beauty and function of the blouse, representing the narrator’s new-found independence and enjoyment in their freedom. As well as very many appositional constructions of this kind, contemporary poetry uses apposition to bring new perspectives on a referent without the need to include a main verb which would make the relationship of equivalence more anchored in time than might be needed. For example, in ‘Prayer’ apposition is used to draw the link between the sight (and sound?) of birds in a tree and what it provides the watcher by way of comfort. The woman lifts her head from her hands to stare at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift. We are presented first with the visual image of birds looking like musical notes on the branches of a tree and then this same image is given a positive evaluation by being referred to by the word gift with its connotations of value. Though noun phrase apposition is the most common type of apposition in the language generally as well as in poetry, there are also examplesof adjectival lists in poems which could be seen as appositional. The final line of ‘Baking’, for example, uses four adjectives to describe the effect of the memories that the poem features: making what is familiar past, particular, necessary, strange.

We could ask whether these four adjectives are really all referring to the same thing—the strangeness of these memories—or whether they are four different reactions to the memories working together. However, the result of seeing this structure in either way is almost the same. Either we see these appositional adjectives all refer to different aspects of one feeling or they are a list of different feelings working together. The point is not their difference, but their similarity or equivalence. The narrator isn’t quite sure how they’re feeling, but these four adjectives between them capture the essence of the emotion. As well as noun phrases and adjectives, clauses can be placed into an appositional relationship, as we see in ‘It Wasn’t Snowing’: Knowing they’ll meet no harm, that they’ll survive Long after the hand that freed them has decayed.

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These lines, as we saw earlier, refer to the lines of poetry that the subject of the poem (a poet) has freed and at the same time refers to the doves that are being used as a metaphor for the poetic lines. The two subordinate clauses are listed with only a comma between them and the second seems to enlarge on the first, giving a specific version of what meet no harm may mean, in this case, longevity beyond the life of the poet/liberator. Many examples of equating in poetry are relatively straightforward in this way, and provide either different perspectives on a concept or more detail in one of the representations than the other. However, like the adjectival example above, it is also often difficult to tell whether the structures are really in apposition with each other or whether they are in a list and thus have not the same but different referents. In ‘Figs’ for example, the fruit are seen as surviving in the cold climate of the UK by dint of a record summer / a stubborn mother. If we see these two noun phrases as in a list, then the (unusually hot) summer has a different referent to the mother. However, since fruit don’t have mothers in the literal sense, we are obliged to read this as a metaphorical mother— either the woman of the house who looks after the fig tree or, if we take the two noun phrases as appositional, the summer itself. Not being able to decide between these options is unproblematic in most cases as it allows the poem to be relatively open in meaning, though within certain constraints. Contemporary poetry is particularly prone to these kinds of open-ended meanings and the structural ambiguity between lists and apposition is just one place where they can happen. 6.1.4

Equating in Conjunction with Other TCFs

The final section relating to equating deals with examples that could equally be treated under the TCFs of Naming and Describing, Representing processes or Prioritising. However, they are being discussed here specifically because their nature means that they are bringing two ideas together and pointing out their similarities. Not all of them are metaphorical, but many of them are and their metaphorical interpretation will be discussed as it arises. There are many examples in contemporary poetry where the noun phrase structure allows for two or more different concepts to be grouped together in a single label or name. These frequently bring together two referents to demonstrate how they might be seen as similar, and more often than not these similarities are not literal but metaphorical. In ‘Doorsteps’, for example, the upturned face of the loaf appears to personify the loaf by giving it a face and in ‘Greenhouse’, the soffits lagged with a/fur of cobwebs takes the architectural feature of soffits (the underside of the roof overhang) and describes them as lagged, which is a deliberate process to insulate pipes and roof spaces, with cobwebs, which may look like the material used in lagging, but are not actually as thick or warm as they look. Thus, in this noun phrase, there are one literal

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and two metaphorical referents which are juxtaposed to show their similarities. A similar effect in ‘Figs’ animates the fruit when it compares them to the blind snouts of avocado in which the head noun is borrowed from the semantic domain of animal bodily parts and blind from any animate being (including humans) which have eyes. This simple-looking phrase, then, names something quite complex, a fruit (avocado) which looks something like the muzzle of an animal (snout ) but which is blind because it has no eyes. The similarities are visual, but they make the fruit come to life. In ‘Pond Dipping’, we have seen that the narrator watching the scene of children at a pond is also dwelling on her lack of a child of her own and, most likely, some failed pregnancies or attempts to become pregnant. The description of the pond as ‘Pregnant with nymph dragonflies’ therefore makes an explicit link to the underlying narrative whilst also continuing the metaphor of the pond as a persona who produces all the life within it. Sometimes, the equating in a poem is so complex that it produces the effects of the core TCFs within it as well as equivalence. In ‘Prospero’s Gifts’, for example, there is a paradigm of naming which skirts around the abuse the child suffered by finding many ways to refer to the same, ultimately unnamed, referent. Here, the noun phrases are listed rather than presented in their poetic lineation: ● ● ● ● ●

A lifetime spent mending this damaged heart what began around the age of three Not the best way for a child’s life to start, Thinking it was happening just to me. (Many years I mourned for) what was done.

The first four of these occur in the first stanza where there is no main clause structure and these nominal phrases and clauses are therefore left to stand alone, with the possibility of being seen as a list (Chapter 7) or as appositional. What might be seen in descriptive terms as one of the weaknesses of English, the structural ambiguity between lists and apposition, turns out to be a very useful mechanism in contemporary poetry for expanding the topic under consideration to develop a number of different viewpoints of the same referent. Deciding whether a string of nominals is apposition or list is sometimes not important, as both have something to offer the interpretation. A final set of examples from my dataset demonstrate the overlap between transitivity analysis and equating where the combination of mismatched Actors and Verb choices can produce a sense of equivalence between the chosen Actor and the expected Actor type. Where there is an unexpected combination of this kind, the external deviation produces a foregrounded effect and in some cases this is to highlight or produce equivalences between the chosen Actor and the expected, but missing, Actor.

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In ‘Doorsteps’, for example, the hands of the person being remembered are described as: Small plump hands before age shirred and speckled them.

The second line here has the Actor, age, being personified by being attached to a verb which expects a human Actor: shirr and speckle. Whilst the latter may often be used in similar contexts (the rain speckled the dry earth), the former, shirr, is a dressmaking verb and thus has a strong expectation of a human Actor. The equivalence, here, then is between age and a person, so that we see the signs of ageing as something that has been done to the hands. In ‘Litany’, the terrible marriages crackled causes us to consider whether marriages are concrete enough to make a noise, since crackle requires not only a concrete Actor, but also one that is dry or brittle enough to make the sound onomatopoeically represented by this verb. The marriages are thereby metaphorically seen as brittle and dry, through the equivalence which arises from this usage. Note that the metaphor is also provided with a literal image in the following noun phrase: cellophane / round polyester shirts. The syntax here is unclear, with this phrase possibly being in apposition with terrible marriages, bringing another metaphorical equivalence into play where the marriages are seen as being made of materials with relatively low status in hindsight, though they were hailed as wonderful when first produced. However, there also might be an implied simile, with like being almost recoverable in the context: like cellophane / round polyester shirts and this would favour the relatively straightforward, though nevertheless still metaphorical, interpretation that the marriages crackled like the cellophane. The unexpected combinations we have seen here are echoed in many of the poems in my dataset, including ‘Men on Allotments’ where there is repeated personification of the plants and vegetables on the allotment by various means, including their choice as Actor with verbs requiring animate or human Subjects (e.g. buds of sprouts rejoice along their stalks ). This section has set out a number of ways in which poems can draw out equivalences between referents to achieve one of the purposes of poetry, to defamiliarise the familiar. In the next section, I will demonstrate the textual production of opposition in the poems in my dataset and draw some conclusions about its poetic effects.

6.2

Contrasting

The introduction to this chapter focussed more on opposition (i.e. contrasting) than on equating because it was the inspiration for the idea of textual-conceptual functions and critical stylistics. We have now seen that the creation of equivalence in texts is widespread and often leads to figurative

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comparisons in similes and metaphors, though non-figurative equating is also common. In this section, we will investigate the construction of opposites in more detail, and in particular attempt to show how the syntactic and semantic triggers which are outlined in Jeffries (2010b) and explored in great detail in Davies (2012, 2013) work. Here, I will summarise the textual indicators of constructed opposition, as they are more numerous and complex than those for equating. The most prototypical structurefor the effect of this TCF is what Davies and I have called negated opposition (X, not Y ), but there are many others and Table 5.1 (adapted from Jeffries, 2010b: 55) illustrates the most frequent. As with most of the other TCFs where there are apparently categories, these should be seen rather as labels of idealised cases which can be used as a vocabulary to discuss genuine examples where there may be more than one trigger type involved and semantic triggers may also play a part. The illustrations here are much simpler than many that are found in texts, where the opposition may be constructed between longer phrases or even clauses. It is also the case that, despite Davies’ extensive work on these trigger types, there is no definitive list of the frames that can trigger oppositions. Nevertheless, the opposition types are relatively stable and can be used as a means of identifying examples in our data. The other aspect of opposition that can impact on textual meaning is the different logical categories of opposition which have long been recognised in lexical semantics. The main four of these categories are: ● Complementaries—mutually exclusive opposites which cannot both be true (e.g. right/wrong) ● Gradable antonyms—the ends of a cline (e.g. hot/cold) ● Converses—mutually dependent opposites which are both true (e.g. buy/sell) ● Directional opposites—opposites which reverse the directionality of the other term (e.g. arrive/depart). The reason why these are important is that as well as constructing entirely new oppositions, texts may also convert conventional opposites from one of these categories to another, with consequences for the meaning. A further aspect of the textual construction of opposition that should be recognised in analysing textual meaning is that conventional lexical opposition often underpins what seem to be completely novel opposites in context. There are two ways in which this may be the case. First of all, conventional opposites often feature in the context of constructed ones. For example, in the parallelism example in Table 6.1, the two clauses that are set next to each other feature the gender opposition of he versus she in Subject position, which sets up an expectation of opposition more strongly than if it had simply said Jane

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liked beer. Sheila liked furniture. This would still have created some opposition between beer and furniture, but it is less strongly triggered. The second way in which conventional opposites underpin constructed ones is in the interpretation of the latter. In the invented case of beer and furniture, both versions of the parallel clauses make us see the people concerned as being differentiated by their interest in a good time on the one hand (beer) and a stable lifestyle on the other (furniture). The reader’s own predilections may cause them to read these through the conventional opposites of excitement vs. boredom or trivial vs. serious or a range of other options. Note that this example precisely demonstrates the difference between textual meaning andpersonal reading(as defined in Jeffries, 2014), giving support to the notion that the text can be analysed separately from the reader’s response. Note also that the version in Table 6.1 reinforces socially dominant stereotypes about men and women, whereas the all-female version is simply comparing two people’s preferences. The rest of this chapter will examine the construction of opposites in my dataset and demonstrate the poetic effects of this TCF. As in other chapters, an inductive approachhas been taken to grouping the examples according to their effect, rather that on the basis of the formal triggers themselves. This is to bring the literary effects to the fore, rather than focussing exclusively on the means by which opposition is created in the dataset. Table 6.1 The main syntactic opposition triggers in English

Opposition type

Example frame

Invented illustration

Negated opposition Transitional opposition Comparative opposition Replacive opposition Concessive opposition

X not Y

Home not dry

Turn X into Y

Explicit opposition Parallelism

X by contrast with Y

Turn water into capital More stupid than evil Food rather than wealth Despite the accident, she danced Steel by contrast with water He liked beer. She liked furniture She was young, but wise

Constrastives

More X than Y X rather than Y Despite X, Y

He liked X. She liked Y X, but Y

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6.2.1

Reimagining or Unpicking of Conventional Opposites

As I have argued above, constructed opposites are very often based in some way on the conventional opposites that underpin them. Sometimes these are reimagined or unpicked by the poem’s context with the effect that not only do we see new opposites in the poem’s world but we also revisit those that are so familiar we might pass them by. This defamiliarisation effect can be seen in ‘Baking’, where the narrator appears to stand before the remembered childhood home with the result that the two versions of the house are overlaid upon each other. Here is the end of the poem: Front to back, home lengthens, making what is familiar past, particular, necessary, strange.

This chapter has already considered the equating potential of the four-part list in the final line and we saw that the syntactic ambiguity of apposition versus listing made the interpretation potentially very rich. The listing itself will be considered again in Chapter 7, but here it is also worth reflecting that we have two conventional opposites (familiar / strange) enclosing three other adjectives (past, particular, necessary) and this adds another dimension to the relationship between these adjectives. It may add strength to the argument that they are in apposition, with the list replacingeach adjective with another one as a means of getting ever nearer to the mot juste, and arriving, finally, at the conventional opposite of familiar. The sense that the narrator is not satisfied with each of the others, but that they all play a part in how she is feeling about this place that is home and not home, is enhanced by the interplay of the appositional equivalence and the use of a conventional opposite in a novel way that draws attention to it rather than skating over it. One of the triggers for opposition that I haven’t mentioned so far is the combination of items with the conjunction, and. This two-part list construction is not always equally likely to produce opposites in co-text, and certainly not as likely as using or, but in the poem ‘10k’, there is a series of such conjoined phrases where the items in the list are always underpinned by a conventional oppositionbetween urban and rural: ● Along the lines of hedges and verges ● Over pavements and cinder paths ● Under sky and street lights. In each case, the runners are being placed in relation to their surroundings (alongside hedges and verges; on top of pavements and paths; beneath sky and street lights). These dimensions of the envelope in which they are running are each divided into those which occur in the city and those which indicate the

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countryside. This paradigm of contextual features of the runners’ landscape provides a sense of their engagement with their surroundings, in the broadest of terms. They do not engage with the detail of the trees and lights they pass, but they do notice the general changes in the dimensions between town and countryside. A final example from ‘Figs’ demonstrates that conventional opposition has the capacity to be made anew in many different ways. This poem reflects on the oddity of finding figs growing in suburban gardens far further north than they might be expected. The different perspectives on their intrusion into such a setting are captured in their description first as foreign bodies, which has a directional deixis towards the place concerned and secondly as expatriate fruit which sees the positioning of the fig tree from its origins far away. These two perspectives might be seen as directional opposites, though they do not involve movement as such. The metaphor produced is one of migration and the implicit negative versus positive evaluation of those who end up out of their comfort zone is captured by these contrasting descriptions of the figs. 6.2.2

Unconventional Uses of Conventional Opposites

Another group of examples of constructed opposition in the poems I have analysed is transitional opposition, where one characteristic becomes another. In the cases I have found here, they are all based on conventional opposites where the opposition itself is dismantled by the change from one end of a gradable opposition to the other or from one of a pair of complementaries to the other. In ‘A Hairline Fracture’, for example, the distress of the narrator and her soon-to-be ex-partner in the context of a sweltering London summer and suffering from hay fever is captured by their confusion on encountering a city they had only known from afar which is involved by cancelling out the conventional opposition of distance in the phrase the remote up close which is expanded upon by: the knowing that in another, unentered existence everything shimmering at the surface is this minute merely, unremarkably familiar—

Here, the conventional opposition between familiar and strange is reimagined by the phrase everything shimmering at the surface. This phrase manages to combine the visual impact of a large city in the scorching heat with the newness of how it looks to the narrator who is simultaneously imagining how it must feel to live in London and take it for granted. ‘Pond Dipping’ similarly uses conventional opposites as a basis for the contrast between the abundant life in the pond and lack of pregnancy in the narrator. Whilst life is normally opposed to death lexically, here the contrast is

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between life (overflows with life) and not-life (draining absence). The lack of a life starting is here proposed as the opposite of life, rather than death, which is the end of a life that has at least happened. Another conventionally based opposite in the poem is between take prisoner and set free, referring to the creatures that the children first capture and then release. There is no explicit connection here to the subtext relating to pregnancy, but it could be seen as analogous to the gestation of the foetus and the birth of the baby. As we have seen, conventional opposites often provide the underlying logic for interpreting new oppositions and can also be reinterpreted to dismantle the basis of the contrast. The next group of cases is similar in taking an unconventional approach to conventional opposites, though they do not necessarily dismantle the opposite in doing so. In ‘Blackberry Picking’, where the children are disappointed year on year to find that their harvest of berries goes sour and rots, the experience is summed up in the final line as: Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

The opposition between hope and know, constructed here as a result of the parallel structures, is not conventional. Lexically, hope is contrasted with despair or lack of hope, but by placing it in opposition to know, the poem changes how we understand hope, as it becomes the opposite of certainty or knowing and more akin to ignorance or not knowing, which is the opposite of knowledge. The converse also applies; by juxtaposing hope with know, the latter becomes the opposite of hope, i.e. despair. Thus the message of the final line is not just the surface meaning that the children knew the worst but hoped for the best. Textually, the oppositions here also imply that they were ignorant in their hope and despairing in their knowledge. Another example of an unconventional take on conventional opposites comes from ‘The Unprofessionals’ where there is another example of the dismantling of an opposition: Coming in shifts, spontaneously. Here, the apparently casual arrival of the helpful friends and neighbours implied by spontaneously is undermined by the implied organisation involved in shifts. Behind the scenes, the supporters of the person at the centre of the tragedy are making sure they are not alone nor overwhelmed by too many people at once, but the experience from the victim’s end is that people simply turn up, unannounced, and appear to have done so on a whim. This merging of spontaneous with its opposite, which might more conventionally be planned or organised, economically captures the two sides of this complex logistical problem of how to support someone appropriately in a time of crisis. The care which is implied here provides me as a reader with a preference as to how to see the unprofessionals; as more positive than negative, despite the hints at nuisance that we saw earlier. This poem has another constructed opposite which works in a somewhat different way. The timeframe in which the supporters work is described as

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being from Anadin to Valium, which are brand pharmaceuticals used to dull pain and help with sleep, respectively. The almost complete coverage of the alphabet, which is not quite A to Z, but nearly, implies that there may perhaps be other drugs taken in between these two. The additional meaning that arises from Valium being a mainly night-time-related drug places Anadin at the opposite end of the day. Although it is not a stimulant, it could be seen as the drug that dulls the pain enough at the start of the day. This constructed opposition, then, creates a sense of the time as being gradable (from morning to night) and the chemical array of options as a range. 6.2.3

Auto-Evocation of Opposites

A final way in which the opposites of my data work is ‘auto-evocation’ whereby the conventional oppositionis triggered by the simple mention of one of the terms of the pair. This is not always automatic when one term is mentioned. For example, if I say ‘It is hot today’, there is no necessary evoking of its opposite, cold. However, there is often a strong tendency for auto-evocation to be triggered, especially in the context of other opposites which can set up expectations. In ‘Greenhouse’, for example, the narrator’s memory of building the greenhouse with his father is captured in a series of more and less explicit conventional oppositions: I remember that journey: you out in front, unsure of your footing on the damp stones, and me behind counting each of your steps through our cargo of glass.

Here, the conventional opposites of you vs. me and in front vs. behind set up an explicit relationship of space between the son and the father, though the metaphorical interpretation is also very clear, with the son following in the father’s footsteps both literally and figuratively. The auto-evocation here is between the father who is unsure of his footing and the son, who is presumably not, at this stage in his life. The last line of the poem, your perfect ghost, just one step behind you, links back to this comparison of father and son, uses the same metaphor of footsteps to make explicit the implicit journey that the son is on (to old age and beyond) and which is prefigured in the unsure footsteps of the older man in the narrator’s memory. A simpler example of auto-evocation comes from ‘Crafty’ where the mother is described through her very many skills across a range of crafts, until this line: Cakes though weren’t your forte. As well as the negation here (see Chapter 8), the mention of a forte (or strength) auto-evokes its opposite: weakness. Although the reality of life is that the strength—weakness range is gradable, and lexically too these are usually gradable antonyms, the change from adjective (strong) to a noun (forte) and the combination with negation

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(weren’t) produces a different kind of opposite; a complementary pair. Thus, the mother cannot be neither good or bad at making cakes, and since she is not good, she must be bad. This simplistic view of baking skills reflects the child’s black-and-white view of the world. So far, we have considered mainly individual or locally concentrated examples of opposition construction in the poems, but in the final section, as with the other TCFs, I will demonstrate how some constructed opposition forms a pattern across whole poems. 6.2.4

Whole Poems Based on Oppositional Strands

Whilst the TCF of contrasting is one of those which is intermittent, rather than ubiquitous, there are some poems which seem to be built semantically on the basis of opposition, both conventional and constructed. One example is a poem we have met a few times already, ‘Ironing’, where the progress of the narrator’s life is cut across by a number of oppositions. The first one, a conventional one, is the difference between her first phase of ironing everything and her second phase where she irons nothing. These conventional opposites demonstrate her (over-)reaction to the first phase where she feels oppressed by her domestic chores, so that she doesn’t even iron what she is wearing herself (I converted to crumpledness). This conventional opposite, which is gradable (something comes between the two extremes) is therefore lived out as though it were a complementary opposite, so that if you decide you cannot iron everything, the consequence is that you iron nothing. The resolution of this situation comes at the end of the poem where the narrator decides to iron just those things she is going to wear. Though the word something doesn’t appear, it nevertheless is implied. Throughout the poem, the opposition between creased and ironed fabric is invoked in a number of ways. The first image is of the flex twisting and crinkling compared with the thinness/of dolls cut from paper which resulted from the first phase of excessive ironing. The middle phase involved the crumpledness I have already mentioned, which continues the semantic field of creases and is only resolved by the ultimate phase where the blouse being ironed is described as creaseless. Note that this interwoven set of words produces a number of equivalences as well as oppositions. Some of these have both sense relations at once. For example, the thinness of dolls cut from paper and creaseless are constructed both as equivalent (i.e. flat) and also opposite (excessively, even violently, flat vs. three-dimensionally smooth). The problem at the heart of the poem is embodied in these sets of near-synonyms and antonyms which ultimately find a middle road. A pattern of opposition which is very common in my data is the exploration of darkness vs. light in both literal and metaphorical senses. ‘Prayer’, for example, hangs on the spiritual as well as literal enlightenment that comes from activities akin to praying, even when unconnected to formal religion:

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Although we are faithless, the truth enters our hearts, that small familiar pain

Here, the equivalence between the truth and pain is set up before the cameos of different people across a Midlands town being shown using the mantras of everyday life (trains, piano scales, leaves on a tree, a child’s name) as the basis of secular prayers or meditation. The poem is built on the conventional opposite some days vs. some nights and finishes with the contrast between the dark of the night and the implied light (or enlightenment through prayer) of the shipping forecast: Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer--Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

This thread of light vs. darkness is seen again in ‘Up on the Moors with Keeper’ where the Bronte sisters are only truly happy when they are out on the moors, where it is light compared with the house they live in. The poem opens by comparing the brilliance of the sun on the moors with a dull brother and later, the light and glory of the girls’ freedom on the moors is contrasted with their lives at home: High summer, a scent of absent rain, away from the dark house, father and duty.

‘Men on Allotments’, like ‘Prayer’, presents a secular version of religion by likening the activities of the gardeners to priests or gods. This is achieved first by distinguishing them from the sounds of both secular (pop music) and formal religious activities (Sunday-morning bells): But neither siren voice has power for these Drab solitary men

Having set up a conventional complementary opposition between secular and religious practice, then, the poem advances an alternative, third, path where the gardeners and plants work in harmony and both are seen as having quasi-religious roles (e.g. The subtle benediction of the beans ). This poem, then, like ‘Prayer’, both builds on the secular/religious conventional opposite and defamiliarises it by undermining the expectation that this is a purely complementary (i.e. mutually exclusive) opposition.

6.3

Equating and Contrasting in Poems

This chapter has investigated the effects of equating and contrasting in poems and seen that, as with other TCFs, these effects may be very localised or more widespread throughout a poem. We have seen that the effects described are

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highly dependent on de-contextual and conventional sense relations between lexical items which often underpin the more creative or unusual examples of equating and contrasting, given the reader an entry point to the constructed textual meaning in the poem. The construction of non-conventional synonymy and antonymy is usually externally deviant, as it stands out from the semantic norms of the language. However, it is also possible, as we have seen, to set up an internal norm which can be disrupted by the dismantling of an established opposition or equivalence.

References Cruse, D. (1986). Lexical semantics. Cambridge University Press. Cruse, D. A. (2004). Meaning in language: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Davies, M. (2012). A new approach to opposition in discourse: The role of syntactic frames in the triggering of non-canonical oppositions. Journal of English Linguistics, 40(1), 47–73. Davies, M. (2013). Oppositions and ideology in news discourse. Bloomsbury Academic. Harding, J. R. (2017). Similes, puns and counterfactuals in literary narrative. Routledge. Jeffries, L. (2010a). Opposition in discourse. Continuum Books. Jeffries, L. (2010b). Critical stylistics: The power of English. Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffries, L. (2014). ‘Interpretation’. In P. Stockwell & S. Whiteley (Eds.), The cambridge handbook of stylistics. pp. 469–486. Cambridge University Press. Jones, S. (2002). Antonymy: A corpus-based perspective. Routledge. Jones, S., & Murphy, L. (2003). Antonymy in childhood: A corpus-based approach Jones, S., & Lynne Murphy, M. (2005). Using corpora to investigate antonym acquisition. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 10(3), 401–422. Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics: Volumes 1 and 2. Cambridge University Press. Mettinger, A. (1994). Aspects of semantic opposition in English. Oxford University Press. Murphy, M. L. (2003). Semantic relations and the lexicon. Vandelanotte, L. (2018). ‘Shunting the same idea back and forth’? Reappraising simile across text and image. PALA International Conference 25–28 July 2018, University of Birmingham.

CHAPTER 7

Enumerating and Equating: Lists and Open Meaning in Poems

One of the least researched TCFs in the critical stylistics model is the phenomenon of listing, which is superficially rather simple in terms of structure, but whose textual meaning is as complex as many of the other TCFs. If we want to be consistent about asking what a text is doing in relation to a TCF, listing has two potentially rather different functions. On the one hand, lists are there to enumerate all the members of a category, such as the ingredients in a recipe or the members of a sports team. On the other hand, lists are also used to exemplify the members of a category without necessarily listing each one separately. However, research in critical stylistics has shown that there is no clear dividing line between these functions and indeed it can suit the author of a text that this is so. Jeffries (2007: 123) found that women’s magazines often blurred the boundary between the ‘real’ list (i.e. enumerating) and the symbolic list (i.e. exemplification): It is not unusual, of course, to find lists that have specific items at first, and then end with a catch-all category to cover anything that might not have been mentioned individually.

The case examined there was one where the article in a magazine was recommending cosmetic surgery by suggesting that the facial contours could be improved “for example by augmenting the cheekbones, the chin, the jawline or any other area that lacks definition”. Whilst this is ostensibly a case of exemplification, as evidenced by ‘for example’, the final item in the list (any other area…) manages to imply that almost all of us will have some feature that needs improving.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2_7

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This overlap between ostensibly different functions of lists has become well known in relation to the three-part list (Atkinson, 1984), which is found across all genres from political speeches to advertising, and is recognised as producing an impression, but a symbolic rather than a real one, that the list is in some sense complete. Thus, government departments promise three things on their websites, preachers list three things that sinners can do to repent and advertisers tell us the three reasons why we should buy their products. Although exemplifying and enumerating are functionally distinct, there is a blurred boundary between them in non-literary texts. This can be very important in politics or news reporting, but the difference in poetry is rather less significant, perhaps partly because the function of poetry is not to be accurate, as an instruction manual or a list of side-effects on a medicine package would need to be. However, as this chapter will show, there are a range of different effects that poems achieve with lists, depending partly on the length, structural clarity/ambiguity and co-text in which the list occurs.1 The range of effects of listing in poetry is broad and can include internal and external deviation causing foregrounding, but may also be more part of the background meaning of the poem. Assessing what is externally deviant depends on having some notion of what constitutes a ‘normal’ list, but as Short (2017: 33) discovered in analysing the language of Dickens, it is difficult to quantify lists in text “because of the range of grammatical levels that lists can occur at and the range of more or less normal construction types” available. There is a great deal of vagueness/ambiguity in the range of structures that we may loosely label ‘lists’ as well as in their meaning. Poets often exploit such weak spots in the system of the language and this chapter explores how lists work in their poems, keeping the meaning open for the reader to construct for him/herself. Note that Short (2017: 33) decides to exclude two-part combinations from his definition of lists: I defined a list for my purposes as consisting of three or more items (on the grounds that two-part coordination was not quite enough).

I am not clear what is meant here by ‘not quite enough’, though I recognise that two-part lists are a borderline case. I have always included them on the basis that there is a fundamental similarity between naming or recounting two, three or more items, though each length of list, including two-part lists, has its own particular characteristics. Two-part lists, for example, have a tendency to work with other TCFs, such as equating and contrasting, if they are linked by conjunctions (and, or). It is possible to have complex philosophical arguments about what constitutes a list. For example, is your ‘to do’ list still a list when everything is crossed off it, and it therefore technically has no items at all? Or if you add just one item to an otherwise putative list, is it still a list? These 1 Note that I had to work quite hard to make this a three-part list because it felt wrong leaving at two parts! We are all subject to the pressures of textual meaning in this way.

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problems need not concern us here, however, since they relate to lists which constitute the whole of a text, rather than appearing in a longer text. It was to sidestep such potentially unproductive discussions that I originally named this TCF ‘Enumerating and Exemplifying’. This label is misleading at first sight, because it refers to a single textual feature (the list) and yet it was clear to me when working on non-literary texts that these lists could have different effects on the textual meaning (the conceptual part of the TCF). At one extreme, lists were used to itemise each and every item in a category, without exception. These would include, for example, all the pieces in a flatpack furniture kit or all the ingredients in a medicine. These, I concluded, were enumerating their items. At the other extreme, there were lists, often with three parts, which were clearly not enumerating all the items in a well-defined list but instead were gesturing towards a vague category with an indeterminate or unknown number of members. As we saw above in the example from an article about cosmetic surgery, these lists often have a catch-all category as their final item and “The final item in the list makes it more likely that each reader will relate to the text personally, as they work out which parts of their own face might come under this description” Jeffries (2007: 123). It seemed to me in working on non-literary language, then, that there were some lists that were exemplifying the kinds of items that belonged in the list, rather than enumerating them individually. That this tendency could have an ideological or even a business function was my focus at the time, but in everyday life there are lists performing these functions in just as many varied ways. A few (invented) examples demonstrate the variety of length, function and effect of such lists: ● Can you get eight knives, eight forks and ten spoons from the drawer? ● I have five children: Joe, Jenny, Julian, Jessie and Junior ● There were people from all over the world there: China, South America, Australia, Canada. ● Get me some milk, bread, and anything else I might need for the weekend. Here, the first two examples are enumerating – they list exactly what is in the category. The third one is clearly exemplifying since there are many more countries in the world than the ones mentioned. The final one has a catch-all item at the end which encompasses any potential members of the category of ‘’things I might need”. If we take lists in structural terms to be adjacent items of the same grammatical level (word, phrase, clause), performing the same function in the higher structure they are within,2 then the additional conceptual requirement of their 2

Note, incidentally, that this part of the definition would include two-part lists and thus solve the problem of whether to include them. The appositional structures are excluded by the second part of the definition.

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textual meaning is that they have different referents (see apposition below) and are exemplifying or enumerating a category, or some combination of these two. Note that there is no requirement for the categories being itemised in this way to be in any sense real. The point of textual meaning is that it can create categories—and their members—by the same textual features that can be used to exemplify or enumerate the members of real-world categories. In contemporary poetry, as we shall see below, lists can range from two to many in length and they often create the categories they describe. However, one of the differences between poetic and other lists appears to be the extent to which they perform the conceptual function of enumerating. Although some may appear to itemise all the items in their category, the exemplification function appears to be far more common. This observation, though difficult to quantify absolutely, makes sense in relation to the tendency of poetry to allude to its meaning, rather than pinning it down.

7.1

Lists of 2

In analysing the poems in my dataset, I annotated them wherever I found a list of any length, from two to many items, and from simple words to complex clauses. There were many examples of two-part lists in the data and a large number of these were similar in structure and function to any simple two-part list in everyday usage, often conjoined with and. The simplest examples always have clearly different referents, are exemplifying rather than enumerating and often contribute something to the music of the poem by their phonology and rhythm. In ‘Blackberry Picking’, for example, the children’s expedition is described in the list of actions which fulfil the predicator role in the clause (We trekked and picked until the cans were full ) and the similar phonology of the closing of these single syllable words, /-kt/ provides not just some rhythmic and harmonic symmetry, but also hints at the rhythm of the children’s activity as they move along the row of blackberry bushes. The distinction between enumerating and exemplifying seems superfluous faced with these children on their day out. Whilst one could imagine other words to capture their progress along the row of bushes (e.g. walked, crept ), there is certainly no given category with a set number of members that can be appealed to here. Instead, what we have is a list of two verbs giving the flavour of (i.e. exemplifying) what the children were doing as they collected the fruit. Note too that, apart from the phonological foregrounding, this is not an externally deviant construction or combination of lexis. Neither is it particularly internally deviant, though the conjoining of two predicators is not found elsewhere in the poem. Thus, as with many aspects of textual meaning in poems, this feature sets up one aspect of the background to the main thread of the poem whilst making the reader aware that movement (trekking) and harvesting (picking) are working in tandem throughout the episode.

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In other cases of two-part lists, it is sometimes clearer that the exemplifying represents a specific category with a relatively well-defined set of members. In ‘Ironing’, for example, the first phase of the narrative has the narrator reluctantly doing the family ironing in which her iron flies over sheets and towels, which two-part list must stand for all the general linen of a household and which could include tea towels, tablecloths, pillow cases and so on, though these are not listed. Thus, exemplifying in this case stands for a lot of other referents, whilst mentioning only two. Closer to the trekked and picked example from ‘Blackberry Picking’, the flex of this iron during the narrator’s angry and resentful phase is twisting and crinkling; another two-part list representing all the ways in which a flex can become entangled. Again, although not starkly foregrounded, there is something in this list which distinguishes it from a single predicator (either twisting or crinkling, for example). If the poet had chosen to use only one of these, the flex would have been seen as less dynamic since there is some interaction between the two processes in the list version. What we appear to have in two-part lists in poems is a feature that is somewhat more foregrounded than no list (i.e. a single item) and whose exemplifying function may gesture towards a fuzzy category with a larger potential membership than two (trekked and picked; twisting and crinkling ) or may indicate a more well-defined category where two members stand for the whole group (sheets and towels ). Two-part lists occur at all levels of structure and with all grammatical classes. Thus ‘Doorsteps’ has two adjective phrases describing the refined bread that the narrator’s relative used to cut: Always white,/Coburg shape. In this case, there is no conjunction, though the different types of feature (colour and shape) ensure that we do not read this as an appositional list (see below). Whether pre- or post-modifying, adjectives are less prone to being linked by a conjunction and the comma is favoured instead, as we see in the phrases using adjective lists in ‘It Wasn’t Snowing’: a slow, dismissive voice; your rusty, lonely voice. Neither of these is particularly foregrounded, though the effect of listing adjectives can be to slow down the poem and in these cases such a slowing down can be seen as contributing to the emerging cameo of the old poet visiting a school. In ‘Blackberry Picking’ we can see how two-part lists of conjoined clauses can work, as the hunger for the berries sent the children Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. The conjoining of these parallel clauses allows the ellipsis of the Goal (our boots ) in the first clause, so that the list itself (briars scratched and wet grass bleached) feels incomplete until the Goal is reached. In other ways, this list works just like other two-part lists, having some symmetry in the structure (SP(O) and SPO) and in the phonology too since the verbs both end in /-Ùt/ which could be argued to have some soundsymbolic meaning representing the harshness of the two actions, scratching and bleaching.

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7.2

List or Apposition?

Where two-part lists lack the conjunction (and),3 the result is that on the surface at least there is a structural ambiguity between the list and an appositional structure (see Chapter 6 on equating). If we think about the syntax of such structures, they may well look identical, apart from their semantics, which is often the clue as to whether they are co-referential (i.e. appositional) or have different referents (i.e. a list): ● I went to see John, my brother-in-law ● I went to see my brother-in-law, that woman down the road. There appears to be a preference, in such cases, for the appositional interpretation, in the absence of other clues, so the first of these will be assumed to be the same person (John = my brother-in-law). In the second case, the clash of male vs. female sex (brother vs. woman) leads us towards a less preferred but semantically more likely interpretation as an appositional structure. Note that in both cases, there are two adjacent noun phrases performing the same syntactic role (grammatical Object) in the same clause, so there is nothing syntactic to distinguish them. In these invented examples, the appositional meaning feels awkward and to some extent like an unfinished list waiting for the conjunction and its final item. However, in poetry, this kind of structure can sit comfortably on the boundary between listing and apposition without a sense that there is a contradiction in the meaning. The last stanza of ‘Up on the Moors with Keeper’, for example, opens with a question: What could there be to match this glory? The answer is made up of two noun phrases which on first sight appear to be in a list: High summer, a scent of absent rain. The referents of these noun phrases are clearly different, but unlike a shopping list (tea bags and sausages ), their referents are related and complementary, almost as though they are in apposition and the scent of absent rain is the definition—or at least one of the symptoms—of high summer. Thus we find that in poems, the distinction between apposition, which we saw in Chapter 5 was one way of equating, and exemplifying pretty much doesn’t matter. ‘A Hairline Fracture’ takes this kind of structural vagueness (let’s not call it ambiguity as it doesn’t matter where the boundary is) to another level with a whole stanza based on lists which could also be seen as rewordings of each other—in other words as appositional in meaning: Unmollified by the freckled plush of mushrooming monkeyflowers in the windowboxes of Chelsea, undone by the miraculous rift in the look of things when you’ve just arrived—the remote up close, 3 It is technically possible for a list with more than two parts to be appositional, but this structural ambiguity is most frequent with two-part lists.

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the knowing that in another, unentered existence everything shimmering at the surface is this minute merely, unremarkably familiar—

This whole stanza is the Adverbial preamble to a main clause that starts in the following (final) stanza. It describes the disorientation of the couple at the centre of the poem who are in London on holiday, both suffering from hay fever and are also in the process of breaking up. The stanza has two adjectival clauses in a two-part list sequence, beginning with Unmollified and undone, respectively. The first of these is quite specific in referring to flowers in windowboxes, which presumably cause a worsening of the hay fever. The second one is more general in nature and refers to how a familiar scene such as London looks different when you are actually there. It would be difficult to argue that these are appositional because they have such different referents. However, the parallelism of the morphological negation (see Chapter 8) in the opening adjectives (unmollified and undone) makes a connection between them that would be absent in less coherent list and the effect of piling up the negative emotions is similar to that found in clearer cases of apposition. In fact, as I argued in Chapter 6, the structure itself lends credence to the interpretation of such adjacent phrases as equating the referents therein. The second part of the list in this case continues through the rest of the stanza and has a three-part list of noun phrases all complementing the preposition by: ● the miraculous rift in the look of things/when you’ve just arrived ● the remote up close ● the knowing that in another, unentered existence/everything shimmering at the surface is this minute/merely, unremarkably familiar– This list is much closer to being appositional than the two higher level adjective phrases and demonstrates that apposition can indeed occur across more than two items. The second and third parts of the list are contained between a pair of hyphens making them appear to be parenthetical in some way, so this could be seen as an embedded explanatory list of two. What is clear, however, is that although these three phrases have rather different ways of explaining the emotion of this couple, they nevertheless are attempting through these different ways to capture a range of feelings and impressions that map onto each other rather than being separately experienced. Thus, the way London looks to someone who’s never seen it except in photos and films is the miraculous rift and the second version is another way to say it, using opposites (remote up close) to show the miraculous rift in a different light. Finally, the longer third part of the list is the culmination of all this estrangement where the narrator imagines themselves not as a visitor for whom everything looks new, but a resident of the city for whom the sights are mundane and everyday.

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7.3

Symbolic Lists of Three (and More)

The meaning and significance of three-part lists is well-documented in Linguistics, Media Studies and popular psychological training in how to persuade and influence your audience, though to my knowledge there has not been any scientific investigation as to why the three-part list should be so special. What is normally said about three-part lists is that they convey—or I would argue rather confer—a sense of completeness. We have already seen that twopart lists can represent categories beyond themselves (such as the full range of domestic linen in ‘Ironing’ represented by sheets and towels) and that many of those in poems tend to have items that are linked, if not through a real-world and well-defined category, at least semantically in some way, gesturing towards a wider, if vague, category. The difference in the symbolic weight carried by a three-part list is that even if the three items are not identical to the comprehensive membership of the category, they are usually by default taken to refer to the whole category and to be seen as complete. In ‘Up on the Moors with Keeper’, for example, the contrast between the Bronte sisters’ freedom when they are outside on the moors and their stifled home life in the village with their father and brother is emphasised in the final line: away from the dark house, father and duty. It is clear from other parts of the poem that this list could also include their brother, but he is not listed here because the three-part list is enough to indicate all the aspects of their lives which are not theirs to control. The final part of the list, duty, is wide enough in reference to encompass any social control that limits their freedoms and is typical of the final catch-all of three-part lists that are operating symbolically. Note that there is a great deal of sound-symbolic patterning in this poem which contributes to this contrast between freedom and constraint, which I will discuss further in Chapter 12. ‘Blackberry Picking’, which we saw earlier has some two-part lists capturing the activity of the children, also has three-part lists to describe the containers in which they collected the berries (milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots ) and the types of farmland where they were picking them (Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills ). Although there is superficially nothing to distinguish these lists from those with two parts, the very fact of them having three parts signals that we are to read them as meaning that the children used any kind of container to hand and that they went wherever the bushes were to be found, adjacent to all kinds of farmland. The phonology and rhythm of these lists, of course, add to the effect as we shall see in Chapter 12. Notice that these lists are not appositional, even where they have no conjunction, since the referents are clearly intended to denote different items, albeit ones with the same intended function. Another poem which uses the three-part list to end with is ‘Litany’, where the shamed child who has sworn in front of her mother’s friends recalls: Yes, I can summon their names./My mother’s mute shame. The taste of soap. This use of sentence punctuation to separate out the members of the list, all of which

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are jointly functioning as the Goal of the predicator (verb) summon, helps to drive home the extent of the trouble she is in.4 She remembers the names of these disapproving women which her mother can articulate, though she is unable to express her shame (mute). The taste of soap refers to a traditional punishment for using ‘dirty’ language in some families, which was to wash out the child’s mouth with soap. Between them, these three items, different though they are, sum up the complete sense of how significant an event this was in the child’s life. Unlike the examples we’ve seen so far, the three-part lists in ‘Men on Allotments’ tend to be longer and more complex in structure. However, they all perform the same function as the ones we have seen so far—in suggesting a completeness that is not present in two-part or many-part lists. The men are first introduced by a three-part list capturing their movements about their plots: Kneeling, or fetching water, soberly,/Or walking softly down a row of beans. These are, of course, only three of many varied activities that the gardeners engage in on the allotments, but it is enough to symbolise all of them. This list also demonstrates something musical about repetition in poetry, which is that, as in jazz improvisation and thematic development in classical music, each repetition tends to be longer than the one before. Three is also a very common repetition number in music. Although this list is made up of different activities, there is a feeling of thematic development as the clauses get longer. A similar musical effect is found in ‘Baking’ where the narrator is remembering her childhood home and seeing, in her mind’s eye, the beloved person ironing, folding the sheets, /or most often baking cakes. Though shorter than the example above, the three parts of the list of clauses get longer and more complex throughout the list. These activities, again, do not sum up all that person did, but they symbolise her role in the household. We have already seen that three-part lists can be developed in length and complexity, whilst retaining their symbolic power to connote completeness. In the remainder of this section, I will introduce some examples where the three-part list is extended by an additional item, though the integrity of the three-part list remains intact and thus makes the same symbolic point. In ‘Litany’, for example, three items in the list of taboo topics for discussion amongst the women are found in the clause no one had cancer, or sex, or debts. This list produces comedy as well as pathos by putting three rather different Goals of the Predicator, have, into alignment. Although having cancer is rather different in nature to having sex or having debts, the verb is broad enough in meaning to capture all these kinds of possessing. Having established what sounds like the complete list of banned topics, it is then extended on the following line with the additional item, and certainly not leukaemia, which no one could spell. It could be argued that this list should therefore be considered a four-part list, with all the flexibility of such lists to be either enumerating or 4 Note that a recent trend in social media uses the same technique of full stops which are used to drive home the meaning.

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exemplifying, but without the symbolic power of the three-part list. However, the change in the conjunction pattern, from or to and, the line-break and the emphasis on the negation (certainly not ), together with the relative clause (which no one could spell ) all point towards it being a three-part list plus an additional item which intensifies the sarcasm in the tone of the narrator towards the women in the room and emphasises their ignorance as well as their fears. It turns out that in this poem the technique of using a three-part list and then adding a further item is found a number of times, as we can see in the list of items which were permitted and discussed (from catalogues, presumably): candlewick/bedspread three piece suite display cabinet and are followed, two lines later, by a single item adding to this list: Pyrex. These items from a particular kind of household in the 1960s are reeled off without commas in the child’s memory, reflecting her reaction to the sounds, rather than the referents of the words. The addition, in a sentence of its own, of Pyrex, adds to this impression that the narrator is remembering the sound and texture of the language around her, whereas the older version of the narrator supplies the more cynical reflection on what the women avoided talking about (cancer, sex, debts, leukaemia). A further three-plus-one list is found in the final lines of the poem when the mother is presumably ushering her friends to the front door: I’m sorry, Mrs Barr, Mrs Hunt, Mrs Emery, sorry Mrs Raine

Though not as complex as the other examples, we see again the poet’s use of the three-part list followed, after a line-break, by a further item, in this case repeating the apology (sorry). These women symbolise all the women in the child’s life as a result of the completeness of the three-part list, but the additional name on the list adds some iconicity to the structure and the form (see Chapter 12) as we imagine the last woman leaving the lounge and the house, and restores some realism to the symbolic meaning of the list which retrospectively becomes complete in a different, enumerating, sense of listing all the members of a category.

7.4

Lists of 4

Whilst three-part lists seem to symbolise completeness, any list with four or more items by as a result appears to be over-long and the effect of this is potentially twofold. Lists with four or more items can seem to be accurate in the sense of getting closer to the enumerating end of the range by virtue of their length. In everyday settings, such as lists of ingredients or symptoms for example, these lists can be very long, but they will be interpreted as simply the exact list of everything relevant. However, a textual effect of longer lists can also be that they are symbolically overwhelming or seen as excessive and this can create a kind of iconic effect (see Chapter 12) if the subject matter also relates to some kind of overwhelming experience. This latter effect is less likely

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to be intentional on lists of ingredients or symptoms (though it could be experienced by some readers) but it could be experienced in informal conversation when a speaker is perceived as overdoing the detail in a story by itemising a category instead of exemplifying. In contemporary poems, the four-part list can provide the same range of textual meaning, from enumerating an accurate list to providing what might be seen as ‘too much information’, leading to a feeling of overkill. We will consider this effect again in relation to iconicity in Chapter 12, and implicature in Chapter 10, but here let us look at some less extreme examples of four-part lists in some of the poems we have already met. The second sentence in ‘Greenhouse’ is an extended four-part list of clauses (main verbs in bold here): I burst in the other day; kicked the door out of its warped frame, stood in the green light among nine years of unnatural growth and thought back to the morning we built it.

This sentence introduces the memory-led remainder of the poem which goes back to the building of the now defunct greenhouse. It is noticeable that the sequence starts with vigorous activity (burst, kicked), then becomes more static (stood) and finally introspective (thought ). This list is otherwise relatively unremarkable, being structured normally with three parts and a conjunction before the final part, though the semi-colon after the first part could indicate that parts 2–4 are an elaboration of the initial bursting in. What is most striking, though, is that the list does not appear to invite interpretation as exemplifying. The reader is unlikely to imagine other activities similar to or in sequence with the activities presented here. We assume, it being a four-part list, that this is what the narrator did, neither more nor less. Thus, though enumerating of the kind found on medicine packets is not common in poems, it is nevertheless one of the techniques available to the contemporary poet. In ‘Baking’, there are a number of four-part lists, some of them quite simple, such as the list in the final line which describes the way in which the memory of home makes what is familiar past, particular, necessary, strange. We saw in Chapter 6 that the final item in this list seems to show the narrator finally settling on the appropriate adjective as it is the conventional opposite of familiar, which occurs earlier in the poem. We also saw that the four adjectives, though clearly different in their semantics, and thus emphasising different aspects of the influence of memory on familiar things, also have a potential appositional effect, because of the lack of conjunction before the final item. These impressions, then, each replace the one before, as though the poet is searching for the right one and hasn’t quite found it. It could be argued that there is an unfinished feeling to this list, as though more adjectives could be added and the range of emotions would still not be complete. However, the closing of the list with a conventional opposite mitigates this effect here. This

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is not exactly a case of overwhelming, but more of unfinished business that cannot be pinned down. Later in the same poem, the narrator looks at her childhood home in her mind’s eye. In this memory, there are again four parts to her list as her mind wanders into the house: 1. the terrace from the road, 2. the house a long way off down the garden, 3. rooms deepening through the hall, 4. light falling in its usual place by the kitchen window where she stands, baking cakes. Each of these items starts a new line, and the final one also begins a new stanza, providing pauses through which the narrator’s thought process can be glimpsed. Though the items in this list are not all the same in structure, they nevertheless all fulfil the same role in the higher level sentence, as an expansion on the idea that nothing has changed which is found in the previous stanza: How readily the present folds away: everything standing back from itself, unchanged–

What is most striking about this list is that there is a natural order of the items, as the viewpoint moves from the road to the garden, to the hall and finally to the kitchen where the person being remembered is present. This is, therefore, a list that accurately maps out a particular space/place and the four parts are not symbolically, but genuinely, complete. However, it is not exactly enumerating, since the rooms which are mentioned could have been itemised, but are not. The stanza break, and the length and complexity of the final item where the remembered person is imagined, almost argue for a three-plus-one list as we saw in ‘Litany’ in the last section. This interpretation would make sense of the rooms not each being mentioned as the three-part list would then include the catch-all final item that we saw is common in non-literary texts as well. There is also a semantic shift from the layout and structure of the house in the three earlier parts of the list to the light in the final part where the room (the kitchen) and the person are subordinated to the head noun (light). Thus we see the effects of prioritising alongside listing which produce the ephemeral image of a person who is no longer with us being glimpsed as though through time as well as space and difficult for the narrator to capture. Before we consider the effect of listing on poems which are almost entirely made of lists, let us quickly consider a different conjunction option in the TCF of listing. As we have seen in this chapter, lists in poems often dispense with the and before the final item, but nevertheless most of them are additive in the sense that there is a notional and between each of the items, whether or not it is present in the text and whether or not they are co-referential or

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overlapping in some way (as in appositional structures) or are entirely separate in their referents. Lists can, however, be linked not by and but by or, as we see in this extract from ‘It Wasn’t Snowing’: Those lines are wise in rhythm and they lead Into a clapboard dwelling, or a field, Or lives that prey upon the land and one another, Or the big country where we both were children.

Here, the list is the complement of the preposition into, and they list the various places that the lines of poetry are being imagined to fly to, like doves. In many ways, this list is like the other longer lists we have seen, replacing one idea by another in turn. However, the repeated use of or emphasises the imaginary quality of this particular image by giving alternative, rather than additive, visions of where they might land.

7.5

Poems Made of Lists---and Embedded Lists

Although there are poems in the contemporary period that are referred to as ‘list poems’, these tend to be linked to educational settings and creative writing workshops. Nevertheless, lists can and sometimes do make up a great majority of a poem and some of those in my dataset turned out to have this as a feature of their structure. ‘Crafty’, for example, establishes the mother’s range of craft skills with an eight-part list of actions (machined, sewed, crocheted, etc.) within which a number of two-part and three-part lists also occur. This is not the whole poem, and as we have seen in other chapters, it sets up the background against which the mother’s lack of baking skills (Cakes though were not your forte) can be foregrounded. ‘Household’ is made up almost entirely of a list of all the materials in a house. The full list is 14 items long, and many of the items include embedded lists within them too. Here is the opening of the poem: The tons of brick and stone, the yards of piping, the sinks and china basins, three toilets, the tiles, and the tons of wood in floors, chairs, tables,

Note the last item here (the tons of wood) itself contains a three-part list (floors, chairs, tables ), so that although the longer list is clearly intended to seem both comprehensive and overwhelming, there are also some symbolic lists within it, here indicating the range of items made from wood in a typical home. The end of the poem, as we have seen before, questions what would it all weigh? and the answer in the final two lines is not in physical, but emotional weight: the mass of love. The question of how this household is viewed by the poem is partly answered by the length and complexity of the list it is mainly made up of: the mass of love is overwhelming. This is not necessarily an evaluative view,

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but could be seen as directly evoking (see Chapter 12) some of the enormity of what it means to be in love and set up home with someone. Other poems in my dataset similarly use long lists to evoke such feelings of excess and ‘The Unprofessionals’ does this in relation to all the activities of the people visiting a household struck by tragedy. These people, who we’ve already seen can be positively or negatively viewed through other TCFs, are certainly hard to ignore as the 8-part list of their actions demonstrates. Sleeping on put-you-ups, answering the phone, Coming in shifts, spontaneously, Talking sometimes, About wallflowers, and fishing, and why Dealing with Kleenex and kettles, Doing the washing up and the shopping, Holding hands and sitting it out

The combination of the list and the non-finite continuous (-ing) verb forms creates an atmosphere of endless, repetitive and ultimately pointless activity aimed at filling in until the blunting of time takes some of the pain away. As (Short, 2017: 34) comments: The longer a list is, the more it is associated, perhaps unsurprisingly, with the effect of copiousness.

Whilst many of the examples of longer lists in my dataset do indeed produce an effect of excess which the reader may process as information, some of this excess may also be directly felt by the reader struggling to process the structures as they come thick and fast. This was Short’s experience in reading the Dickens’ travelogue that he analyses and I would argue that this is part of what I have called syntactic iconicity in the past (Jeffries, 2010) and in this book have renamed Evoking, as a new TCF in the model of textual meaning. We will see in Chapter 12 that there are many ways of directly evoking meaning in poems, and some of the listing examples I have discussed above have something of this effect in them. ‘10 k’ sets up a rhythmic background for the narrator and running mate in a series of two-part lists which might be seen as directly evoking the footsteps of the runners: ● ● ● ● ● ●

fell open and lifted hedges and verges closed gates and badly fenced fields pavements and cinder paths sky and street lights hovered like a promise/and left its metal on our lips.

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This is not a phonological effect, since the items in the lists vary in length, syllable count and stress patterns. However, it is a kind of syntactic rhythm which is all the more convincing when, near the end, there is internal deviation as the people who are indoors and not running are described in terms of a five-part list of their activities: Indoors, people ate, checked their mail, flicked channels, made love or slept

I will finish this section with another quotation from Short’s insightful analysis of Dickens’ lists in his description of the city of Genoa, where Short (2017: 32) likens the effect of long and complex lists in terms of the artistic movement of Impressionism: Here I argue that Dickens’s idiosyncratic use of list constructions helps to explain some of the cognitive difficulty and consequent effects I experienced when reading the description of Genoa and that an examination of the lists also helps to support a view that he was writing a kind of description which could be said to be impressionistic in the same way that impressionist painting is

I agree with this assessment but would add that it could be helpful to distinguish, as I do here, between processing a series of structures (the cognitive effort of processing) and the emotive experience of so-doing, whether that is frustration, impressionistic glimpses of a whole or some other kind of direct evocation.

7.6

Lists in Contemporary Poetry

This chapter has examined the lists occurring in my dataset and concluded that, as in non-literary work, there can be both enumerating and exemplifying uses of lists in poems. Similarly, too, the three-part list suggests symbolic completeness whilst anything longer than three parts may produce both the meaning and the direct experience of excess. We also saw that these poems contain examples where the three-part list is extended for particular poetic effect, whilst retaining the core effect of completeness that is associated with three parts. This phenomenon may well occur in other text types, though I have not observed it so far. The concept of listing is a simple one in principle, but this chapter has demonstrated that both formally and functionally lists are more complex and more interesting than we might anticipate. There is more work to do on lists, both theoretically and in relation to particular genres and text types.

References Atkinson, N. (1984). Our masters’ voices: The language and body language of politics. Routledge.

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Jeffries, L. (2007). Textual construction of the female body: A critical discourse approach. Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffries, L. (2010). ‘The Unprofessionals’: Syntactic iconicity and reader interpretation in contemporary poems. In D. McIntyre & B. Busse (Eds.), Language and style (pp. 95–115). Palgrave Macmillan. Short, M. (2017). Listing and impressionism in Charles Dickens’s description of Genoa in Pictures from Italy. In J. Douthwaite, D. F. Virdis, & E. Zurru. (Eds.), The stylistics of landscapes, the landscapes of stylistics (31–44). John Benjamins.

CHAPTER 8

Negating: Poetic Construction of What is Not

One of the ways in which poems construct a rich experience for the reader is through alluding to what might have been, but is not, the case. Negation, like modality in the next chapter, allows the boundaries of the world in the text to be broken and for the imagination to range freely. Negation is perhaps the clearest example—one might almost say the prototype—of a TCF. It sits on the boundary between linguistic and pragmatic construction of meaning, as all the TCFs do, and it has forms which range from core to peripheral as well as contested or variable forms which blur the boundaries of this fuzzy category. Negation is, therefore, typical of the kind of textual meaning being explored in this book. On the one hand, it is embedded in, or triggered by, the text. On the other hand, the interpretation relies not just on the immediate linguistic structure and basic meaning, but on a wider co-textual understanding of why the negation is relevant to what is going on in the text. Though some would wish to call this pragmatic and/or cognitive, I would argue that it at least forms part of the meaning of a text which we could call consensual. There are, of course, fuzzy boundaries between what we understand because of our membership of a particular (language) community and what we understand because of our unique personal experience. Nevertheless, progress is often best made by investigating strands of linguistic behaviour and meaning separately and what I am trying to do here is to delineate the social, consensual meaning that is inherent in texts. Poetry is one of the most open genres in terms of meaning and it is a particular feature of contemporary poetry that it values meanings that are not tied down too tightly. One might set this at the opposite extreme of legal

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2_8

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language where tying the meaning down is the whole point of the text. As with the openness we saw in relation to lists and appositional meaning in Chapter 7, negation also allows for open-ended meaning, which is ideally suited to poetry. This kind of openness is support for the view that arguing for consensus in textual meaning is not the same as arguing for a single interpretation of any one text. The consensus can, itself, be based on an agreement that there is some kind of fluidity in the meaning, but conversely, texts cannot mean absolutely anything at all, depending on the reader’s whim. Stylisticians would argue that not only do words have (default) meanings (sometimes multiple meanings), but that the meaning of texts where they are used also have some consensus, albeit a consensus about their vagueness, ambiguity or open-endedness. Our task is to examine and explain how that textual layer of meaning comes about through stylistic choice. In relation to negating, Nahajec (2009: 117) summarises: Like many linguistic features, negation has an apparent form and function relationship, but in reality, in context, there is a variability of discourse effect; negation has the stable property of defeating expectations of the opposite while its functions in discourse, its effects, are variable and context dependent.

Whilst I am not comfortable with the word ‘discourse’ because of its very many meanings and lack of clarity as a result, I agree with Nahajec that negation has an overall stable effect of rejecting expectation of its positive counterpart and where no such expectations pre-exist, creating them at the same time as rejecting them. To explain further, I will consider a single poetic example from ‘Crafty’. This is a poem about a person (a mother or grandmother is implied) described in the past tense as having many craft skills (sewing, knitting, crochet and some cookery). However, as the narrator adds: Cakes though weren’t your forte and the negation (n’t ) lets the reader know the limits of this person’s abilities, as we saw in Chapter 6 in relation to auto-evocation of opposites. What Nahajec (2021) and others (e.g. Nørgaard, 2007) argue is that negation is not simply the counterpart to positive assertion, but that it conjures up both positive and negative scenarios, whilst privileging the negated one. A negated statement, it is argued, still brings to mind the version of the world where the positive might be expected to be true. Thus, in the case of ‘Crafty’, once we know that the poem is about the kind of mother who has lots of skills in homemaking and arts and crafts, we would perhaps naturally expect her to also be good at making cakes. Thus, the negated sentence stops the reader short and informs us that if we had expected her to also make cakes, we were wrong. Not only that, but if we hadn’t even considered her cake-making abilities, we probably should have done so, since it was to be expected beside all the other skills. The negated sentence, having produced the expectation that the mother would be a good cake baker, then refutes that expectation.

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There is no matching situation with a positively oriented statement. If the poem had said Cakes were your forte instead, there is no parallel situation simultaneously called up which expects cakes not to be her forte. The positive statement stands alone, whereas the negative one brings two scenarios to mind. This is a powerful textual mechanism and is used to great effect in poems, as we will see in the rest of this chapter. For now, I would reiterate the definition of negation which works best to capture this textual-conceptual function (TCF) as summarised by Nahajec (2021: 52): Underlying a definition of negation, be it in logic or discourse function, is the linguistic realisation of an absence, that is, that some attribute, event or object is absent from some situation (in which it was expected). The linguistic realisation of an absence can be considered the basic function of negation, which, in turn, can be put to higher level functions of reversing the polarity of propositions or denying the truth of a prior implicit or explicit assertion. This basic premise is captured by Jeffries’ (2010) suggestion that linguistic forms are ‘textual vehicles’ for underlying conceptual practices.

In order to use negation as one of the analytical tools for examining poetic meaning, it is important to have a sense of which textual features to look for, even if some of them turn out to be peripheral to the category. Nahajec (2021: 52) divides these textual features into explicit and implicit negators: Whilst the range of explicit negators can be viewed as a closed category, the range of implicit textual vehicles is open ended and only a sample of the types of negators that fall into this category are listed.

Table 8.1 summarises the range of features that can—and mostly do— deliver negation in texts. Note that there is a progression from left to right across this table, marking out the most prototypical vehicles of negation to the most peripheral. Whilst Nahajec argues that negation in general could be seen as pragmatic, here she appears to limit the term to the least prototypical negators. In order to achieve consistency with the other TCFs in this book, I will avoid the term pragmatic here, as it has increasingly been used in relation to situational contextual meaning and what Nahajec and I are referring to is more co-textual and to some extent socio-contextual (i.e. widely agreed in a speech community) rather than situational. Rather than illustrating the different vehicles for delivering negation here, the next section will illustrate these different forms of negator in poetic texts. Whilst we may speculate about the range of different reactions any poem will produce in a reader, and some of these may be shared amongst a number of readers, our task here is to establish the extent to which the negators in poems have the capacity to produce some kind of consensus of meaning, albeit a variable or open-ended one.

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Grammatical Negation in Contemporary Poetry

The use of straightforward grammatical negation using the prototypical lexical items no and not in poetry is sparse in most poems in my sample, and is usually not foregrounded syntactically, in that it is usually grammatically standard. However, in addition to the de-contextual linguistic meaning of negation, there is the textual effect to consider. In ‘Blackberry Picking’, for example, the children who have picked so many blackberries learn from bitter experience that they cannot keep the fruit for long without it going sour and rotting. The narrator, from a distance in time, nevertheless captures the heartfelt cry of the disappointed child of his memory: It wasn’t fair/that all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. The resonance of the childish ‘it’s not fair’ is overlaid here with the perspective of the narrator, as the verb is in the past tense. The dual effect of the negator here underlines the illogicality of many such cries in childhood as it would be difficult to imagine nature’s workings being fair in any human sense. Thus, we are brought to realise that the children have not yet worked out that life is not fair, because using the negator, as we have seen, brings up an expectation of the positive— in this case that life (nature) is fair—and this very instantiation makes us, as adults, aware of the gap between us and the children in the poem. However, the poem ends with something of that realisation in the use of another grammatical negator: Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not. Unlike the previous example, the child’s naivety here is tempered by experience. In Chapter 6 we saw that the constructed opposition between hope and know contributed to this meaning. In many cases, negators are not juxtaposed to an explicit statement of the positive version of events, but here Heaney sets them side by side, so that we can see the growing child’s realisation as the years go by that he will be disappointed yet again. At this stage, in the final line of the poem, if any reader has been able to ignore the darker side of the meaning, it is difficult to do so now. Whilst in the language generally we would not see hoping as the opposite of knowing, here they are starkly positioned in a pair of clauses which construct them as complementary, so that it becomes impossible for hope and knowledge to co-exist. Another use of the grammatical negator (not ) in ‘Doorsteps’ similarly sets out the two (positive/negative) scenarios by the use of a constructed opposition: She would slice not downwards but across whereby the conventional up/down distinction is reimagined as down/across. This works specifically in relation to cutting bread, the subject of the poem, where the norm is to place the loaf on a board and cut down from the top. This person, however, hugs the bread to her, butters it first, and then slices towards herself, managing to make each slice very thin. Although not the most inventive use of negation, the order of the two parts might be seen as marginally deviant, or marked, so that as well as negation and opposition, we find that there is a prioritising, and thus a foregrounding effect with the focus on the final word, across. The negation effect of conjuring up both positive and negative scenarios works

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with these other textual effects, to emphasise that the usual expectation is to slice downwards, but the person being memorialised did not do so. Note that so far we have seen examples of the most prototypical negator, not, modifying verbs (wasn’t fair; knew they would not ) and directional adverbs (downwards ). This versatile particle can also modify intensifying adverbs, as we see in the final line of ‘Figs’ where the fruit grown in a not quite warm enough country are described as not quite sweet. This is a perfect example of the power of negation to conjure up what might be expected—that figs would taste sweet—at the same time as defeating that expectation by asserting that they were not, in fact, sweet. The other main core type of grammatical negation (in the second column of Table 8.1) includes all the pro-forms that can take the place of nouns (none, nobody, no one, nothing ); adverbs (nowhere, never); quantifiers (none, neither) or conjunctions (neither…nor). Perhaps the most powerful one, nothing, is found in a number of the poems in my dataset. In ‘Ironing’, for example, the narrator’s low point comes when she stops frenetically ironing everything in the house (I used to iron everything) and wanting to iron the house itself flat: Then for years I ironed nothing. What is striking about this negator is that there are five stanzas before this where the narrator is clearly unhappy, but very active. The stanza containing the negator is alone in representing the years in which she ironed nothing and the following three stanzas, when she irons only her own clothes represent happier and calmer times. This negator, the only one in the poem, is the turning point in the narrator’s life. Although it is linguistically negative, it is difficult to see it as delivering a negative meaning in the sense of how the narrator is feeling, since this is the moment that she broke free. We see that she is going through some emotional turmoil (I converted to crumpledness ), but it is nevertheless a step on her journey to contentment. In textual terms, this negator contrasts with its explicit opposite (everything ) which is in the first line of the poem. However, having set up this complementary opposition, the poems resolve the problem by demonstrating that this is, in fact, a gradable opposition, not a mutually exclusive one. You do not, it turns out, have to decide between ironing everything and ironing nothing. You can just iron those items that will give you personal pleasure as a result of being smooth. The three options may be interpreted as allegorical representations of a person’s freedom of action, but they work in the same way either literally or metaphorically. Whilst nothing is one of the core negators and thus has a powerful effect of negation, it can be found in contexts where we might want to interpret it more positively. In ‘Platform Piece’, for example, the lovers who are being separated by one of them leaving on a train are waving to each other at the end of the poem: so many waving now it comes to nothing, and nothing keeps you riffling through those postcards till rails tear you blinking from that city.

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Table 8.1 Outline of the range of textual vehicles for negation (from Nahajec, 2021: 52)

There are two occurrences of nothing here, the first one appearing to confirm that being one of many people waving to a loved one on (or from) a train undermines the significance of any individual parting. The second occurrence, however, is placed as the Actor in a relatively detailed clause (nothing keeps you riffling through those postcards ) whose action (riffling) is assumed to be happening as a result of this detail. Thus, we know that the person concerned has indeed been riffling through the postcards, and that nothing is what is keeping them riffling. The textual cohesion of the two occurrences of nothing in close proximity allows us to interpret the second as referring anaphorically to the first. Thus we may arrive at the conclusion that the label nothing is being used to refer to the very thing (the parting with a loved one) that was apparently erased by so many people being in the same position. The power of these uses of the pro-form negator is to make us understand

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that however much may happen to undermine our emotions, there are some moments in life that cannot be so easily erased. The personal pro-form, nobody, is used in the poem ‘10 k’ about running, to show that the direction of travel when running for leisure or pleasure is not relevant: We ran though nobody came or went. The effect of the negation in this context, as in any, is to create two scenarios; one in which people are coming or going with a destination in mind and the other, more unusual one, in which people run with no aim but the journey itself. This effect helps to emphasise the strangeness of these people who run for no reason as it contrasts with normal human behaviour of aiming towards a destination.

8.2

Morphological Negation in Contemporary Poetry

In addition to the core grammatical negators in English, there are a great many affixes that are used to indicate negation. Many of these are prefixes (in-, de-, non-, anti-, dis-, un-) but there are also a few suffixes (e.g. -less ) that produce negative versions of their root word. Some of these affixes are more productive than others. That is, they can be added to words freely to create a negative version. Thus, we can add anti- and non- to many words (e.g. anti-yoga, nonburn) and they sound so natural that we cannot be certain whether they have been used before, whereas we get a more foregrounded deviant effect if we decide to put de- or un- into new words such as de-weed or un-tweet. Notice in these invented cases, hyphens often appear between the affix and the root. Though morphological negation is a potential source of inventiveness in poetry and other texts, in fact there is relatively little innovative use of negative affixes in contemporary poems. This may be because the prominence of the foregrounded neologisms can make them stand out in a way that is not in tune with the rest of the poem, though early twentieth-century experimentation with language (see, for example, e.e. cummings’ poetry) had some examples of this process. However, in my dataset there are frequent occurrences of complex words with negative affixes which are superficially uncontroversial, such as the moment when the narrator in ‘Greenhouse’ recounts how he broke into the old greenhouse and stood in the green light/among nine years of unnatural growth. There is nothing lexically or grammatically odd about this phrase, but in the context of a greenhouse, which is where human beings create growth which might be called unnatural, because it is forced and regulated, here the narrator turns such an idea on its head and calls the weeds and overgrown plants which have had no help to develop unnatural because they are out of place. The negator (un-) adds to this impression by bringing to mind both natural and unnatural growth at the same time. In recognising what is missing (i.e. the regulated growth of crops), the narrator emphasises the loss of the person (his father) who had all this growth under control. Thus, although the usage itself is not deviant (and therefore not foregrounded), the link to the ‘wrong’ referent foregrounds it semantically.

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Later in the same poem, as the narrator recalls he and the father figure building the greenhouse, another morphological negator demonstrates the way in which even the younger version of the narrator was beginning to be aware of the passing of life as he feels the father’s loss of physical confidence: you out in front, unsure of your footing on the damp stones,

In this case, there is nothing beyond the textual context to make us notice the negator (unsure) specifically, but since this is a memory introduced after a description of the greenhouse that has gone to seed, it is clear that the tentative footsteps that the younger man is aware of spell out the mortality of the father. The negator alerts us to this uncertainty of footing, but it also brings to mind what it is like to be sure-footed, like the younger man or boy and this contrast brings its own poignancy with it. Two final examples, here, of the use of morphological negation, come from ‘Summer Evening’ where the scene is set In parks/that saw offices undress for lunch. Apart from the metonymy created by the foregrounded combination of an inanimate object (offices ) with a verb that requires a human Actor (undress ), there is also a morphological negator as part of this verb itself. One of the effects of this negator is to conjure up a situation in which one might dress for a meal, and the phrase dress for dinner then comes to mind. This expression, now quite dated, and associated with the rich or upper class, refers to the habit of changing from day wear into something more formal to gather for the evening meal (dinner). By contrast, there is no such recognised phrase relating to taking clothes off to eat the midday meal (lunch) so by contrast with dress for dinner, we may conclude that this is an informal habit indulged by the masses who are the opposite of the upper classes. It is taking liberties with the conventional opposition too, since the opposite of dress in dress for dinner would not be undress but dress down. Later in this poem, once the busy town and park have been left far behind, the narrator takes the long cut to the car park and captures the visual image of the reflected night sky in the clause: swans on a river/disprove the moon they paddle through. There are a range of TCFs in operation here, including the verbal choice in relation to its Goal (you cannot disprove something concrete like the moon), but the negator, dis- has a particular effect in making us contemplate how the reflection of the moon can seem so real until the water is disturbed. There are many similar morphological negators to be found in contemporary poetry, and they work in a subtle way to add layers of meaning to the text. Whilst completely new inventions are relatively rare, the scope for negative affixes being used in interesting ways is broad. The one consistent factor in the meaning of such negated forms is that, like linguistic negation more generally, it creates the awareness of dual scenarios—positive and negative. The precise effect of that depends on the co-textual surroundings. ‘The

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Unprofessionals’, for example, has a familiar-looking negated lexical item in its title, though its use as a noun rather than an adjective is deviant and thus foregrounded. Having introduced these people in the title, the poem sets a scene When the worst thing happens and then the unprofessionals arrive: They come/Unorganized, inarticulate, unprofessional. Here, the three-part list of adjectives are all conventionally negated, morphologically. The list invites us to see these people as having all the worst qualities for their role in supporting someone in crisis and together with the title they portray not only the people who do turn up, but the people who might also turn up—or turn up instead— those people who are organised, articulate and professional. This poem is a masterclass in the use of negators which are used first of all to imply negative evaluation, but which, by their very subtle use, make us realise that it is those people who least know how to support you in a crisis that will actually be most helpful and sit with you, holding hands, Through the immortality of all the seconds,/Until the blunting of time, In Sect. 8.5 we will see that using negation in the title of a poem, as in ‘The Unprofessionals’ is not uncommon in contemporary poetry. Before we look at some more examples of this phenomenon, the next section considers lexical negation which is more peripheral to the category of linguistic negation than the examples seen so far.

8.3

Lexical Negators

As we saw in Table 8.1, there are lexical items which can be said to be inherently negative, though these are not a closed set and it is therefore more difficult to locate them and analyse them. However, in contemporary lyric poetry, which is a relatively short form of text, it is possible to go through a poem word by word and ascertain whether any of them might be considered as belonging to this peripheral group. Although it is not always definitive, one test that can be used to identify semantically negative lexical items is to try to paraphrase them with an explicit negator. Thus, for example, we may reword absent as not present and conclude that it is a negator in the line from ‘Up on the Moors with Keeper’ which answers the question What could there be to match this glory?: High summer, a scent of absent rain. We have already seen (Chapter 7) that these two noun phrases are in a list—or possibly in apposition. The ambiguity between these structural analyses means that high summer may be defined for this writer by the absence of rain, and the scent, which could be defined in a positive way (the scent of dry grass, for example) instead is defined by the absence of dampness in the air. Absence also features in another poem which I have been analysing throughout this book, ‘Pond Dipping’. The end of the poem makes explicit the simile that has been hovering about the whole text, that the pond and its life are to be considered as analogous to a womb: The nets lean against/the wooden rail, like wombs, draining absence. Here, the combination of absence as a Goal of the material action verb, drain, produces a foregrounded external

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deviation and it inclines the reader to pay it more attention as a result. The added effect of the negation is to produce the alternative scenario of presence, rather than absence, which in this context means a foetus. We are left at the end of the poem contemplating the two alternative paths the life of the narrator will take, with or without a child of her own. Other lexical negators may be less immediately obvious to the analyst, but again the paraphrase test may help. In ‘Summer Evening’, for example, the use of decline seems to invite the reader to imagine the alternative scenario in which the narrator (or addressee, depending on how you interpret the pronoun) takes the boat out on the river instead of heading to the car park: The rowing boat moored there is a temptation you decline,

Although the rewording with an explicit negator (e.g. a temptation you do not accept ) is very much more clumsy, it helps to confirm that this is indeed lexically negative and this alternative scene is indeed played out in the final lines of the poem where the imagination takes over: you imagine being out on that water, the drag and viscous ripples as you pull, then shipping oars and just letting it drift.

The contrast is then fully established between this meditative alternative ending to the outing and the jollity of the flowers being loaded into cars at the garden centre and the conversations at the pub tables. Yet the narrator sticks to the planned journey back home, eschewing the temptation, leading to the wistful note on which it ends.

8.4

Thematic Negation

One of the striking features of the poems in my dataset is the frequency of poems that either have a negated title or are clearly thematically negated in other ways. We have seen many of these earlier in this book, but have not specifically focussed on the negated element of their stylistic choices. ‘The Unprofessionals’ is perhaps the most obvious case, and one where the morphological negator has already been examined in this chapter. However, it is potentially significant for the reader that the title of the poem sets up the dual scenarios of the positive and negative versions of this word right from the start. The ambivalent responses that some readers feel towards these people are triggered by a range of features, but the negation certainly helps to set up a reading experience in which we may wonder what it would be like if the helpers were professionals.

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‘It Wasn’t Snowing’ previews the opening line in its title and makes explicit the positive version of the scene there (but it should have been), providing an insight into the narrator’s poetic sensibility as he imagines the appropriate weather for the visit of a famous poet to his school who is nine months from the grave. This time, the negation produces not anxiety but a dramatic sense of occasion with the imminent death of the poet demanding—but not receiving—the weather worthy of a child’s sense of pathetic fallacy. Whilst these poems use negation in their titles, some others are thematically negated in other ways. ‘Marble’, for example uses the analogy of Michelangelo making his sculpture of David to reflect on the work of heart surgeons sculpting the arteries of their patients. The link is thereby made between the best of marble sculpture (a work perfect in completion/without wax, was sine cera) and the patient lying on the hospital bed who is perfect to the narrator. Whilst using wax to cover flaws in the workmanship of sculptors might even be possible for great artists such as Michelangelo, the unavailability of this work around to the surgeons who cannot simply cover up their mistakes, leads to the narrator’s fear of failure as she contemplates her lover’s fate in their hands: Never was a foot so beautiful, or sincerity so chill. The use of never here, defeats the expectation that anything could be as beautiful produced by public opinion about Michelangelo’s statue of David which is often considered to be the pinnacle of beauty. Thematic negation is also found in ‘Prayer’ which begins with an acknowledgement that the title is misleading (although we cannot pray) and is confirmed in the second stanza (although we are faithless ). These grammatical and morphological negations both produce an expectation of religious belief and defeat it at the same time, but the poem nevertheless refers to many everyday experiences which could be seen as types of prayer, even calling a child’s name, which is presented as a prayer against the loss of that child. ‘A Hairline Fracture’, as we have seen, is a poem about the loss of a relationship under difficult circumstances (in sweltering London with hay fever). Table 8.2 shows that it uses morphological, semantic and grammatical negation threaded throughout the poem to produce both an account of the breakdown and at the same time a vision of how it could have been: The five morphological negations (out of nine) form a kind of theme through the poem. There is something wheedling and unhappy about this and it marks out the period of the couple trawling through London. The resolution, when it comes, is almost a relief and is marked by the two much more definitive negations of nothing and nowhere. Acceptance, one feels, cannot be far behind. The two other negations, missed and was not to be composed, participate in the unhappy process of the split (missing being unintended) and the clausal example tantalisingly allows us to envisage the opposite (the composition) which was not to be. ‘Prospero’s Gifts’, likewise, imagines a childhood and life which is not blighted by abuse and the struggle to survive it by presenting the actual, negated, situation:

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Table 8.2 Negating in ‘A Hairline Fracture’

● ● ● ●

Negated element

Type of negation

unintended missed trains was not to be composed unmollified undone unentered unremarkably familiar nothing nowhere

morphological semantic grammatical morphological morphological morphological morphological Lexical/grammatical Lexical/grammatical

Not the best way for a child’s life to start (grammatical negation) Many years I mourned for what was done (lexical negation) Wondering where each missing part had gone (lexical negation) And they were not magic, but more hard won, (grammatical negation).

Working alongside other TCFs, these negators each create—and then defeat—the expectation of the positive. Thus, the text invites the reader to imagine the best way for a child’s life to start; not having to mourn the lost childhood; not having pieces of one’s heart missing or where they might be and the option even after all this of a magical solution, rather than having to work hard for resolution. Each time a negator is introduced, the burden for the child, now adult narrator is more poignant as the positive scenario is both introduced and cancelled out at the same time. The final example in this chapter is from another poem that has been discussed in earlier chapters, ‘Pond Dipping’. Like other poems in my dataset, it should be becoming more and more familiar to the reader as I discuss each of the layers of meaning contributed by each TCF. In this case, the negating reiterates the theme of lack (or loss) of a child for the narrator: ● the son I don’t yet have ● now the excited shrieks/and baby blond heads are gone ● draining absence. The grammatical negating in the first example here creates a situation where the non-existent son is named by the noun phrase and the relative clause creates both the expectation of that son and its denial. The imagined child is presupposed to exist (see Chapter 10) and at the same time he does not. This paradox is at the heart of negating and produces the hope and despair pairing of this poem. The second example is a case of lexical negating (gone) and although it relates to a straightforward episode in the narrative when the children leave, the feeling of being bereft and its link to the lack of a child

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of her own is enabled by the double scenario where the children are expected to stay longer when in reality they have left the pond. The final example, as we saw in relation to lexical negating earlier, produces both the image of the nets/womb as full of life and of them, as they are, empty.

8.5

Negating in Contemporary Poetry

This chapter has explored the textual effect in contemporary poetry of the TCF of negating, which has been shown to produce both the negated scenario and its reverse, by producing the expectation that the reverse (positive) scenario could be true and then denying or defeating it. This textual effect is particularly suited to poems dealing with anxiety, trauma, despair and other negative emotions, where the hope for a better outcome is overlaid by the reality of the situation. As with the other TCFs, negating can be a highly localised feature of a single line of poetry but is also often to be found as a thread throughout the poem, linking the often rather disparate images or events in a narrative together, particularly when those parts are figurative or analogous, rather than literal. Some poems flag up their thematic negating in their titles and for others the negating creates tension with the supposed theme or title of the poem. In the next chapter, we will see how a TCF linked to modality can have effects similar to those of negating in contemporary poetry.

References Jeffries, L. (2010). Opposition in discourse. Continuum Books. Nahajec, L., (2021). Negation, expectation and ideology in written texts: A textual and communicative perspective. John Benjamins. Nahajec, L. (2009). Negation and the creation of implicit meaning in poetry. Language and Literature, 18(2), 109–127. Nørgaard, N. (2007). Disordered collarettes and uncovered tables: Negative polarity as a stylistic device in Joyce “Two Gallants.” Journal of Literary Semantics, 36, 35–52.

CHAPTER 9

Hypothesising: Possible Worlds, Hypothetical Scenarios and Wish Fulfilment in Poems

This chapter is devoted to a phenomenon we often label ‘modality’ in linguistics, but as we shall see, this simple label covers a range of forms—and meanings—which share a concern with the hypothetical, rather than the actual. Most commentators describe modality as making clear the speaker’s view of the likelihood or desirability of something being the case. This is a simplification, but it works as an introductory definition which will be nuanced a little more later in this chapter. These two types of modal meaning (likelihood and desirability) seem, at first sight, rather different, but in English they are both delivered prototypically by the modal verbs, so this is some indication that the underlying system of the language recognises what they have in common. Simpson (1993) developed modality into a model of narrative, which I will investigate a little in relation to poetry later but let us first consider Simpson’s four categories of modal meaning (based on Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), which divide into two major semantic groups (likelihood and desirability) each further subdivided into two. ‘Epistemic’ modality is the label for those modalised texts which give an indication of how true or how likely a scenario is. This is often, but not always, the speaker’s view of this level of likelihood, as in the invented example: I think John said he’d come to dinner. In this example, we are given a scenario (John said he’d come to dinner) which is filtered through the speaker’s view of how accurate that scenario is, based on his imperfect recollection (or hearing). A sub-type of epistemic meaning is labelled perceptual modality which is specific in relating the potential scenario to the senses of the speaker: I heard John say he was coming to dinner. The other main type of modality, desirability, divides into two relatively equal parts, which relate to the level of obligation conveyed by © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2_9

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Table 9.1 Examples of modality types

Speaker/narrator modality

Third-person modality

Epistemic

I think she’s coming

Perceptual Deontic

It appears she’s coming She ought to come

Boulomaic

I hope she comes

Julia thought she was coming It seemed to Julia that she was coming Julia thought she ought to come Julia hoped she would come

the modal form (labelled ‘deontic’ modality) and the level of desire or hope associated with it (labelled ‘boulomaic’ modality), respectively. Deontic modals would include, for example: John ought to clean his kitchen. Boulomaic modals include examples like I wish it would stop raining. Because modality is usually characterised as putting forward the speaker’s view of the likelihood or desirability of the scenario being described, it is often assumed that this is therefore one of the more interpersonal parts of the linguistic system. Systemic Functional Linguistics in particular treats it as having a primarily interpersonal meaning. However, in the system of textual meaning I am attempting to develop here, I would argue that modality, just as much as any of the other TCFs, contributes to the ideation of a text. That is, it characterises the world of the text in relation to the likelihood or desirability of the featured scenario from the point of view of either the voice of the text (whether that is the speaker or a narrator) or of a character quoted within the text (Table 9.1). Table 9.2 uses invented examples to demonstrate that there is equivalence between the speaker modality and third-person modality in ideational terms, though in the first set of cases, it is more immediate and may have a direct effect on the listener, which is where the interpersonal concept arises, I suppose. However, they both contribute to an idea of how certain or desirable someone thinks the scenario is. That person can be the speaker or first-person narrator, or it can be a third-person character. In addition, I have changed present to past tense in the third-person examples, which adds to the distance between the scenario and the text but does not change the modality. The present tense works just as well. There is little discussion in the literature on modality about this question of whether first-person and present tense modality is qualitatively different from other (e.g. third person and past tense) uses of the same forms, though most treatments of modality seem to assume that the first-person present tense version is at least prototypical of modal meaning. Simpson’s modal grammar (1993: Chapter 3) treats third-person modality as evidence of narratorial or character-based modality in literary narratives which assumes that the modality

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Table 9.2 Comparing modal frequency (per million words) with BNC sub-corpora

HYPOTHESISING: POSSIBLE WORLDS …

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Corpus

Would

Should

Could

BNC SPOKEN BNC FICTION BNC MAGAZINE BNC NEWSPAPER BNC NON-ACADEMIC BNC ACADEMIC BNC MISCELLANEOUS My poetry dataset

2019 3162 1142 1508 1282 1153 1198 1963

3396 3612 1805 2356 2285 1984 2159 245

1211 874 968 928 999 1,275 1395 1472

is either the viewpoint of the omniscient narrator (e.g. It was bound to fail ) or allocated to a character, albeit through a third-person structure (e.g. She was certain that they would come). In advertising texts, Simpson (1993: 136) demonstrates that it is the organisation behind the advert whose modality is being displayed (e.g. Here is a herbal remedy that every overweight person should seriously think about trying ). As we will see, the understanding of modality in poetry can be somewhat different from these cases where modal forms are interpretable on analogy with the straightforward face-to-face use of modals in everyday speech. To the extent that all textually created meanings are interpersonal, since they may impact on the perception of those processing the texts, I am treating modality as just another feature of textual meaning which throws doubt or desirability over the propositional meaning, and that this is ideational in the same way as the other TCFs. Thus, a world peopled in a certain way through the naming process is just as impactful on a reader as a world made (un)certain or (un)desirable through modality. Similarly with the effects of negation as explored in Chapter 8, the reader is presented with the negated (and thereby also the positive) version of scenarios. There is no space here to explore the full implications of seeing modality as part of the ideation of a text, but it may be easier to see it in relation to the functions of a text in presenting a particular world view. The original model of critical stylistics used continuous forms of verbs in the TCF labels where possible to indicate what a text was doing, and clearly, even in third-person forms, the examples above are presenting one possible departure from what is categorically known, which I have sometimes labelled ‘hypothesising’ to emphasise the textual function. Whilst third person is sometimes considered in relation to modality, the question of tense is less recognised as a challenge to the assumed norms of first-person, present tense modality. Thompson (2013: 71) uses the example He must have inspected the cottage to argue that modality is usually linked to the speaker’s present opinion, even where the event itself is in the past. However, he acknowledges that past tense and modality can work together more directly:

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There are certain contexts where the Finite does signal past tense in addition to modality – for example, when it is another person’s modality in the past which is being reported. In such cases, the ‘past tense’ forms must normally be used: He explained that he might be late.

As Thompson’s book is a descriptive overview of Functional Grammar, rather than a theoretical treatise, he does not follow up this observation with a wider discussion about how modality works. The poetic examples to be examined later in this chapter will present some challenges to the default view of modality as fundamentally interpersonal and speaker-oriented. I will therefore return to this debate after the analysis has been presented. Before we consider how modality is used in contemporary poetry, I will explore the ways in which modality is typical of the TCFs in this framework for textual meaning. As we have seen, TCFs are often centred on a form-meaning combination with a prototypical form or set of forms plus a range of more peripheral forms, sometimes shading into a fuzzy boundary to the category. The specific meaning of TCFs is affected by the co-text (and context), but there is usually a general effect contributed by the TCF itself. The range of modal forms in English will be the basis of this examination of the construction of hypothetical alternative worlds in poetry. In English, the modal verbs (will, would, shall, should, can, could, must, might, ought ) are the prototypical delivery mechanism for the core types of modality (deontic and epistemic) but many of these core meanings can also be delivered by modal adverbs or adjectives. Thus, He might come can also be phrased as possibly he’ll come or It’s possible he’ll come. Modal adverbs and adjectives are not only duplicates for the modal verbs, however, as they can add different types of epistemic meaning (usually/usual ) or deontic meaning (e.g. crucial/crucially) to a text. One step more distant from the core modal forms are those lexical verbs which in some of their senses can behave modally by raising the question of the likelihood or desirability of the scenario being described. Thus, the verb think can have a modal (epistemic) meaning in sentences like I think it’s raining, but not in sentences like She was thinking very hard. Other lexical verbs can have boulomaic meaning as in I wish it would rain and the perception sub-category of epistemic modality is always delivered by lexical verbs denoting the senses: I hear it’s been raining; I see the Prime Minister has resigned, though as Simpson (1993: 46–47) notes “verbs which represent straightforward mental processes do not de facto constitute part of the perception modal system. Statements of the sort I saw the game or I heard the noise are simply categorical assertions presenting observations on the part of the speaker”. Once we are at the point of finding modal meaning in lexical verbs, there is a less clear cut-off point between verbs behaving modally and categorically. Verbs of cognition are particularly problematic in this regard, as they could be seen as simply reporting the truth of what is going on in someone’s mind, rather than raising a question about the certainty or otherwise of the scenario

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presented. Thus, I consider myself an excellent candidate for the job is at one and the same time a statement of fact about what the speaker considers themself to be and a modalised view of the situation. This is not a problem for the model of modality we are using, nor indeed of the model of textual meaning I am developing. It is, rather, a strength of the nature of human language that we have managed to build a structure and meaning system with prototypes that set out idealised form-meaning combinations whilst allowing for peripheral and indeed questionable members of categories at the same time. In the case of modality, for example, we can point to even those features of language which are peripheral in themselves as evidence of this. Intonation, facial expression and body language are all capable of presenting a modal meaning in the absence of grammatical or lexical modality. A shrug or a raised eyebrow could be enough, in some circumstances, to question the certainty or desirability of what is being said. Thus, modality is a typical TCF in my terms, and like the other TCFs it contributes to how a text presents the world or the reality it is charged with. The rest of this chapter will examine the types of modality which I have found in my core dataset of poems. My impression to begin with was that modality was relatively rare,1 but a search of the BNC (British National Corpus, Davies, 2004) found similar frequencies per million words of would and could, though should 2 was noticeably less frequent compared with other text types and genres. Given the low word count in my dataset (4075 words in total), it is difficult to be certain that this is generalisable to all of contemporary poetry, but as there are no accessible large poetry corpora, this is the closest I can get to challenging my first impression (that modality was rare in my data) and confirming one aspect of it (deontic modality using should is relatively rare). Although the numbers are too low to be significant, there appears to be some difference between the different modal verbs here, with would occurring in similar quantities to the spoken and fiction sub-corpora of the BNC and could occurring in similar amounts to the spoken, academic and miscellaneous sub-corpora. We will see in the analysis that these frequencies may reflect a particular set of uses of the modal verbs which are common in my dataset. The low frequency of should, by contrast, looks much more likely to be significant, and could reflect the tendency for this modal verb to be almost entirely deontic in usage (though it is possible for should to have an epistemic meaning, it is less common than the deontic usage). 1 Note that I haven’t used any frequency data for the other TCFs because the core TCFs are ubiquitous and no comparison would make sense. It might be interesting to compare negating figures across genres, but it is more difficult to search automatically for all the negators. Other TCFs (e.g. Equating and Contrasting, Listing) are more difficult still to pin down because of their lack of formal consistency. 2

Note that simple searches on other modal forms, such as can or will, are not reliable because these word forms have other lexical (non-modal) meanings and cannot be automatically discounted.

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What is striking about modality in poems is that it is intermittent compared with other grammatically based TCFs like naming and representing processes and what there is can be quite specialised. Unlike the narrative texts that Simpson (1993) uses to construct his model of modality, many poems have little or no modality and yet would not be easily classed in the ‘Neutral’ categories of style that Simpson includes in his model of modality. We will try to ascertain why this is the case in the analysis below. Unlike the other TCFs we have considered, where modality is present in poems (some poems, like ‘Baking’ have none), it tends to occur in isolated cases rather than being a consistent or patterned feature of the style as anticipated by Simpson’s modal grammar, though a few poems are more modalised across the text than the majority. The other striking feature of my data is that there are some uses of modality that might be considered peripheral in other genres, but which are common in my poems. These include, for example, the use of modal verbs will and would to indicate habitual actions. I was reluctant to class these as modal to begin with, but then realised that this kind of observation by a poet effectively hypothesises what will go on typically in a certain scenario and cannot therefore be seen as categorical.

9.1

Deontic and Boulomaic Modality

The least common type of modality in my dataset is the desirable side of modal meaning as represented by deontic (obligation) and boulomaic (desire) sub-categories. ‘The Unprofessionals’, for example, opens with a catastrophe (When the worst thing happens ) and continues by stating that there is no escape from such tragedies: That you must live for every hour of your future

The deontic modal, must, does not clearly mark out a narrator’s voice telling the reader or addressee what they have to do. Rather, it seems to set out a universal truth which is unavoidable when bad things happen. This does not fit neatly into the interpersonal system of modality assumed by most functional approaches to grammar, but it can be seen as one aspect of the ideation of this text, whereby the occurrence of a disaster sets in train certain unavoidable processes which follow the event and are predicted to continue for ever. ‘Men on Allotments’ has a similar case of must producing deontic modality in relation to the plants which are set in lines and evenly spaced by the gardeners: And all must toe the line here. Again, this is not obviously the opinion of the writer or the gardeners themselves, but a more general truth, that the plants are obliged to behave in a certain way. The default use of must or should as deontic modals is in the second person (you should; you must), but here the third person is used to describe what the plants are obliged to do, rather than addressing them. This is one of the reasons why I see modality as fundamentally ideational, though it clearly also has an interpersonal use.

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Another argument for the ideational analysis of modality is that neither of these examples can be said to present the writer’s view of what must be— they are simply a statement of the obligations that the people/vegetables are under. Whilst Simpson’s model includes examples in third-person form, he can usually argue that they present the view of the writer where it is in Narratorial mode, or the view of a character when it is in Reflector mode. Neither case seems appropriate to these examples.

9.2

Epistemic and Perception Modality

Slightly more frequent than deontic and boulomaic modality in my sample is epistemic modality. Perception modality seems to be largely absent, though this could be a function of the sample I have chosen. Nevertheless, it is easy to see that perception modality (You appear to be losing weight ) is a primarily conversational feature which might be expected to turn up only in poems drawing on such conversational style. Epistemic modality provides some kind of assessment of the likelihood (or lack of it) of the scenario being described. This can refer to the past, present and the future, and despite the general view that it is only the writer’s or speaker’s view that is being represented, many examples in poetry do not exactly match that interpersonal understanding of modality. 9.2.1

Present Reference

The two examples of present reference in my dataset perfectly illustrate the problem with defining modality by the most prototypical conversational uses of these forms. In the case of ‘Crafty’, there is a textbook example of the firstperson narrator expressing their own clear assessment of something being the case: I’m aware that even the names for your skills are exiting Left out of my head,

In this case, the lexical verb aware performs a modal function by letting us know that this is the writer’s perception of what is happening. Compare the non-modal version, which would lose the highest level clause: even/the names for your skills…. This would be a categorical statement about what is happening, whereas the version decided upon by the poet places another layer above it in the syntax, meaning that I’m aware is the top level clause and everything else is subordinate. Thus, we see that modality works with prioritising and in this case also presupposition because the whole of the subordinate clause (that even/the names for your skills are exiting Left/out of my head) is logically presupposed by following the factive verb be aware (see Chapter 10).

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The second example of modality with present time reference appears in ‘Summer Evening’ where the scene being described begins with entirely categorical statements (Every summer comes an opaque evening ) and apparently told from an external, ‘floating’ narrator’s point of view (It’s brisk in Wickes ). Towards the end of the first stanza which retains this narratorial perspective, there is a description of the people drinking outside pubs: Everywhere is couples, and pushchairs that make sense of last year or last but one, till pubs overflow round continental tables on main roads, laughing like it might last.

The final subordinate clause (italicised here) presents a modalised version of how these third parties (the couples) are perceiving their enjoyment of a warm summer’s evening. The narrator’s viewpoint insinuates itself into the meaning by means of implicature (see Chapter 10), since any reader will know that summers do not and cannot last, but the modal meaning belongs to the people sitting outside the pubs who are hoping the summer will continue. Whilst this poem appears to be told from an externally narrated point of view, even into the second stanza, there is eventually a participant introduced by the second-person pronoun: The rowing boat/moored there is a temptation you decline… but as we saw in Chapter 5 this second person may not be the reader or even a third party addressee, but refer to the first person. Wales (1996: 79) comments on the increasing use of you to mean not only a generic referent (equal to one) but also possibly the speaker him/herself: “The subjectivity of the generalisation makes you strongly egocentric in its orientation, and it is often difficult to distinguish between ‘indefinite’ and ‘definite’ reference”. This phenomenon, Wales implies, may have started out as a social dialect usage. However, it is yet another way in which poems can make use of the fluidity of English grammar to prevent the closing down of meaning. ‘Summer Evening’ has the detailed observation of a scene that appears to be so specific that it can only refer to a particular occasion, and yet the use of you allows the reader to put themselves into the position of the narrator and imagine being the person who is choosing whether to take the boat out or go to the car park and home. This poem as a whole text, then, does not conform in any simple way to the categories of modality that Simpson’s model envisages, though the model can be helpfully used as a vocabulary with which to describe what is going on. We might say, for example, that this poem appears to start out as Simpson’s category B(N) neutral, with a small amount of B(N)-ve when the epistemic modal appears at the end of the first stanza, but can be retrospectively recategorised as a first-person narrative, category A, once the first-person narrator is introduced, albeit via a second-person pronoun. The problem with this assessment of the poem is that these categories do not fit a poem in which the dominant present tense is used to indicate

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some kind of general or repeated typical scene, rather than a single scene that happened once and is being recounted. This is a very common strategy of contemporary poetry in English, where the ‘show not tell’ mantra regularly underlies this kind of combination of detail (which might indicate a particular occasion) with a generic overlay indicated by the habitual use of present tense aided by adverbs of repetition (Every summer). This is very far from the kind of hard-boiled detective fiction that Simpson says typically characterises a B(N) neutral type of text and even when the reader recasts the whole text as a firstperson narrative (A), simultaneously telling both a specific and a generic story of a summer evening, the poem finishes on an imaginary alternative ending to the evening: you imagine being out on that water, the drag and viscous ripples as you pull, then shipping oars and just letting it drift.

Here, the verb imagine allows the narrative to set off (on the boat) in a direction that we are clear hasn’t happened or, in the parallel generic version of this scenario, wouldn’t happen. I am not clear whether that makes it a modal lexical verb or whether this is one of the verba sentiendi (i.e. verbs referring to thoughts, feelings and perceptions) which Fowler (1986) introduces and Simpson uses in his model. However, it is clear that this is a fork in the road kind of moment where the persona (you/one) chooses the more mundane, predictable action of returning to the car whilst their mind takes them on the more adventurous (or threatening?) journey by boat. 9.2.2

Future Reference

Epistemic modality with future reference is not common in my sample but does occur once in ‘Men on Allotments’: the proper space/The manly fullgrown cauliflower will need. This is a relatively straightforward future use of the modal verb will and it raises no particular issues for textual meaning beyond the recognition that this poem also uses a mainly present tense framing to produce both a generic and a specific scenario. This future modal simply fits into that framing, since it suggests a highly predictable requirement (the space for cauliflowers) of the seasonal circuit of growing vegetables. 9.2.3

Past Reference

Unlike the present and future uses of modality, those uses which occur in past tense narratives are often linked to a specific narrative or specific but repeated scenario, with no attempt to generalise it beyond the narrator. ‘Litany’, for example, tells the story of a female child who is regularly present as her mother hosts her friends who gossip about other people, including their illnesses: and

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certainly not leukaemia, which no one could spell. Whilst this ‘ability’ meaning (could = was able to) seems to be less obviously modal than other meanings (e.g. could = may happen), it nevertheless underlines the contingent nature of abilities such as spelling. Like negating, as we saw in Chapter 8, modality has the power to conjure up two opposing scenarios, one actual and the other imagined, hypothetical or wished for. In this case, the precociously clever and linguistically adept daughter knows even at her young age that these women are not her intellectual equals and conjures up both the inability of these women to spell and the imagined opposite; a world in which they can. Some poems recount a single event in the past rather than a set of memories which make up the past. ‘10 k’ is one such poem and it tells the story of people running, possibly (though not explicitly) in a race or group event, on one particular occasion. There is only one modal form in what is otherwise a straightforward account, with some imagery, of what running feels like when you are with a partner. Here is the modal form: And the only sound was our feet in the road That seemed to make the earth move.

This use of perception modality in the verb seem is the mechanism by which a particular effect is produced. This effect is the idea that running on the earth makes it revolve, just as a hamster’s wheel or a treadmill are operated by the feet of the animal or person on it. There is a similar idea in a mid-twentiethcentury poem ‘Hawk Roosting’ by Ted Hughes: Now I hold Creation in my foot/Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly. In this case, the hawk imagines that he is turning the globe as he flies, rather than changing his orientation towards planet earth. In the current case, the arrogance of the hawk is missing as the narrator admits that the running feet only seem to turn the earth, so the perception modality has the effect of showing that this is an alternative, but not necessarily accurate, way to see the world. Whilst most of the modality I have discussed so far has been individual localised examples, some poems lend themselves more to a Text World Theory approach (see Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007), whereby the modality causes a shift in the poem which could be seen as a ‘world shift’ in TWT terms. ‘Ironing’, for example, has a short episode in the first phase of the narrator’s life where her anger over her domestic role (symbolised by ironing sheets and towels) takes her on a flight of fancy: I’d have commandeered a crane

if I could, got the welders at Jarrow to heat me an iron the size of a tug to flatten the house.

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This diversion into an alternative reality where she could have asked steel workers (at Jarrow) to produce a giant iron so that she could flatten the house feels more like a world switch than most hypothesising in the poems. Here, the modals in I’ d have and if I could, work as epistemic links to the imagined revenge scenario but notice that these are things that clearly didn’t happen, in the past, and thus seem to behave less like interpersonal modality than a trigger for a move into an alternate (hyper)reality, Very often, epistemic modality works with other TCFs to produce the hypothetical or alternative worlds in the poems. In ‘A Hairline Fracture’, for example, there are a number of examples of such combined TCF effects (Table 9.3): This poem charts the end of a relationship through a series of images, most of them metaphorical representations of their increasing (emotional) distance in terms of geological structures or medical references to broken bones. The first case here is a simile making the basis of the analogy explicit. The second modal (would) is paired with the negation (nothing ) to produce an unsettling counsel of despair whilst the positive scenario where everything is right is also present in the background. Similarly with the third and fourth examples which use the negation nowhere to emphasise the fact that it is not the fault of London because there is nowhere they could make things right. The modals in these three negated examples work in similar ways to the negators themselves, producing the tantalising image of what could be whilst denying its possibility. As in ‘Ironing’, the past tense here ensures that we know things are not going to be put right, though the modal itself shows the reader how the narrator felt at the deictic centre of the poem; that there is always hope. Whilst most of the poems in my data have little modality, ‘It Wasn’t Snowing’ has a higher concentration than most, also in the past tense, which produces a childlike quality of wonder, starting with the opening line: It wasn’t snowing, but it should have been. This insistence on the wrongness of the weather is a romantic gesture and one that suits the idea of a child already aware of the power of poetry. However, in this case, the deontic meaning of should comes from the first-person narrator, and, like Thompson’s example mentioned above, it relates to a present tense modality (in the context of the poem’s present), even though it relates to a past event. Thus, the reflection Table 9.3 Modality in ‘A Hairline Fracture’ Extract

Type of modality

Other TCFs

it was as though we watched nothing would ever again be right Nowhere in the universe would the bone again be knit or the rift be closed

Perception Epistemic (would) Epistemic (would)

Equating (simile) Negating (nothing) Negating (nowhere)

Epistemic (would)

Negating (nowhere)

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that it should have been snowing is attached not to the child but to the adult recalling the events of that day, knowing that the poet was to die shortly after it. The poem reinforces the subjective nature of the impressions of the visit, using a range of epistemic (as I recall; I think; It must have been) and perception (you seemed) modality. The reader is repeatedly reminded, therefore, that this experience, clearly a formative one for the narrator, was also very personal and could have been viewed rather differently by other boys (or teachers) in the audience. 9.2.4

Habitual Modality

Whilst most of the examples so far discussed are within the norms of modality as it is used in other genres, the poems in my sample exhibit frequent use of what I am calling ‘habitual’ modality where the inclusion of will or would indicates either something that happens repeatedly or something that is symbolic of many similar events or processes. In my sample, only one or two examples of the habitual use of modals are in the present tense. For example, the unknown woman in Duffy’s ‘Prayer’ will lift/her head from the sieve of her hands to look at the birds in a tree and the unidentified man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth/in the distant Latin chanting of a train. These characters, though sounding quite specific, nevertheless are introduced by the indefinite article (a) and together with the modal auxiliary will they are identified as representing anyone or everyone. The modality, therefore, introduces a habitual scene which could be found in any (Midlands ) town rather than a particular event or scene in one town. The other example of present tense habitual modality works in a similar way, though it is limited to a single occurrence. The poem ‘Platform Piece’ characterises Love as the hand at the carriage window and in the second sentence of the poem it is the Actor in a number of processes, including (it) will trace initials in a filthy ashtray. Here, the habitual action of a bereft lover is represented by an action that is repeated but has no power to bring the lover back. The past tense version of this habitual action use of modality is often present in the poems that memorialise a person or a time, often in the narrator’s childhood. Heaney’s ‘Blackberry Picking’, for example, recalls that every year, despite the narrator’s optimism, the berries would ripen and then would turn sour. And in ‘Doorsteps’, the habitual actions and language of the person remembered are also modal: She would slice not downwards but across; Doorsteps/she’d have called them. Armitage’s ‘Greenhouse’ also uses this mechanism to present the memory of repeated occasions in the narrator’s childhood: Some nights I’d watch from my bedroom window as you arrived home late from a concert, ---

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I’d wait, straining for the sound of the hasp --Then you’d emerge, a hoard of tomatoes swelling the lap of your luminous shirt;

These examples in particular seem to emphasise the way in which the habitual use of modal would are less hypothetical than other uses and are only diverging from the categorical meaning insofar as they are describing what typically happened, rather than what always actually happened. A very similar effect is achieved in ‘Litany’ where The Lounge/would seem to bristle with eyes and the habitual coffee mornings of the narrator’s mother had a habitual tendency to turn into scrutiny of the rebellious child. These habitual uses of modality are epistemic, indicating that this is the kind of thing that might be expected to happen regularly in the scenes playing out. This habitual use of modality is perfectly at home in other genres, such as faceto-face conversation, but it appears to be linked, as in the poetic examples, to the recounting of generalised memories (he would say goodnight and leave) or generalised observations (she will leave her coffee cup unwashed). 9.2.5

Asking Modal Questions

There happen to be two poems in my data which ask modal questions and as we saw earlier, it is not easy to decide whether these questions are being asked by the narrator, the poet (if they are distinct) or a character in the poem. In the case of ‘Up on the Moors with Keeper’ all three possibilities are in play as the Bronte sisters could be what Simpson calls the Reflector(s) of the point of view. When the poem asks What could there be to match this glory?, despite being in the third person, there is a strong sense that this is a question being attributed to the sisters, though it works equally well as a question that the narrative voice of the poem is asking as a reflection on their lives. This kind of openness of meaning is typical of contemporary poetry where more than one interpretation can be comfortably accommodated. In ‘Household’ a similar question What would it all weigh? is hypothetical in being an impossible task to carry out. Rephrased, the question What does it all weigh’ would make little sense, except in a very practical, quantity surveyor, sense. Thus, the hypothetical nature of the question sets up the poem’s answer, which is not literal, but expressed in terms of the mass of love. This time there is no participant to whom the question can be attributed, and so it is linked by default to the voice of the poem. Since most of the poem is a list of materials making up a house, there is little narrative and no sense that it is either first or third person. There is little deixis and no anchoring in a timeframe. It therefore works rather differently from fiction and other narrative texts as it lacks focalisation. This disorienting lack of a deictic centre could be argued to be an example of direct evocation (see Chapter 12) whereby the reader is

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made uncomfortable by not being able to find a point of view in which to situate themselves.

9.3

Hypothesising in Poetry

We have seen in this chapter that modality is relatively uncommon in the poems of my dataset, though not as rare as it first appeared compared to other genres. Deontic modality is very rare as it typifies the interpersonal function of modality which is less central to poetry than to other text types. It is clear as a result of this analysis that modality can occur in both present and past narratives in poems and is not always linked to the narrator or to a participant in the narrative, as sometimes there are no participants and the modality is unanchored. Despite this, modality creates alternatives to the world of the poem in something like the same way as negating, though the uncertainty that comes with epistemic modality causes a more nuanced effect than the positive/negative binary of negating.

References Davies, M. (2004). British National Corpus. Oxford University Press. https://www. english-corpora.org/bnc/ Fowler, R. (1986). Linguistic Criticism. Oxford University Press. Gavins, J. (2007). Text world theory: An introduction. Edinburgh University Press. Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar. Edward Arnold. Simpson, P. (1993). Language, ideology and point of view. Routledge. Thompson, G. (2013). Introducing functional grammar. Taylor and Francis Group. Wales, K. (1996). Personal pronouns in present-day English. Cambridge University Press. Werth, P. (1999). Text worlds: Representing conceptual space in discourse. Longman.

CHAPTER 10

Alluding: Implying and Assuming in Poems

Two of the original TCFs from critical stylistics that most obviously border on the pragmatic are Implying and Assuming. They seemed to fit well with the concept of textual meaning that I was developing,though clearly some of the less text-based aspects of implicature make identification from text alone rather difficult. The solution was to limit the TCFs to those aspects of implying and assuming that were textual in nature. This was not difficult with presupposition, which can be traced to features of the text, and cannot be cancelled by negation, but was less easy to achieve for implying. The distinction between conventional and conversational implicature (Grice, 1978) was used as the dividing line between situational and textual meaning, though the border is fuzzy and thus open to discussion in individual cases. Grice’s original view that implicating was primarily an aspect of speaker meaning is widespread in pragmatics, but he and others (see Grice, 1975: 43–4; 1981: 270–272; Levinson, 2000: 137–142) have also recognised that sentences, as well as people, can implicate: Whereas knowledge of what speakers implicate is essential to fully understand speakers, knowledge of what sentences implicate is a critical component of our knowledge of a language. (Davis, 2019)

Simpson’s (1993: 118) model of semantic and pragmatic meaning includes the interim category of pragmatic presupposition:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2_10

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These are the meanings that attach conventionally to particular items or constructions which derive from their normal contexts of use. Crucial to this definition is the fact that pragmatic presuppositions…are not derivable from the context-free semantic base of a sentence.

This category is explicitly intended to include Grice’s concept of conventional implicature which can be triggered lexically or syntactically (see Davis, 2019). This triggering, however, does not mean they form part of what Simpson refers to as the semantic base, i.e. the proposition and entailment(s), of a sentence. One of the challenges involved in using these peripheral concepts in a model of textual meaning is that some text types, and poetry in particular, are only contextual insofar as they belong to a tradition or a society in general. They usually have little or no context of situation in which they are communicating with a specific audience.1 The arguments about whether poetry (and literature in general) is different in kind from other genres are now far in the past (see, for example, Pratt’s (1977) book which starts out by contesting the Russian formalist view of the differences between literature and everyday language) and arguing for an approach based on use, rather than form. However, it is in the pragmatics of poems that the differences between literature and other communication are most evident. There has been a growing interest amongst stylisticians (Black, 2006; Hickey, 2014); in the reader’s experience of processing texts, including poems, which necessarily draws on the more pragmaticaspects of poetic meaning as well as being a late reaction to the concerns of poststructuralism’s interest in the reader’s construction of meaning. The rise of mentions of pragmatics and poetics (Van, 1977); cognitive stylistics (e.g. Semino & Culpeper, 2002); pragmatic stylistics (e.g. Black, 2006) are evidence of this trend. I do not wish to deny any of the more fundamental claims of these approaches about the importance of the reader in actively constructing the meaning of a text, but there remains much to do in ascertaining what consensus can be established from the text itself, irrespective of the meaning supplied for different readers by their background and experience. Indeed, I think it is vital that we work to tease out the threads of meaning as textual on the one hand or readerly on the other in order to understand more about how these aspects of meaning interact at their margins. I hope that my work will help in understanding the contribution of the text to this composite meaning.

10.1

Presupposition and Implicature

In general, poems are dislocated in time and space. This is not to say that poems fail to reference contemporary (or other) issues or that poetry doesn’t reflect the language and times in which it is written. Neither is it to deny 1 Exceptions apply to performance poetry which has been excluded from this study as explained earlier. Though even in these cases, the poetry has a de-contextual origin.

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that some poetry is written and used very specifically in an interpersonal or interactional way. Nevertheless, most poems are written to be read (or read aloud) by anyone who happens upon them. The result is that the interactive pragmatics of everyday language is largely suspended from the communicative situation that poems occupy. Therole of conversational implicature, for example, is all but suppressed in poetic texts. Since poetry is not, in any normal sense, necessary for communicating, there is little value in asking to what extent the textflouts Gricean maxims of quantity (it’s all excess) or quality (much of it is invented) or relevance (poems tend to go off at a tangent) or manner (clarity is not the aim or the achievement of much poetry). However, Eco (1984) provides some basis for the use of the Gricean maxims in text analysis when he argues that the potential for symbolic interpretation can be triggered by an apparent violation of one or more of the maxims—particularly those of quantity, manner or relation. An excessive attention to some textual detail, which appears to be insufficiently motivated by the surrounding cotext and the stylistic norms of the text, invites symbolic interpretation on the grounds that it is otherwise unjustifiable. There are, therefore, exceptions to the general rule that the textual aspects of implying and assuming fall short of the truly interpersonal, though it is, of course, likely that some poems will include narrative structures where interpersonal communication between characters is available for analysis by such frameworks as Grice’s Co-operative Principle and politeness theories, etc. Despite this characteristic, of poetry being de-contextual as far as that is possible, there is a paradoxical sense in which poetry is the genre par excellence for implying more than it states and does so more than most text types or genres. This book has already shown a range of ways in which indirect allusion to meanings beyond the mundane surface meaning is an essential part of textual meaning in poems. This is not only in the classically recognised figures of speech such as metaphor and simile, but in the very use that poetry makes of the standard features of textual meaning. Thus, we saw in Chapter 7 that the syntactic ambiguity operating between lists and appositional structures allows the poem to provide open spaces of meaning where the items listed can be seen as separate, or identical or both. We could argue that many of the features examined in this book contribute to poetry’s indirect and allusive construction of meaning. The specific TCFs in this chapter were originally named ‘implying and assuming’ in my first version of the framework of textual meaning which I called critical stylistics.. There is perhaps too much of the pragmatics of implicature in the label and I have therefore decidedthat what textual implying and assuming could be said to have in common is allusion. Alluding seems to me to capture both what is being taken for granted—presupposed—in a text and what is implied. Though we may wish to separate out the more clearly interpersonal aspects of poetry (such as the author-to-reader communication), the labels implying and assuming still work if we take them to mean what the text, rather than the text producer, is implying and assuming. However, it may be helpful to think

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of these as two sides of the same coin,labelled alluding. Presupposing builds assumptions about the world of the text into the background and is rarely, if ever, foregrounded as a result. Implying projects its ideas forward, but these are still not foregrounded and still not part of the propositional meaning of the text. This chapter, then, deals with the aspects of poetic texts which are by their nature backgrounded and yet contribute to the stylistic choices made by the writer. In order to use these concepts as part of the analysis of poetic language, we need to know how to recognise them. Unlike most of the TCFs, there is no clear core form or set of forms shading off into peripheral forms and a fuzzy boundary. There are, instead, a few different categories delivered by a set of forms, some of which are more like fuzzy categories than others. Before we look at how poems make allusions through these means, I will set out the main checklist of triggers for assuming and implying. Assuming is another label for what is technically known as presupposition in linguistics. I chose to use continuous verb forms where possible in the first version of this model, as a reminder to the user that we were looking at what texts do. This was particularly important in what was primarily a textbook, though it was also the first account of the approach I was taking and this seemed an important point to make. As Levinson (1983) and Simpson (1993) set out, there are two main kinds of presupposition to look out for. Thefirst, existential presupposition, is usually triggered by definite noun phrases, where the referent is presupposed to exist by virtue of being named. Chapter 2 has already explored noun phrases in some depth, but here we can add the important addition to naming, which is that in many cases, usually those which have some kind of definite determiner, the phrase presupposes the existence of the referent being named. Like the TCF of negation which both assumes and produces the expectation of the positive all the while negating it, definite noun phrases both assume and produce the assumed existence of their referents. There is a fun way to prove this which I have used very often in presentations and classes. An old Victorian parlour game, called Consequences, involves the use of some strips of paper which the participants write on, then fold over to hide what they have written and pass on to the next person, creating a story written by the group who are not privy to others’ contributions. The classic version starts with a woman’s name, followed by a man’s name, the place they met, what she said, what he said, what the consequence was and what the world thought.2 The version I use to demonstrate the power of existential presupposition through naming uses the same technique, but asks participants to choose a determiner, an adjective, a noun, another noun (so we have a modifying noun and a head noun) and some kind of prepositional postmodifier. The results can be nonsensical but are often amusing and sometimes 2

An example story would be: The Queen met Uncle Michael in the chip shop. She said to him “What’s the time?” He said to her “Not likely old girl!” The consequence was that they cycled off into the sunset. The world thought it was a happy ending.

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almost poetic. Once you have heard of that authentic table helicopter on my bed or the ridiculous sausage sacrifice in the field it is difficult not to believe in their existence, however absurd they seem. Naming, then, at least when characterised by definiteness, is one of those TCFs which overlaps with another TCF, in this case assuming. The second kind of presupposition, is triggered by one of a number of possible features. The list described here is based on Simpson (1993), but a longer list can be found in Levinson (2000). There is no finite list of such triggers, though most are covered by the longer list. The important test of presuppositions, including logical presuppositions, is that they cannot easily be negated or denied, though some of them can be ‘defeased’ (see below). Here are the five kinds of triggers that form the majority of such logical presuppositions: ● Change of state verbs which presuppose an earlier state characterised by the opposite of the subordinate clause (e.g. Paula started running presupposes she was not running beforehand) ● Factive verbs whose subordinate clause complements are presupposed to be true (e.g. Adil realised that Jess was lying presupposes that Jess was indeed lying). ● Temporal clauses which are presupposed to be true (e.g. When Jason arrived, the door was open presupposes that Jacob arrived). ● Cleft sentences which presupposed the truth of the subordinate clause (e.g. It was Callum that stole the bike presupposes that someone stole the bike). ● Iterative words and affixeswords and affixes which presuppose an earlier event or action (e.g. Jamil played the longest solo again presupposes that Jamil had played the longest solo before). ● Comparators where the second part of the comparison is presupposed to be true (e.g. Kim is as talented as Riley presupposes that Riley is talented). Implying is more difficult to define than presupposition, but here I will base it mostly on Grice’s (1975) conventional implicature with some references to conversational implicature where relevant. In simple terms, the former is the kind of implication that is regularly associated with a particular form or structure in texts, whereas the latter is associated with aspects of textual construction in particular situational contexts. As we saw earlier, Simpson (1993), following Levinson (1983), uses a broader term, pragmatic presupposition, to capture those aspects of implying that are embedded in the text, and I will follow this practice here. The significant difference between semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition is that the latter is not absolutely tied to particular structures and forms and rely to a greater extent than semantic presupposition on the specifics of the text type or genre. As their name implies, they sit somewhere between the semantic and the situational

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ends of a spectrum of meaning, placing them exactly where I envisage textual meaning more generally to sit. For the reasons given in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, conversational implicatures are relatively rare in poetry, though we will see some candidates from poems in what follows. Though there has been much development of Grice’s ideas in relation to stylistics in the years since he first developed the Co-operative Principle (see, for example, Chapman, 2012; Pilkington, 2000) I will use Grice’s maxims for examining the poetic examples here because they are relatively well-known and anyway quite unusual in poetic texts. As for conventional implicaturesor pragmatic presupposition, there is some evidence that this category of alluding could be helpful in poetic analysis, despite being difficult to pin down in some cases. They have been rescued from oblivion by some who can see their value (e.g. Horn, 2008; Partee, 2009; Potts, 2007) in the range of meaning, from linguistic, through textual, to contextual and interpersonal.

10.2

Nominal and Logical Presupposition in Poems

The most mundane, but ubiquitous,type of presupposition in my poems is the definite noun phrase which both assumes the existence of its reference and at the same time creates that assumption. In many cases, there is nothing particularly significant in the use of a definite noun phrase beyond the naming practice of creating the places, people and things that are to be found in the poem’s world. In Blackberry Picking, for example, the blackberries are introduced (assumed) early in the poem and thereafter the berries are referred to anaphorically (that first one; red ones; green ones; the fresh berries; the fruit ). This is no more than the usual cohesion that we would expect to find in any text with a relatively focussed theme and as we might expect in poetry, the references to the blackberries exhibit what I have called poetic variation(Chapter 2), rather than repeating the same words. So far, then, we find that the existential presuppositionof naming is simply an unremarkable feature of poems as it is of any text. However, a string of definite noun phrases can also have a strong textual effect, as we find in ‘Baking’ where the narrator remembers a childhood home and the mind’s eye moves from the road through the garden to the house: the terrace from the road, the house a long way off down the garden, rooms deepening through the hall,

This strand of definite noun phrases (underlined) continues for a further two stanzas and although in the context they do not seem to be overwhelming, the very process of picking them out demonstrates their dominance in this part of the poem. On the one hand, then, these are very specific memories we cannot

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be expected to share, but on the other hand, the presupposition that they exist, and the definite article’s potential for making the referent seem unique in the world being described, allows the reader to share something of the experience and emotions of the narrator. There is nothing particularly foregrounded here, as these definite noun phrases are well-formed grammatically and not deviant in their semantic make-up either. The poetic effect is one of accumulation across the text. By contrast, the existential presuppositions that are foregrounded in poems tend to work with other TCFs to create an effect of being (internally or externally) deviant. In ‘Pond Dipping’, for example, there are two definite noun phrases that work with negation to produce a foregrounded effect. In the first case, the son I don’t yet have, there is nothing grammatically or even semantically odd about the phrase, but there is a clash between the existentially presupposed son and the negation which produces a deviant effect and causes the reader to wonder about the specificity of a child that both exists (is presupposed) and doesn’t (is negated). The same poem ends with the image of the children’s nets draining absence where there is, again, a clash between the concept of draining which requires some kind of concrete Goal and the specified Goal here, which is the negated lexical item, absence. The lack of concreteness of this Goal puts it at odds with its presupposed existence and captures the strong emotions of the narrator who is torn between her maternal instinct and her lack of a child. In other cases, we find definite noun phrases foregrounded through a relatively unusual or striking collocation, as in ‘Litany’ where the narrator takes for granted that her mother’s and the mother’s friends’ marriages are unsuccessful: The terrible marriages crumbled. Here, the definite noun phrase (underlined) allows no other possibility than the marriages being terrible through the combination of presupposition and the placing of the adjective within the noun phrase. Note that placing the adjective as a complement (the marriages were terrible) moves the negative judgement to the proposition of the sentence, which opens it up for discussion (were they really so terrible?) whereas the presupposition does not. Existential presuppositions in texts do not allow the reader to deny the existence of the referents and these can vary, as we see, from the mild memories of childhood in ‘Baking’ to the more insistent ones of terrible marriages in ‘Litany’. The variation of effect, as with all the TCFs, is dependent on the specifics of the poem and in some cases the presupposition presents the reader with difficult referents from which it is hard to look away. ‘The Unprofessionals’, for example, opens with a vague, but relatable, definite noun phrase, the worst thing. We are not told exactly what that worst thing refers to, but this allows space for the reader to imagine what that would amount to for them. In most cases, I imagine that the worst thing is to lose a loved one, but precisely who that is will differ with readers. A slightly different kind of unavoidable presupposition comes in ‘Prospero’s Gifts’ where the opening line presents the reader with the history of

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a seriously troubled childhood: A lifetime spent mending this damaged heart. Whilst we are never told in graphic terms what happened to this child, the heart metaphor for emotional harm is represented not just by the definite noun phrase in this line (underlined here) but in later lines by further definite noun phrases: every sharp and shattered piece and each missing part. As with all the poems analysed in this book, these existential presuppositions work with other TCFs to make the whole effect. Teasing them out is about finding out how each TCF contributes to the integrated whole. Note here, incidentally, that this poem allows us to make a very clear distinction between what Icall interpretation (text-based) and what I call reading (experience-based) meanings (see Jeffries, 2014). The experience of the abused child would be a trigger for anyone who had a similar childhood, with the vagueness of what actually happened allowing for a range of possible experiences to be read into the text. For other readers, the text may trigger empathy from an outsider’s perspective. Either way, the harm is present and unavoidable in the construction of the text. Turning from the ubiquitous existential presuppositions, there are also logical presuppositions to be found in contemporary poems. Though less frequent than definite noun phrases, the triggers for logical presuppositions are a normal part of everyday language and their effects therefore vary between insignificant, in terms of their poetic effect, through backgrounded but with a cumulative effect, to fully foregrounded. When the blackberries in ‘Blackberry Picking’, for example, are said to ripen, the logical presupposition arising from this change of state verb is that they were not ripe beforehand. This is a relatively trivial presupposition, though it adds to the atmosphere of the poem by reminding the reader that the brief opportunity for harvesting blackberries is when they have just changed from the unripe to the ripe state and before they become overripe. Returning to ‘The Unprofessionals’, the existential presupposition we noticed earlier (the worst thing ) is set within a temporal clause that also triggers a logical presupposition: When the worst thing happens, That uproots the future, That you must live for every hour of your future,

This adjunct clause presupposes not just the existence of the worst thing, then, but also the fact that it will happen, though the precise time is not known. The following relative clauses (that uproots…; that you will live…) form part of the original noun phrase, postmodifying the worst thing, so they become part of the description of the existentially presupposed event too. They are marked by the second-person pronoun, but this is not aimed at a particular second-person addressee. Instead, it is ambiguous (or is this vague?) between first-person and third-person generic (i.e. one) reference. This allows the poem to imply that this particular narrative has happened to someone specific at the

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same time as assuming that the same series of processes will occur when the worst thing happens to anyone. Whilst it is likely that the other logical presupposition triggers listed in Sect. 10.1 also turn up on occasion in poetry and may have significant or trivial effects depending on the context, my sample set of poems contained very few of them.

10.3 Alluding Through Implying: Conventional and Conversational Implicature As indicated in Sect. 10.1, there is relatively little conversational implicature in poetry, though it is of course possible to analyse any interactions between characters in narrative poems pragmatically. The main communicative event in a poem is, however, between the writer and the reader, and to the extent that this takes place asynchronously and remotely, there is less opportunity than in face-to-face interaction to exploit the Co-operative Principle by flouting or violating the maxims to produce implicatures. We will see below that this is not an absolute rule, but it holds generally. Conventional implicatures, on the other hand, work much as they do in all text types and genres. There is no clearly defined set of forms that deliver these implicatures, though some frequent ones can be identified relatively easily. Many do not have significant poetic effect, but simply help to set the order of the narrative, as in ‘Prayer’, where the use of and has the effect of chronologically ordering the sequence of events: So, a woman will lift her head from the sieve of her hands and stare at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Similarly, in ‘Platform Piece’ the conjunction indicates temporal order: Then part all of a sudden and be waving. Note, however, that this is not inevitable and the conjunction only indicates chronology where that makes sense. Often, it is the more basic additive meaning that is intended, as in ‘Men on Allotments’ where the plants are growing at the same time: Cabbages Unfurl their veined and rounded fans in joy, And buds of sprouts rejoice along their stalks.

Other conventional implicatures in my sample set of poems include those in ‘Crafty’ where the mother figure is described as having very many arts and craft skills which are listed until the clause: Cakes though weren’t your forte. After the list of things that the person was said to excel at, this is a minor detraction, but there is nevertheless a kind of wistfulness about it that implies that the narrator might have liked a mother good at making cakes. This is achieved through the

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negation of weren’t your forte where the double (positive/negative) scenario is produced, as we saw in Chapter 8. As a result of imagining both the mother that is (the one who doesn’t bake cakes) and the one that is not (the one that can bake cakes), we can see that despite the praise being heaped on the mother, the child who may have wanted a different kind of mother at times is showing through. Note that one way of seeing this double-scenario effect of negation would be to see it as one of the triggers of conventional implicature. Another separate caseof conventional implicaturein the same poem is triggered by the adverb even: I’m aware that even the names for your skills are exiting Left out of my head

Here, the narrator does not state that s/he lacks those skills attributed to the mother figure, but this is implied by the fact that s/he cannot even retain the names for them. This produces an implicature because it would be logically possible to utter this sentence and yet have lost only the names for the skills and not the skills themselves. In other words, the implicature is easily defeased. As in the case of the conjunction, and, which will imply chronology where that makes sense semantically, here the adverb implies a hierarchy of knowledge; we tend to know the names for things like skills prior to having the skills themselves and sometimes without ever achieving them. Notice also that the implicature as described here is contained within a logical presupposition triggered by I’m aware that, where aware is a factive adjective whose complement is necessarily true. Conventional implicature, then, is one of the many ways in which contemporary poems can be said to be allusive rather than direct in their textual meanings. Despite the general lack of conversational implicature in poems, there is nevertheless some evidence of flouting of maxims in the poems in my sample. For example, in ‘10k’, which describes an evening run, there is the breaking of the maxim of quality in these lines: And the only sound was our feet in the road That seemed to make the earth move.

Since the epistemic modality of seemed indicates that this is not literally true, we can see the world being turned by all the running feet, like hamsters in a ball or a wheel. In addition, the phrasing of make the earth move is also reminiscent of a cliched idiom for expressing the extreme of sexual gratification: Did the earth move for you? Both of these non-literal allusions are dependent, then, on the poem not conforming to the maxims of the Co-operative Principle.

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In the same poem, the maxim of quantity is flouted by the overloading of activities typically being carried out by all the normal people who are not out running in a cold winter’s evening: Indoors, people ate, checked their mail, flicked channels, made love or slept and all the while you were with me counting out the rhythms on the hills.

As we saw in Chapter 7, the narrator and her running partner are running in a context of many two-part lists summing up the simple pleasure being experienced by them compared to the more overloaded and possibly mundane lives of normal people whose activities are presented in a much longer (5-part) list. Whilst there is no explicit negative evaluation of the normal people, the valuing of the companionship of the two people running implies a contrast with the other option expressed in the list. We saw earlier how ‘Prospero’s Gifts’ was based on an existential presupposition triggered by the definite noun phrase this damaged heart. The relative vagueness of what exactly had happened to the narrator was commented on at that point, and we can see from other phrases in the poem that this underspecification is repeated more than once. What began around the age of three and (I mourned for) what was done both allude to the cause of the damaged heart, but neither is direct about what it was that began or was done. This underspecification, by flouting various maxims,3 most obviously quantity and manner, gives a less precise indication of what happened than would be possible in theory. Implicatures of this kind can be interpreted against the gold standard of clarity and informativeness that would be expected in less troubled communicative situations and in this case we could conclude that being more precise, direct, comprehensive and so on would be inappropriate because (a) it is a poem and poems often use allusion rather than direct reference to produce their effects; (b) the direct alternative might be too painful for writer/narrator and reader alike and (c) there is social taboo around child abuse of any kind. We could add that the hidden nature of these crimes is evoked by the hidden way in which they are referred to here. This kind of direct evocation is the topic of Chapter 12. By contrast with the underspecification of these phrases, we could argue that the reference to Prospero’s gifts is overspecified: Prospero’s gifts buried deep in the sea Had to be dived for,

3 The fact that it is hard to pin down exactly which of Grice’s four maxims have been broken here demonstrates one of the reasons for the reduction of the maxims to two in Neo-Gricean pragmatics (see Chapman, 2012) or one in Relevance theory (see Clark,2013).

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This reference to the magic of Shakespeare’s character is specific and, because it cannot be interpreted literally, it has a metaphorical or allegorical effect which is continued for two more lines until the end of the poem comes up for air and explains that what was needed to mend the damaged heart was not magic but wisdom. We saw this constructed opposition in Chapter 6, and now we also see that it works alongside an implicature that the reference to Prospero is not literal, to produce a satisfying final couplet to the sonnet: And they were not magic, but more hard won, Glimpses of wisdom in this evening sun.

The final example of implicature to be discussed here comes from the poem ‘Household’ which as we saw in Chapter 7 is primarily a list of the materials and items making up a house and its contents. The list is made up of 14 items, many of which are long or complex in themselves. I will quote just a short extract here: the yards of flex and cable that wrap the house like a net, the heavy glassed front door, the gate onto the street, the rippled sheets of window,

The crux of the poem after the long list of what makes up a household is the question what would it all weigh? and the implied answer: One kiss, one breathed/declaration, and there it is: the mass of love. Whilst there is nothing in the poem which explicitly evaluates the physical signs of a relationship as embodied in the bricks and mortar of the household, the very excess of the list of items flouts the maxim of quantity and unlike the ordered description of the remembered home in ‘Baking’ which gives the reader a kind of video tour, this list appears to be disordered and takes a point of view that is physically impossible. One cannot, for example, see the yards of flex and cable unless the house is being built or demolished. There is, as a result, a slightly unnerving sense that if you weigh up love by the simple quantity of stuff in the shared life, it may be somewhat overwhelming. This use of maxim flout to create an uneasy sense of excess could also be seen from the angle of evocation. We will return to that idea in Chapter 12.

10.4

Alluding in Contemporary Poetry

This chapter has dealt with what I originally called implying and assuming and whilst these two terms work to distinguish between the presuppositional and the implicative, I nevertheless want to group them together under the label of alluding because they both operate on the basis of (not always fully automatic) textual triggers but share the effect of building the world of the text through shadowy, non-propositional meaning. Whilst the directly interactive aspects of conversational implicature are largely missing from these poems, we have

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also seen that seeing some of the textual features through the lens of Gricean maxims can also provide insights into the poem’s world and meaning. What we have also seen is that this TCF is frequently to be found operating alongside or through other TCFs. This is not a weakness of the model but demonstrates the integrated nature of textual meaning which the model aims to tease apart for the sake of systematic analysis and clarity of interpretation.

References Black, L. V. (2006). Pragmatic stylistics. Edinburgh University Press. Chapman, S. (2012). Towards a neo-gricean stylistics: Implicature in Dorothy L. Sayers’s gaudy night.Journal of Literary Semantics, 41(2), 139–153. Clark, B. (2013). Relevance theory. Cambridge University Press. Davis, W. (2019). “Implicature.” In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, (Fall 2019 ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/ implicature/ Eco, U. (1984). Semiotics and the philosophy of language. Indiana University Press. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Studies in syntax and semantics III: Speech acts (pp. 183–198). Academic Press. Grice, H. P. (1978). ‘Further notes on logic and conversation.’ In P. Cole (Ed.), Pragmatics [syntax and semantics 9] (pp.113–128). Academic Press. Grice, P. (1981) Presupposition and conversational implicature. In P. Cole (Ed.), Radical Pragmatics (pp. 183–198). Academic Press. Hickey, L. (2014). The pragmatics of style. Routledge. Horn, L. R. (2008). ‘Implicature’. In L. R. Horn & G. Ward (Eds.), The handbook of pragmatics. Blackwell Publishing Jeffries, L. (2014). Interpretation. In P. Stockwell & S. Whiteley (Eds.), The cambridge handbook of stylistics (pp. 469–486). Cambridge University Press. Levinson, S. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press. Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. MIT Press. Partee, B. (2009). ‘Conventional implicatures ’, https://people.umass.edu/partee/ MGU_2009/materials/MGU098.pdf Pilkington, A. (2000). Poetic effects: A relevance theory perspective. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Potts, C. (2007). ‘Conventional implicatures: A distinguished class of meanings.’ In G. Ramchand & C. Reiss (Eds.), The oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces. Oxford University Press. Pratt, M. L. (1977). Toward a speech act theory of literary discourse. Indiana University Press. Semino, E., & Culpeper, J. (2002). Cognitive stylistics: Language and cognition in text analysis. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Simpson, P. (1993). Language, ideology and point of view. Routledge. Van, D. (1977). Pragmatics and poetics pragmatics and poetics. In D. van (Ed.), Pragmatics of language and literature (pp. 23–58).

CHAPTER 11

Presenting Others’ Speech and Thought: Multiple Voices in Poems

Like Alluding (Chapter 10), at first sight Presenting others’ speech and thought is not the most obvious feature of poetry, except in those cases where a long narrative poem has a cast of characters and plot lines worthy of a novel. However, it turns out that the presentation of language (or its cognitive equivalent in thought) is still a significant feature, even in the short lyric poems of my dataset. This chapter, therefore, explores the extent to which the TCF of speech and thought presentation is useful or insightful in the analysis of poetic language. In everyday communication, we spend a lot of time telling each other what other people have said and even what they have thought, though we have no direct access to the latter. In public communication, such as news reporting, advertising and political communication, we also quote each other regularly and in both cases that representation of others’ language may be more or less accurate, giving rise to the possibility of misrepresentation and resulting manipulation on both personal and ideological levels. In poetry, and indeed in fiction more generally, there is usually no realworld prior language event that is being reported, so the reception of any representation of speech or thought relies on the reader’s understanding of the norms of those everyday genres and text types which do have antecedent language events to report. In poetry, there is an additional default expectation that in the absence of other evidence, the poetic voice is the poet’s own voice and this adds a dimension to the potential effect of speech—and as we shall see later in this chapter—particularly of thought presentation. Moreover, though poems are perfectly capable of being used to tell stories, in fact the genre of the lyric poem is less inclined to include a range of characters who communicate with each other than other fictional and non-fictional genres. This means that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2_11

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the main direction of speech and thought presentation is from the writer to the reader, either representing the writer/narrator’s voice or a persona within the poem. Although poetry has some different norms to other genres, poems in the contemporary period show an awareness of the norms of discourse and thought presentation which allows them to bring in a range of voices to the world being constructed by the text. This includes characters in the scene as well as the poet’s voice. One of the premises of my approach to textual meaning is that there is no absolute difference in how genres use the TCFs, but just some differences of emphasis, frequency or effect. If language users were obliged to learn a series of genre-defined linguistic features in addition to the basic semantico-syntax of a language, this would form a huge burden on memory and it is therefore much more likely that the same range of textual techniques are employed in genres, though to different extents and with different effects, except at the most general level. Though this is generally true of poetry, I found that poems are less likely to use direct and indirect speech than other texts unless there are personas or interactions being represented. As mentioned above, there is also a default assumption about whose thoughts the poem expresses and that default is either the poet or an assumed narrator. Since there is relatively little quotation in my poem sample, the emphasis appears to be on the narration of voice, in other words the simple reporting of the fact that someone spoke (or thought). This end of the spectrum (see Sect. 11.1) is where speech presentation merges with narration itself, with the narration of speaking being just another kind of action alongside other material actions. The transitivity analysis in Chapter 3 noted the fluidity of the categories of Verbalisation and Material Action in a similar way to this. Although my sample of poems did not contain examples of direct speech, this does occur in contemporary, as in older poetry. Tony Harrison’s poems about his parents, for example, often represent their speech, which has a Yorkshire flavour, by the use of italics to highlight the contrast with the poet/narrator’s speech. Here is the opening of part I of ‘Long Distance’ (Harrison, 1978): Your bed’s got two wrong sides. Your life’s all grouse. I let your phone-call take its dismal course: Ah can’t stand it no more, this empty house! Carrots choke us wi’out your mam’s white sauce!

Note that the father in this extract is apparently addressed (by the secondperson pronoun), but we understand that the narrator is not saying these words to the father. The father’s words (italicised), however, represent the monologue that the son is listening to down the phone line. In the remainder of this chapter, I will introduce the model of discourse presentation devised by Leech and Short (1981) and explain the version of

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this model that I am using here. I will then apply it to the poems in my sample and draw some conclusions about the presentation of speech and thought in poetry.

11.1

Speech and Thought Presentation---A Model

Stylistics has benefitted from the model developed by Leech and Short (1981) and revised a number of times since then (see Leech & Short, 2007; Short, 1988, 2012; Short et al., 2002). Though the labels have changed in these revisions, the focus has always been on the way in which others’ language use is represented in text (covering speech and writing) and to the extent that thought is analogous to language use, how that is also represented. Table 11.1 presents the categories as finally settled upon in Short’s (2012) version. Short (2012) adds discourse summary to the list in Table 11.1, but as with many of the later versions, he omits Free Direct Speech, which is deemed to be no different in essence to Direct Speech itself, at least in its claims to faithfulness to a prior speech event. I will discuss these developments in the model in the course of the analysis below. Note that this system for analysing speech, thought and writing presentation in texts has been labelled discourse presentation in more recent discussions. The reason for not using this term here is that on the whole poems do not use quotation for presenting a version of discourse that is happening/has happened. Much more frequently the presentation of speech or thought (rarely writing) is of the kind we saw in Harrison’s poem in the previous section, where the father’s typical speech is presented and the apparent addressing of him by the narrator is what the narrator is thinking rather than saying to the father in return. One of the main issues for speech presentation in both fiction and nonfiction (e.g. political) texts is the extent to which the presentation of speech is faithful to the original language in the case of non-fiction or perceived to be faithful to some imagined antecedent in the case of fiction. The ability to misrepresent others’ language either minimally or extensively is clearly important in the management of human relations either in real or fictional worlds. Table 11.1 Speech presentation categories and prototypical examples

Category

Example

Direct Speech (DS)

‘Just, go – now!’ he said grumpily She should get out now! Grumpily he told her to leave Grumpily he ordered her out He spoke grumpily

Free indirect Speech (FJS) Indirect Speech (IS) Narrator’s Presentation of Speech Act (NPSA) Narrator’s Presentation of Voice (NPV)

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In poetry, misrepresentation is less of an issue, though faithfulness of language in representing a person or a kind of person is of course relevant to the characterisation of such personas. Sometimes, as in the case of Harrison’s poem, the difference between the poetic voice of the poem and any quoted characters is also part of the poem’s literary value.

11.2

Speech and Thought Presentation in Poems

Although there will be some discussion of the presentation of thought in contemporary poems later in this chapter, much of what follows regards the presentation of speech, and only in one case the presentation of writing. I will work through the latest categories set out in Short (2012) from the most faithful end of the scale; i.e. the end of the scale with the most information about what is said and how. 11.2.1

Direct Speech

Because poetry does not generally involve complex narratives with a large cast of characters communicating with each other, there is relatively little direct speech in the poems in my sample. It is more likely, for example, that a narrator (assumed to be the voice of the poet in the absence of evidence to the contrary) will quote themselves, as Duffy does in ‘Litany’: A boy in the playground, I said, told me to fuck off;

As we saw above, the common practice in contemporary poems is to put direct speech in italics, rather than using quotation marks which can interrupt the visual aspect of a poem. Other than this, it is much as a direct quote would work in fiction or other texts, such as news reporting. There is a reporting clause (I said) and what we presume is the verbatim language used in the original utterance. However, this kind of DS is very rare in the poems I have analysed. Direct speech of any kind is also relatively rare, and although Short and others abandoned the category of Free Direct Speech, claiming that it doesn’t differ in faithfulness claims from DS itself, my observation is that this category does seem to be of some use in relation to poetry. ‘Litany’, for example, opens as follows: The soundtrack then was a litany – candlewick bedspread three piece suite display cabinet –

Whilst it is not evident at this point in the poem exactly who the speakers are, the initial head noun (soundtrack) indicates that these words are, indeed, pronounced by someone. Although they are not necessarily said in this order or indeed as a string of nouns, we are nevertheless made aware that this

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kind of naming went on in a child’s memory of the mother’s living room (Lounge) where her mother and friends are discussing such mundane items of middle-class life. The reader therefore understands that the child is remembering snippets of language representing the outdated items and as they were itemised by the women. A more mimetic representation of direct speech, but without a reporting clause and thus potentially seen as FDS, comes at the end of the poem, after the child has shocked the assembled company: I’m sorry, Mrs Barr, Mrs Hunt, Mrs Emery, Sorry Mrs Raine.

Whilst the incident being recounted could have happened exactly as represented, and might have been the poet’s own experience, the representation of speech, we are aware, is possibly only impressionistic. It has the advantage of demonstrating the social norms of these women who are friends but still use their married titles and surnames, rather than first names. We are told these are the actual names (Yes, I can summon their names.) but we are also aware, from the norms of everyday conversation, that when people recount their stories there is some licence in the accuracy with which they represent the language used. The mother may have actually said the names in another order or there may have been one name missed out but these details do not matter to the narrative or its delivery. In ‘Up on the Moors with Keeper’ there is a similar example of what we could call FDS, since there is no reporting clause, though the quoted speech appears to be verbatim: a dull brother whose keep still can’t you? wants to fix them to canvas.

Here, the Bronte sisters’ brother, Branwell, is described as dull and his wheedling speech is put into a noun phrase (whose keep still can’t you?) as though he was known to say this repeatedly when painting them. We have no way of knowing, of course, whether he actually ever said this and because of the distance in time we can be sure that the poet has invented the detail of his speech as a device to express the difference between him and his sisters. Here, then, the faithfulness or otherwise of the attributed speech is not in question so much as the attribution of characteristics that the speech represents. The sisters are free spirits who feel at home on the moor, whereas the brother represents all that constrains them, including in his efforts to capture their likenesses in paint. The question of whether poems are all, in a sense, direct speech, is one that perhaps is more of a literary than a linguistic question. If we think of them as fundamentally a message from the poet to the reader, we could see them as direct discourse of a kind. However, there is often nothing in the text itself to

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indicate this and it is therefore more a contextual generic expectation than an aspect of textual meaning. However, there are occasions in poems when the communication between poet and reader appears to be more direct and this is particularly so when a question is asked. In ‘Up on the Moors with Keeper’, for example, the final stanza opens with the question What could there be to match this glory? It is unclear whether this is a question being asked by the three girls or the narrator/poet voice, but it could be argued that even as a thought, rather than an utterance, it has something direct about it because of its question format. The poem finishes by answering the question, so it clearly was not intended to be something for the reader to answer, but perhaps could be seen as a pause in which both the reader and the narrator contemplate what the answer might be. A very similar technique is used in ‘Household’ which as we have already seen is mainly made up of a list of all the physical materials which are found in a house. After the list, which takes up the first seven lines of the poem, the question is posed: what would it all weigh? and the final line and a half answers the question: One kiss, one breathed/declaration, and there it is: the mass of love. As with the previous example, this seems to be a rhetorical device to let the reader and the poet consider a question that is then answered by the poem. We may not want to see it as being exactly direct speech, but it does appear to remind us of the communication event taking place between the poet and the reader. I will return to both these examples in discussing presentation of thought later in this chapter. A final example in this section comes from ‘Prayer’ which ends with a couplet quoting the shipping forecast which is still broadcast on BBC radio stations long years after it was made redundant by better satellite communication for those at sea: Inside, the radio’s prayer— Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Duffy does not use a reporting clause here, nor the italics which often indicate speech. However, the juxtaposition of the noun phrase the radio’s prayer followed by a dash with the four names of shipping areas in the final line makes it clear that these two are in apposition, with the final line expanding on the notion of what constitutes the radio’s prayer itself. Many have noted that these four shipping areas are not the whole of the list of shipping areas around the coast of the UK and indeed they are not usually listed in quite this way, because there is a set of information about weather which comes between them. Also, they are in the ‘wrong’ order, presumably to fit the rhythm and rhyme scheme of the poem. The questions of whether it makes any sense here to see this as direct speech, or speech summary, or whether it is relevant to ask about its faithfulness to some example of an ‘original’ shipping forecast seem unnecessary to answer. What we have here is an echo of some rhythmic language which many will recognise as part of the soundscape of the UK without it

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needing to be an exact or faithful replication of what is actually said in these speech events. The symbolic value of the shipping forecast as a sign of stability and safety in a changing world, the comfort of empty and under-interpreted words are the reasons why it can be equated with prayers of the more usual (religious) kind. We don’t need to know what they mean, but they make us feel better. 11.2.2

Indirect Speech

As with DS, there is again relatively little IS in the poems I have examined and no examples at all of Free Indirect Speech. This is slightly more surprising, given that FIS in particular is one way to avoid pinning down exactly who is saying the words that are represented—and is therefore one way to merge the writer’s voice with a character’s. In many cases, the putative IS anyway hypothetical, and often modalised too, as in ‘Doorsteps’ where the name for chunky sandwiches that would have been used by the remembered person is recalled: Doorsteps /she’d have called them. In other cases, it seems to be a specific occasion that is recalled, but the speaker is not identified and the general topic, rather than the precise wording is presented: Children stand in line, as if at prayer, being told how to dip their nets once, then twice, into water,

Here, then, the speaker is unimportant (it is some adult looking after the children—a teacher, perhaps) and is avoided by the use of the passive voice (being told). The children become the theme of the sentence, by their positioning as the Goal of the telling process in sentence initial position. The nature of what they are told is partly enacted by the adverbs (once, then twice) which is directly evocative of the actions of the teacher showing them how at the same time as talking (see Chapter 12). But the words the teacher uses are not recoverable in any detail. 11.2.3

Narrative Presentation of Speech Acts

By far the most common type of speech presentation in the poems in my sample was the Narrative Presentation of Speech Acts, such as in ‘A Hairline Fracture’: wherever we went, between fits of sneezing we quarreled and in ‘Doorsteps’: earls and countesses were hinted at. As with the NV category, it would be easy to see this more as a narration of a (spoken) action than presentation of speech itself. However, the slightly increased detail provided by the Speech Act category referred to does get the reader just a little closer to the kind of words spoken if not the content of the communication itself. What is perhaps surprising is the range of possible Speech Acts which occur in the data and how they extend our understanding of the nature and variability of speech

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act categories. Thus, whilst we might not be surprised to see quarrelling and hinting being described as Speech Acts, it might never have occurred to me to talk about spelling out as one, though we see it in ‘Litany’: and sharp hands poised over biscuits as a word/was spelled out. Another deviation from the strict discourse presentation categories represented in this data is the evidence that they are not, in fact, categories at all, but idealised forms between which there is no clear dividing line. In ‘Ironing’, for example, the speech act of inviting is followed by a relatively extended description of what the invitation involved: inviting anyone who dared to lie on my silver padded board, to be pressed to the thinness of dolls cut from paper.

Whilst the context indicates that this was perhaps not an explicit verbal invitation at all, it is nevertheless presented as such and to the extent that the narrator explains what the intention is, we find ourselves almost back in IS territory. A similar example in ‘Summer Evening’ demonstrates the tendency to use communicative events figuratively in poetry: The rowing boat moored there is a temptation you decline,

Even poetic licence does not incline the reader here to interpret this as the rowing boat speaking, and it is only construed as a communicative event by the choice of decline as the (speech) act. We could interpret this through the co-operative principle and its maxims (Chapter 10) as a case of implicature created by the inappropriateness of the speech act verb in reaction to the mere existence of the boat. By unnecessarily answering an unspoken temptation/invitation by the boat, the protagonist/narrator (second person but interpretable as first person) produces the implicature that there is a dialogue being acted out in their head in which they wonder whether to take a boat out on the river but decide against it. This way of producing the impression of an internal dialogue is in some senses a crossover to thought presentation, though the cognitive aspect of the process is not made explicit but is conveyed by implicature. Poems in my sample use NPSA alongside negation to show when language doesn’t occur as in ‘Prayer’ (although we cannot pray) and ‘10 k’ (And the trees and night birds made no comment ) producing in the process an expectation that language might have been expected. As we saw in Chapter 8, negation tends to produce the expectation of the positive, so these poems produce the expectation of prayer and natural sounds (trees rustling and birdsong), respectively, each cancelled by the negated form. Speech Acts can also be introduced by naming, as in ‘Men on Allotments’ where the subtle benediction of the beans is again a figurative use of the speech

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act of blessing, possibly more linked to the physical sign of the cross that priests often make in that moment than to the words. Though writing is rarely mentioned in the poems in my sample, when it is, it is usually equivalent to Speech Acts rather than being direct or indirect reporting of actual language used. Thus, in ‘Platform Piece’, the bereft lover will trace initials in a filthy ashtray, whilst in ‘A Hairline Fracture’ the couple who are in the throes of separating can’t find consolation at: even the small house on Ebury Street where Mozart, at the age of eight, wrote his first symphony,

We are given context through these acts of writing without being told exactly what was written. This is because it is not relevant to the main action. 11.2.4

Narrative Presentation of Voice

We have seen that speech presentation is more common in poems as Speech Acts than direct or indirect reporting of speech. This provides information on the nature of the communication without having to include the details of the wording. Narrative presentation of voice in the model refers to the occasions when we know still less of what the speech is doing, but just know that some speech is taking/ has taken place. ‘It Wasn’t Snowing’ includes a number of NPV examples, including the least explicit That night you read in a slow, dismissive voice. Here, we know that the addressee read aloud (we already suspect it’s a poet and can assume the reading is of poetry). We are told something about the manner in which the reading takes place, though nothing of the content. Other lines recount that You talked about Miss Dickenson of Amherst, thus giving the reader something more than the simple fact of talking but adding only the most general of topics. The effect of these NPV examples in this context is to provide the reader with something of the experience of the child listening to the poet, probably caught up more in the event itself and the manner of delivery than in the exact words spoken. Whilst the Short (2012) model is based on a notion of (perceived) faithfulness, we are not in any sense likely to judge the narrator here for forgetting, misremembering or failing to report exactly what was said. The event is more important than the words themselves, except for the one case where we are indirectly told exactly what was said: And said aloud the eight lines of her poem ‘The heart asks pleasure first’.

This example is interesting from the point of view of the model, as the exact words are entirely recoverable if the reader has the inclination to look up the poem mentioned. This looks something like what Short calls discourse

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summary, and like the earlier examples it gives a flavour of the event, with the exception of a single line, rather than presenting the words spoken in detail. As in many cases in my sample poems, NPV provides some of the atmosphere and background to the wistful thoughts of the narrator in ‘Pond Dipping’: Now the excited shrieks/and baby blond heads are gone. The various versions of the model have not spent much time on the question of whether nominal references to speech (and thought) should or can be included in the analysis, though McIntyre et al. (2004) include this phenomenon in their version of the model as Representation of Voice (RV) and Thompson (1996: 508–509) includes nominal references to speech in his list of signals. It could be argued that such noun phrases as the excited shrieks are equivalent in terms of their position on the faithfulness cline to NPV. We are therefore made aware of the shrieking of the children in much the same way as if it had been presented through a clause (e.g. the children have stopped shrieking). The poetic value of using the nominal phrase instead is that we are not invited to think of the individual children at this point, but of the overall impression their presence made on the observer/narrator who is wishing for a child of her own. Many of the cases of NPV in my sample of poems are presented in nonfinite continuous clauses, such as in ‘Summer Evening’ (laughing like it might last ) or ‘The Unprofessionals’ (Talking sometimes,/About wallflowers, and fishing, and why/ answering the phone). In all of these cases the contribution to the poem is one of general atmosphere and background, rather than individual speech or communicative events. The topics or reason for the communication are sketched in, but there is no simple prior speech event against which faithfulness can be judged and indeed that judgement itself is not relevant since we are aware that the presentation is of an exemplar, rather than an occasion, to provide the backdrop—a kind of soundscape—against which the poem is set. As in these examples, we find that one of the hallmarks of contemporary poems in English is that they often combine detail with generalisation. The balance that is struck between specificity (which implies a particular scenario or event) and general applicability (the scenario may be repeated or could happen to anyone) is one of the great achievements of this kind of poetry where the reader is simultaneously invited into a particular world and also given the opportunity to relate it more widely to their own experience or imagined experience. This effect is achieved not just by the non-finite continuous clauses we saw above, but by present tense verb phrases in the context of Adverbials indicating repeated occurrence, as we see in ‘Prayer’: Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer/ utters itself . Notice the move from the Actor we, which probably indicates anyone or everyone, to the prayer itself being the Actor in a reflexive process (utters itself ). This inability to pray, except involuntarily, is situated in a repeating pattern by the initial Adverbial (Some days ) and like other examples of NPV we have seen it indicates a generalised lack of speech (we cannot pray) as well as a backgrounded indistinct

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speech event where the prayer is spoken despite the speaker’s lack of control over it. Later in the same poem another speech event is represented by NPV: Then dusk, and someone calls a child’s name as though they named their loss.

As with all the examples in this section, this is both specific (we can visualise the scene looking out over a Midlands town) and vague (someone, a child’s name). Thus the use of NPV allows the poem to build a vivid picture of the scene and speech event within that scene and at the same time to provide enough space for the reader to imagine who that someone might be and what the child might be called. We have seen that the presentation of speech in my sample of poems is typically not a combination of standard DS and IS but favours instead narrative reports of Speech Acts and speech events with any DS and IS having a very specific role in building the world of the poem, rather than moving on a plot or informing the reader in a detailed way of the words used. For the final analytical section of this chapter, I will consider the presentation of thought in my sample poems and the extent to which poetry diverges from other genres in its use of thought presentation.

11.3

Thought Presentation in Poetry

As we saw earlier, thought presentation was originally included alongside speech presentation in the model developed by Leech and Short amongst others. The idea was that texts often present thought in a way that is analogous to the presentation of speech, even to the extent that there can be direct thought presentation where the wording of the thoughts is presented in quotation marks: Sam thought “I wonder how long it’s been there?” (invented example). Although the two sets of categories for speech and thought presentation were apparently symmetrical, it was clear that they are not equivalent in terms of faithfulness. We cannot be certain that we think in words and sentences and that others cannot directly witness our thought processes either. Thus, the concept of faithfulness is not relevant. Additionally, the ‘norm’ of thought presentation is seen in the model as being indirect rather than direct, since the gist of thoughts is all that we can really aspire to know (see Leech & Short, 2007: 276). 11.3.1

Direct Thought

In view of the limitations on our knowledge of others’ thoughts, it is perhaps not surprising to find that my sample of poems has few cases of DT, and those that do occur are in poems narrated in the first person. Whilst even our own thoughts are not necessarily accessible in some kind of verbatim form, we

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nevertheless have the authority to express them as we wish. The faithfulness of DT presentation in the first person is therefore as reliable as it gets. In ‘Baking’, for example, the narrator thinks (consider) about the face of the loved one being recalled and how she associates this face with a range of senses (sounds, thoughts, smells, shapes ): so that I stop to consider how, involuntarily, sounds, thoughts, smells, shapes are habits arranged around her face.

There are no quotation marks here and it is possible to think of this as indirect thought, rather than direct thought, particularly in light of the subordinating adverb, how. Nevertheless, the present tense of the memories (are) potentially brings this presentation of thought into the direct category. Although poetry is very often concerned with the internal workings of the mind and emotions, the explicit presentation of thought is less evident than, for example, in literary fiction where an omniscient narrator may present the thoughts of a number of characters. The common mantra in poetry-writing courses, Show not Tell, partly explains the lack of meta-presentation of thought, since, in a sense, poetry is almost all indirectly presenting thoughts. 11.3.2

Free Indirect Thought

For the reasons given at the end of the last section, FIT is harder to identify than it might be in fiction or other genres, such as news reporting. Whilst much poetry could be seen as a kind of internal monologue, which it might be argued is thought presentation, there is little of the equivalent to FIS where the wording of such thoughts is made plain. Perhaps the two clearest candidates for FIT in my sample of poems are the two examples of a question being asked, with no explicit addressee in the scenario. We have already seen these in Sect. 11.2.1, where the inclusion of direct questions was considered a possible sign that the poet is ‘speaking’ directly to the reader. However, an alternative, or even possibly a preferred option is to interpret these questions as evidence of internal monologue, with the answers also forming part of the thought process of the narrator. Here are the examples again: What could there be to match this glory?1 High summer, a scent of absent rain, away from the dark house, father and duty.

[Up on the Moors with Keeper] 1 In this case, a third option is that it is the thought process of the three sisters, which works just as well.

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what would it all weigh? One kiss, one breathed declaration, and there it is: the mass of love.

[Household] In both of these cases, the implied presence of a narrator is caused by the use of a direct question, but since the narrator is not explicitly present in the scene and there is no addressee mentioned, the default interpretation is that the question in each case is in the mind of the omniscient narrator (or poet) as is the answer too. These are, therefore, close to being examples of Free Indirect Thought. It is perhaps significant that these are both taken from the closing lines of the poem. Whilst not all poems in the sample close with a reflective comment on what has gone before, it is within a strong tradition, often found in the sonnet form, to have just such a reflection. Interpreting these examples as internal monologues fits with that tradition. 11.3.3

Indirect Thought

Like the other categories of thought presentation, Indirect Thought (IT) is rarely made explicit through reporting clauses, though as we have seen it is often possible to see poems as containing thought representation. The examples below are the only ones in my sample where the thought presentation is made explicit. In ‘It Wasn’t Snowing’, the narrator tells the reader what he thinks of the poet who has visited his school to read to the children: I think you let more lines free into language And memory with your rusty, lonely voice Than any other poet of our age,

The opening of this clause (I think) allows us to accept that what follows in the clausal Object is the truth of the thoughts of the narrator in as accurate a wording as possible. However, it might be argued that this is a modal use of the verb think and that it is therefore more an expression of an opinion than of a thought process. The difference is, perhaps, relatively trivial, but it is another illustration of the fact that it is often possible to approach textual analysis using different tools (in my case, different TCFs) and these will throw a different light on the textual meaning. Thus, we can see here that there are thoughts being expressed, which can also be seen as opinions (and thus open to argument). A similar argument can be made for the analysis of the other example in my data, from ‘Crafty’, where the use of an explicit statement of mental cognition (I’m aware) not only tells us what is in the narrator’s mind, but as it is a factive verb, also presupposes the truth of what follows: I’m aware that even

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the names for your skills are exiting Left out of my head, and the mother tongue, shop soiled, shop spoiled, we learn to forget.

Note that in this case, the modality does not raise doubts about the awareness itself, because the presupposition trumps the modal effect. However, the presence of the reporting clause produces a range of effects that can be explained through other TCFs, including the de-prioritising of the things the narrator is aware of, to a level of structure below that of the awareness itself. Taking that clause away would produce a different effect: even the names for your skills are exiting left … with the loss of the symbolic effect of the things that are lost being embedded at low levels of structure and thus backgrounded. Perhaps the most striking example of meta-representation of thought in my sample of poems comes from ‘Prospero’s Gifts’ where the troubled childhood of the narrator is presented in a series of clauses where the nature and variety of the thought processes are captured by the reporting verb (underlined here): Thinking it was happening just to me. Many years I mourned for what was done, Puzzled over every sharp and shattered piece, Wondering where each missing part had gone, Looking for the keys to my own release.

In the context of the genre of contemporary poetry where explicit thought presentation of this kind is rare, this repeated use of reporting clauses expressing different kinds of thinking is externally deviant and thus foregrounded. The pattern which this section of the poem sets up is then broken in the second half of the poem where the metaphor of Prospero’s gifts contrasts with the angst-ridden thinking of the first half and presents the solution as ‘glimpses of wisdom’ rather than an organised set of thoughts. 11.3.4

Narrative Presentation of a Thought Act

The categories of thought presentation are even more slippery in poetry than in other genres and less clear-cut than speech presentation too. However, there are some candidates in my sample for NPTA where the nature of the thinking (hence thought act) and the general topic, rather than a detailed account of the thoughts, is presented. In ‘Greenhouse’, for example, the narrator thought back to the morning we built it which introductory NPTA is followed by a narrative account of what actually happened on that morning: We used the old sash windows from the house, held them flat with leather gloves, steadied them down the path.

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Whilst this extract, out of context, would seem to be narration rather than thought presentation, in the wake of the NPTA, it appears to be filling in detail of the memories themselves, thus becoming more like another case of FIT. This is not the narrator telling the reader what happened but telling the reader what they remembered. The difference is significant as it adds layers of perception to the poem which would be absent from a simple narration of events. Although the example above uses the general verb think, it implies a particular kind of thinking (i.e. a specific thought act) by the addition of back (I thought back). By contrast, the final example is an example of thinking forward, or imagining. It comes from ‘Summer Evening’: you imagine / being out on that water and presents a generalised thought about what it would be like to take the boat instead of continuing to walk. Like the previous example, the poem continues with more details of how it would indeed feel to be out on the water: the drag and viscous ripples as you pull, then shipping oars and just letting it drift.

In the previous example, from ‘Greenhouse’, the additional detail was provided in a separate sentence which was only interpreted as part of the memories in the context of what went before. Here, however, the additional detail is in the form of a noun phrase and a nominal clause both of which act in apposition to the general concept of being out on that water. They are thus more clearly linked to the initial imagined scenario and could even more readily be interpreted as free direct thought extending the imaginary sequence.

11.4

Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in Poetry

What this chapter has discovered about the use and effect of speech (writing) and thought presentation will be summarised here and some conclusions drawn as a result. Whilst there is no clear pattern of usage that marks out the genre of contemporary poetry in this regard, we have seen that there are tendencies in the sample of poems examined which indicate a slight difference between poetry and other genres such as fiction, non-fiction and everyday spoken interaction. The findings here are that with regard to speech and writing presentation the poems favour the non-faithful end of the Leech and Short (2007)/Short (2012) model, though the occasional inclusion of DS and FDS in some poems is marked by being indicative of what might have been said, often across a number of occasions, rather than reporting a particular speech event verbatim. I have speculated that the tendency towards the non-faithful end of the spectrum might be because there is less narrative complexity in poems with fewer

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characters interacting with each other (though this can happen). More significantly, perhaps, the non-faithful end of the spectrum (NPV, NPSA, etc.) allows more space for the reader to fill in the blanks of what exactly might have been said, allowing poetry the latitude to be both detailed and also vague enough for readers to find their own way to relate to the scenario being presented. On some occasions, too, the lack of verbatim detail about the wording itself indicates the relative unimportance of what was said, compared to the fact of someone speaking or the background effect on the soundscape of speech and other communicative sounds (such as shrieking and laughter). The presentation of thought in my sample of poems created a different kind of challenge. There is little clear meta-presentation of thought (through explicit reporting clauses) in the poems, though where it does happen, it can be foregrounded as a result of its rarity and is often linked to a first-person narrator or an identifiable third-person narrator. More difficult is the identification of thought beyond these examples, since it is possible to interpret much poetry as though it were all free direct thought, which would invalidate the label to some extent. However, some identifiable signs of FDT and FIT were observed. The conclusions to be drawn from this chapter are that poetry occupies a particular corner of the STWP spectrum and makes several specialised uses of the range of normal presentation of speech, thought, and to a lesser extent writing. The presentation of speech events can often merge with the narration as a simple part of the background, and even where DS is indicated, this may be more symbolic of the kinds of things that are typically said than verbatim reporting. In the poetic genre, perhaps above all others, faithfulness of reporting is not what is valued, since it is an accepted aspect of poetry that we are reding the poet’s view of how things are, with the expectation that this may differ from others’ viewpoints.

References Harrison, T. (1978). From the school of eloquence: And other poems. Collings. Leech, G., & Short, M. (1981 [2007]). Style in fiction. Longman. McIntyre, D., Bellard-Thompson, C., Heywood, J., McEnery, T., Semino, E., & Short, M. (2004, 1 January). In ICAME Journal, 28, 49–76. Short, M. (1988). Speech presentation, the novel and the press. In W. van Peer (Ed.), The Taming of the Text (pp. 61–81). Routledge. Short, M., Semino, E., & Wynne, M. (2002). Revisiting the notion of faithfulness in discourse presentation using a corpus approach. Language and Literature, 11(4), 325–355. Short, M. (2012). Discourse presentation and speech (and writing, but not thought) summary. Language and Literature, 21(1), 18–32. Thompson, G. (1996). Voices in the text: Discourse perspectives on language reports. Applied Linguistics, 17 (4), 501–530.

CHAPTER 12

Evoking: Experiencing the Poem’s World

So far, this book has applied the existing TCFs from the critical stylistics framework to poetry, to see how well they work as an approach for poetic style as opposed to ideological style. The process has thrown up some differences of stylistic preference between the poetic and other genres and had caused me to rethink the labelling and nature of some of the TCFs, but on the whole the model of textual meaning seems to adequately cover those aspects of poetic style that I would want to capture. However, there is one area of poetic meaning that has not, so far, been integrated into the model, though it is one that I have written about in other contexts before (see, for example, Jeffries, 2010). I have long been interested in the way that both phonology and grammar can seem to directly evoke the meaning that they convey and though I have often labelled it iconicity, I am now calling it direct and indirect evocation, in order to align it with the other TCFs and because iconicity may not cover all of the effects that can be grouped together, including indexical meaning. For this TCF, texts are seen as directly (or indirectly) evoking meaning that they may also convey by more conventional linguistic means. This direct evocation differs from conventional linguistic meaning in that it is intrinsically linked in some way to the meaning it conveys whereas much of the rest of language at all levels is considered to be arbitrary (though see Dingemanse et al., 2015 for a different view). Whilst onomatopoeia is wellrecognised as a minor example of direct evocation of sounds by the sounds of language, especially in child-directed language (e.g. in the moo, baa, woof woof of animal sounds in English), this semiotically iconic use of sound in the lexicon is not the only way in which language can directly evoke meaning

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and it is in the study of textual meaning, particularly poetic meaning, that we find the most interesting extension of this idea. Seeing such effects as part of textual meaning allows us to consider a wider range of iconic effects, as we shall see in this chapter, but it also provides space to include a more indirect effect of evocation, which in semiotic terms we could label indexical.

12.1

Iconicity1

Although much of modern linguistics, from Saussure onwards, has been predicated on the notion that the linguistic sign has an arbitrary connection to its referent(s), the existence of iconicity in language has always been recognised minimally in the form of onomatopoeia and sound-symbolism more generally, and has recently been studied extensively as a property of language as a whole, including possible universal iconic features. Much of the impetus for this work has come from literary studies, and particularly from those working in this field from countries where English is not the dominant language who often do not see a gap between literary and linguistic approaches to text. As Müller (1999: 394) says: The study of iconicity provides an ideal field of research for linguists and literary critics alike and may thus help to bridge the gulf between the two disciplines which has steadily widened in the course of the twentieth century.

Those working in this field have drawn distinctions between iconicity which has a direct link to referents, in some way being straightforwardly mimetic of the ‘real world’ and iconicity which is more indirect in its linking to referents. These have been labelled imagic and diagrammatic iconicity, respectively, initially by Peirce (1960) and Jakobson (Jakobson, 1963; Jakobson & Halle, 1956) and later by Haiman (1985), amongst others. Fischer (1999: 346) explains: only in imagic iconicity, is there a straight iconic link between the verbal sign and the image or object (the ‘signans’ and the ‘signatum’), as for instance in onomatopoeia. Diagrammatic iconicity is more like a topographic map, where the relation between objects or concepts in the real world (as we see it) can be deduced from the relations indicated on the map.

If we think in terms of phonology, then, the fact that speech sounds can (directly) mimic other sounds such as whistles (through fricative consonants), high pitches (through close vowels) or gunshots (through plosive consonants) would be seen as imagic, since there is a direct correlation between the sign and its referent. Sound-symbolism, such as the use of close vowels to signify small size and open vowels to signify large size, would then be diagrammatic, 1 This section is adapted from an account originally published as part of Jeffries (2010) where ‘The Unprofessionals’ was analysed as an example of iconicity.

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since there is a correlation, but not a direct mimesis. However, there is no absolute distinction between these two kinds of iconicity, as Fischer (1999: 346) explains: But even within diagrammatic iconicity, there are differences in terms of concreteness. It is interesting to observe, for instance, when Max Nänny applies the various types of diagrammatic iconicity distinguished by Haiman (1980) to poetry, that the use made of it there is more concrete than the examples that Haiman gives from the more conventional syntax of everyday speech.

It seems, therefore, that there is at least a single-dimension cline between directly iconic and less concretely iconic signs in language. It is possible, too, that this gradation falls away in more than one direction (see Jeffries, 2010). Notice that those concerned with iconicity make no qualitative distinction in general between the iconicity of literary works and the language more generally. Müller (1999: 393–394), for example, makes the explicit assumption that literary language works in much the same way as other language: Now if iconicity is always a latent possibility of aesthetic or poetic language and, further, if we take it for granted that aesthetic or poetic language exploits, develops and heightens possibilities already inherent in ordinary, non-poetic discourse, the massive presence of iconic forms of expression in literature can be regarded as lending support to the theory of the iconic potential of language in general.

This assumption is one that is now taken for granted in stylistics, which treats all text processing by readers as essentially the same. This will be an important point in the analysis of iconicity later in this chapter, since I want to argue that iconicity in poetry of the kind I am interested in is both dependent on, and also deviant from, the norms of English. For now, let us consider some of the iconicity that has been proposed at the syntactic level of language. One of the more influential writers on this topic in recent years has been Haiman, who is amongst those postulating a universal link between the tendency for languages to order their syntax in SVO order, and the centrality of the action, in linking the participants in any process. Here is an explanation of this idea from Conradie (2001: 230): Given that entities/things and actions/activities are conceived of as a basic distinction in perception, two universal but complementary strategies of sentence construction come to mind as possible ways of dealing with the relationship between them: (i) a classificatory strategy of grouping together elements similar in status, viz. the entities vs. the action, as would be exemplified by SO-V or V-SO structures, and (ii) an activity-based strategy with the action in the centre (not only figuratively, but also literally) and entities relegated to the periphery. Though it is to be expected that any universal trait of

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language is iconically motivated in some sense, the present claim in regard to iconicity does not apply to the former or other conceivable strategies, but only to the latter, i.e. the relation between SVO structures and activity.

This relation between the SVO (or SPO) order and a proposed arrangement of process/action and participants is part of the argument that some put forward for a ‘natural’ iconicity which reflects the point of view of the producer, rather than an objective link to something in the real world. Thus, it is argued, human beings perceive the events that they see unfold as processes linking the various participants and circumstances, with the result that it seems most natural to have the verb in the middle of a clause, linking the Subject with the Object or other participants. Note here that the use of point of view refers to the natural, and possibly universal perceptions of any speaker or writer in any (SVO) language. However, in the case of many specific texts, including literary ones, there is also the potential to exploit this underlying (possibly universal but at least generalised) point of view and present a specific point of view of a character, the narrator or the author. I will return to this point later, but here we should note that even early semiotics (as put forward by Peirce and others) never really claimed that linguistic signs linked to any objective reality; rather, the whole of linguistic signification, from the arbitrary to the iconic, is always a question of point of view. Nöth (2001: 20) explains: The object of a sign, according to Peirce, is no object of an external reality, no object that exists independently of the sign. Peirce says nothing about the ‘reality’ of this object at all and describes it as something “perceptible, or only imaginable or even unimaginable in one sense” (CP 2.230). He even goes so far as to speculate that “perhaps the Object is altogether fictive”. (CP 8.314)

So, iconicity in language is the direct (imagic) or indirect (diagrammatic) or even mediated (metaphoric) representation of perceived objects, events, actions and processes. If we think in terms of the more concrete (direct) end of this spectrum being a little like looking at a film of a person, then the experience is similar to actually seeing this person, even though it is a two-dimensional, image which cannot interact with us, rather than the threedimensional interactive image we see if we actually encounter her/him. At the other extreme, but still within the non-arbitrary range, we have something like the stylised map of the London Underground, which represents the relationship between stations in terms of their links, but has no direct relationship to distance, as anyone who has tried walking overground using a tube map in London will testify! Some of the stations that look close together on the map are actually very far apart indeed. So, the Tube map is like a code, but it is not completely arbitrary. We can work out routes in the real world from the logic of the system, without being able to directly translate from the map to the lines themselves.

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How can we see the iconicity of syntax in relation to this range of iconicity in visual phenomena? We may, perhaps, assume that any direct connections between language and the bodily senses are at the concrete end of the spectrum. Since language cannot be smelt or tasted, and only in relatively rare cases (including, of course, braille) can it be felt, we are left with the sound and the look of language as the main possibilities for imagic iconicity. These bring us back to the classic case of onomatopoeia in the case of sound on the one hand and perhaps concrete poetry, where the layout and font can be made to look like the meaning, in the case of the written language on the other (see Short 1999 for discussion of this phenomenon). As we saw earlier, one step away from direct iconicity might be the sound-symbolism which relies on some kind of indirect relationship, such as the relation between pitch of vowels and size, or the use of fonts in emails to SHOUT at your addressee. Once we move to syntax and higher level structures, it is the linearity of language which leads us to the most direct kind of syntactic iconicity. Thus it is the linear form of language which can most directly be mapped onto the (perceived) world either in space or in time. Sentences and sequences of sentences often tend to address events and process in the order they happened, leading to the common view that chronology is the default order of a narrative and that this is direct (imagic) iconicity. Similarly, it would be possible for the linearity of a sentence or sequence of sentences to represent relationships in space, though as space is multi-dimensional, and time is more clearly experienced as linear, time tends to take precedence in linking to structure. Whilst this kind of link between syntax or discourse structure and the world may seem to be direct, we are reminded by various researchers that the link is between the linguistic form and the norms of human cognition and perception, rather than being simplistically a mirror to reality. Here is Müller (2001: 305) on this subject: What the linguistic structure imitates is not external reality, but a subjective perception or, rather, conception of reality, a mental structure which is related to external reality but does not merely imitate or copy it. Rhetorical features, for instance, schemes like asyndeton and climax or different forms of word-order, are structuring and ordering devices, which point to the structure and activity of the mind and to cognitive and epistemological processes. The categories, which Earl Anderson relates to syntactic ‘iconisms’, — “chronology, hierarchy, preference, direction, length or duration, and complexity versus simplicity” (...) — belong to the sphere of the mind or consciousness and not to that of external reality.

This argument appears to take iconicity beyond the purely physical and into the emotional and cognitive field. Directly evoking emotion as opposed to evoking sensory effects in the visual or auditory domains, seems nevertheless to retain something of the more concrete, imagic form of iconicity, since no key is required to unlock the iconicity. However, since it is presented in the quotation above as a version of universal iconicity, which by its nature will

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be backgrounded, it is being presented as not choice-based and therefore can have no particular stylistic effect. Nevertheless, there do appear to be syntactic choices, in English at least, whereby if we take the basis of syntax and discourse construction to be a case of working with the grain of natural iconicity, authors can produce otherwise syntactically acceptable texts which foreground deviation from this iconic norm. This property of text construction points to what could be seen as a secondary kind of iconicity, producing an iconic reaction in readers as a result of deviating from universal iconicity and leading to effects that I will discuss in relation to the poems in the next section. Some scholars of rhetoric have argued that there is a relation between the tropes and schemes of rhetoric on the one hand and natural iconicity on the other. Here, Müller (2001: 308) makes this point: Citing evidence from the entire tradition of rhetoric, Brian Vickers argues that in writing “schemes and tropes are basically stylizations or records of man’s natural emotional behaviour as expressed in language” (...). Thus rhetorical figures of omission, unusual word order or repetition are held to be imitative of actual disturbances of language in emotional contexts, which, in turn, reflect feelings and emotional states such as anger, grief, indignation or consternation.

This kind of argument is often made, not just in relation to rhetorical figures, but also in relation to the style, for example, of Modernist writing, where the disintegration of syntax was seen as a direct reflection of the apocalyptic views often taken in the literature of the early twentieth century (see Sherry, 2004 for a discussion of this subject). What I want to argue here goes beyond the simple reflection of the subject matter of a text in its syntax. I would make the case that the reader is invited to directly experience some of the meaning of the text, triggered by the structures of the text. This is achieved most readily when there is some kind of foregrounding, as explained here by Müller (2001: 319): In this as in many other cases in rhetorical speech it is just the deviation from the iconic norm which manifests iconicity most conspicuously. This is iconicity, to be sure, on a level different from the mere miming of external reality. It is non-objective or, to use Tabakowska’s term once more, ‘experiential iconicity’.

Though iconicity in poetry may be foregrounded by being deviant, this is normally still within the bounds of syntactic acceptability, unlike some of the more radical syntactic deviation I have mentioned above. Thus, although the reader may be marginally aware of things not being quite ‘normal’, this will be less salient than, say, an invented word or a long string of alliterative words. We will return to the question of salience later. What is clear, from those approaching iconicity from the viewpoint of rhetoric, is that some rhetorical figures are seen as naturally iconic and others seem to be deviant, and thus foregrounded, to achieve their effect.

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The closest example I have found to my own observations is from Müller (1999: 406) who describes in detail the way in which Wilkie Collins manages to produce suspense in his most famous novel, The Woman in White. The commentary is long, and the following begins about halfway through: It is only then that the grammatically required temporal clause is reached which resolves the syntactic and semantic suspense of the construction. But even then Collins uses protracting syntactic devices, an adverbial phrase and a passive construction which shifts the agent of the action to a prepositional phrase: “when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand …”. But, owing to Collins’ point-of-view technique, even now the entire event is not yet brought into focus. The following onesentence paragraph describes the protagonist’s physical reaction to the event, before the whole situation is depicted in the last of the quoted sentences, yet again not without the use of suspense-increasing syntactic devices (inversion of the word order, the use of adverbial elements, parenthesis): “There […] stood the figure of a solitary Woman …”. This is indeed a supreme example of the art of creating suspense. The syntax with its many retarding, i.e. suspenseheightening devices, makes the passage examined a suspense plot in miniature, an analogue to the novel’s overall structure with its step-by-step revelation of the central mystery.

Interestingly, the commentary itself acquires something of the same technique of slow revelation as it describes each clause and delaying tactic that is used to produce a sense of anticipation in the reader. What Müller does not do, however, is to take the reader’s perspective in this description. If he had done so, he would have used this commentary to explain how the reader is drawn into the viewpoint of the narrator and how s/he therefore feels some of the anticipation directly, as a result of the syntactic suspense. It is this direct experience of the reader which interests me here, and which I would argue cuts across some of the distinctions made by other researchers into iconicity.

12.2 Direct and Indirect Evocation by Sound and Image Since language is mostly processed either aurally or visually, the two straightforward ways in which texts such as poems can evoke meaning are by the way they look and the way they sound. In this section, I will examine the ways in which my sample poems use these two methods of evoking meaning and will discuss the extent to which this evocation can be seen as direct (i.e. imagic iconicity), indirect (i.e. diagrammatic iconicity) or in many cases as having aspects of both. In ‘Ironing’, the early days of the narrator’s domestic unhappiness are symbolised by her frantic ironing of everything that comes her way: my iron f lying over sheets and towels

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like a sledge chased by wolves over snow;

The concentration of fricative sounds in this extract (in bold) can be seen as evoking directly the sound of the steam iron that the narrator is using. Notice, however, that this sound effect is in addition to the rest of the textual meaning, since the words themselves are not describing the sounds of the ironing. It is continued in the lines that follow, whilst the narrator remains in a state of high emotion and this whole first part of the poem contrasts in sound with the final lines of the poem where the narrator is happily and contentedly ironing only her own clothes: breathing the sweet heated smell. Although the direct evocation of steam ironing is still to be found in the fricatives here, the furious pace of the earlier ironing has been replaced by the repeated long vowel /i:/ in three closely placed words (breathing, sweet, heated) which directly evoke the slower strokes of the iron in this phase of life and perhaps also indirectly evoke the calmer breathing of the narrator herself. Textual meaning is tied to the choices made in the surroundings of the cotext: unlike linguistic meaning, it does not deliver propositional meaning and unlike interpersonal (pragmatic) meaning, it is not reliant on a set of complex contextual clues and knowledge. What this means for direct evocation of the kind I am discussing here (as for all the TCFs) is that the same phenomenon can have different effects depending on the other textual features around it. In the last paragraph, I argued that a concentration of fricative sounds evokes the sound of a steam iron, but it can also evoke the sound of many feet running, as in this extract from ‘10 k’: Along the lines of hedges and verges Past closed gates and badly f enced f ields Over pavements and cinder paths

As in ‘Ironing’, the direct evocation here is not linked to the linguistic meaning which describes the terrain over which the runners are passing. However, the sounds of the 10 km race are evoked by the frication which favours the non-sibilant fricatives over /s/ or /z/. The effect is therefore more of white noise than whistling. Insofar as it represents the sounds of the runners, then, it is direct evocation, even though this is not the direct topic of the text. Whilst there is a great deal of direct evocation in poetry, as there also is in other creative genres, such as advertising, by far the greatest number of phonological reflections of meaning in my sample were hard to classify as direct evocation alone. Many of them, for example, have elements of both direct and indirect evocation. In ‘Greenhouse’, for example, this happens when the narrator first enters the old structure: I burst in the other day; kicked the door out of its warped frame

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Here, the sound of the violent entry is represented directly by the short front closed vowels (/I/) and plosive consonants (/b/, /t/, /k/, /d/, /p/) but at the same time, the short sharp movements necessary to break in through the warped door are also indirectly evoked by these same sounds. Indirect evocation of this kind is one of the most effective features of contemporary poetry, working at a slight remove from the lexico-syntactic features of the text but adding a layer of experiential meaning which the reader may respond to at a subconscious level. The effect is made more prominent by the next clause in the poem which shifts from action to contemplation and where the phonology is dominated not by short vowels and plosives but by long vowels, nasals and liquids: stood in the green light among nine years of unnatural growth

There is nothing directly evocative about this combination of sound types, since quiet contemplation does not produce a sound in itself. However, the softer and slower movement of the phonemes in this extract indirectly evokes the calmer atmosphere of the greenhouse once the narrator is inside, particularly in contrast to the previous lines. Later in the same poem, another example of both direct and indirect evocation is evident in the passage where the narrator is remembering being a child and looking out for the father from a bedroom window: straining f or the sound of the hasp or guessing your distance by the sparkle of a cuff link

Here, there is yet another use of a build-up of fricative consonants which in the first line directly evoke the sound of the gate opening and in the second line indirectly evoke the sparkle of the father’s cufflinks. Though different senses are invoked here, the use of the same phonological set to evoke both a sound (grating of the hasp) and an image (the sparkling of something bright) brings out the combined experience of the child straining to both hear and see his father and also draws out the intermittent nature of a rough sound like a gate being opened and of a sparkling cufflink. Within phonemic patterns, each aspect of the sound can be used indirectly to evoke something about the meaning of the text. We have seen frication used both for direct evocation of a range of sounds from ironing to running and gates opening. We have also seen frication’s intermittent nature being turned from a reflection of sound to the reflection of light (sparkling). This evocation which turns a physical characteristic into one appealing to a different one of the senses is one of the ways in which indirect evocation is still linked to the essence of the sound but not representing sound itself. Thus, in ‘Blackberry Picking’, for example, the shape of the berries is evoked by glossy purple clot where the assonance of the back vowel, /A/, in glossy and clot, indirectly

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evokes the shape of the berries by the relatively open and rounded shape of the oral cavity and the lip-rounding of this vowel. In addition, the tasting of the berries as the children are picking is evoked by the shape of the mouth as a berry enters it, appealing thereby to the sense of touch and perhaps also taste. Compared to this evocation, the end of the poem, when all the berries have gone rotten and are covered with mouldy growth, evokes the lack of visual definition of the individual berries and the texture of the mould by yet another concentration of fricative sounds: But when the bath was f illed we f ound a f ur, A rat-grey f ungus, glutting on our cache.

The long nature of fricative sounds echoes the mould growing across and between the berries, and the additional small cluster of voiced velar plosives (/g/) personify the mould as somehow swallowing the berries, with the physical link of the back of the throat to swallowing being the cause of the evocation here. In some cases, as here, it is difficult to say which sense the evocation is drawing on, given that it is not direct. Touch, via the experience of swallowing, is perhaps closest in this case. There are very many ways in which the physicality of sounds can be used indirectly to evoke meanings. The higher pitch of closed vowels and lower pitch of open vowels can be used not only to represent pitch directly but to evoke size (small and large, respectively) and, through metaphorical means, even psychological features such as timidity versus bravery or light versus dark. In ‘Up on the Moors with Keeper’ for example, the freedom of the girls when they are outside on the moor is associated with front vowels (They’ve kicked up their heels; all wings and f aces dipped in l ight ) whereas the constriction of their domestic life is connected with back vowels (dull brother; dark house, f ather and duty). These indirect evocations are of the airiness and light of being outdoors, with the front vowels being so close to the outside of the mouth, and the darkness and lack of air in the house, with back vowels being located away from the opening of the lips. The high/low vowel distinction is also in play here, with the lightness/darkness of high front and (mostly) low back vowels playing a part in evoking not just physical but also psychological characteristics of the three Bronte sisters. In addition to the phonetic nature of the sounds evoking meaning directly or indirectly, the rhythm of poetic lines can also be iconic in certain ways. I will not be investigating poetic metre here, because unless it is internally or externally deviant, and thus foregrounded, it is not, on the whole contributing to textual meaning beyond placing a poem into a particular tradition, which is contextual information beyond the scope of this book. However, as English is largely made up of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, though not uniformly so, any foregrounded deviation from a mixed pattern of stresses and unstresses may contribute to the evocation of meaning, directly or indirectly. The juxtaposition of a number of stressed syllables, for example, will usually

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appear to slow the text down and thus directly evoke a slowing of whatever action is being taken, particularly if the vowels are also long (or diphthongs). In ‘Figs’, the tree is found in suburban garden, presumably in the UK. The figs themselves are snuck among broad-leaved green and the three stressed syllables here, each with a long vowel as their nucleus, indirectly evoke the large fig leaves which hide the fruit from sight and the effort required to see them. Similarly in ‘Greenhouse’, three stressed syllables, also built around long vowel nuclei, in the first line evoke the narrator’s scanning of the broken down structure: each l oose pane and repeated single syllable words in the final line of the first stanza evoke the narrator’s memory of watching each of your steps as he and his father carried the windows to the garden to create the greenhouse. It is hard to say whether this is a direct evocation of the footsteps (their sound and rhythm) or an indirect evocation of the mental image of those steps in the mind’s eye that is remembering them. The distinction, useful in some cases, may not always enlighten. Like all linguistic labels and so-called categories, they should be treated as reference points with no hard borders between them.

12.3 Evocation Through Manipulation of Poetic Form Poetic form is not a major topic in this book because on the whole it is a feature of the art form of poetry which does not draw on the textual level of meaning which I aim to examine. The choice of sonnet or villanelle forms, the use of a regular rhyme scheme, metre or syllabic structure are all decisions made by poets, consciously or otherwise. They also convey some meaning, but most of this is not based in the language so much as the genre and traditions of poetry in particular and literature more widely. The meaning of any form chosen by a poet, therefore, is mainly intertextual, with an indirect reference to the real world, rather than a textual effect within the world of the poem. However, within these more contextually based considerations, there are stylistic choices made within the patterns of metre, rhyme and verse form which may reflect or construct the meaning of the text in ways that are entirely in line with the kinds of textual meaning I am considering here, and this section will explore the variety of ways in which form works in the poems in my sample. Whilst choice of the form, metre and rhyme scheme may also work with other TCFs (for example, to underpin equating or opposition), these are secondary effects of such choices. Here, I am concerned with effects which directly or indirectly evoke the meanings themselves. One of the most common ways in which poetic form corresponds to meaning in my poetry sample is in the meaning potential of line-breaks. Since most of these poems do not conform to a standard form with, for example, fourteen iambic pentameter lines, as in a sonnet, the line-breaks themselves become meaningful, rather than simply musical, and thus almost any line-break can be used (and often is) to directly evoke the meaning. There are two basic options available for line-endings. First, they can be end-stopped, usually by a

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sentence boundary, though this could also be a less final punctuated boundary such as the end of a finite clause or phrase signalled by a comma or semicolon. The other option is what is traditionally called the run-on line, where the structure, sense and meaning continue smoothly from one line to the next. However, the line-breaks are not irrelevant. They provide the eye and the ear (the latter either aurally or in the mind’s ear) with a break that is either coextensive with the structure (as in the end-stopped lines) or that produces tension with the structure (as in the run-on lines). Whilst this generation of poets are not by any means the first to exploit this potential for matching of structure and line-endings or tension between them, the prevalence of free verse in contemporary writing means that this technique is perhaps more fully explored. We could see the line-breaks in a poem as a natural place to also break the structure and therefore the sense. This would mean that run-on lines are externally deviant, since they break up the synergy of line-endings and syntactic boundaries. However, run-on lines and internal syntactic boundaries are so common in poems that the end-stopped line which corresponds to the sentence boundary can also be foregrounded as internally deviant in places. The frequency of meaningful run-on lines means that they are less foregrounded than if they were rarer. However, the process of considering the form of a poem adds to the analyst’s understanding of how the particular meaning and atmosphere of that text is created. In ‘Baking’, for example, the two run-on lines in the opening stanza give the eye or ear a pause where there might be none if it were written as prose: Strange, her knack for turning up these thirty odd years when I least expect her:

These line-breaks allow us to consider first the length of time over which the person has been turning up and then how she is not expected. In each case, the new information on the new line adds something that might not be anticipated. We could explain this in terms of direct evocation, since the turning up over a period of thirty years is extended over the line ending and the surprise each time is also provided by its occurrence on a new line. This effect is created because each of the run-on lines could legitimately be the end of the sentence but the lack of a full-stop conveys the information that it is not. The reader is therefore caught between the syntax which appears complete at first glance and the punctuation which tells us that it is not. The way in which poets read out their work often uses incomplete intonation patterns (level or rising tones) to leave such ambiguity in place even in the spoken version of the poem. Although I am exploring this evocation as a direct time-related phenomenon, in fact it is the spacing of the words on a page which are fundamental to the effect and we could therefore express it as indirect evocation with space standing in for time, as it so often does. However, since even language on the

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page has to be processed in a linear fashion, it is arguably a straightforward and direct evocation of time. In the same poem, the break between stanzas two and three is more foregrounded still: so that I stop to consider how, involuntarily…

Unlike the earlier examples, the run-on line here does not end at a potential syntactic boundary (since the verb consider is expected to be followed by an Object) so the line-break propels the reader forwards, though they are compelled to negotiate not just a line-break but also a stanza boundary. The direct evocation here is one of time. The form of the poem reflects the narrator’s actions as they stop to think about the remembered person and there is a hiatus in both the space on the page and the likely effect of reading the poem (either out loud or internally) which directly evokes the stopping to consider itself. The linear nature of language, we have seen, produces a natural tendency for it to be used to reflect the human being’s experience of time, so that it is no surprise to see the hands of the beloved person in ‘Doorsteps’ being described first as they used to be and then as they were in old age: Small plump hands before age shirred and speckled them.

The additional effect of the run-on line here is to represent the gap in years between these two images of the hands which are remembered cutting bread. Note also that this is a minor sentence and it thus has no main verb and no anchor in time, meaning that the earlier version of the hands are somehow frozen in memory. As with most of the TCFs, evocation works alongside and in conjunction with other features. In ‘Pond Dipping’, for example, the line-break and stanza break between stanzas 1 and 2 work with negation and presupposition to create the tension: My eyes search their faces for the son I don’t yet have.

The narrator watching the children at the pond is wondering what her unborn (and not yet conceived) child might look like. The break between stanzas and lines comes at a place in the syntax, after a preposition (for) where there is clearly no structural boundary and so the reader is driven on to the next line

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whilst being aware of the space/time gap before being told that the narrator is looking for a (presupposed) child which does not (yet ) exist. This tension produced by the space/time gap may be seen as a direct evocation of the heart-stopping pain that the narrator is feeling in the face of her as yet childless status in the context of watching all the children but it could also be seen as more diagrammatic or indirect than the earlier examples, since there is also a symbolic gap between the narrator’s desires and her reality. Many similar points could be made about almost all the line-breaks in the poems in my sample. One poem, however, ‘10 k’ illustrates best the space and time evocation by form, because it is concerned with running and this activity links space and time very clearly. Out of the 18 lines in the poem (in two stanzas of 10 and 8 lines), only 7 are end-stopped to any degree, and only four of these are full-stops. Most of the poem, then, evokes the feeling of pushing on as a runner, with commas providing only the shortest respite: As the leaves fell open and lifted Like momentary magic carpets, Along the lines of hedges and verges

This extract from the first stanza shows the comma reflecting the slight relief of feeling that the leaves were going to transport the runners (like a magic carpet ) before the continuation of reality (the lines of hedges and verges ) kicks in again. These line-breaks evoke both the experience of fluctuating time when running and the space through which they are running. Other lines in the poem appear to be end-stopped, but for the lack of punctuation, and evoke the fluctuating feelings of running when you think you may nearly be finished and then there is further to go: We ran though nobody came or went And the trees and night birds made no comment And the only sound was our feet in the road That seemed to make the earth move.

The first three lines of this stanza each appear to finish the sense, but the continuation of the next line shows that there is more to do. This is more diagrammatic than direct evocation, where the mild surprise that the syntax continues (mild because the lack of punctuation is a hint) echoes a similar sensation in the runner realising what is coming next on the route. In addition to line-breaks, there can be some direct and indirect evocation arising from the form itself, particularly the stanza form, when it reflects the narrative of the poem rather than a simple choice of regular structure. ‘Blackberry Picking’, for example, is made up of two stanzas representing hope and despair (though the latter is presaged in the first stanza as we have seen); ‘Crafty’ has two stanzas which move from past to present; ‘Household’ is made up of a single, square-shaped stanza which visually evokes the solidity

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of the house described in such material detail (the mass of love). ‘Prospero’s Gifts’ also uses sentence breaks to distinguish the stages of the narrative from childhood through struggle and resolution to interpretation. These formal reflections of the poem’s meaning are indirectly evocative of time differences, even where the timeline goes backward, and of shapes, or logical stages in a psychological journey. In most contemporary poems, particularly where the form does not dictate their position, line-breaks are potentially meaningful in the ways seen here and there are many similar examples in my dataset. The co-text is vital in providing the precise interpretation of the line-breaks, though we have seen that the tension or harmony between the break and the syntax is a potential trigger of their textual meaning. There is some evidence in my dataset that rhyme schemes as well as other aspects of form can be directly evocative of meaning in the poems. This is not extensive, partly because of the relative lack of poems with formal structure, but ‘Prospero’s Gifts’ being from a collection of sonnets has a regular rhyme scheme with the following pattern: abab. cdcd. baba. cc. The syntactic structure, rather than stanza breaks, provides the boundaries between the subpatterns, and there is some potential for the phonology here to reflect the stages of the narrative with the third quatrain (baba), where the solution for the problems was found, reversing the pattern of the initial quatrain (abab) whilst the second quatrain takes the narrator out into a different world of rhyme (cdcd) which is only resolved in the final couplet (cc) where the wisdom is finally achieved. These patterns, if they evoke any meaning at all, are at the extreme end of any cline of directness, since there is no mimesis here, but a pattern that echoes indirectly what is going on in the poem. To what extent a reader will respond directly to these patterns, it is hard to know, but if they do indeed reinforce the patterns of the form, they are to that extent evocative of at least the stages of the poem’s narrative.

12.4

EVOCATION Through Syntax

So far this chapter has introduced the idea of evocation through sound, visual effects and elements of poetic form. This final section will detail the extent to which syntax itself can also play a part in directly and indirectly evoking meaning through the manipulation of the grammatical flexibility of English. We have already seen (in Chapter 4) that certain changes to the default grammatical structures (e.g. fronting or cleft structures) can place certain pieces of information into focal positions and that subordination can background other aspects of a narrative whilst also possibly presupposing them. This section relates most closely to the iconicity of grammatical form that I have written about before (Jeffries, 2010) and though it can occur in prose fiction. as we saw in the discussion in Sect. 12.1 of Müller’s (1999: 406) analysis of Wilkie Collins, its prevalence in poetry from the twentieth century (at least) onwards means that it is a candidate for being one of the defining stylistic features

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of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics, though this claim would need testing for it to stand. The basis of the claim to iconicity or evocation in relation to syntax depends on the default structure of clauses and sentences and of the length of clause elements. As we saw in Sect. 12.1, there have been some claims about natural iconicity in relation to SVO structure languages, but the details of each language’s syntax mean that at the moment we need to link claims of evocation to particular languages (in my case, English) before making any universal claims. Most of the examples discussed below arise from manipulations of the basic clause structure of English as described in Chapter 4, but unlike the preoccupation with subordination and focus there, this section is concerned with the direct evocation of feelings that can arise from such manipulation. By this stage, many of the poems analysed in this book will have become familiar, and some of the extracts have already been analysed more than once from the point of view of different TCFs, so I will keep the focus here on direct evocation where possible. The default information structure of English clauses, as we have seen, is for the focus to be on the final (obligatory) clause element and for the Subject, as a result, to be relatively short in comparison with later clause elements which tend to carry the new information. One consequence of this tendency is for English speakers to expect Subjects to be short and for the Predicator to be arrived at relatively soon. If the Predicator is delayed by either a long optional Adverbial or string of such Adverbials, or by an unusually long Subject or all of these, this can produce a sense of discomfort which could be a simple reaction to a badly formed clause but can also reflect the meaning of the clause itself by creating a delay in the reader’s processing of the clausal relationships between participants and processes. The feeling evoked depends, as in all TCFs, on the general effect combined with the specifics of the co-text in which the feature is found. A straightforward example of initial Adverbials delaying the Subject comes from the opening lines of ‘Blackberry Picking’: Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

Here, there are two Adverbials prior to the Subject (the blackberries) which evoke the experience of waiting for the blackberries to ripen. The line-break in the second Adverbial adds a layer of frustration to the waiting time as the end of the first line appears to have completed the conditions under which the ripening would take place, only to add the requirement that a full week of rain and sun is needed for them to be ready. A similar childhood memory of waiting is evoked in ‘Doorsteps’ where the impatience of a hungry child waiting patiently for the food to be prepared is evoked not by optional Adverbials but by a long Subject (underlined here):

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Finely rimmed with crust the soft halfmoon half-slices came to the tea table herringboned across a doylied plate.

What is particularly pleasing about this example is that it demonstrates the power of extended clause elements to evoke feelings. Whilst the elaborate preparation of a teatime spread is being described in detail here, the additional textual meaning, which is not part of the propositional meaning, is that the child who is already at the table (evidenced by the deixis of came) is watching the preparations, probably knowing they are not allowed to just start eating. This time-lag is not only evoked for the reader in waiting for the Predicator, but also in the additional modification of the Subject that follows the Predicator and indicates yet another layer of (unnecessary?) presentation in herringboned across a doylied plate. As with the additional phrase (for a full week) in ‘Blackberry Picking’, this additional elaboration of the noun phrase Subject extends the agony of waiting both for the child and the reader. ‘The Unprofessionals’ is examined in some detail in relation to iconicity in Jeffries (2010) but one aspect of its evocation is worth repeating here as it demonstrates a slightly different effect from the examples already seen in this section. The opening stanza delays the Subject and Predicator using an Adverbial (underlined) extended by the addition of two relative clauses: When the worst thing happens, that uproots the future, that you must live for every hour of your future, They come,

The evocation of the relief felt at the arrival of the people (they) who are not given a long name, nor an elaborate verb phrase (come) is achieved by this long lead-in and is thereafter undermined by the rest of the poem which is made up of a long list of all the things they do, couched in a string of Adverbial non-finite clauses of which the following stanza is only the beginning: holding hands, From tea to tea, from Anadin to Valium, Sleeping on put-you-ups, answering the phone, Coming in shifts, spontaneously,

The ambivalence that the reader may feel towards these people is embedded in many of the choices under other TCFs, but is experienced more directly in the structure, where the initial wait for help is relieved by the arrival (grammatically as well as semantically) of the unprofessionals and yet the realisation that the pain is not going to dissipate fast is experienced through the seemingly endless list of trivial actions taken by these same people who initially brought relief.

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There are too many examples of similar evocative effects in the structure of the poems in my dataset to include all of them here. The extension of, or delay to, clause elements is the most frequent type of direct evocation, but there are other more indirect types of evocation which also seem to create a visceral response unconnected to the surface meaning of the structure. These include the common use of minor sentences (i.e. those with no main verb). We have already seen these in relation to deixis, because by having no verbal tense they avoid providing a time anchor for the deictic centre of the poem. If readers of full sentences with main verbs are waiting for the finite verb (sometimes, as we have seen, for a long time), then the experience of reading a sentence where there is no main verb phrase extends that waiting period indefinitely, particularly where the sentence is extended in other ways. ‘Prospero’s Gifts’ opens with just such a sentence, and the early life of the abused child is thus taken outside time, with the consequence that it evokes the terrible waiting experienced when you have no control and no idea of when the abuse will end: A lifetime spent mending this damaged heart For what began around the age of three, Not the best way for a child’s life to start, Thinking it was happening just to me.

The lack of finite verb phrases in this opening sentence means that there is no end to the pain it describes. The co-text, of course, is responsible for the precise interpretation of the minor sentence which, in other poems, can evoke timelessness in a good way, as we saw in the opening of ‘Up on the Moors with Keeper’ where the Bronte sisters enjoy their freedom on the moors and lose track of time: Three girls under the sun’s rare brilliance out on the moors, hitching their skirts over bog-myrtle and bilberry.

This can be seen as a cameo of the girls on the moors, but it also fails to link them to a deictic centre of time, leaving the image hanging, as it were, in the air. A different indirect evocation type arises when the clauses in a sentence are similar lengths and coordinated, evoking a sense of balance in the world of the poem: Someone down the terrace is mowing their lawn, and our side of the street is in cool quiet shadow.

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All is right in this world of the childhood home and the absence of the kind of excessive length or lack of Predicator of the earlier examples is also evocative of order and calm. Another example of this kind of coordination is from ‘Blackberry Picking’: You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking.

Whilst the coordinated clauses in the first line here also evoke ideas of balance and harmony, this impression is undermined in the remaining two and a half lines of the sentence with the unexpected postmodification of flesh on the second line and the additional extended clause after the colon which not only hints at the obsession produced by the berries in its lexico-grammar, but also structurally evokes excess by being longer than a notional norm.2 Excess has already been discussed in relation to ‘Household’ where most of the poem is a list of materials making up a home. The experience of reading this poem, however, also indirectly evokes the suffocating excess of what makes up the building, as we read the list and wonder where it is taking us, lacking as it does a Predicator. The answer to that question comes in a very brief final couplet: One kiss, one breathed declaration, and there it is: the mass of love.

The contrast between the excess of the list and the simplicity of the commitment which brings it all about evokes the clash between the ease of falling in love and the complexities of a life lived together. A final example in this section comes from ‘Marble’ where the narrator’s cold body after a heart attack is compared to the statue of David by Michelangelo. The opening of the poem contrasts the ease with which even a great artist might make a mistake with the difficulty of putting that mistake right: Even Michelangelo made, maybe, the odd slip. To chip, say, a cheek, brought some student girl or boy with a fingertip of beeswax, smoothing it in, soothing with marble dust, polishing to a finish. 2 The concept of norms in relation to this work is a particular problem, as there is no extant measurement of what constitutes a ‘normal’ length Subject or Object, etc. and it would anyway differ for different genres. Corpus linguistics may be able to supply some notional answers to this question in due course, but it would take another extensive research project to do so and the research questions would be difficult to devise.

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The first line is a simple sentence with normal placing and length of clause elements, which on its own would have no specific effect. However, in contrast the second sentence has a complex Subject which is a nominal clause (to chip a cheek) and the Object (underlined) is a noun phrase with lengthy postmodification evoking the care and attention which needs to go into covering up an error, compared with making the error itself. This evocation of care and length of time becomes poignant later in the poem in relation to heart surgery.

12.5

Evocation in Contemporary Poetry

This chapter has explored the extent to which direct and indirect evocation of meaning may play a part in contemporary poems. Though onomatopoeia and sound-symbolism are traditionally recognised as part of the poetic toolbox, the mimetic potential of form and structure is less well-recognised, though some of the work on iconicity has examined this phenomenon. There is scope for more work to be done on the theoretical aspects of direct and indirect evocation, to examine the extent to which there is overlap with other terms used in stylistics and literary studies (e.g. mimesis vs. diegesis); the extent of similarity between evocation and imagic vs. diagrammatic iconicity and to what extent the semiotic terms iconicity and indexicality provide the distinction we need. The question of whether this distinction is absolute or gradable and how one might go about describing cases between the extremes if so is also still open at this stage. Whatever we decide to call them, the examples here demonstrate that on the level of sounds (and to some extent image); form (line-breaks and rhyme schemes) and structure (delayed or over-long clause elements; minor sentences; structures reflecting narrative stages) there is plenty of evidence that contemporary poetry uses the resources of the language to evoke meaning directly, indirectly and sometimes both at once.

References Conradie, J. C. (2001). Structural iconicity the English S and OF-genitives. In Fischer, Olga (Ed.), The Motivated Sign. Iconicity in Language and Literature 2 (pp. 229– 248). John Benjamins Publishing. Dingemanse, M., Blasi, D. E., Lupyan, G., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2015). Arbitrariness, Iconicity and Systematicity in Language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(10), 603–615. Fischer, O. (1999). On the Role Played by Iconicity in Grammaticalisation Processes. In M. Nänny, & O. Fischer, (Eds.) (pp. 345–374). Haiman, J. (1980). The iconicity of grammar: isomorphism and motivation. Language, 56, 515–540. Haiman, J. (1985). Natural syntax: Iconicity and erosion. C.U.P. Jakobson, R. (1963). Essais de linguistique générale. Minuit. Jakobson, R., & Halle, M. (1956). Fundamentals of Language. Mouton.

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Jeffries, L. (2010). ‘The unprofessionals’: Syntactic iconicity and reader interpretation in contemporary poems. In D. McIntyre & B. Busse (Eds.), Language and Style (pp. 95–115). Palgrave Macmillan. Müller, W. (1999). The iconic use of syntax in British and American fiction. In M. Nänny, & O. Fischer (Eds.) (pp. 393–408). Müller, W. (2001). Iconicity and rhetoric. A note on the iconic force of rhetorical figures in Shakespeare. In O. Fischer, & M. Nänny (Eds.) (pp. 305–322). Nöth, W. (2001). Semiotic foundations of iconicity in language and literature. In O. Fischer, & M. Nänny (Eds.) (pp. 17–28). Peirce, C. S. (1960). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volume 2. In C. Hartshorne, & P. Weiss (Eds.). Harvard University Press. Sherry, V. (2004). The great war and the language of modernism. Oxford University Press. Short, M. (1999). Graphological deviation, style variation and point of view in Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irving Welsh. Journal of Literary Studies, 15(3/4), 305–323.

PART III

Conclusions

Having worked through first the core TCFs (Part I) and then the intermittent TCFs (Part II), this part will bring together the conclusions from the research, first in the form of integrated analysis of a new set of poems using the TCFs together (Chapter 13) and then by taking a step back from analysis and summarising the lessons learned about linguistic theory, textual meaning in poetry and the style of contemporary poetry (Chapter 14).

CHAPTER 13

Putting It All Together: Integrated Analysis of Poems

This chapter demonstrates what happens when you put together all the TCFs in approaching the analysis of a poem. To make sure that this approach would work on poems other than the ones I chose myself, I asked Peter Sansom (poet and editor of The North) to send me six poems to analyse. This is such a small number in the context of all the poetry being written and published that there was no value in trying make sure it would ‘represent’ contemporary poetry in any meaningful way. However, I knew that Peter’s experience would mean that the poems were varied and thus provide a reasonable test of how this model will work as a framework for analysing the language of poems. What follows is a commentary on each of the poems in turn, derived from a full analysis using all of the TCFs, but only commenting on those that were meaningful in the co-text of the poem. There is almost certainly more that could be written about each of the poems even stylistically, but I hope that this exercise demonstrates the value in a systematic approach which allows for the possibility of comparison of stylistic features and preferences across poems, poets and even genres. Each poem is reproduced at the beginning of its section as well as in the Appendix.

13.1

Jimmy Knight (David Constantine 2021)

Waking this morning I remembered Jimmy Knight From Hope Road Primary School. Every kid could tell What sort of a family life every other kid had By how they were shod and clad and fed

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2_13

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And whether they looked you in the eyes all right And smiled or never did and by their smell.

Jimmy had none of the good signs and all of the bad. I remember his scared white face, the snot And elsewhere of him that was damp. But one Last lesson of the afternoon, all the lights were on Smog at the windows, in her normal voice Mrs Thomas said Come out the front, Jimmy, love, and sing to us

And doing as he was told that’s what he did Came out the front and wiped his nose on his jersey sleeve Covered the wet with his hands and lifted up his eyes Towards something he could see and we could not And sang us ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ But without the words if I recall it right or none

We understood though a blackbird might for all I know Or the angels I suppose, pure melody it was Pure carolling, the breath of clearness, always near Or perhaps already gone beyond a world of tears Clean lovely it soared and dipped and soared again It was grace, what he’d had given him not asking why, he gave

Till he stopped and returned from wherever he’d been Stood still, eyes down, in the silence, and Mrs Thomas said Thank you, Jimmy, love, and the small soiled lad Went back to his place and looked the same And outside was the smog that dripped from the skies And left black on the masks we wore to school and home.

Jimmy Knight is a character who could have been in anybody’s schooldays. But unlike the one I remember from my primary school, Jimmy has a redeeming feature; he can sing like an angel. In this poem, the first-person narrator recalls an incident from a winter’s day in a time when pollution caused thick smog and teachers had the power to suspend classroom activities to ask a boy to sing. Though the school itself is named (Hope Road Primary School), the people in the poem on the whole are not. The narrator is given a pronoun(I ) and only Jimmy and the teacher (Mrs Thomas ) are named whereas the notional every kid is used for all the other children in the classroom who are only mentioned in passing with the pronoun we. The naming in the poem is therefore largely unremarkable with unambiguous use of pronouns and many noun phrases being no more than a definite article and head noun (the front; the words; the angels ), producing the usual existential presuppositions as a result. However, by contrast with the everyday naming, a few longer

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noun phrases stand out. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator points out how aware children are of each other’s backgrounds and then states that Jimmy had none of the good signs and all of the bad. Without specifying what these signs are at this point, the opposition between what we notice about our classmate that is good and what is bad is established. This is a world in which children judge each other very harshly according to a set of unspoken standards. The bad signs are hinted at in the three-part list (in bold) that follows this statement of opposites: I remember his scared white face, the snot/And elsewhere of him that was damp. The first two of these are relatively straightforward noun phrases, but the final one is indirect in a way that hints at taboo subjects such as wetting oneself, which are one of the causes of children being outcast from the in-group. The good signs, that would have got Jimmy a better reputation, are left unlisted, but are alluded to by the negation of none of the good signs, which allows the reader to ponder what these might be in the alternate world where Jimmy had some of those good signs. The transitivity choices in the poem are not noticeably deviant or foregrounded through patterning, though there are sections of the poem where there is a predominance of action verbs (e.g. gave, stopped, returned, stood, went ) and other sections where the contemplative atmosphere of memory takes over and there are more cognition verbs (e.g. recall, understood, know, suppose) which echoes the recounting of the narrative versus the reflecting on it that the poem contains. The sentences and clauses in this poem are varied in structure and length and have a conversational tone which is created through a range of means, including the use of reduced elliptical clauses added to main clauses which have the effect of afterthoughts: We understood though a blackbird might for all I know Or the angels I suppose,

There are also a number of clauses where a non-standard ordering of elements is evident, including pure melody it was; clean lovely it soared; and outside was the smog. These fronted elements (Complement and Adverbials, underlined) produce different themes and focal points from their default equivalents and this promotes the song itself (in the first two cases) and the outside (in the third case) to the level of theme. Some structural patterns work with other TCFs to produce their effect. The list of Jimmy’s actions, for example, produces a pragmatic presupposition of chronology, but also combines the overarching three-part list (numbered below) with internal two-part lists to produce an effect of both completeness and balance: (1) Came out the front and wiped his nose on his jersey sleeve (2) Covered the wet with his hands and lifted up his eyes Towards something he could see and we could not (3) And sang us ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ But without the words if I recall it right or none

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Other lists in the poem also use three parts to indicate completeness, as we saw in the earlier example of the signs of the bad in Jimmy’s person. A shorter three-part list (underlined) also initially sums up the ways in which children can judge each other’s background, but is then joined by a further four ways in which they could be judged: By how they were shod and clad and fed And whether they looked you in the eyes all right And smiled or never did and by their smell.

The initial list here is syntactically linked by their function as participles and phonologically linked by the single syllables, the short vowels and final /d/. There is no obvious mimesis in this sound patterning, though it pulls the list together and by contrast the relatively long-winded extension of the list in the following two lines appears to be another case of afterthought which allows the poor children who are to be judged no escape, since both smiling and not smiling were equally bad. There are a number of other potentially evocative structures in the poem, often linked to the fronting we saw earlier. This example has an extended appositional structure which appears to be trying to nuance the original description of the singing as pure melody, but in its attempts demonstrating the impossibility of capturing the elusive sound in words: pure melody it was Pure carolling, the breath of clearness, always near Or perhaps already gone beyond a world of tears

Though not a direct evocation of something like time or sequencing, this piling up of attempts to describe the sound of Jimmy’s singing nevertheless indirectly evokes the experience of trying to capture something and failing. The deixis of this poem produces a standard first-person narrative in the past tense, though with some present tense references to the narrator who is remembering. The place deixis strongly locates the action in the classroom with the teacher at the front and Jimmy is the only person who moves around within the space (went back to his place), Outside being a place that is damp and dirty (smog ). The only deictic element in the poem that appears to be foregrounded is the use of came in: Came out the front, which echoes the teacher’s deictic centre in Come out the front rather than retaining the narrator’s viewpoint which would be more like to produce Went out the front. Rather than repositioning the deictic centre, this seems to be more like a use of Free Direct Speech, so that the teacher’s words are echoed directly, perhaps merging her viewpoint into that of the adult narrator who is looking back on the memory.

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The ambivalence in the poem which we have already seen in the long description of the singing is partly produced by the modalised comments (underlined below), all of them epistemic, which throw doubt on the narrator’s memory or understanding of the events of that day: ● ● ● ● ●

He could see and we could not If I recall it right or none Though a blackbird might for all I know Or the angels I suppose Or perhaps already gone beyond in a world of tears.

This memory and the events of the day itself, then, are seen through the flawed understanding of the children who witnessed the singing and through the narrator who appears to be no further along in understanding what it was they saw. This effect of uncertainty is linked to negating in some cases (we could not; or none) which explicitly references the two possible scenarios in each case, the first where the narrator imagines being able to access the vision that was clearly motivating the singer and the second where the narrator acknowledges that he may be mistaken in his memory. This commentary has highlighted some of the main features of this poem through the TCFs, though there are others for which there is no space here. The significant effects that I would draw from the analysis are those of ambivalence and uncertainty in the narrator and the clarity of purpose and execution in the song which transcended any description of it.

13.2

Important People (Gina Wilson 2020)

Pandemic, 2020 I’m reading the book my daughter gave me last Christmas, A History of the World in 21 Women. She likes facts, something to believe in, and I’m trying to believe in a world made up of Joan of Arc, Frida Kahlo, Benazir Bhutto… their wonders reeled off on ten pages each. Around me, the hospital waiting room is dotted with very ill people. They whisper in pairs, or sit separated by six feet, some reading like me or pretending to, watching the clock go round. Nameless nurses, in blue, walk through and back and through again. Once in a while they call someone to stand on the scales.

A poem that touches on some of the themes raised by the pandemic in 2020, the title (Important People) provides the background against which the named protagonists in the poem are measured. There is the narrator, named

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by the first-person pronoun; her daughter, named simply with the possessive my daughter; the famous characters in the book which are represented by a symbolic three-part list (Joan of Arc, Frida Kahlo, Benazir Bhutto); the others in the waiting room (very ill people) and the Nameless nurses. Apart from the famous women in the book, none of the others are represented by their personal names, which raises the question which of these groups of people, the famous or the nameless, are the important ones? The importance of health workers during the pandemic is indirectly referenced in this created opposition between famous individuals and nameless groups of workers, whose morphological negation (nameless ) produces the dual scenario effect of all negation whereby we imagine a world in which these nurses were known by their names rather than as an anonymous group. In the case of the famous people, the narrator’s clause I’m trying to believe in a world made up of… produces a strong implicature that this effort is not a success. The poem is made up of a series of relatively simple sentences. The foregrounded parts of their structure include the subordinate clause which is postposed after the main clause and elaborates on the famous people: their wonders reeled off on ten pages each. The disparaging reeled off infects the meaning of wonders here, which is retrospectively revised to be read ironically and the short length of the accounts (on ten pages each) underlines the narrator’s lack of faith that these women can help in her current situation. The structure of the sentence describing the activities in the waiting room also evokes the experience of waiting your turn in a treatment room by the addition of three further subordinate clauses to the two conjoined main clauses which are separated by a comma as well as the conjunction (or) signalling the social distance of the post-pandemic world: They whisper in pairs, or sit separated by six feet, some reading like me or pretending to, watching the clock go round

The line-break after separated also evokes the pandemic’s social distancing through formal means, and the string of subordinate clauses (reading, pretending to, watching ) evoke the tedium of waiting in such situations. None of these activities are meaningful and their subordinate status emphasises this. The following sentence describes the nurses walking through and back and through again. This repetitive phrasing evokes the experience of watching the activity and the lack of specificity of where it is exactly the nurses go through reinforces a sense of mystery about what happens behind the treatment room doors. This contrasts with the unnecessary detail about the nurses (in blue) which again evokes the boredom of the waiting room and the resulting attention to detail in what can be seen.

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A Square of Sunlight (Meg Cox 2021)

She dawdled home as usual through the town with school friends. One was left at the station another at the library. Three of them stopped at the bakers in the High Street for free stale cakes and after some window shopping by the time she reached the Butter Cross she was on her own She turned into the Close and took the short cut through the Cathedral, in the front and out the back, touching the Jane Austen grave, then hurrying under St Swithuns church, into Kingsgate Street, through the garage to the front door at the back under the scent of ripening pears against the wall. The hall, shadowy dining room and its candle smell, through the breakfast room, by the walk-in larder, shedding satchel, blazer, boater and shoes as she went into the kitchen, back door open, and her dad in his cricket whites, prone and beating his fist on the quarry tiled floor in a square of sunlight.

This poem recounts a schoolgirl’s walk home from school through a cathedral city in the UK (Winchester) to the kitchen of her home where her father is behaving very oddly. The contrast between the normality of her walk home and this final disturbing scene is embedded in the language choices of the poem itself as we shall see. Depending on how you count them,1 there are at least 39 noun phrases in this short poem, most of which are simple determiner + head noun patterns (e.g. the town, the station, the library, the short cut ). Almost half (19) of these noun phrases participate in prepositional phrases (e.g. through the town, with school friends, at the library) and even where they are a little more complex, with premodifying adjectives or nouns (e.g. shadowy dining room, the walk-in larder) a relatively mundane pattern of naming is by far the most common in the poem. Nevertheless, there are just two moments in the poem where the pattern of naming changes. In the first instance, the protagonist has finally reached her home, entering through the garage to the door under the scent of ripening pears against the wall. This prepositional phrase contains the first complex noun phrase which has the effect (evocation) of slowing down the action for the first time and is also the first indication of the internal life of the girl as everything up to this point has been factual information about who stopped off where (Three of them stopped / at the bakers in the High Street for free 1 Trying to be accurate in counting noun phrases is generally speaking a fool’s errand as so many of them are embedded in other noun phrases and you would have to decide which level you are counting. I am using this number simply to show the dominance of naming here through simple noun phrases (as is common in the poems) and to demonstrate that the final complex noun phrase is internally and externally deviant, and thus foregrounded.

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stale cakes ) and her route home (through the Cathedral, in the front and out the back). In this noun phrase, her senses are alert to the smell of the pears, and apart from touching the Jane Austen grave as she passed through the Cathedral, it is the only time the reader gets a sense of her inner cognitive state. Though the earlier series of noun phrases are largely unmodified (except by factual information as in free stale cakes ), from here on, as she enters the house and passes through the shadowy dining room and its candle smell, the atmosphere becomes more intense until she reaches the kitchen where the only long complex noun phrase ends the poem: her dad in his cricket whites, prone and beating his fist on the quarry tiled floor in a square of sunlight.

The movement in the naming patterns of the poem from simple to complex and from outer and factual to inner and emotional is completed by what is a disturbing image of a parent who on normal school days might be welcoming her home or cooking the tea. Though we do not know what prompted this behaviour, parents are not expected to be in this kind of state and the impression it makes is vivid and detailed as a result. The patterning of the verb choices reflects the apparent control of the schoolgirl over her actions as she is consistently the Actor in material action processes (dawdled, reaches, turned, touching, hurrying, shedding, went ), though one exception comes as her school friends peel off to their various activities: she was on her own. This moment in the poem signals a minor change of mood from the relaxed action of the earlier part of the poem where she and her friends are ranging across the city and doing relatively mundane things such as window shopping. As we saw from the discussion of naming, where many of the noun phrases occur in prepositional phrases, the processes in the poem are often heavily modified by adverbial content and there is a pragmatic presupposition of chronology in the long series of deictic place markers which show the deictic centre of the poem moving with the schoolgirl as she goes home. However, the early part of the poem is made up of a number of simple clauses (e.g. One was left at the station), albeit garnished with a number of Adverbials in some cases: S P A A A A She | dawdled | home | as usual | through the town | with school friends.

The effect of these long tails of Adverbials is to evoke in the reader a sense of the ongoing journey as they experience a clause that grammatically speaking could have finished after the third word (in this case). When the clause’s obligatory elements occur early, the trailing Adverbials add information but also a sense of purposelessness as they are not required for the structure and seem therefore to be somewhat aimless. By contrast, as the other girls gradually peel

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off, the clause structure reverses, with initial adverbials delaying the start of the clause proper, resulting in a focus on the main clause where she is suddenly and finally alone: cj A and | after some window shopping | by the time A S P C she reached the Butter Cross | she | was | on her own.

The evocation of time here is achieved by the structuring and prioritising of the information which could, of course, and with less effect, have been structured differently: A S P O cj S P O then | they | did | some window shopping | and | she | left | the others A A at the Butter Cross, | leaving her on her own.

In this decidedly inferior version of these lines, the incidental actions of window shopping and passing the Butter Cross are given main clause status and the significant shift in the narrative, where she is left alone, is relegated to a subordinate clause. The original, by contrast, uses both prioritisation (i.e. main and subordinate structures) and evocation (i.e. foregrounded deviation from information and focal norms) to allow the reader to experience the bereft feeling of a young person left without her peer group support network and the trivial activities of the group which allows her to avoid what is waiting for her at home. After this turning point, the girl starts to hurry and the short main clause where she departs from the busy city she turned into the Close is followed by another which has an even longer string of Adverbials, some of them nonfinite clauses (touching the Jane Austen grave), some prepositional phrases of place (in the front and out the back): P O took |the short cut A A cj A through the Cathedral,| in the front | and | out the back, A cj touching the Jane Austen grave,| then | hurrying A under St Swithuns church, into Kingsgate Street, through the garage to the front door at the back under the scent of ripening pears against the wall.

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Note that the final Adverbial clause here, which starts at hurrying, contains within it another string of prepositional phrases of place embedded within it: under St Swithuns church, into Kingsgate Street, through the garage to the front door at the back under the scent of ripening pears against the wall.

The speed of movement, evident not just from the semantics of hurrying but also from the list of short prepositional phrases which come thick and fast, nevertheless contrasts with the length of time it takes to actually reach home, which is evoked by the large number of phrases in this list. A five-part list, by any standards, is a long one. Many poems, as we have seen, like other genres, use the three-part list to symbolically represent the members of a category that is being invoked and anything longer than this is likely to be either an exact enumeration of all the members of the category, which is rare in poetry, or an excessively detailed list of members which could be seen as overspecified and thus produce an implicature. The question of why we are presented with the child’s journey home in such detail is answered once the end of the poem is reached. Each stage in the journey is both a delaying of the inevitable and also a step nearer its conclusion. The slight delay I have already discussed which is caused by the longer noun phrase at the end of this sentence and the completion of the sentence itself (by a full stop) both evoke a hiatus which the reader experiences alongside the child before the final sentence, which is made up of a series of noun phrases and no main clause at all: The hall, shadowy dining room and its candle smell, through the breakfast room, by the walk-in larder, shedding satchel, blazer, boater and shoes as she went into the kitchen, back door open, and her dad in his cricket whites, prone and beating his fist on the quarry tiled floor in a square of sunlight.

The lack of main verbs in this final sentence means that although we have been following the progress of this child home from school, and the deictic centre of place remains with her, there is now no time reference and the scene she comes across is therefore timeless. Although this is not presented as a memory of the kind we saw in other poems in this book (e.g. ‘Baking’, ‘Doorsteps’), the narrative is largely past tense until this point, but becomes suspended in time in this final scene. The gradual erasing of time deixis in favour of place can be seen clearly when the deictic forms are schematised in the analytical stages The sequential list in Table 13.1 shows that time is gradually replaced by place as the major deictic signal of the girl’s position. Where she is begins to matter much more than when things are happening, and as we saw in the

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Table 13.1 Deictic analysis of ’A Square of Sunlight’ Item(s)

Feature

Type of deixis

Dawdled Home Through the town Stopped At the bakers in the High Street After some window shopping By the time She reached (she reached) The Butter Cross Was Turned Took Through the cathedral In the front and out the back Under St Swithuns Church Into Kingsgate Street Through the garage To the front door at the back Under the scent of ripening pears against the wall Through the breakfast room By the walk-in larder Her dad On the quarry lined floor In a square of sunlight

Verb past tense Adverb Prepositional phrase Verb past tense Prepositional phrase Prepositional phrase Prepositional phrase Verb past tense Noun phrase Verb past tense Verb past tense Verb past tense Prepositional phrase Prepositional phrase Prepositional phrase Prepositional phrase Prepositional phrase Prepositional phrase Prepositional phrase Prepositional phrase Prepositional phrase Noun phrase Prepositional phrase Prepositional phrase

Time Place Place Time Place Time Time Time Place Time Time Time Place Place Place Place Place Place Place Place Place Person Place Place

previous paragraph, by the end of the poem, time has stopped. This occurs at the one point in the poem where person deixis enters the narrative in the form of her dad. Whilst earlier she dawdled with school friends, which could be seen as demonstrating person deixis through the lexical meaning of friends, the lack of a possessive determiner (i.e. her school friends ) downplays this relationship by contrast with the link to her father.

13.4

Victoria Avenue (Alan Payne 2020)

Port of Spain The pair of us, in the heat, standing on the pavement, gazing at the house that’s no longer there, its yellow walls, verandah, hanging baskets from behind which Isabel

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appears, in her apron, a yam in her hands, above her, a bookcase, cobwebs descending from an illustrated edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a snakeskin on a table, cracks in the floorboards, an open window, me looking down at us, the pair of us, in the heat, standing on the pavement, gazing at the house that’s no longer there.

Can I help you? Who’s this? A stranger. What can I say? This is where we live.

This is a poem of two parts. The main part, consisting of 21 of the poem’s 26 lines, is a description of a scene in which there are no main clauses at all, Like many poems, the syntax of this long minor sentence is difficult to unravel. Although it could perhaps be argued that there are a series of elliptical auxiliaries (The pair of us, in the heat, | are standing…), this solution is not sustainable through the long sequence of phrases that make up the majority of the poem. It fits much better to see this as one long noun phrase, which starts simply (the pair of us ) and is then postmodified by a prepositional phrase (in the heat ), an adjectival clause (standing on the pavement ) and another extremely long and complex adjectival clause whose layers look something like this: gazing at the house that’s no longer there, its yellow walls, verandah, / hanging baskets / from behind which Isabel / appears, in her apron, / a yam in her hands, above her, a bookcase, / cobwebs descending / from an illustrated edition / of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a snakeskin on a table, / cracks in the floorboards, / an open window, / me looking down at us, the pair of us, in the heat, standing on the pavement, gazing at the house that’s no longer there.

This is not a technical description of the structure of this sentence, and there are almost certainly other ways to describe it. However, I have tried to indicate the possible prioritising of the subordination visually. The house has two main

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postmodifying threads, the first being a short relative clause (that’s no longer there), the second a series of noun phrases expanding on the description of the house (its yellow walls; hanging baskets; a snakeskin on a table; cracks in the floorboards; an open window; me looking down at us ). In two places, this list of items in the imagined or remembered house is interrupted by a long series of further subordinate modifications. The first time, it is to imagine Isabel appearing from behind the hanging baskets, and another series of phrases, some prepositional (in her apron) and some simple noun phrases (a yam in her hands ) presents a cameo of the scene in which Isabel is remembered. The second series of postmodifying phrases elaborates on the pronoun us, which is repeated appositionally in the expanded phrase the pair of us, and followed by a repetition of three further opening lines of the poem, but this time at a much lower level of structure. There are a number of effects arising from this complex structure, one of which is evocation. Whilst we can try (with difficulty) to nail down the exact way in which these noun phrases, clauses and prepositional phrases relate to each other, the experience of reading them is not as complex as the process of analysing their grammar. However, like wandering into a forest and not being able to remember the path out, there is an effect of being drawn onward in this long minor sentence, where each local part of the structure makes sense, but there is little chance of seeing the whole picture and making sense of it as a piece. This out of control syntax evokes the rush of feelings and memories of the couple looking at the place where a familiar (and loved) house had been. The sentence names an experience which has no link to time through main clauses and verbs, adding to the evocation of a suspended moment in time when the memories come crashing in. The repetition of the opening lines, but at a much lower level of structure, has an additional effect as it makes the scene seem to be down a long tunnel or receding from view. Reinforcing the effect of a scene that is frozen in time, the verbs that appear in this sentence, albeit in subordinate structures, are all static in nature even where they could be characterised as material actions (appears, descending, looking, standing, gazing ) and the repeated contracted form of the copula (‘s ) that occurs twice (the house that’s no longer there) presents the static transitivity of an intensive relational verb. This is one poem where the transitivity categories explain less of the textual meaning than a categorisation into static and dynamic processes. The repeated phrase, the house that’s no longer there, as we have seen, ends up a long way from the surface of the structure and its negation on both occasions produces the double scenario of negation that we saw in Chapter 8. The house, despite being no longer there, is nevertheless very present in the poem as the detailed description of what it was like shows. There is a contradiction in the assertion that the couple are gazing at something that is not there, which lies at the heart of this poem. The inclusion of the distal demonstrative, there, hints at the dislocation which runs through the poem’s theme.

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As we have seen, the poem is mostly timeless, although the relative clause (that’s no longer there) brings the present into play. This is therefore foregrounded as the main message—and cause of regret or grief—that the narrator is focussed upon. The other deictic elements, as in other poems I have examined, create the space and contents in their relative positions of the imagined/remembered house by means of a series of prepositional phrases and adverbs (e.g. above her; down) which are embedded in complex ways, as we have seen in the main long noun phrase of the poem. The poem culminates in the second shorter section where the couple are forced to confront the reality by someone whose relationship is defined by reference to the couple’s own deictic field (a stranger) asking them indirectly what they are doing: Can I help you? This example of Free Direct Speech is not introduced by a reporting clause but the italics indicate that it is intended to be seen as a direct representation of the speech. The non-italic responses which follow (Who’s this?/A stranger./What can I say?) provide a rare example in the poems I have analysed of Free Direct Thought, where the narrator is documenting the thought process they follow in response to the question which interrupts the trip down memory lane. The three parts of this response, separated by line-breaks, slow down the poem at this point and evoke the experience of the narrator who is wondering how to respond. The final line, in italics, indicating direct speech, demonstrates the depth of the narrator’s denial about the house no longer being there: This is where we live.

13.5

Dai (Stephen Payne 2019)

A car carrier carrying no cars owns the frozen motorway. It’s night. The sky is salted too, with stars,

and the verge is thick with snow. Dai floors the accelerator, grips the wheel tight and the car carrier carrying no cars

lurches into a climb; its V8 roars. It’s a long time since he’s travelled this light under a sky vaulted with stars.

Not that Dai’s thinking of those desert tours, the Scorpion he drove. The road is quiet and the car carrier carrying no cars

is an easy drive. Up through the gears as the road levels. Things are all right— the January sky has recalled its stars

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and he’s speeding through the small hours, through the land of his fathers cowled in white, in a car carrier carrying no cars under a cloudless sky, a sprawl of stars.

If we consider this poem from a literary, contextual and propositional point of view, we can say certain things about it. First of all, it is a villanelle, which has certain literary resonances and intertextual echoes if the reader knows other villanelles.2 It also puts some constraints upon the choices available to the poet, which we will consider in the analysis below. As for contextual knowledge that might be brought to bear upon the poem, the reader may be aware that Dai is a Welsh name and that the phrase land of his [my] fathers is an intertextual reference to the English translation of the Welsh national anthem (Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau). If the reader doesn’t know the reference to Scorpion, it is easily looked up, but also recoverable as a likely armoured vehicle in the context of desert tours. This encyclopaedic information feeds in alongside the lexico-grammatical meaning and propositional content of the poem to present a narrative of a car transporter being driven at night (across Wales) with no cars on it, by someone called Dai who used to be in the army driving tanks during one of the wars the UK was involved in (in Iraq or Afghanistan for example). It is a cold and snowy night and the sky is clear and starry. Without engaging the textual meaning model, we can also comment on some of the word choices and the effects of the repeated lines, including their variation. In other words, as sensitive readers of literature, we may, for example, notice that the everyday compound noun car transporter has been changed to car carrier and make some comment on the effect of this choice. Other choices, both lexical and grammatical, can also be commented upon and these are the ones that perhaps give the poem its specific poetic effect, but they are not guaranteed to be noticed unless there is a systematic way to analyse the poem which will help to mitigate researcher effects. To achieve a transparent and rigorous analysis, I worked my way through this poem, as with the others in this book, looking individually at each TCF to see what was going on. The resulting analysis below is reconstituted into a merged commentary on the poem, but is based on teasing out the strands as explained in Chapters 2–12. The villanelle form prescribes that lines 1 and 3 will be alternately repeated at the end of the four following stanzas and both repeated at the end of the final stanza. They also dictate the rhyme scheme, of which more later. One of the joys of the villanelle is to find a topic in which the repetitions are more than musical and have some link to the meaning or topic. In this case, the naming of the car carrier carrying no cars is emphasised by this repetition and the oddness of the head noun (car carrier instead of car transporter) is foregrounded. Whilst this produces a repeated phonological effect of consonance with the 2

Possibly the most famous villanelle in the modern era is Dylan Thomas’s (1952) ‘Do not go gentle into that goodnight’ which is a heart-rending plea to a father not to give up on living.

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initial /k/ sounds, the meaningful effect is that we would not normally expect a long and postmodified noun phrase to be repeated in a text, but referred to by a briefer noun phrase (e.g. the car carrier) or even by a pronoun (it). But here, the whole phrase is repeated, making it foregrounded through this external deviation and it brings a focus onto the apparent deviation of a car carrier that is not doing its job of carrying cars. Thus the combination of naming and negation produces two images—one as it is with no cars and the other with a full load. Given the time of the journey, we might well conclude that Dai is on his way home from a job of dropping off a load of cars, and we may also conclude that this is a feeling of lightness (he doesn’t have to worry about the cars on the truck) including the pleasant feeling of being on the way home. The other TCF that links to these images of the car carrier is opposition. The poem sets up two scenarios, one cold (land of his fathers) and the other hot (desert tours) but Dai is driving vehicles in both and the contrast between these vehicles is perhaps stronger than the contrast between the carrier in its full and empty modes. Thus, Dai is feeling the lightness of the carrier which the poem compares with driving a tank, laden with soldiers and weapons, through enemy territory where at any moment they could be blown up. The negation of Not that Dai’s thinking of those desert tours produces two scenarios in which Dai does or doesn’t think about his past experience of war. We are explicitly told he’s not thinking about these experiences, but the negation alerts us to the alternative possibility, that he is, at some possibly deep level, aware of the contrast between the current driving job and his old one. The negation here is presenting Dai’s possible thoughts and at the same time denying them. The use of the distal deictic determiner, those, before desert tours, emphasises the emotional as well as temporal and physical distance between the tank driving events and the driving of the car carrier. This places the deictic centre firmly in the present with Dai in the truck driving across Wales at night, emphasised by the proximal deixis of It’s a long time since he’s travelled this light where there is an implication that we are witnessing his thoughts before the denial (Not that Dai’s thinking…) in the next stanza. Perhaps the effect of this change of direction could imply that Dai is pushing those memories away to avoid their effect on his feeling of well-being. The tenses of the verbs reinforce this effect of the deixis of here and now. There are fourteen present tense verbs in the poem, and only drove in the past tense, in a subordinate clause (the Scorpion he drove) amongst a sequence of present tense clauses, most of them main clauses with simple SPO, SPC or SPA structures. This is the one moment where the presumably troubling memories show through what is pragmatically presupposed to be a chronological narrative in which the reader moves in space and time along with Dai in his truck. The one exception to the simple structures of the clauses is the final one, which has a string of four relatively complex Adverbial prepositional phrases:

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and he’s speeding through the small hours, through the land of his fathers cowled in white, in a car carrier carrying no cars under a cloudless sky, a sprawl of stars.

This is the final stanza of the poem which is longer than the other stanzas in a villanelle and in this poem is the only one which has no sentence or clause breaks, so that the Adverbial string, including the two-part list (a cloudless sky, a sprawl of stars ), is foregrounded through its abnormal length. The effect on the reader could evoke the feeling of settling into a long journey with no thoughts of what’s gone or what is ahead, but just experiencing the movement through time and space. Apart from the vehicle I have already discussed, naming in this poem is largely simple and straightforward. Many of the head nouns chosen are everyday names and most of them are premodified by a definite article (the sky, the verge, the accelerator, the wheel ) with just a few having premodifying adjectives (the frozen motorway, an easy drive) which are not noticeably foregrounded as being unusual. The everyday nature of most of the lexis, and modification highlights the unusual choices, including car carrier and the final noun phrase: a sprawl of stars. The noun sprawl is more commonly a verb and one usually attached to animate, including human, beings. Sprawling is something that an Actor does itself, with its own body (the child sprawled on the floor) and the extension here to stars implies that they have thrown themselves across the sky. There is, therefore, no other hand (God?) putting them there. The rarity of the foregrounded choice of noun is matched by the verb choices on the whole, where the everyday verbs (e.g. floors, lurches, is, are) are matched with usually expected Actors and Goals. However, the repeated third line of the villanelle, unlike the first line, varies much more in form and meaning, its only consistent content being that it describes the sky which is covered in stars. Thus, we have a paradigm of verb forms, as well as the deverbal noun sprawl, two of them presented as postmodifying participles, which have a phonological parallelism in their vowel /O:/ and two of which have a full end rhyme (salted, vaulted). If we bring these lines together, the pattern is unmistakeable: The sky is salted too, with stars, under a sky vaulted with stars. the January sky has recalled its stars under a cloudless sky, a sprawl of stars.

These lines both repeat the basic information (it’s a starry night) and also vary the way in which it is presented, to give a full sense of the range of ways in which Dai is experiencing the night sky. First of all, a comparison is made with the salt which has been scattered on the frozen motorway (salted), then the emphasis is on the visual effect of a ceiling (vaulted), then there

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is a personification of the January sky which is paired with a verb normally expecting an animate Actor (recalled). There are a number of potential meanings of this verb out of context. On the one hand, there are two potential directional meanings, whereby recall could mean to bring out or to take in. In this context, the likely meaning is to bring out, since there is a consistent message that the stars are out throughout the poem. The other main meaning that could also be relevant here is as a synonym of remember. Finally, another visual representation of the stars uses the deverbal noun sprawl as already mentioned. All of these variations together provide a range of perceptions of the stars which contrasts with the dogged consistency of the repeated line about the car carrier carrying no cars. The effect is to provide a stronger sense of the unchanging immediate environment of Dai in the truck’s cab laid against the changing but always starry night sky he’s seeing from his position.

13.6

I Was Na’amah (Shash Trevett 2021)

I was known by many names and now by none.

I was Na’amah, the pleasant one mother to all creation. The hourglass gathered pace in my shadow.

I was Emzara, Betenos, Barthenon wheat and millet swayed to my song. Around my feet grew common reed papyrus sedge and bullrushes. I was Haykel in Arabic. Through my mouth sun rose flowers, blue pimpernel and yachnuk spoke a language of their own. Cumin and chamomile formed my veil.

In Georgian I was T’ajar, a temple. Bitter herbs formed my seat. Out of my left arm grew olive trees, cypress and cedar of Lebanon. Red bush, date palms and myrrh out of my right.

I was Nemzar in Armenian. I knew every lacewing of every petal every wrinkled bark, each sharp thorn. I twirled every leaf in dewdrops and hid a covenant into each rotund kernel.

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I was Emzara, Noyemza. Norea to the Gnostics. The Babylonians called me Tytea.

I was the sunrise of creation the moon glow of eternity. In the Book of Jasher I was Na’amah the pleasant one. Now I am only the wife of Noah.

This poem is explicitly about naming. The whole poem is a list of all the different names by which the wife of Noah has been known. The proper names, and their origins, are explicitly contrasted with none, which is how the narrator sums up being called the wife of Noah. In some cases there are lists of noun phrases explaining the meaning or connotation of the particular name: I was Na’amah, the pleasant one mother to all creation.

Here, the name Na’amah is associated with two other concepts in this string of noun phrases. The structure leaves open whether these are appositional or listing but as in many poetic contexts, the difference is not important. The second one, being the mother to all creation, provides the key to much of what follows, as other names from other traditions are linked to the natural world: Through my mouth sun rose flowers… Apart from its explicit focus on names, this poem is unusual too in having no subordinate clauses. The simplicity of the poem is delivered partly by it being a series of main clauses which document the ways in which this person has been portrayed in a range of traditions. An example of this simplicity can be found here: In Georgian I was T’ajar, a temple. Bitter herbs formed my seat. Out of my left arm grew olive trees, cypress and cedar of Lebanon. Red bush, date palms and myrrh out of my right.

This stanza has four sentences, each a simple clause, with the verb (grew) being predictable (elliptical) in the final sentence. The simplicity of structure combined with the vivid description of a range of middle and far eastern plants and herbs produces a background against which the final line (Now I am only the wife of Noah) resonates and indirectly makes the point of the poem, which is that the history of women is lost in patriarchal accounts. The processes in the series of clauses which make up the poem are either intensive relational processes, represented by the copula (I was ) or material

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events with natural, but inanimate, Actors (the hourglass gathered pace; flowers rose through my mouth). This means that with a couple of exceptions (I twirled; I hid), the protagonist herself is not a material actor to any extent. This combination of being (I was ) and natural, but not dynamic or intentional material action processes (grew; formed; swayed) provides a calm and relatively static background to the parade of different names for this significant, but now unnamed, female character.

13.7

Approaching New Poems

This chapter has demonstrated what happens when using the model I have been developing to analyse the language of poems that are entirely new to the analyst. The process of using each of the TCFs in turn to consider strands of textual meaning enabled me to engage with the poems in a way that is systematic and yet retains much of the pleasure of engaging with—and understanding—a new poem that comes from simple reading and re-reading. Whilst some of the TCFs are intermittent in their relevance, the core TCFs each produce challenges in working out how to describe everything in the poem and yet pick out those cases where the textual choices contribute most to the poetic effects.

References Constantine, D. (2021). Jimmy knight. The North, 65. Cox, M. (2021). A square of sunlight from a square of sunlight. Smith. Doorstop Books. Payne, A. (2020). 3 Victoria avenue. The North, 64. Payne, S. (2019). Dai. The North, 62. Trevett, S. (2021). I was Na’amah from a borrowed land, Smith. Doorstop Books. Wilson, G. (2020). Important people. The North, 64.

CHAPTER 14

Textual Meaning, Linguistic Theory and the Stylistics of Poetry

This book has attempted to establish whether a framework I originally applied to ideology in political language and news reporting could be developed into a more general model of textual meaning which would provide a systematic approach to ideation in texts, and specifically in contemporary poems. The theoretical implications of proposing such a model are to place stylistics more centrally as one of the pillars of linguistics, rather than seeing any kind of text analysis as dependent on, and subservient to, general linguistics. One of the stated aims was to provide a rigorous and transparent account of the textual meaning of a number of poems which could be used as the basis of comparison, both with other poems and with other accounts of the same poems. In general terms, I think these aims have been achieved, though as we shall see below, there is a great deal more work to do in this field. If readers can see exactly how this project was carried out and how the analysis led to the interpretation, then it can at least be claimed as legitimate (rigorous and transparent) stylistics. As I acknowledged in Chapter 1, the research questions themselves, indeed the whole project, is rather broad in scope. This led to some of the more intractable problems that I encountered, but here is my assessment of the extent to which I have answered the research questions I set out with. RQ1: To what extent (if at all) does the framework of TCFs developed for Critical Stylistic purposes provide descriptive and explanatory adequacy for the language of a sample of contemporary poems?

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The concepts of descriptive and explanatory adequacy are a helpful way to think about the value of this kind of work which is partly descriptive and partly theoretical. For this project, I would relate the description of the TCFs in the poems to descriptive adequacy, and with a few caveats (see 14.2) the model of textual meaning covers much of what might be considered consensus about the style choices made in the poems. There is, of course, additional contextual information that can inform our own personal, societal or historical readings of poems, but these additional (i.e. the interpersonal or pragmatic) perspectives were not in my sights. The explanatory adequacy of this model for poetry, I would argue, comes into play in relation to those aspects of the poem’s meaning that would not necessarily be flagged up either in a commentary based on formal linguistic features alone, as in the early type of stylistics, or by a literary scholar with historical (albeit anachronistic) or social context as their frame of reference. Thus, I see the approach as providing what used to be called a ‘discovery procedure’ and providing confidence that, were another scholar to repeat the process, much the same account of the poem’s textual meaning would be produced. The only caveat to this claim is that some of the TCFs (e.g. prioritising) are so all-encompassing that two scholars may each only find themselves commenting on a subset of the potential observations. However, there should be no problem in each recognising and acknowledging the observations of the other if they are grounded in the model in the same way. RQ2: What additional amendments to the model of textual meaning and the consequent TCF framework need to be made to provide any shortfall in the adequacy described in RQ1?

The second research question is one that I have answered in a range of ways throughout the book. Sect. 14.3 summarises the observations that I made about each TCF in turn and raises three more general issues about the model as a whole and how it provides the descriptive and explanatory adequacy needed for poetry. The one area I was most conscious of needing to add to the model was iconicity, which I have labelled Evoking, to keep the pattern of labelling of TCFs consistent. This was a phenomenon I had long been working on in relation to poetry (Jeffries, 2010), but which had never seemed relevant to my work on non-literary texts. This meant that I had not worked out whether it was indeed a new TCF that could be added to the list or whether it worked at an angle to the other TCFs, as metaphor does. My conclusion is that it does extend the list of TCFs and that it provides a complementary viewpoint on many of the phenomena we see in poems. This extending of the list of TCFs is not done lightly. The fear of an ever-extending list of labels for ever more detailed features of language is one that ought to make us pause. This is a problem, as we saw, for transitivity and it can also be a problem in pragmatics (e.g. speech act theory) and other sub-fields of linguistics. However, I am relatively confident that evoking works in much the

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same ways, and at the same level, as the established TCFs of the earlier model, being linked to certain forms, but not limited by them and producing a range of effects that are interpretable in relation to the specific co-text in the poem. RQ3: What does the development of this model for the wider purpose described in RQ2 tell us about textual meaning more generally?

This third research question is the vaguest and has the least chance of being definitively answered as a result. However, the open-ended nature of the question means that any set of answers will allow me to claim that the research has fulfilled its aim. Sect. 14.1 summarises what we may learn about a general theory of language from this work and Sect. 14.2 focusses on what we may learn specifically about textual meaning as a result of applying it to a different genre. To some extent, then, I would claim that this question has also been answered, although a further widening (e.g. to other languages and other genres) would provide the opportunity for other and possibly different answers, so this part of the conclusion, perhaps even more than the others, is contingent.

14.1

What Have We Learnt About Linguistic Theory?

In this section, I will summarise what I think are the lessons we can learn from this project about a generalised theory of (human) language. This may sound like rather a grand claim, but is really an attempt, in its generalisation, to allow us to step back from the minutiae of our daily work to see the wood for the trees. The following paragraphs itemise the observations about language that I think should be built into any broad linguistic theory. 14.1.1

Textual Meaning

Before beginning this project I was already convinced that there is a layer of textual meaning that operates somewhere between the basic semanticosyntactic layer of the language and the fully contextualised pragmatic use of that language. Although I had concentrated on non-literary texts and ideological interpretation of the textual meaning, I had also seen how some of the TCFs (contrasting in particular) worked equally well on both political and poetic texts. This led me to the conclusion that I should carry out an extensive project to see whether this layer of meaning worked in the same way across all the TCFs irrespective of the genre. The answer to this question is that they do work well in relation to poetic meaning, though there are some differences of emphasis and execution which appear to be more typical of poetry than non-literary genres.

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14.1.2

Tripartite Structure of Language

As with the existence of a layer of textual meaning, I had also already proposed (see Jeffries, 2014) that it should sit alongside the other pillars of communication which, though their details and underlying assumptions may vary, have been called langue / parole; competence / performance; code / usage in former linguistic theories. I am not the first to suggest that this set of dichotomies should be replaced by a tripartite system of what Halliday called the metafunctions of language (though I am not certain he couched it in these terms) and I have claimed his term ideation(al) to cover what I mean by textual meaning, though it differs somewhat from his application of the term to certain grammatical systems and not others. This conviction about the placing of textual meaning at the centre of any model of language has not been challenged by the work I have done here, (see Jeffries, 2014) but remains to be fully theorised in later work (Jeffries in prep). What I would argue, though, is that every individual instance of a TCF pointing out meaning that is not carried by the linguistic meaning alone provides more evidence of such a layer of meaning. This is a move away from the assumption that texts are simply applications of linguistic structure to particular instances of use which has been at the heart of the view that stylistics is some kind of applied linguistics, rather than linguistics per se. Much of the difficulty that has beset stylistics and similar fields such as discourse analysis is the lack of a place in linguistics’ theory of language. The troublesome gap between langue and parole is one that approaches to textual meaning can help to fill. 14.1.3

Learning from Descriptive Linguistics

The other main conclusion here is that there is much to gain by teasing out strands of meaning. Whilst this is partly a practical or methodological conclusion, it is also more than this. Whilst future research could be focussed on finding evidence of the psychological reality of the textual layer of meaning, I would propose that we need a meta-theory of language to make progress in understanding how each of the lower levels of language work together, whichever theoretical approach is adopted at these levels.

14.2 What Have We Learnt About Textual Meaning in Relation to Poetry? Poetry has often been considered a genre apart, with its own stylistic features and habits. To some extent, this is true, though more in some periods of history and some parts of the world than others. However, the differences that are most striking between poetry and any other genre tend to be at the level of form and not textual construction of meaning. This means that whilst we do not find business reports in iambic pentameter or broadcast news reports

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in sonnet form, they do have their own generic features which differ from poetry. However, this is not the aspect of poetry that most interests me and contemporary poetry in English is anyway on the whole less likely to use the traditional forms of poetry than earlier periods. What this project has shown in relation to the textual meaning of poems in the contemporary period is that it works much like the other genres I have so far examined through the lens of the TCFs. Most of what stylistics has said or wishes to say about poetry can be covered by this approach, apart from purely musical or formal effects, unless they are also linked to meaning. The differences (see Sect. 14.3) are at the level of application of the features represented by the TCFs, rather than the TCFs themselves. Most importantly, the textual-conceptual approach to poetic meaning seems to provide a way to get under the skin of poems without being overly formalistic nor too vaguely literary about it. Whilst the textual analysis is systematic and transparent, it is nevertheless sensitive to the co-text in a way that allows the analyst to get at poetic meaning beyond the purely superficial, but linking back to the text itself.

14.3 What Have We Learnt About Style in Contemporary Poetry? The opening chapter of this book provided various caveats about the sample of poems analysed (it is small); the definition of contemporary poetry (it is vague) and the lack of comparison with poetry of other times, languages and places (there is none here). The reader wanting a definitive description of the style of contemporary poetry, defined by place and time, will be disappointed, but has probably stopped reading long ago. Nevertheless, the analysis provided in Chapters 2–13 have produced a description of a small dataset made up of poems that are in English, date from the late twentieth to early twenty-first century and are largely, though not exclusively, of British origin. This description includes some observations about the ways in which the TCFs appear to be working in the poems, some of them spread across the data and some more local. This is a starting point against which future studies can compare their results and reflect on the extent to which my findings are specific to the poems, type of poems, or period of poetry represented in my sample. The next section will summarise the main observations from each of the TCFs. 14.3.1

Observations from the TCFs

In Chapter 2, the TCF of Naming provided insights into the long-established concept of defamiliarisation in relation to poetry where we saw that variation in the naming of referents could produce different perspectives which enable the reader to see them anew. Similarly, the naming in a poem could produce a ‘thrill of recognition’ for a phenomenon that the reader may know

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at some level but have no name for. Finally, we saw naming having the power to create referents by the very act of labelling. None of these effects of naming is unique to poetry, of course, but they were abundant in my data and perhaps are more typical of poetry than some other genres. The other main finding of this chapter was the way in which the naming patterns across a whole poem can reflect the poem’s larger meaning. Again, this kind of patterning may be found in other genres, but it is particularly noticeable in the poems in this study. Chapter 3 demonstrated both the strengths and weaknesses of a verbal TCF based entirely on Transitivity. It became clear that additional semantic labelling (e.g. stative/dynamic; intentional/unintentional) might mitigate the problems arising from a model that tries to cover all these aspects of meaning and the danger of proliferating category labels as a result. In relation to the poems, we saw that verb choices foregrounded through external deviation can produce poetic effects, as can the patterning of verbs across a poem to set up the conditions for internal deviation and thereby foregrounding of a different kind. Chapter 4 used the structural description of sentences and clauses to discuss the TCF of Prioritising in the poems under scrutiny. The relative priorities of main and subordinate clauses showed that some of the most significant meaning, whilst deprioritised structurally, can often be found at the lower levels of subordination. Information structure and its manipulation within clauses (e.g. fronting) also demonstrated the use of Prioritising to produce non-default focus and themes. Finally, we saw how poems often have complex syntax, some of which is syntactically ambiguous or unable to be simply parsed because it moves from one structure to another (much like spoken language) in a stream of clauses which cannot be pinned down. There are, of course, meaningful textual consequences of this structural chaos too. The most important contribution that is made by structural (i.e. grammatical) features of the poems is in combination with other TCFs and often these effects take place across the poem as a whole. In Chapter 5, the effects of deixis on the TCF of representing space, time and person were examined and we saw that complex patterning of time deixis across poems in the sample was common, especially in poems dealing with memory. These poems also used place deixis to produce the effect of a tour of a remembered place by moving the deictic centre around in the imagined space, often as the narrator moves from place to place in their memory. Though many of the poems are in the first person, we also saw how deixis works equally to produce deictic centres, and thus a poetic point of view, in third-person poems. Having examined the core TCFs, which by their nature are found in every text, Chapters 6–12 investigated the presence and effects of the more intermittent, but nevertheless important, TCFs. Chapter 6 showed the widespread use of similes to produce an effect of equating in the poems and other techniques of equating, intensive relational and appositional structures were also shown to have a place in the poems. Contrasting was also shown to be threaded

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throughout the dataset and to work in similar ways to those found in political and news texts. The underlying presence of conventional opposites is as evident here as in non-literary texts, though the creation of new opposites is more unusual and therefore more foregrounded in the poems. Some poems were found to be based on a pattern of opposition which extended through the text as a whole. Other examples are more localised. Exemplifying and Enumerating, which I have called Listing here, are shown to have a place in contemporary poems with lists forming the major part of some poems and occurring regularly in many of them. Whilst enumerating is less common than exemplifying, as a result of poems not being purely functional texts, there is, nevertheless, some evidence of lists which are explicitly complete, as well as many more three-part symbolic lists. One of the striking features of this dataset was the occurrence of three-plus-one lists, where the initial three-part list appears to be symbolic but an additional item is added as a kind of afterthought. It would be interesting to see whether this phenomenon is common outside poetry. I suspect it might occur in spoken language, where the limitations of memory could produce such an effect, but in that case, I doubt that the initial three-part list would be symbolic in the same way. Though none of the poems in my data are ‘list poems’ in the usual sense of that label, many of them are made up of lists, including embedded lists within lists. There is much more to discover about how this TCF works in general as a contribution to textual meaning and it is clearly part of the array of poetic features available to the contemporary poet. Chapter 8 demonstrates the potential for textual meaning of the TCF of Negating which simultaneously produces both positive and negative scenarios. Since many poems deal with complex and profound emotional distress, it is perhaps not surprising that negating is widespread, though not ubiquitous, in my data. The presence of a positive scenario hovering behind the negated one is often the source of hope in such situations, though it can also be the source of a darker undercurrent against a brighter (negated) background. The poems use all the negators available, from grammatical and morphological to lexical, to produce these effects and in many cases there is a negated theme running through the whole poem, often from the title onwards. Whilst negating produces a binary set of scenarios, modality is the source of the TCF Hypothesising, examined in Chapter 9. We saw in the analysis that generalised modality of the type that gave rise to Simpson’s (1993) modal grammar was less evident in poems than in his (prose fiction) data. Modality when it occurred in the poems was mainly epistemic or perception modalityand used to create alternative possible narratives, though less clearly of the positive/negative kind we saw with negating. The most striking feature of the dataset analysed here was the frequent use of modal verbs(would) to indicate a tendency or a habitual type of behaviour. As many of the poems are poems of memory, often memorialising people, their typical actions are modalised to show that these are giving a flavour of the person’s habits, rather than a factual account of them.

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One of the most difficult TCFs to pin down was the one I originally called Implying and Assuming. The problem is that it is on the border of pragmatics, though I am relatively satisfied with my solution, which is to make a practical distinction between conventional and conversational implicature (the latter not so relevant to the textual meaning in poems) so that I can then refer to both presupposition (which is clearly textual and thus not pragmatic at all) and conventional implicature under the same label, Alluding. What we see in Chapter 10 is that normal presuppositional processes can work both in the background of poems and in foregrounded non-standard ways to produce assumptions that are never propositional, but often form a significant part of the poem’s subtler meaning. Likewise, conventional and to a lesser extent conversational implicature can also create the foundation of a poem’s textual structure in the background or foreground a particular violation of one of Grice’s maxims. These effects almost always work with other TCFs in the poems. Whilst the presentation of others’ speech is less of an expected phenomenon than in prose fiction, nevertheless many contemporary poems use speech presentation to bring different voices into play. Chapter 11 showed that my sample of poems included very little direct speech, except when the narrator was quoting themselves or summarising some of the language heard around them, rather than quoting a speech event in itself. The lack of direct speech is not likely to be a complete absence if a wider dataset were obtained, though the relatively lack of plot and characters compared with fiction means that it will always remain less common in poems. Some evidence of Free Direct Speech, though only as a symbol of what might have been said at some earlier time, is present, though not frequent, in the data. There is similarlylittle indirect speech in the poems. However, the reporting of speech more generally, through NPSA and NPV, is much more common in the data and provides a broad sense that someone is talking, rather than a faithful account of what they are saying. Sometimes these accounts are, like the habitual use of the modal (would), indicators of general habits rather than referring to specific speech events. This is one of the ways in which contemporary poetry achieves its appeal to the universal at the same time as providing the kind of detail that allows the reader to engage with the scenario being presented. The presentation of thought, as opposed to speech, is more complex, since much of poetry could be seen as presenting the thoughts of the narrator/poet and yet there are few explicit indicators (i.e. reporting clauses) of thought presentation, leaving the reader to work out to what extent the poem is a representation of a thought event as a whole or in part. The final chapter (Chapter 12) dealing with individual textual features introduces the new TCF of Evoking. Whilst this is not a phenomenon that is new to me or others, the perspective of bringing sound, image, form and structure under one umbrella term is an innovation which fits into the wider model of textual meaning I am trying to construct. Here, we saw that not only does phonology create directly and indirectly evoked meaning (i.e. onomatopoeia

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and sound-symbolism) in the poems, but that the manipulation of form (e.g. line-breaks and stanza shapes) and structure (e.g. long Subjects, delayed Predicators) has just as much chance of directly evoking a response in the reader as the more traditionally recognised sound effects. The poems themselves made abundant use of these features and it is clear that the relative freedom of form in the contemporary period allows for a range of effects which a stricter format may prohibit. 14.3.2

Poetry in the Round

As well as the detailed examination of how the TCFs work in my dataset, the analysis also answered some questions that have been hovering around since I firstdeveloped critical stylistics. The question of whether metaphor and other figurative effects should be allocated to their own TCF is one that I have been asked, and asked myself, many times. This project provided the opportunity for me to add metaphor to the list of TCFs if it seemed to be appropriate, but it did not. The reason for this is the anchoring of TCFs in some kind of link, however broad, to formal features. In some cases (e.g. contrasting), there are a number of potential formal triggers of a TCF; in others (e.g. negating and modality) there are core realisations and more peripheral ones. But metaphor does not appear to be like these. Instead, it can be created by almost any of the other TCFs, given the right co-text. I did consider whether to simply include metaphor as part of Equating, but though simile explicitly and neatly belongs there, metaphor remains more slippery and I see it as cutting across textual meaning at a different angle (there’s a metaphor right there). Another concern I have had for a while is whether the lack of a clear boundary between the meaning produced by textual choices and produced in the act of reading by the interaction of a text and a reader is a problem for my model. Jeffries (2014) proposed that what I am defining as textual meaning should be seen as the consensual meaning of a text and be referred to as an interpretation, whereas the individual reader’s response to a text should be referred to as a reading. This seems to me clear, and since there are ways in which the analysis of the poems allows us to distinguish between what the text is doing and how one might react to that, the boundary between them is, if not unfaltering, at least partly visible. The only area in which there may be some doubt about this boundary is in relation to what the reader already knows. This means that if the reader’s linguistic knowledge (through age, competence, second language skills, wider reading experience or social, educational or geographical background) is widely divergent from the speech community in which the text is most commonly encountered, then the difference between the consensus I am proposing and the individual reader could be problematic. This is not a counterargument to the existence of textual meaning per se, though it may cause

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readers to mistake this meaning. Teachers at all levels have experience of their students ‘getting a text wrong’, though it is possible to get a text right at a number of levels, particularly in the case of poems. It is also, of course, possible to react to a text in different ways for all of the reasons given above. We may agree or disagree with the ideology of a political speech, but we may also react positively or negatively to what we are hearing about the people in a poem like ‘The Unprofessionals’, depending on our own personal experience. None of this, it seems to me, undermines the textual meaning itself, though it could incline the reader to read more or less of that kind of text as a result.

14.4

More Work to Do

There are many aspects of this field of study where there is more to do. This is more than one person over one career can possibly manage. There are potential PhD theses and larger projects that could easily come out of this work and I hope that it does so. This final section outlines some of the work that could be carried out, given resources and immortality. 14.4.1

Work on the Model

Each of the TCFs is huge. Some have had more attention than others, but there are some big questions waiting to be answered. If this model is something like a meta-framework of where things fit together, each part of the jigsaw requires close attention by scholars to learn exactly how it works in relation to texts. This has happened to some extent for Contrasting (Davies, 2008, 2013); Negating (Nahajec, 2012, 2021) and Representing Speech and Thought (Mohamed, 2022), though there is more that could be said about these. There is also scope for studies of similar depth to be carried out on Listing and Evoking and even more work than already exists on all of the other TCFs. Apart from such in-depth studies of individual TCFs, the model I am proposing needs to be tested out on much more data, including many more different text types and genres. I have supervised PhD theses attempting to widen the scope of critical stylistics to ideology in news reporting (in English) from different viewpoints (Abeed, 2017); poetry in Kurdish (Ibrahim, 2018) and multimodal aspects of online news (Khuzaee, 2019), but this is a drop in the ocean of what could be done. Much linguistics is founded on examination of English and to some extent other common languages of European origin. Some of the TCFs here would not work the same in other languages (see Ibrahim, 2018) and there is much to gain from people adapting it to fit a range of language types with the ultimate aim of refining the model of textual meaning itself. Similarly, testing out

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the ideas in this book on a range of different genres, including fiction, advertising, spoken informal language and so on would be the ultimate test of its usefulness. 14.4.2

Work on Theory

Each part of the TCF jigsaw also can (and does) draw on different insights from theories that are sometimes seen as in competition with each other (e.g. grammars). There is a theoretical case to be made for an eclectic approach to language description (Jeffries, 2000) but this is also a practical issue. I would make a plea for our field (linguistics, not just stylistics) to agree on some highlevel structures to the meta-theory, so that the work of each researcher can be fitted into the bigger picture. I feel that early linguistics had this advantage, but more recent work has been fragmented and has therefore not added to a cumulative wisdom but to a sense of disorientation, except within one’s own narrow field where there are shared axioms. Linguistics is a young discipline and could become subsumed into other more powerful fields if it continues to fragment in this way. This would lead to a loss in knowledge that would be difficult to recreate. It would therefore be practically helpful to get back to something approaching a disciplinary definition. 14.4.3

Work on Poetry

Finally, the elephant in the room is the rather narrow set of poems, within a narrow tradition of contemporary lyric poetry, that I have investigated here. I would be really interested to see the extent to which this approach to poetry works for a wider range of poems (including dub, slam, etc.) and a wider range of poetics in other cultures and languages. I have stuck to the British tradition of lyric poetry (with small contributions from the US) because this is the poetry I know best. I wanted to see whether this approach would satisfy me first of all in analysing the poems I know well and then some poems in a similar tradition which I didn’t know at all and finally some poems (again in a similar vein) that someone else chose for me. This succeeded, but I have my suspicions that, as this project has thrown up challenges I didn’t see when analysing political language and reportage, there are more challenges to be faced with different poetic traditions.

References Abeed, M. (2017). ‘News representation in times of conflict: A corpus-based critical stylistic analysis of the Libyan Revolution. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Huddersfield. Davies, M. (2008). ‘Oppositions in news discourse: The ideological construction of us and them in the British press.’ Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Huddersfield. Davies, M. (2013). Oppositions and ideology in news discourse. Bloomsbury Academic.

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Ibrahim, M. (2018). ‘The construction of the speaker and fictional world in the small mirrors: Critical stylistic analysis.’ Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Huddersfield. Jeffries, L. (2000). ‘Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater: In defence of theoretical eclecticism in stylistics.’ Occasional Papers No. 12. Poetics and Linguistics Association. Jeffries, L. (2010). The unprofessionals: Syntactic iconicity and reader interpretation in contemporary poems. In D. McIntyre & B. Busse (Eds.), Language and Style (pp. 95–115). Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffries, L. (2014). ‘Interpretation’. In P. Stockwell & S. Whiteley (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of stylistics (pp. 469–486.). Cambridge University Press. Khuzaee, S. (2019). ‘A multimodal textual analysis of non-literary texts: A critical stylistic approach.’ Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Huddersfield. Mohamed, H. (2022.) Voice fusion in reporting the Ethiopian-Egyptian Conflict: A combined approach using critical discourse analysis and critical stylistics. University of Huddersfield, unpublished PhD thesis. Nahajec, L. (2012). ‘Evoking the possibility of presence: Textual and ideological effects of linguistic negation in written discourse.’ Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Huddersfield. Nahajec, L. (2021). Negation, expectation and ideology in written texts: A textual and communicative perspective. John Benjamins. Simpson, P. (1993). Language, ideology and point of view. Routledge.

Appendix

Full Poems Used in This Book (Listed in Alphabetical Order of Titles) 10K Just as autumn gave way to winter As the leaves fell open and lifted Like momentary magic carpets, Along the lines of hedges and verges Past closed gates and badly fenced fields Over pavements and cinder paths we ran. Weightless, the pea in the whistle, Under sky and street lights and always The night air hovered like a promise And left its metal on our lips.

We ran though nobody came or went And the trees and night birds made no comment And the only sound was our feet in the road That seemed to make the earth move. Indoors, people ate, checked their mail, flicked channels, made love or slept and all the while you were with me counting out the rhythms on the hills.

Jane Aspinall from The Result is What You See Today. Poems about Running. Ed Paul Deaton, Kim Moore and Ben Wilkinson. Smith Doorstop 2019.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2

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3 Victoria Avenue Port of Spain The pair of us, in the heat, standing on the pavement, gazing at the house that’s no longer there, its yellow walls, verandah, hanging baskets from behind which Isabel appears, in her apron, a yam in her hands, above her, a bookcase, cobwebs descending from an illustrated edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a snakeskin on a table, cracks in the floorboards, an open window, me looking down at us, the pair of us, in the heat, standing on the pavement, gazing at the house that’s no longer there.

Can I help you? Who’s this? A stranger. What can I say? This is where we live.

Alan Payne from The North Issue 64. Smith Doorstop 2020. A Hairline Fracture Whatever went wrong, that week, was more than weather: a shoddy streak in the fabric of the air of London that disintegrated into pollen and came charging down by the bushelful, an abrasive the color of gold dust, eroding the tearducts and littering the sidewalks in the neighborhood of Sloane Square,

where the Underground’s upper reaches have the character, almost, of a Roman ruin—from one crannied arcade a dustmop of yellow blossom hung with the stubborn insolence of the unintended,

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shaking still other mischief from its hair onto the platform, the pneumatic haste of missed trains, the closing barrier—

wherever we went, between fits of sneezing we quarreled: under the pallid entablatures of Belgravia, the busy brown façades that were all angles going in and out like a bellows, even the small house on Ebury Street where Mozart, at the age of eight, wrote his first symphony, our difference was not to be composed.

Unmollified by the freckled plush of mushrooming monkeyflowers in the windowboxes of Chelsea, undone by the miraculous rift in the look of things when you’ve just arrived—the remote up close, the knowing that in another, unentered existence everything shimmering at the surface is this minute merely, unremarkably familiar—

it was as though we watched the hairline fracture of the quotidian widen to a geomorphic fissure, its canyon edge bridged by the rainbows of a terror that nothing would ever again be right between us, that wherever we went, nowhere in the universe would the bone again be knit or the rift be closed.

Amy Clampitt from The Kingfisher Faber and Faber 1984. A Square of Sunlight She dawdled home as usual through the town with school friends. One was left at the station another at the library. Three of them stopped at the bakers in the High Street for free stale cakes and after some window shopping by the time she reached the Butter Cross she was on her own. She turned into the Close and took the short cut. through the Cathedral, in the front and out the back, touching the Jane Austen grave, then hurrying under St Swithuns church, into Kingsgate Street, through the garage to the front door at the back under the scent of ripening pears against the wall. The hall, shadowy dining room and its candle smell, through the breakfast room, by the walk-in larder,

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shedding satchel, blazer, boater and shoes as she went into the kitchen, back door open, and her dad in his cricket whites, prone and beating his fist on the quarry tiled floor in a square of sunlight.

Meg Cox from A Square of Sunlight. Smith Doorstop 2021. Baking Strange, her knack for turning up these thirty odd years when I least expect her:

ironing, folding the sheets, or most often baking cakes; so that I stop to consider

how, involuntarily, sounds, thoughts, smells, shapes are habits arranged around her face.

Suddenly, through a half-open window, comes warm layered scent of syringa, bonfires, mown grass.

How readily the present folds away: everything standing back from itself, unchanged –

the terrace from the road, the house a long way off down the garden, rooms deepening through the hall,

light falling in its usual place by the kitchen window where she stands, baking cakes.

Someone down the terrace is mowing their lawn, and our side of the street is in cool quiet shadow.

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Front to back, home lengthens, making what is familiar past, particular, necessary, strange.

Lucy Newlyn from Ginnel Carcanet 2005. Blackberry Picking Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full, Until the tinkling bottom had been covered With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre. But when the bath was filled we found a fur, A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

Seamus Heaney from Death of a Naturalist. Faber and Faber. 1966. Crafty You made handbags out of milk bottle tops bound in raffia; machined rugs out of rags and odd balls of wool; sewed cami-knickers from parachute silk, my first satchel handkerchiefs from flourbags; cooked up bread poultices sheepshead brawn; crocheted cuffs and collars; smocked, pleated, piped; cable and moss stitched. Cakes though weren’t your forte. You were defter unspooling golden syrup onto mounds

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of bread and marge, doled out slice by slice or recycling the weekend’s leftovers.

Now, sitting here, turning up trouser legs apprentice task, I’m aware that even the names for your skills are exiting Left out of my head, and the mother tongue, shop soiled, shop spoiled, we learn to forget.

Maureen Duffy from Oxford Poetry Vol 13 No 1. 2009.

Dai A car carrier carrying no cars owns the frozen motorway. It’s night. The sky is salted too, with stars,

and the verge is thick with snow. Dai floors the accelerator, grips the wheel tight and the car carrier carrying no cars

lurches into a climb; its V8 roars. It’s a long time since he’s travelled this light under a sky vaulted with stars.

Not that Dai’s thinking of those desert tours, the Scorpion he drove. The road is quiet and the car carrier carrying no cars

is an easy drive. Up through the gears as the road levels. Things are all right— the January sky has recalled its stars

and he’s speeding through the small hours, through the land of his fathers cowled in white, in a car carrier carrying no cars under a cloudless sky, a sprawl of stars.

Stephen Payne from The North Issue 62. Smith Doorstop 2019

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Doorsteps Cutting bread brings her hands back to me the left, with its thick wedding ring, steadying the loaf. Small plump hands before age shirred and speckled them.

She would slice not downwards but across with an unserrated ivory-handled carving knife bought from a shop in the Edgware Road, an Aladdin’s cave of cast-offs from good houses earls and countesses were hinted at.

She used it to pare to an elegant thinness. First she smoothed already-softened butter on the upturned face of the loaf. Always white, Coburg shape. Finely rimmed with crust the soft halfmoon half-slices came to the tea table herringboned across a doylied plate.

I saw away at stoneground wholemeal. Each slice falling forward into the crumbs to be spread with butter’s counterfeit is as thick as three of hers. Doorsteps she’d have called them. And those were white in our street, rubbed with hearthstone so that they glared in the sun like new-dried tennis shoes.

Pamela Gillilan from Sixty Women Poets Newcastle: Bloodaxe. 1993. Figs Foreign bodies snuck among broad-leaved green a shade too deep for suburbia.

Specked purple, extravagance scarred by wasps, skin the worked grain of metal.

Expatriate fruit surviving out in the cold; blind snouts of avocado

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made possible by a record summer, a stubborn mother.

Inside, they split under their own sagging weight till the edge of the breadboard

brims, bright with their oil and I bite into polyp flesh not quite sweet.

Mario Petrucci from Smiths Knoll No 9. 1995. and Shrapnel and Sheets. Headland. 1996. Greenhouse It’s gone to seed now; each loose pane pitted with lichen like the walls of a fish tank, the soffits lagged with a fur of cobwebs. I burst in the other day; kicked the door out of its warped frame, stood in the green light among nine years of unnatural growth and thought back to the morning we built it. We used the old sash windows from the house, held them flat with leather gloves, steadied them down the path. I remember that journey: you out in front, unsure of your footing on the damp stones, and me behind counting each of your steps through our cargo of glass.

Some nights I’d watch from my bedroom window as you arrived home late from a concert, and leaving the headlights on to guide you waded into the black of the garden. I’d wait, straining for the sound of the hasp or guessing your distance by the sparkle of a cufflink. When you disturbed them the seeds of rose-bay willow-herbs lifted like air bubbles into the beam of light. Then you’d emerge, a hoard of tomatoes swelling the lap of your luminous shirt; and caught in the blur of double glazing your perfect ghost, just one step behind you.

Simon Armitage from Zoom! Bloodaxe Books 1989.

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Household The tons of brick and stone, the yards of piping, the sinks and china basins, three toilets, the tiles, and the tons of wood in floors, chairs, tables, the yards of flex and cable that wrap the house like a net, the heavy glassed front door, the gate onto the street, the rippled sheets of window, the yew tree by the back, the pictures, books, piano: what would it all weigh? One kiss, one breathed declaration, and there it is: the mass of love.

Henry Shukman from New Welsh Review No 76 (Summer 2007) Important People Pandemic, 2020 I’m reading the book my daughter gave me last Christmas, A History of the World in 21 Women. She likes facts, something to believe in, and I’m trying to believe in a world made up of Joan of Arc, Frida Kahlo, Benazir Bhutto… their wonders reeled off on ten pages each.

Around me, the hospital waiting room is dotted with very ill people. They whisper in pairs, or sit separated by six feet, some reading like me or pretending to, watching the clock go round. Nameless nurses, in blue, walk through and back and through again. Once in a while they call someone to stand on the scales.

Gina Wilson from The North Issue 64. Smith Doorstop 2020. I Was Na’amah I was known by many names and now by none.

I was Na’amah, the pleasant one mother to all creation. The hourglass gathered pace in my shadow.

I was Emzara, Betenos, Barthenon wheat and millet swayed to my song. Around my feet grew common reed papyrus sedge and bullrushes.

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I was Haykel in Arabic. Through my mouth sun rose flowers, blue pimpernel and yachnuk spoke a language of their own. Cumin and chamomile formed my veil.

In Georgian I was T’ajar, a temple. Bitter herbs formed my seat. Out of my left arm grew olive trees, cypress and cedar of Lebanon. Red bush, date palms and myrrh out of my right.

I was Nemzar in Armenian. I knew every lacewing of every petal every wrinkled bark, each sharp thorn. I twirled every leaf in dewdrops and hid a covenant into each rotund kernel.

I was Emzara, Noyemza. Norea to the Gnostics. The Babylonians called me Tytea.

I was the sunrise of creation the moon glow of eternity. In the Book of Jasher I was Na’amah the pleasant one. Now I am only the wife of Noah.

Shash Trevett from A Borrowed Land. Smith Doorstop 2021. Ironing I used to iron everything: my iron flying over sheets and towels like a sledge chased by wolves over snow;

the flex twisting and crinkling until the sheath frayed, exposing wires like nerves. I stood like a horse

with a smoking hoof, inviting anyone who dared to lie on my silver padded board,

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to be pressed to the thinness of dolls cut from paper. I’d have commandeered a crane

if I could, got the welders at Jarrow to heat me an iron the size of a tug to flatten the house.

Then for years I ironed nothing. I put the iron in a high cupboard. I converted to crumpledness.

And now I iron again: shaking dark spots of water onto wrinkled silk, nosing into sleeves, round

buttons, breathing the sweet heated smell hot metal draws from newly-washed cloth, until my blouse dries

to a shining, creaseless blue, an airy shape with room to push my arms, breasts, lungs, heart into.

Vicki Feaver from The Handless Maiden Jonathan Cape. 1994. ‘It Wasn’t Snowing’ It wasn’t snowing, but it should have been. You were an old man, nine months from the grave. Your hand was very dry and very hot And large, as I recall (I was a boy, Fourteen years at most, I led you round Part of the school, your guide; you seemed to listen) That night you read in a slow, dismissive voice That left the words like notes on staves hung in the air, No longer yours, but part of memory You talked about Miss Dickinson of Amherst And said aloud the eight lines of her poem ‘The heart asks pleasure first’. And from that night I’ve known the poem word-perfect, part of me.

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I think you let more lines free into language And memory with your rusty, lonely voice Than any other poet of our age. It must have been like freeing doves And watching them go off to neighbouring cotes Or into the low clouds of your New Hampshire Knowing they’ll meet no harm, that they’ll survive Long after the hand that freed them has decayed.

Those lines are wise in rhythm and they lead Into a clapboard dwelling, or a field, Or lives that prey upon the land and one another, Or the big country where we both were children.

Michael Schmidt from The North No 1. Smith Doorstop. 1986. Jimmy Knight Waking this morning I remembered Jimmy Knight From Hope Road Primary School. Every kid could tell What sort of a family life every other kid had By how they were shod and clad and fed And whether they looked you in the eyes all right And smiled or never did and by their smell.

Jimmy had none of the good signs and all of the bad. I remember his scared white face, the snot And elsewhere of him that was damp. But one Last lesson of the afternoon, all the lights were on Smog at the windows, in her normal voice Mrs Thomas said Come out the front, Jimmy, love, and sing to us

And doing as he was told that’s what he did Came out the front and wiped his nose on his jersey sleeve Covered the wet with his hands and lifted up his eyes Towards something he could see and we could not And sang us ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ But without the words if I recall it right or none

We understood though a blackbird might for all I know Or the angels I suppose, pure melody it was Pure carolling, the breath of clearness, always near Or perhaps already gone beyond a world of tears Clean lovely it soared and dipped and soared again It was grace, what he’d had given him not asking why, he gave

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Till he stopped and returned from wherever he’d been Stood still, eyes down, in the silence, and Mrs Thomas said Thank you, Jimmy, love, and the small soiled lad Went back to his place and looked the same And outside was the smog that dripped from the skies And left black on the masks we wore to school and home.

David Constantine from The North Issue 65 Smith Doorstop 2021. Litany The soundtrack then was a litany – candlewick bedspread three piece suite display cabinet – and stiff-haired wives balanced their red smiles, passing the catalogue. Pyrex. A tiny ladder ran up Mrs Barr’s American Tan leg, sly like a rumour. Language embarrassed them.

The terrible marriages crackled, cellophane round polyester shirts, and then The Lounge would seem to bristle with eyes, hard as the bright stones in engagement rings, and sharp hands poised over biscuits as a word was spelled out. An embarrassing word, broken

to bits, which tensed the air like an accident. This was the code I learnt at my mother’s knee, pretending to read, where no one had cancer, or sex, or debts, and certainly not leukaemia, which no one could spell. The year a mass grave of wasps bobbed in a jam-jar; a butterfly stammered itself in my curious hands.

A boy in the playground, I said, told me to fuck off ; and a thrilled, malicious pause salted my tongue like an imminent storm. Then. uproar. I’m sorry, Mrs Barr, Mrs Hunt, Mrs Emery, sorry Mrs Raine. Yes, I can summon their names. My mother’s mute shame. The taste of soap.

Carol Ann Duffy from Meantime Anvil Press 1989.

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Marble Even Michelangelo made, maybe, the odd slip. To chip, say, a cheek, brought some student girl or boy with a fingertip of beeswax, smoothing it in, soothing with marble dust, But a work perfect in completion without wax, was sine cera. Sincere.

In High-Dependency, I cushioned your hushed white foot until the beat gurgled back, and ankle, instep, and finally all five toes glowed roseate, and they took you away to the sculptors of bypass and artery. Never was a foot so beautiful, or sincerity so chill, my warming, healing love.

Frances Corkey Thompson rom MsLexia 2012 Issue 55. Men on Allotments As mute as monks, tidy as bachelors, They manicure their little plots of earth. Pop music from the council estate Counterpoints with the Sunday-morning bells, But neither siren voice has power for these Drab solitary men who spend their time Kneeling, or fetching water, soberly, Or walking softly down a row of beans.

Like drill-sergeants, they measure their recruits. The infant sprig receives the proper space The manly fullgrown cauliflower will need. And all must toe the line here; stem and leaf, As well as root, obey the rule of string. Domesticated tilth aligns itself In sweet conformity; but head in air Soars the unruly loveliness of beans.

They visit hidden places of the earth When tenderly with fork and hand they grope To life potatoes, and the round, flushed globes Tumble like pearls out of the moving soil. They share strange intuitions, know how much Patience and energy and sense of poise It takes to be an onion; and they share The subtle benediction of the beans.

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They see the casual holiness that spreads Along obedient furrows. Cabbages Unfurl their veined and rounded fans in joy, And buds of sprouts rejoice along their stalks. The ferny tops of carrots, stout red stems Of beetroot, zany sunflowers with blond hair And bloodshot faces, shine like seraphim Under the long, flat fingers of the beans.

U. A. Fanthorpe from Collected Poems Peterloo Poets 2005. Platform Piece Love, which is the hand at the carriage window taken, stroked, touched, held and then held on to until it has to

wave with every stranger waving also, writes letters in a café now. It lingers always in this misremembered city of still canals reflecting the green lamplight, will trace initials in a filthy ashtray, or take some colder hand in its cold fingers to stroll along those lapping watersides perhaps a mile at midnight.

Then part all of a sudden and be waving, enthusiastic, positive with pity, so waving with all strangers waving also, so many waving now it comes to nothing, and nothing keeps you riffling through those postcards till rails tear you blinking from that city.

Glyn Maxwell from Best for the Wicked Bloodaxe 1995. Pond Dipping Children stand in line, as if at prayer, being told how to dip their nets, once, then twice, into water, pregnant with nymph dragonflies and pond skaters. My eyes search their faces for

the son I don’t yet have. The lake overflows with life. Small hands empty trawled nets into trays,

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take each catch prisoner in a glass jar for a day, freshwater shrimps, a water boatman, a hog louse,

before setting them free, back in their element, like old lovers. Now the excited shrieks and baby blond heads are gone. The nets lean against the wooden rail, like wombs, draining absence.

Sarah Wardle from Fields Away Bloodaxe 2003. Prayer Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself. So, a woman will lift her head from the sieve of her hands and stare at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth enters our hearts, that small familiar pain; then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales console the lodger looking out across a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls a child’s name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer— Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Duffy, Carol Ann from Mean Time Anvil 1998. Prospero’s Gifts A lifetime spent mending this damaged heart For what began around the age of three, Not the best way for a child’s life to start, Thinking it was happening just to me. Many years I mourned for what was done, Puzzled over every sharp and shattered piece, Wondering where each missing part had gone, Looking for the keys to my own release. Prospero’s gifts buried deep in the sea Had to be dived for, when breath was short, And I swim badly; all was fear for me,

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Then with one chance hook I found they were caught. And they were not magic, but more hard won, Glimpses of wisdom in this evening sun.

James Nash from A Bench for Billie Holiday Valley Press 2018. Summer Evening After Stanley Cook Every summer comes an opaque evening before the beach is photos and the leaves let go to relight autumn. It’s brisk in Wickes and the garden centre’s scented colours are loaded in the backs of estates. In parks that saw offices undress for lunch lads career in the wake of the World Cup and wood after deliberate wood finds a path in its own curve to the jack. Everywhere is couples, and pushchairs that make sense of last year or last but one, till pubs overflow round continental tables on main roads, laughing like it might last.

Sooner or later, swans on a river disprove the moon they paddle through, cameod by willows. The rowing boat moored there is a temptation you decline, though all the time you walk, taking the long cut to the car park, you imagine being out on that water, the drag and viscous ripples as you pull, then shipping oars and just letting it drift.

Peter Sansom from Point of Sale. Carcanet. 2000. The Unprofessionals When the worst thing happens, That uproots the future, That you must live for every hour of your future, They come, Unorganized, inarticulate, unprofessional; They come sheepishly, sit with you, holding hands, From tea to tea, from Anadin to Valium, Sleeping on put-you-ups, answering the phone, Coming in shifts, spontaneously, Talking sometimes,

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About wallflowers, and fishing, and why Dealing with Kleenex and kettles, Doing the washing up and the shopping, Like civilians in a shelter, under bombardment, Holding hands and sitting it out Through the immortality of all the seconds, Until the blunting of time,

U A Fanthorpe from Safe as houses. Calstock: Peterloo Poets 1995.

Up on the Moors with Keeper Three girls under the sun’s rare brilliance out on the moors, hitching their skirts over bog-myrtle and bilberry.

They’ve kicked up their heels at a dull brother whose keep still can’t you? wants to fix them to canvas. Emily’s dog stares at these

three girls under the juggling larks pausing to catch that song on a hesitant wind, all wings and faces dipped in light.

What could there be to match this glory? High summer, a scent of absent rain, away from the dark house, father and duty.

Maura Dooley from Explaining Magnetism. Bloodaxe Books 1997.

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Index

A Action event (AE) transitivity, 57 Action intentional (AI) transitivity, 57 Action unintentional (AU) transitivity, 57 Actor, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 69, 83, 228 Adjectival complement, 32, 104 Adjective, 91, 92, 110, 116, 156, 173, 232, 237 Adverbial, 76, 78, 212, 223, 236 Agent, 55, 57, 58, 67 Agentless passive, 83 A Hairline Fracture, 18, 31, 81, 103, 107, 117, 128, 149, 163, 187, 189 Alluding, 20, 167–170, 172, 175, 248 Antonymy, 102, 122 Apposition, 50, 109, 128 A Square of Sunlight, 21, 78, 227 Assuming, 11, 248 Attribute, 57

B Baking, 18, 28, 37, 47, 48, 63, 78, 93, 108, 116, 133, 172, 178, 208, 230 Beneficiary, 57, 58 Blackberry Picking, 18, 35, 50, 61, 78, 93, 118, 126, 127, 130, 142, 164, 174, 205, 210, 212–214

Boulomaic modality, 154, 158

C Carrier, 57, 58 Circumstance, 57, 58 Cleft sentence, 79, 171 Cognitive, 35, 89, 91, 139, 181 Comparator, 49, 171 Complement, 28, 76, 78, 114, 120, 121, 143, 223 Conjunction, 103, 116, 127, 128, 132, 143, 176, 226 Constructed opposition, 5, 7, 102, 114, 142 Contrasting, 7, 9, 11 Conventional implicature, 171, 175, 176 Conventional opposition, 101, 116, 117, 119 Conversational implicature, 169, 176 Converses, 114 Copula, 107, 239 Crafty, 20, 82, 119, 135, 140, 159, 175, 193, 210 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), 6, 15 Critical stylistics, 3, 4, 6, 101, 123, 155, 169, 197, 249

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09749-2

279

280

INDEX

D Dai, 21, 234 Davies, M., 102, 114 Defamiliarise, 33, 34, 113 Definite determiners, 49 Deictic centre, 89, 91, 94, 165, 246 Deixis, 11, 17, 90, 95, 98 Deontic modality, 154, 158, 166 Describing, 10, 11 Descriptive adequacy, 242 Diagrammatic iconicity, 198 Direct evocation, 82, 197, 203, 204, 216 Directional opposites, 114 Direct speech, 182, 184 Direct thought, 191 Discourse, 37, 38, 140 Distal, 91, 93 Doorsteps, 2, 3, 18, 35, 49, 79, 85, 93, 95, 105, 109, 111, 113, 127, 142, 164, 187, 209, 212, 230 Dynamic verb, 59, 69, 72

E Elegant variation, 34 Ellipsis, 32 End-stopped, 207 Enumerating, 11, 124, 125, 247 Epistemic modality, 153, 154, 156, 159 Equating, 11, 124 Evocation, 20, 51, 197, 208 Exemplification, 11, 124, 125, 247 Existential presupposition, 49, 170, 172, 173 Existential transitivity, 57 Explanatory adequacy, 242 External deviation, 17, 60, 124

F Factive verbs, 171 Figs, 20, 66, 85, 111, 112, 117, 143, 206 First-person, 94, 97, 98, 155 Focus, 77 Foregrounding, 17, 54, 65, 81 Free Direct Speech, 183 Free Indirect Speech, 187

Free Indirect Thought (FIT), 192, 193 Fronting, 78 Fuzzy boundary, 5, 8, 91, 156 Fuzzy categories, 56, 170

G Goal, 57–59, 69 Gradable antonyms, 114, 119 Greenhouse, 18, 46, 47, 93, 96, 97, 104, 111, 119, 133, 145, 164, 194, 195, 204, 207 Gricean maxims, 109, 169

H Head noun, 28, 30 Household, 20, 65, 79–81, 135, 165, 186, 193, 210, 215 Hypothesising, 11, 153, 166, 247

I Iconic effect, 132, 198 Iconicity, 198 Iconic reaction, 202 Ideation, 4, 5, 9 Ideology, 6, 8, 9 Imagic, 198 Imagic iconicity, 198 Implicature, 169 Implying, 11, 248 Important People, 21, 225 Indirect evocation, 82, 216 Indirect speech, 182, 248 Indirect Thought, 193 Inductive process, 15, 34, 115 Information structure, 75, 78, 84 Intensive circumstantial (IC) transitivity, 57 Intensive influential (II) transitivity, 57 Intensive possessive (IP) transitivity, 57 Intensive relational (IR) process, 107 Intensive relational (IR) transitivity, 57 Intensive verb, 66 Internal deviation, 17, 54, 65, 124 Interpretation, 140, 165, 174 Ironing, 18, 28, 78, 94, 104, 109, 120, 127, 130, 143, 162, 163, 203, 204

INDEX

Iterative words, 171 It Wasn’t Snowing, 20, 76, 107, 110, 127, 135, 148, 163, 189, 193 I was Na’amah, 21, 238

Negator, 8, 141, 144, 147, 150 Nominalisation, 29 Non-finite, 66 Noun phrase, 13, 28, 30

J Jimmy Knight, 21, 221

O Object, 28, 78, 200 Onomatopoeia, 197, 198, 201, 216

L Lexical semantics, 102 Line-breaks, 207, 211 Linguistic meaning, 2, 7, 9, 139, 197, 244 Listing, 19, 123 Litany, 18, 31, 79, 105–107, 113, 130, 131, 134, 161, 165, 173, 184, 188 Logical presupposition, 171, 172 Lyric poem, 97, 181 M Main clause, 55, 76, 77, 246 Main verb, 29, 65 Marble, 20, 64, 78, 79, 82, 149, 215 Material Action Intentional (MAI), 46 Men on Allotments, 19, 34, 43 Mental cognition (MC) transitivity, 57 Mental emotive (ME) transitivity, 57 Mental perception verb, 55 Mental perceptual (MP) transitivity, 57 Meronymy, 61 Metaphor, 12, 50, 61, 103, 108, 114, 249 Metonymy, 61 Mimesis, 216 Minor sentences, 84, 85, 213 Modality, 153 Modal verbs, 247 Morphological negation, 145 N Naming, 10, 11 Narrative Presentation of a Thought Act (NPTA), 194 Narrative Presentation of Speech Acts, 187 Negation, 11, 139, 151

281

P Passive voice, 83 Perception modality, 247 Perceptual modality, 154 Personal deixis, 91 Personification, 61, 63 Phenomenon, 57 Platform Piece, 19, 31, 62, 143, 175, 189 Poetic variation, 34, 35, 50, 51, 172 Point of view, 40, 41, 47, 51, 160, 200 Pond Dipping, 19, 38, 39, 62, 63, 68, 69, 76, 105, 112, 117, 147, 150, 173, 209 Postmodification, 36, 236 Postmodifiers, 31 Pragmatic meaning, 2, 3, 10, 139, 168 Pragmatic presupposition, 171, 172 Prayer, 19, 28, 40, 41, 104, 110, 121, 149, 164, 186, 188, 190 Predicator, 28 Premodifiers, 31 Prepositional phrases (PPs), 31, 47, 104, 228, 233 Presupposition, 50, 51 Prioritising, 11, 75 Pronoun, 29, 30, 97 Proposition, 3, 17, 29, 213, 235 Prospero’s Gifts, 20, 83, 112, 150, 173, 177, 194, 210, 211, 214 Prototype, 8, 56, 103, 114, 141, 142, 153, 154 Proximal, 91–93 Pseudo-cleft, 79

R Reading, 45, 115, 174, 249

282

INDEX

Relative clause, 32, 66, 76 Relative pronoun, 32 Representing processes, 11, 53 Rhyme scheme, 75, 211 Rigour, 7, 14–16 Run-on line, 207, 208 Russian Formalism, 17 S Schema-recognition, 36 Schema refreshment, 36 Schema reinforcement, 36 Schema theory, 35 Second-person pronoun, 41, 43, 63, 92 Senser, 57, 58, 69 Simile, 50, 103 Social deixis, 92 Society representation, 11, 89 Sound-symbolism, 198, 216 Space representation, 11, 89 Spatial deixis, 91, 94, 95 Speech presentation, 11, 17, 181, 183, 184, 187, 248 State verb, change of, 171, 174 Stative verb, 59, 66, 69, 72 Subject, 28, 76, 200, 212 Subordinate clause, 55, 68, 76 Subordination, 75, 84, 211 Summer Evening, 19, 32, 41, 42, 47, 50, 70, 78, 146, 148, 160, 188, 190, 195 Synonymy, 102, 122

Syntactic iconicity, 136 Systemic Functional Linguistics, 7, 15, 154

T Temporal deixis, 91, 95 10k, 20, 136, 145, 162, 176, 188, 204, 210 Textual-conceptual functions (TCFs), 7, 8, 40, 54, 113, 245 Textual meaning, 2–5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 16, 243 Text World Theory, 89, 162 The Unprofessionals, 19, 29, 66, 67, 118, 136, 146, 147, 158, 174, 190, 213, 250 Thought presentation, 11, 181–184, 188, 191, 194, 195 Three-part list, 37, 130, 132, 230, 247 3 Victoria Avenue, 21, 231 Time representation, 89 Transitivity, 27, 28, 53–55

U Up on the Moors with Keeper, 19, 47, 85, 121, 130, 165, 186, 206, 214

V Verbal transitivity, 56, 57 Voice, narrative presentation of, 189