Reading Poetry 9780719088506, 9780719088513, 9781526111777, 9781526111760

Table of contents :
READING POETRY
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Illustrations
Preface. About this book
Acknowledgements
Introduction: ‘One small step’
Part I. Reading the lines
1. Meaning
2. Imagery
3. Diction
4. Metre
5. Form
Part II. Reading between the lines
6. Close and distant reading
7. Feeling and sentiment
8. Text and context
9. Poems and pictures
10. Sequences and clusters
Part III. Reading beyond the lines
11. Time and place
12. Poetry with theory
13. Minimalism and micro-poetry
14. Concrete canticles
15. Textual genesis
End-note
List of poems discussed
Glossary
Further reading
Index

Citation preview

BARRY

READING POETRY PETER BARRY

The three sections of the book cover progressively expanding areas of concern – ‘Reading the lines’ deals with basic matters, such as imagery, diction, metre, and form; ‘Reading between the lines’ concerns broader matters, such as poetry and context, and the reading of sequences and groups of poems, while ‘Reading beyond the lines’ looks at ‘theorised’ readings, at how place and time in poetry are never quite what they seem, and at the ‘textual genesis’ of poems from manuscript to print. The book, from the author of the acclaimed Beginning Theory, is aimed at those studying poetry on university-level literature courses, and at lecturers and teachers who are looking for new ways of imagining, presenting, and discussing poetry. It is also for all those seriously interested in poetry, whether as readers or writers, or both.

Peter Barry is Professor of English at Aberystwyth University Cover image: David Miller, ‘Untitled (Visual Sonnets)’, ink on paper, 2008. Collection of Ken and Hilary White. © David Miller (2008) 2013

READING POETRY

This book is about reading and studying poetry. Using fully-worked examples and complete poems wherever possible, it shows all the key elements of poetry ‘at work’ in poems, rather than in artificial isolation. It covers many different kinds of verse, from traditional and mainstream forms which have been in existence for hundreds of years, to innovative and experimental versions of the art, such as ‘concrete’ poetry, various kinds of minimalism, and poems which contain no words at all. The emphasis is on responding to meanings rather than just to words, and the reader is encouraged to look beyond technical devices such as alliteration and assonance, so that poems are understood and enjoyed as dynamic structures geared towards the creation of specific ends and effects.

READING POETRY www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

PETER BARRY

Reading poetry

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Reading poetry Peter Barry

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Peter Barry 2013 The right of Peter Barry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 0 7190 8850 6  hardback ISBN  978 0 7190 8851 3  paperback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Schneidler by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby

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Contents

List of illustrations page vi Preface. About this book vii Acknowledgementsxi Introduction: ‘One small step’

1

Part I. Reading the lines  1. Meaning   2.  Imagery   3. Diction   4.  Metre   5. Form

11 21 34 49 60

Part II. Reading between the lines   6.  Close and distant reading   7.  Feeling and sentiment    8.  Text and context   9.  Poems and pictures 10.  Sequences and clusters 

75 86 97 110 123

Part III. Reading beyond the lines 11.  Time and place 12.  Poetry with theory 13.  Minimalism and micro-poetry 14.  Concrete canticles 15.  Textual genesis

135 145 158 169 188

End-note197 200 List of poems discussed Glossary203 210 Further reading Index211

v

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Illustrations

Every effort has been made to contact the rights’ holders; if there are any omissions or errors, please contact the publisher.   8.1 Compositing stick, from Mechanick Exercises (1694), by Joseph Moxon (1627–91). Harry Ransom Center. page 107 The University of Texas at Austin   8.2 Compositor, printer and bookseller at work; woodcut from The Dance of Death (1499), printed by Matthias Huss, in Lyon. From Medieval Macabre © 2000 James 107 L. Matterer   9.1 Cover of Jeremy Hooker’s collection Solent Shore (Carcanet, 1978), with the photograph which is the subject of ‘On a Photograph of Southampton Docks’, reproduced by permission of Jeremy Hooker 115 14.1 Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Il Pleut’, from Calligrammes (1918)174 14.2 Edwin Morgan’s ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ (1968). From the Carcanet Press archive in the Special Collections Division of John Rylands University Library of Manchester 176 177 14.3 A version of Bob Cobbing’s ‘Beethoven Today’ (1971) 14.4 One of several versions of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s ‘Acrobats’ (1964) 178 14.5  ‘Catarata’ (‘Waterfall’), a ‘tipoema’ (type-poem) by 179 Ana Maria Uribe (c.1997) 14.6 ‘Moon Shot Sonnet’ by Mary Ellen Solt (1967), as published in Jeff Hilson (ed.), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008) 181 14.7 David Miller, two texts, both called ‘Untitled (Visual Sonnet)’ and first published in Jeff Hilson (ed.), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008) 184 14.8 ‘Thaloc, No. 21’ by Álvaro de Sá (1969) 185

vi

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Preface. About this book

I sat down to put the finishing touches to this book towards the end of a warm weekend day in July, thinking that a glass of wine might be a pleasant accompaniment to my labours. Because of a lifelong engagement with ‘Eng Lit’, this thought drifted through my mind in the form of a familiar quotation from Keats – ‘Oh for a beaker full of the warm South, / With beaded bubbles winking at the brim’. Having noticed on several occasions that the lines we love to quote are often slightly misremembered, I checked the quotation in a respectable edition, and duly found that they are not quite as I had recalled. They are from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and read thus: O for a beaker full of the warm South,   Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,    With beaded bubbles winking at the brim The middle line about the blushful Hippocrene had slipped my mind, and I wondered why. The comforting answer is that I forgot it because it isn’t memorable. It’s a line that now needs a footnote, which would tell us that the Hippocrene was a fountain on Mount Helicon in Greece, and that this fountain on a mountain was sacred to the Muses. So the lines express the desire, not just for liquid refreshment, but also for poetic inspiration. By contrast, the lines I had remembered merely comment on the inviting appearance of a just-poured glass of wine. That simplicity does not make them better, or worse, in themselves, but it certainly helps to make them memorable. The question which has been puzzling me is what exactly the word ‘beaded’ is doing in the phrase ‘beaded bubbles’. Bubbles are round, and so are beads, so what does the adjective add to the meaning of the noun? Beads are often shiny, so perhaps a suggestion of sparkly brightness is conveyed, and the alliterative ‘b’ sound linking ‘beads’ and ‘bubbles’ might seem to reinforce the notion of the bubbles bursting and ‘winking’ invitingly in the glass. But is a question of this kind an advanced one or an elementary one in poetry study? Poetry is not like maths, and the distinctions vii

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viii  Preface between beginners, competent practitioners and experts at poetry reading are not at all clear-cut. That is why this book is addressed to a wide spectrum of readers, including: students engaged in formal study, who want detailed examples of poems being read, enjoyed and interpreted; readers with more general purposes who would like to join in a systematic conversation about poetry reading, one which is engaged and practical, and doesn’t assume that detailed textual discussion will necessarily crush the life out of a poem; and finally, academics and poets themselves, whose professional lives are much taken up with poetry, but who may feel that some aspects of the ‘basics’ (whatever they are) always seem to elude them, and that they can benefit from alternative perspectives and overviews. Whatever stage we are at, poetry reading is a topic about which there is always something more that can usefully be said. That is the spirit in which the book is written and in which I hope it will be read. Wherever possible, this book explores key aspects of poetry by discussing poems which are quoted in full and then treated in a sustained way over two or three pages, or (in a few cases) more. For the most part, I try to avoid snipping out just a couple of lines from a poem and using them to illustrate a micro-point before moving on. But exceptions have to be made from time to time, for instance in the discussion of metre, where a comprehensive discussion of a poem in those terms could work only if the poem were very short. Why is it necessary or desirable to offer a detailed critique of a neces­sarily small number of poems, rather than basing the book on a series of general points backed up with brief examples from many different poems? My answer is that, in poetry, the angel, as well as the devil, is in the detail. I have read a great deal of poetry criticism which seems to hold the poetry itself at arm’s length, and have not usually found it terribly enlightening. I want to share the feeling of intimate engagement with the words and flow of poems – that core reading experience, which engrosses the imagination – and that is why many of the chapters work very closely with their cluster of examples, each of which is intended to illustrate some crucial aspect of the topic in question, and why the same poet, or even the same poem, will sometimes crop up in different chapters. The book considers a broad range of poetry, using examples taken from the Tudor period to the twenty-first century. Some are very traditional, and some are very avant-garde, and most are somewhere in between, so it is unusually broad and eclectic in its generic range. It invites readers to cultivate what might be called generic

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Preface  ix generosity, and entertain a willingness to be astonished, from time to time, by the bizarre practices poets sometimes indulge in, in the privacy of their garrets, and among consenting adults. The range inevitably represents the bias of my own interests, as poetry reading must, so there is quite a bit of Irish poetry; all of it is by well known authors, though Chapters 13 and 14 look at experimental forms of poetry which are not usually featured at all in books of this kind. The value of using the latter kind of material in this context is that looking at these rather extreme kinds of poetry has the effect of foregrounding issues concerning how poetic effects are achieved, and what the mind is doing when we read and respond to language in general and poetry in particular. The book is divided into three parts, of five chapters each. Part I contains chapters which are similar in scope to the contents of other books with similar titles to this one. Part II moves on to areas which mostly do not feature in such books: Chapter 6 can be read first by the more experienced reader, if so desired, as it suggests an approach to poetry reading which aims to join up the various facets of poetry considered separately in the first five chapters. Chapter 7 looks at the matter of feeling in poetry, and the next three, in different ways, all concern poetry and context. Thus, Chapter 8 offers an overview of the issue, Chapter 9 looks at the booming practice of writing poems about pictures and other art objects (which is a special case of the text–context relationship) and Chapter 10 looks at poetry sequences and other groupings, where a major aspect of the context of the poem is other poems. Part III continues the process of widening the perspective, again dealing with features of poetry which are not usually considered in similar books. Thus, Chapter 11 considers the way poems represent time and place, showing that they are set in what might be described as a virtual space-time in which past and present, here and there cannot quite be distinguished from each other. Chapter 12 demonstrates how ideas drawn from literary theory may sometimes be useful when reading poems, and Chapters 13 and 14, as already mentioned, boldly go into experimental poetic territory. The last chapter, ‘Textual genesis’, goes back to the beginning of the poem, considering how the circumstances of its writing and publication, and the stages it passes through as it evolves towards its final form, can help us to understand it better. To assist clarity and facilitate navigation, a glossary is included. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of technical terms associated with poetry, but simply a convenient reference list of

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x  Preface technical or quasi-technical terms used throughout the book. Terms for which there is a glossary entry are printed in bold on first occurrence. No glossary entry is longer than 40 words, and most are much shorter. Fuller definitions will often be found in the text itself, and some terms, of course, are used in advance of the chapter which includes them in its title. As a way of avoiding the cumbersome inclusion of birth dates and publication data in the text, all such information is given in summary form in the ‘List of poems discussed’, which comes at the end of the book. This is not a comprehensive list of all the poems mentioned, but of all the poems which are discussed at length or substantially. The ‘Further reading’ list at the end contains only up-to-date and recommended books about poetry reading in general, rather than critical books and articles on individual authors and works. Where such works are relevant to the discussion, they are given in footnotes in the text. Illustrations have been used sparingly, but web links are given where possible to images relevant to the argument or exposition. Links are also given where possible to the full texts of longer works or sequences which are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to my friends and former colleagues Chris Slater and Bernard Tucker for reading an earlier draft of this book and making many excellent suggestions for improvements. I am also grateful for the publishers’ permission to republish the following poems in full, below. To simplify matters, I am recording the poet, the poem’s title, the publisher and original date of publica­ tion. Every effort has been made to contact the rights’ holders; if there are any omissions or errors, please contact the publisher. Auden, W. H., ‘Thank You, Fog’ © Curtis Brown (1974); Ball, Patricia M., ‘Interview with the Knife-Thrower’s Assistant’ © The English Association (1997); Bernstein, Charles, ‘This Poem Intentionally Left Blank’ © Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2010); Causley, Charles, ‘Eden Rock’ © Picador (2000); Carson, Ciaran, ‘Bloody Hand’ © Bloodaxe (1990); ‘Edward Hopper: Early Sunday Morning’ © Gallery Books (2003); Cobbing, Bob, ‘Beethoven Today’ (poster poem) © Covent Garden Press (1971); Donaghy, Michael, ‘Liverpool’ © Picador (2009); Dove, Rita, ‘Rosa’ © Norton (1999); Durcan, Paul, ‘The Arnolfini Marriage’ © Macmillan (1994); Durcan, Paul, ‘Aughawall Graveyard’ © Harvill/Harper Collins (1993); Bolam, Robyn (aka Marion Lomax), ‘The Forked Tree’, ‘The Peepshow Girl’ © Bloodaxe (1989); Feaver, Vicki, ‘Ironing’ © Cape (2004); Finlay, Ian Hamilton, ‘Acrobats’ © University of California Press (2012); Fisher, Roy, ‘A Sign Illuminated’ © Oxford University Press (1994); Harwood, Lee, ‘Brighton. October’ © Shearsman Books (2008); Hooker, Jeremy, ‘On a Photograph of Southampton Docks’, © Enitharmon Press (2006); Kavanagh, Patrick, ‘To the Man After the Harrow’ © Penguin (2005); Lowell, Robert, ‘For the Union Dead’ © Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2007); Miller, David, ‘Untitled’ (Visual Sonnet) © Reality Street (2008); Morgan, Edwin, ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ © Carcanet (1990); Nagra, Daljit, ‘University’ © Faber (2007); Pound, Ezra, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, ‘Liu Ch’e’ © Faber (2004); Raworth, Tom, ‘University Days’ © Carcanet (2003); Riley, Denise, ‘Shantung’ © Reality Street (2000); Sá, Álvaro de, ‘Thaloc, No. 21’ © (1969); Saroyan, Aram, ‘lighght’ © Ugly Duckling (2007); Sharrock, Roger, ‘Gun Girl Chicago 1929’ © Windows 9, East Sussex xi

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xii  Acknowledgements College of Higher Education (1979); Solt, Mary Ellen, ‘Moon Shot Sonnet’ © Reality Street (2008); Williams, William Carlos, ‘A Sort of a Song’, ‘The Descent’, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ © Carcanet (2000); ­Wynne-Rhydderch, Samantha, ‘Delft’ © Picador (2012).

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Introduction: ‘One small step’

The words spoken, or at least popularly supposed to have been spoken, by the first person to set foot on the surface of the moon were ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’. The utterance is a vivid encapsulation of a significant moment, and its simple yet powerful language is made memorable by the arrangement of the words into a strong pattern of contrast and emphasis. Further, the formal tone seems to match the solemnity and signifi­ cance of the occasion. If Neil Armstrong had simply punched the air (or whatever is up there) and shouted ‘Made it!’, or something similar, we would surely not feel that this significant moment had been given its definitive expression. In other words, what Armstrong said, brief though it was, was a poem. If we try to spell out exactly how it works as a poem, we will touch upon five fundamental aspects of poetry which are considered in the five chapters in Part I of this book. The first chapter is called ‘Meaning’, and perhaps the meaning of Armstrong’s words seems obvious at first, but not quite so obvious when pondered with the close attention that poetry demands. For instance, the speaker modestly effaces himself from the utterance – he doesn’t say ‘One small step for me’, but ‘One small step for man’, because the step was made by the many thousands of people who contributed to the enterprise, even though it had to be taken by a single individual. So the meaning expressed isn’t quite so simple after all, as it combines a due sense of personal humility with an understandable feeling of personal and collective pride. The second chapter is called ‘Imagery’, and Armstrong’s use of the image of leaping allows him to say a good deal in a brief sentence. Instead of having to spell out the difference between a small individual achievement and a huge collective advance, the utterance merely contrasts the taking of a (small) step and the making of a (large) leap. The image couldn’t be simpler or more familiar, but it is lifted out of the common­place by the balance and precision of the language – that is, by the nature of the diction, which is the subject of the third chapter. We note that the ‘step’ in question is literally the act of stepping onto the surface of the moon, but the ‘leap’ is metaphorical, and the choice of this word is a way of emphasising how the moon-landing is a 1

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2  Introduction major advance of the technological kind. Further, the rhythm of the utterance seems to strengthen and enhance it, which brings us to ‘Metre’, the subject of the fourth chapter. Thus, we notice that the stress pattern of ‘one giant leap’ seems to reproduce that of ‘One small step’, with three fully stressed words being used in each case. Likewise, the endings of each half of the utterance (that is, ‘for man’, in the first half, and ‘for mankind’ in the second) contain a rhythmic echoing of the first phrase by the second. But this time we notice also that the echo is not exact, since ‘for mankind’ has three syllables whereas ‘for man’ has only two. However, this lack of total acoustic symmetry is not a defect – rather the opposite, in fact, for if the first echo (of ‘One small step’ by ‘one giant leap’) is perfect, it is better that the second (of ‘for man’ by ‘for mankind’) should not quite be so. This is because ‘performed language’ (such as poems, or speeches, or proclamations) needs elements of surprise and variation as well as elements of predictability. The last chapter in the first part of the book is entitled ‘Form’, and this too is a crucial element in the Armstrong example. What is said is carefully shaped into a symmetrical, mirror-like pattern, so that each word in the first half is paralleled or contrasted with a word in the corresponding position in the second half, like this: A B C D E A1 B1 C1 D1 E1 One small step for man,  one giant leap for mankind Thus, ‘small’ contrasts with ‘giant’, ‘step’ with ‘leap’ and ‘man’ with ‘mankind’, and the second item in each of these pairings suggests, not the just the next stage of progression, but several stages beyond the first. So, ‘small’ is not contrasted merely with ‘large’, but with ‘giant’, and ‘step’ isn’t followed by (for instance) a mere ‘stride’, but by a ‘leap’. Overall, then, the whole utterance is tightly bound together into a satisfying whole by its skilful use of a range of poetic devices, and these are the devices that are explored in detail in Part I of the book. When we consider the context of the moonwalk utterance, some intriguing issues are raised. For instance, we know that Neil Armstrong was the speaker of the words, but were they composed and scripted in advance (by himself or others), or spoken spon­taneously under the inspiration and excitement of the moment? If the former is the case (as seems likely), it leaves open the question of whether Armstrong wrote the script himself, or was speaking words com­ posed for him by somebody else. In fact, what Armstrong said and

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Introduction  3 didn’t say on that memorable occasion was heavily influenced by a highly specific set of circumstances. It is surprising, for instance, that though he was a deeply religious man, his moonwalk statement is broadly humanist rather than Christian. To understand why, we have to know something about the context of the moonwalk broadcast. In 1961, when Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first person to travel into outer space, he reportedly said ‘I don’t see any God up here’ (according to a speech made by the Soviet Presi­ dent of the day, Nikita Krushchev). American astronauts were keen to counter this anti-religious pronouncement, so in a TV broadcast from Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968, three of them read aloud from the Book of Genesis. As a consequence, the US government was sued for an alleged violation of the First Amendment, on the grounds that astronauts were government employees and should not be promulgating religion in the workplace. The Supreme Court declined to rule, on the modest grounds that its jurisdiction did not extend to outer space, but the case caused widespread controversy, and NASA did not want a repetition. So at least one aspect of Armstrong’s actual feelings are repressed rather than expressed in his statement, as a study of the context makes clear. Knowing about this item of contextual information certainly affects our sense of the ultimate significance of the ‘poem’, as is often the case. A poem usually passes through various stages of development as it evolves towards its final form during the composition process. In the case of Armstrong’s ‘poem’, there is no known manuscript source, so the surviving audio-tapes of the event must be taken as its equivalent moment of origin. Listening to these might suggest that the more correct wording would be ‘One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind’.1 The supporting evidence includes the fact that this version of the text actually makes better sense than the well known official version, for, strictly speaking, the text in its familiar form seems to contradict itself. It doesn’t really make sense to say that the moon landing is a small step for ‘man’, without the indefinite article, since ‘man’ in the first half of the statement often means (or meant then) ‘humans in general’, which is the same thing as ‘mankind’ in the second half. With the ‘a’ inserted, ‘a man’ just means the individual who is speaking the words, as he takes the small step from the space capsule onto the lunar surface. Studying 1 See James R. Hansen’s First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (Simon and Schuster, 2005). Armstrong told Hansen that others have pointed out that he can often be heard dropping vowels from his speech in his radio transmissions.

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4  Introduction the audio-tape of the utterance, then, closely parallels the way a scrutiny of the manuscript of a familiar poem will often reveal details which are difficult to square with the ‘received’ or established view of a poem. Going back to the manuscript is like going back to the generative moment of the poem, to the poem-before-the-poem, as we might call it. This discussion may have made Armstrong’s words a little more difficult to understand fully than is usually assumed to be the case, but I hope that it has also made them seem more interesting. A great deal of discussion about poetry is almost exclusively pre­ occupied with the question of difficulty, and I should say something on this matter at the start. One of the aims of this book is to show that the meanings of poems (in spite of what some poets sometimes say) are hardly ever deliberately or deviously hidden, nor are they usually encrypted in poetic devices like assonance or alliteration. Of course, the full meaning is not usually apparent on first reading, and is more likely to emerge only gradually, as we read and re-read the poem, and begin to perceive an overall shape and pattern. Thus, the discussion of Armstrong’s words required meticulous attention to the details of the language, but no arcane concepts were used, and nothing was cited as evidence which could not be seen in the patterns of the words by any fully attentive reader. But the pattern may well be missed if we have developed over-ingenious habits of mind and interpretation, perhaps in response to pressure from teachers or tutors. For poetic meaning is, more often than not, placed in full view, like the missing letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneering 1844 detective story ‘The Purloined Letter’. In the story, the letter is not actually hidden at all, but is openly displayed on the mantelpiece. Because the ‘lost’ letter has been placed, as if carelessly, exactly where you would expect a letter to be, it cannot be found by those who are desperately searching for it. They have assumed that something so precious must have been elaborately concealed, so they do not think to open the apparently unimportant letter which the occupant of the room has not even bothered to hide. In Poe’s tale, the recovery of the stolen letter is a matter of the highest priority, because dire consequences for the state will follow from the disclosure of its contents. So the police make a highly methodical and elaborate search of the entire apartment during the occupant’s absence, dismantling furniture, tapping and feeling for disguised cavities in the walls, and so on. In the same way as the letter in the story remains invisible because it is not hidden, so the meanings and effects of

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Introduction  5 poems may be rendered invisible to readers if they assume that all clues about poetic significance must have been ingeniously hidden somewhere deep within the grammatical patterns, phonetic structures, or metrical devices of the text. So readers will set about such arcane activities as dismantling the metrical feet (just as all the chair legs are unscrewed and examined in ‘The Purloined Letter’) to see if any important fragments of signification have by any chance been concealed inside them. Poe himself said quite clearly in his exemplary tale what was wrong with this approach to the detection of meaning – he said that it is pretty well incapacitated by its over-ingenuity. I can best illustrate the misguided nature of this kind of poetry interpretation by using a second non-poetic example. In April 2010 the Belgian insurance company ‘Fortis’ changed its name to ‘ageas’. ‘Ageas’ is not an acronym, nor is it a word in any European language, so the firm issued a press statement explaining the meaning of its new name. The ‘a’ and the ‘g’ in ‘ageas’, it said, ‘celebrate the roots’ of the company, which was founded as AG Leven in 1824; the ‘e’ and the ‘a’ in the middle refer to its two key markets, Europe and Asia; the ‘as’ at the end stands for ‘assurance’; and the absence of capital letters in the new name ‘heightens the sense of unity within our group’ and shows that ‘we don’t want to force our opinions on anyone’.2 The statement adds that ‘like our group, the name “ageas” is more than the sum of its parts: it derives from the Latin word “agere”, meaning action, drive, and a conviction to forge ahead’. So, understanding the meaning of this new brand-name requires the word to be broken up into its constituent letters of the alphabet, to which various meanings are then assigned. It seems a bizarre way of reading a word, and an even more bizarre way of composing a communication. And yet, is it any more bizarre than the practices which are routinely recommended in books about how to read poetry? Many years ago, in a piece called ‘The Enactment Fallacy’, I noted a recurrent tendency in criticism to assume that, in poetry, ‘elements of the sound patterning (especially alliteration and assonance, rhyme and rhythm) are directly related to meaning, to which, ideally, they offer implicit support by “enacting” or “miming” or “embodying”

2  Independent, Business Diary, 11 March 2010; and Observer, 14 March 2010, p. 46, www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/14/fortis-rebranding-ageas-insurancebusiness.

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6  Introduction the sense’.3 Thus, a critic writing of a poem by Thomas Hardy cited as evidence for a particular way of reading it ‘the limitless freedom of the vowel in “sky”’. I quite agreed, then as now, that mentioning the sky could be a way of suggesting the notion of ‘limitless freedom’, but I think it silly to believe that the vowel sound has anything to do with it. It was a relief, therefore, to discover that the issue of these supposed poetic ‘enactments’ of sense by sound has been hotly debated since at least the eighteenth century. In a passage in his literary-critical essay in verse entitled An Essay on Criticism (1711), Alexander Pope declares that, in poetry, ‘The sound must seem an echo to the sense’ (line 365). Pope, it should be noted, merely says that the sound must ‘seem an echo to the sense’, not ‘be an echo to the sense’, a concession which the modern critics I quoted in the article never make. All the same, Dr Samuel Johnson, the most eminent critic of his day, took issue with Pope in his journal The Rambler (no. 92, from 1751), disputing the reality of these supposed sound-sense effects. He returns to the matter in issue 94, with the conclusion that ‘it is scarcely to be doubted, that on many occasions we make the music which we imagine ourselves to hear, that we modulate the poem by our own disposition, and ascribe to the numbers [that is, the rhythm and the metrical devices] the effects of the sense’.4 I believe that he is right, and that the main effect of recommending this approach in teaching poetry is to convince most people that they can never be poetry readers. One aim of this book, then, is to show that we do not have to tune into phonetic bat-squeaks from the hinterlands of language in order to read and appreciate a poem. Poetry readers do not have to acquire the techniques of the Bletchley Park code-breakers of the Second World War, because poets do not encode their meanings in that way. I would not wish to give the impression that my own teachers encouraged such over-ingenious methods of interpretation and response to poetry, and that I am now rebelling against them. On the contrary, I am trying in this book to do as the best of them did. I remember prompts and interventions which helped me a great deal, but were light in touch. For example, one teacher would

3 Peter Barry, ‘The Enactment Fallacy’, Essays in Criticism, 30 / 2, April 1980, pp. 95–104. 4  For further discussion, see Richard Terry, ‘“The Sound Must Seem an Eccho to the Sense”: An Eighteenth-Century Controversy Revisited’, Modern Language Review, 94 / 4, October 1999, pp. 940–54.

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Introduction  7 merely suggest that we might want to look again at a particular line, or would advise us to think about whether any other possible meanings might have existed, at the time the poem was written, for a particular word or phrase we had picked out as significant. And, to be honest, I don’t recall any good teacher or lecturer ever saying much at all about alliteration or assonance, or even metrical feet. They were perfectly informative when a specific question about such technical matters was put to them, but they never fore­grounded those things, and, above all, they never gave the impression that that was where the true worth or essence of poetry lay. A limited amount of such knowledge, I concluded, will go quite a long way. Another received and long-embedded view about poetry is the notion that its language is always characterised by precision and exactness, in contrast to the language of everyday usage, which is regarded as merely vague or approximate. It is said that amateur poets are fond of the word ‘shard’, and that judges of poetry competitions can expect to encounter it frequently. The same object might be described in a more round-about way as a broken bit of pottery, or a splinter of glass, or (if metaphorical) as the shattered remnants of, for example, a dream or an illusion. But shard is more compressed, and has an air of technical precision about it, giving the impression (which many seem to want to create) that the user is someone who chooses words with finicky exactness. My own feeling is usually that if a word in a poem draws unique attention to itself for any reason (including its precision, or its dazzling aptness), then there may well be something wrong with it, because all the words in a poem should be working together to produce an inte­ grated effect, not (so to speak) putting on an individual display. In practice, vagueness and precision in poetry are friends, not enemies, and the words of a poem are just a means, not an end in themselves. When a poem achieves what Houston calls lift-off, we should hardly be conscious at all of the words as words – they should seem to fall away, like the launch-gantry as a rocket takes off. Words are simply the devices which enable the poem to enter the stratosphere of meaning and effect. It isn’t necessary for poetry readers to feel emotional about words as such, to ‘love words’, as it is often put. Actually, I never quite know what people mean when they say this. It seems rather like professing to love wheels or engines, rather than just enjoying cars and where they can take us. This book is not a manual for poem-mechanics – it is about enjoying poems and where they can take us.

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Part I. Reading the lines

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1. 

Meaning

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 crinking 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, 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 11

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12  Reading the lines As we read this poem, we probably sense immediately that it can’t just be about ironing. Without the feeling that poems often mean more than they seem at first to say, there would not be very much in poetry to ponder and enjoy. But what is it that creates in the reader’s mind the feeling that a poem is also, and often even primarily, about something other than its stated or foregrounded subject? Sometimes it will be a conviction that develops only gradually as the poem goes on, but in the case of this one, we already seem to be beyond ironing by the end of the first stanza. The two opening lines are a literal comment on doing the ironing – they could be dropped into casual conversation without sounding too odd – but the third line would sound strange in a chat with a friend about domestic routines. For the line ‘like a sledge chased by wolves over snow’ is fundamentally different in vividness and intensity from any formulation which might be used in casual conversation – yes, we can still see in that phrase the ironing board with a white sheet on it, and the iron sliding up and down along it, but it has been metaphorically transformed, the sliding iron into a sledge, and the white sheet into a snowy landscape. In many poems, the transformative use of metaphor marks the transition point, the moment when the act or object being described gathers new associations or connotations and starts to mean something else, or, more often, something else as well. For instance, there are added elements, such as the chasing wolves, which don’t seem to be the metaphorical equivalent of anything we can immediately see in the simple domestic scene of the iron and the ironing board. But with the mention of wolves, the hint of an alien, feral world has broken into the domestic calm, and the ironing begins to seem linked into some kind of compulsive obsession. The implication is that the familiar domestic activity is driven by fear of some imagined (perhaps even imaginary) external force. So now it is impossible to iron fast enough to stay ahead of the baying wolf-pack, no matter how desperately the sledge-pulling huskies are whipped in an effort to make them go faster. We are so frantic now that the harnesses are twisted and frayed, like the flex of the iron, and the nerves exposed and jangling. Then the ironing seems to become even more fraught, and the iron becomes the iron-shod hoof of a snorting horse which will trample anyone who gets in its way – now everything is going to be flattened, the whole house, even, if there is an iron as big as a tug boat to do it. So this seems now a ‘macho’ form of ironing, ironing on an industrial scale, which amounts to a kind of frenzied climax in which the

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Meaning  13 whole world is to be steam-ironed into submission. And then the grip of the addictive compulsion is suddenly broken, and now the only way to stay sane is to do no ironing at all – to iron nothing, to put the very implement beyond use in a high cupboard, and to convert ‘to crumpledness’, as the only cure for the opposing addiction to flattenedness. But the obsessive ironer, who now irons nothing, rather than just ironing a few selected things, fearful that the mere taste of ironing will be enough to bring back the addiction, must still be an obsessive ironer at heart. So evidence that the addiction is cured arrives only at the final stage, when the speaker comes back to ironing, but now in a different mood – relaxed, sensuous, appreciative – with the external, alien, pressurising force gone. Rather than being driven and frantic, the activity is now enjoyed for what it is, and the result is fulfilling, giving a sense of air, space and self-realisation. So have we ‘paraphrased’ the poem here? In a way, yes, of course, for the frequently encountered view that poems are by nature unparaphrasable is a poetry-reading shibboleth which needs to be broken. But it’s not exactly paraphrasing, of course, for what we have been doing is more like a process of talking to oneself about the poem, talking oneself through the poem, or alongside it, and putting it into ‘our own’ words as we go. I don’t know of any substitute for this, and I often start doing it before I’m sure I understand the poem. Then I find that, as I do, I am drifting into understanding as the ‘talk back’ process goes on. It is valuable, and recom­mended, because it makes the reader active rather than passive in the reading process, as poetry readers need to be. Here, we have certainly ‘re-said’ the poem or ‘re-played’ it, into a kind of blend of our own and the poet’s words. It is a way of groping towards what we think the poem might mean, and perhaps, more than anything, a way of slowing the poem down in order to make its meanings and effects observable. And yet, we haven’t said what the other activity is (or other activities are) that the poet is speaking about – could it be sex, or writing, or home-making, or teaching, or thinking? That list pretty well comprises the usual broad-scale interpretive suspects in poetry – but more of that later. At first, this implied, but unnamed activity, whatever it is, does us, because we are so eager to do it right, or do it best, or do it as much as possible. Then we rebel against the forces that are pushing us, and, eventually, we find ourselves in the activity which had previously consumed us, and then we start doing it. So in the end we are speaking the language which hitherto was speaking us. Likewise, we too, as readers, must

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14  Reading the lines find room for ourselves in the poem, room ‘to push / [our] arms, breasts, lungs, heart into’, so that the poem makes its meanings by a combination of saying and not saying. The ‘concreteness’ of the poetic material, we realise, must also have a certain openness attached to it: nothing could be more mundane and familiar than ironing – but we might wonder whether a poet ever could iron without irony. So the much-proclaimed ‘rightness’, ‘inevitability’ and ‘precision’ of the poet’s words – that merciless flattening of the unruly medium of language – have to allow a degree of elasticity and vagueness too, and we have to be able to stretch the words of the poem to cover more meaning than is at first apparent. It is essentially in that elasticity – that vagueness, even – that a poem expresses its meaning. In the case of this Vicki Feaver poem, the interpretive strategy of the reader, if it can be so grandly named, involves standing back from the particular, so that something specific – the mundane business of ironing – comes to be seen in a generalised way, as representing (or connecting with) our inevitably changing attitudes to life in general as life goes on. But the poem, of course, doesn’t overtly declare that ironing is to be seen as ‘representative’ in some way, though it might be argued that it does do so implicitly when it opens with the bold statement ‘I used to iron everything’. Since this statement cannot literally be true, we are prompted to think of ways in which it might be metaphorically so, so that the act of obsessively ironing clothes into neatly pressed stacks suggests an urge and a determination to control every aspect of life, till eventually there is not enough room to push ‘arms, breasts, lungs, heart into’, and life is forced into a kind of straitjacket of predictability. Being a poem, however, it cannot just tell us things directly, but must show things which seem to have implications of the kind I have tried to tease out in ‘Ironing’. Note that we are leaving this poem now without seeking to wrap it up conclusively and exit with a feeling of ‘closure’, having pinned down exactly all the implied overtones of the ironing activity d ­ escribed in the poem. The roomy, ‘airy shape’ mentioned at the end suggests the attainment of a more easy-going lifestyle, one which is less hidebound by routine, but the poem does not give any literal detail about it, and confines itself to presenting this concluding image of the unrestricting ‘creaseless blue’ garment. In general, then, poets value mimesis (the ‘enactment’ or ‘embodiment’ or ‘showing’ of an idea or situation) above diegesis (the ‘mere’ description or telling of it). Thus, a large body of criticism has

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Meaning  15 long insisted that the poem must ‘enact’ its sense, not simply assert it. But the dichotomy between showing and telling is not absolute, and it makes sense to recognise that in poetry we always need both the saying and the showing, just as in grasping an argument most of us require both a proposition (which is usually abstract and generalised) and an example (which is usually concrete and specific) before we can truly comprehend what is being said. We can develop this idea of the complementarity of showing and telling by looking at another poem, a sonnet by Charlotte Smith, a writer now best remembered for her long poem ‘Beachy Head’. The poem considered here is about Middleton Church, close to the Sussex coast, where cliff erosion had toppled much of the graveyard into the sea, so that bones were seen on the shore at low tide: Sonnet 44 Press’d by the moon, mute arbitress of tides, While the loud equinox its power combines, The sea no more its swelling surge confines, But o’er the shrinking land sublimely rides. The wild blast, rising from the western cave, Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed, Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead, And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave! With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore, Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave; But vain to them the winds and waters rave; They hear the warring elements no more: While I am doom’d – by life’s long storm opprest, To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest. By convention, the first word of each line in metrical poetry begins with a capital letter, but that initial capital does not have the same function as the capital letter at the start of a prose sentence, and the danger is that the initial capital at the start of each line may give the misleading impression that every line of poetry is self-contained, like a prose sentence, and will therefore make sense on its own. But no matter how long the opening line of this poem is pondered in isolation, it will never make sense, and reading poems line by line is not the way to understand what they mean. An important secret of reading poetry and making sense of it is to pay more attention to the full stops than the capital letters. We must read sentence by

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16  Reading the lines sentence, not line by line, and I have nothing to say in this book which is more important than that. Thus, ‘Press’d by the moon, mute arbitress of tides’ has no meaning on its own – it makes sense only as part of the sentence that begins with that line and ends with the full stop that concludes the fourth line. The whole block of four lines is the ‘unit of sense’, and the full stops, not the ends of lines, are the places to pause and make sure that we have grasped the sense of what is being said. If, as you read a poem, you realise at some point that you have lost the sense of it, then you should go back to the beginning of the sentence in which the loss of sense occurred – sometimes, indeed, it is better still to go back to the start of the sentence before, and then re-trace the sense continuously from there. This poem exploits the form of the ‘English’ sonnet, in which the rhyming couplet at the end is expected to ‘turn’, or encapsulate, or finesse the direction of the poem up to that point. The couplet in this case seems to do that, for the first 12 lines seem like a conventionally melancholy meditation on death, showing the buried dead being subjected to the natural process of decay, then disturbed in their graves by the power of storms, so that bones are left scattered along the seashore. As a mode of writing, this 1789 poem very much looks back to the eighteenth century, rather than forward to Romanticism, using a not displeasing kind of picturesque ‘retro-diction’, as seen, for example, in the description of the moon as the ‘mute arbitress of tides’ (literally, the silent ruler of the tides), making it a personified female figure of destiny. True, the lines which begin the sestet (the last six lines in a sonnet) – ‘With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore, / Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave’ – have almost an eyewitness sim­plicity and directness, as if the speaker has actually seen this sight, but the whole of that outward scene is immediately dismissed, as the emphasis suddenly turns inward in the final couplet, revealing that the real subject matter is the speaker’s own inner turmoil, that is, the storm of restless consciousness within, which is so relentless as to cause the speaker almost to envy the unfeeling dead. Nothing in the main body of the poem quite prepares the way for that dramatic inward turn, so that the final couplet may feel, at least at first, too much of a grafted-on after-thought to work effectively. Essentially, the final couplet merely says how the speaker feels – ‘doom’d’ and ‘by life’s long storm opprest’. But the previous 12 lines of the poem must be taken as the ‘showing’ part, for the speaker’s morbid fasci­ nation with the site of the land-slip, and the bones of the long dead

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Meaning  17 which are thereby revealed, implicitly conveys the state of mind which is made explicit in the final couplet. As a bald statement, the final couplet would have no real poetic force on its own, but it acquires force because of the juxtaposition, for we can easily imagine how such thoughts would be brought out by the scene des­cribed in the main body of the poem. The thought expressed in the final couplet, taken on its own, is merely a commonplace remark about the burden of consciousness in times of extreme trouble or hardship, but its ‘re-saying’ (or ‘pre-saying’) in the main body of the poem, by means of a vividly realised scene, gives it poetic force. Conversely, and likewise, the ‘showing part’ of the poem – the bulk of it in fact – is, in theory, the ‘visual’ equivalent, or word-picture, of the plain statement made in the end couplet. But it would be wrong to imagine that the plain statement is deducible from what has gone before and doesn’t need to be made explicit. This assertion, however, runs counter to a widespread belief about poetry – namely, that the more the poet leaves unstated, the better the poem, as the reader will do the ‘work’ of bringing the implied meanings to the surface. It isn’t so – both components are needed, for saying and showing work together in poetry and are natural partners, not natural antagonists. Yet Smith’s sonnet is a good poem, rather than a brilliant one. For it to be nearer to the ‘brilliant’ end of the spectrum, we would want a little more integration between the first 12 lines and the last two. It is worth asking whether the next poem achieves a higher degree of that kind of ‘through-integration’, even though it too has a largely descriptive ‘main body’, with the poetic point made explicit only in the final two lines. It is by Roy Fisher, whose methods are often oblique and teasingly indirect. For much of his career anything directly autobiographical tended to be excluded from his work, but recently it has become more seemingly direct, so that glimpses of his childhood in 1930s Birmingham have appeared, as in this intriguing poem called ‘A Sign Illuminated’. The poem is about a municipal bus, illuminated with hundreds of light bulbs, which toured through the city on celebratory occasions such as coronations or civic anniversaries. ‘Brummies’ of Fisher’s generation share his vivid memories of the illuminated bus, as evidenced by several local-nostalgia websites, but the title of Fisher’s poem gives a different starting signal from (for instance) the first line of Vicki Feaver’s, for it seems to be an open indication that the bus is representative of other things, perhaps even of meaning itself – this, then, is a poem about a sign:

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18  Reading the lines A Sign Illuminated In honour of something or other – poor King Bertie’s crowning; the Charter Centenary; 1938 as a whole – the city decreed that on several occasions there should emerge from the Depot on Kyotts Lake Road an Illuminated Bus. On a published route it would slowly glide through every suburb and slum in turn. Crowds might turn out. So it came cruising on summer evenings, before the little boys went to their beds, its lights plain in the sun from as much as a mile off; those lights were its headlamps and certain thin patterns of domestic bulbs all over the coachwork. What the city had picked was one of its own retired double-deckers. They’d sliced off the top, blacked the windows, painted out the livery; it was a vehicle so old that the shadowy driver sat exposed above the engine in an open cab. Among the little boys were many who knew the design and the period registration plates. In the sunset light they could take it all in: this emblem that trundled past all the stops; possessed no route number, passengers or conductor; was less than a bus, let alone less than lit up. The signal given by the word ‘sign’ in the title is made even more explicit when the bus is referred to near the end of the poem as ‘this emblem’ – but what is it an emblem of? As often, in Roy Fisher’s work especially, and in contemporary poetry generally,

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Meaning  19 the language of the poem is defiantly relaxed and ‘unpoetic’ – the bus is brought out, the poet says vaguely, ‘In honour of something or other’, and the linguistic precision which is in evidence merely concerns place-specifics, like the fact that the illuminated bus is based at ‘the Depot on Kyotts Lake Road’, a point which will now mean something precise only to locals of a certain age. How, then, can we get some purchase on the question of what the illuminated sign means? One excellent way to do so is to look closely at the tone of the vocabulary, thinking about its nuances and overtones: it is striking, firstly, that though the bus is officially a joyful and cele­ bratory object, it is presented here in a rather sombre way, so that it quickly begins to seem a little sinister. When the city ‘decreed’, it would ‘emerge’ from the depot and ‘slowly glide’ through all its districts: it came ‘cruising on summer evenings, before / the little boys went to their beds’, which seems to imply that they might dream uneasily about it. This ancient vehicle, with its sliced-off top, blacked-out windows and shadowy driver, is like a revenant, a cluster of absences, which stops at no stops, has no route number, no passengers and no conductor. It seems like an embodiment of the Freudian uncanny – it both is and isn’t a bus, and so disturbs our taken-for-granted ways of classifying the familiar world around us, hinting at another world, a parallel universe, a life after death, when this decommissioned and partly dismantled entity from the past rises again from its depot and glides uncannily round the city like a memento mori, reminding us of our last end, when we too will be superannuated, with painted-out livery and decommissioned registra­tion plates, and trundling helplessly past all the stops. The illuminated bus, seen with ‘its lights / plain in the sun from as much as a mile off ’, seems to hint at a haunting and premonitory awareness of all this, and, says the poem, ‘In the sunset light / they [the little boys] could take it all in’. But that doesn’t seem to be the whole of the poem, for there is a metaphysical sting in the tail (and tale) of the poem, for what they are ‘taking in’ is this emblem which ‘was less / than a bus, let alone less than lit up’. We can understand fairly easily what is meant by ‘less than a bus’, since the poem lists several ways in which the illuminated bus isn’t really a bus at all, since it lacks a number, does not take passengers and so on. But in what sense is it ‘less than lit up’? Well, if the bus is a sign, and if it is less than lit up, this may suggest that its meaning remains to some extent obscure. We cannot know what the intentions might be of its ‘shadowy driver’, or what goes on behind those blacked-out windows. What gives the emblem its

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20  Reading the lines force, in fact, are those aspects of it which are ‘less than lit up’, less than spelled out and nailable-down, as is often the case in poetry. We can only go so far in explaining what the emblem in a poem might mean (as I have done above, ‘talking-through’ the poem in quasi-paraphrase, as I did with ‘Ironing’), but we can never quite go all the way (to the terminus in Kyotts Lake Road). Indeed, if we felt that we had rounded up all the meaning that resides within a particular poetic emblem, then the poem would lose its force and we would never want (or need) to re-read it. Fisher presents us with a vehicle of public transportation, but we have an uneasiness when it is at large and gliding round the city, and perhaps we will sleep more peacefully in our beds when we know that it is safely back in its depot. In the case of Charon’s ferry across the Styx, for which the fare to the driver-conductor is one obol, the homely notion of the ‘ferry’ only serves to make its life-terminating function seem all the more disturbing. Similarly, the fact that this haunting emblem is a ‘bus’ – an object which seems the very epitome of the mundane – makes it all the more haunting. In that sense, then, Fisher’s bus is like Charon’s ferry. We have looked at Feaver’s ‘Ironing’, Smith’s ‘Middleton Church’ sonnet and Fisher’s ‘Sign Illuminated’, trying to say something specific about poetic meaning: what the three poems have in common is that they all spend most of their time describing a procedure (ironing), a natural process (coastal erosion), or an object (the illuminated bus), but the thing described gathers implicit connotations as the poem goes on, and in all three cases these become more explicit at the end. That is a fairly common pattern in poetry, and the success of the poem as a whole depends upon the complementary fusion of the ‘showing’ part in the main body and the ‘telling’ part towards the end. The extent of the reader’s enjoyment and grasp of the poem will have a lot to do with appreciating the means and skilfulness of that fusion. The two aspects (telling and showing) are equally important to the construction of the overall poetic effect, even though (as often) they are not of equal length. The poetic effect as a whole is tightly shaped and crafted by the poet, and it is natural for poetry readers to be curious about how that process works. An important aspect of how it does so is the poet’s use of imagery, which is the topic of the next chapter.

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2. 

Imagery

A considerable mystique has gathered around the notion of the image in poetry, but the idea of the image is not in itself complex. A basic definition of the poetic image would be that it is an evoked object (in the broadest sense) which is used to suggest an idea (in the broadest sense). In his book How to Read a Poem Terry Eagleton considers the famous image which (after an un-translated Italian epigraph from Dante) opens ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, the first poem in T. S. Eliot’s first collection, Prufrock and Other Obser­vations of 1917. Eagleton sees this image as typifying the im­pact of modernism: How, the reader wonders, can the evening look like an anaesthetised body? Yet the point surely lies as much in the force of this bizarre image as in its meaning. We are in a modern world in which settled correspondences or traditional affinities between things have broken down.1

The use in poetry of a long-standing tradition of ‘settled correspondences or traditional affinities between things’, which Eagleton mentions, might be exemplified by the opening of Robert Herrick’s seventeenth-century poem ‘To Daffodils’: Fair daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon It seems natural to the poet to begin his poem by citing an affinity between beautiful flowers and beautiful women, imagining these short-lived, early spring flowers as young women hastening away from a party before ‘we’ have seen enough of them. For Eagleton, responding to Eliot’s opening metaphor (and one sees his point), no such ‘traditional affinity’ could be said to exist between the evening sky and a patient stretched out on an operating table. The more conventional poetry readers of the day would probably have expected a poetic depiction of the evening sky to contain something

1  Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Blackwell, 2007), p. 93.

21

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22  Reading the lines touching, romantic and aesthetically pleasing, perhaps something like this description in W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘Adam’s Curse’ (1902): We saw the last embers of daylight die And in the trembling blue-green of the sky A moon moon-worn as if it had been a shell Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell About the stars and broke in days and years. This is a recognisably ‘poetic’ description in Yeats’s earlier ‘romantic’ or ‘Celtic twilight’ style, full of gently soothing imagery – the day dies in a picturesque way, like the glowing late embers of a fire, the colours are rendered with some precision (the ‘trembling blue-green’), and the waters of time lapping at earth’s shore and the delicate shell-like moon are typical aesthetic touches. But the readers of ‘Prufrock’, not many years later, get none of this lush verbal scene-painting, and instead they are given this: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table Eagleton holds that the modernist force of the image lies in the deliber­ate incongruity between the object being evoked (the evening sky) and the idea used to represent it (the etherised patient). Of course, he is right that the image deliberately jars expectations. Yet the juxtaposition is not completely random either, for object and idea share what might be called a common horizontality – the long streaks of light and cloud often seen across the evening sky might suggest, to a rather morbid sensibility, a patient lying horizontally on the table of an operating theatre. The clouds Prufrock imagines must be stratus clouds, which are characterized by horizontal layering, and as flat, featureless clouds of low altitude, so in that sense the image works as a kind of visual pun. But notice that it is a subjective image, not an objective one. In other words, its aim is not (or not primarily) to tell us how the sky looks, but, rather, to indicate how it seems or feels to a certain kind of sensi­ bility. That shift of primary emphasis from the objective to the subjective is typical of modernism, and, in the same way, Vincent Van Gogh’s Café Terrace painting doesn’t show how the stars look at night, for he shows some of them looking as big as flying saucers. Rather, it tries to suggest how it can feel to look at them in a certain

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Imagery  23 mood – exhilarating, overwhelming, baffling, and so on. It should not be assumed, though, that subjective imagery is exclusively the product of the modernist period of the early twentieth century. For instance, in the 1990s the poet Eleanor Brown, in her collection Maiden Speech (1996), uses an evening-sky image which is similar in tone and effect to Eliot’s. It occurs in ‘What Song the Syrens Sang’: On the knife horizon, the evening sun Slit his own throat and bled into the sea The overwrought, end-of-one’s-tether feel of the image conveys (primarily) a state of mind, not a visual impression of a maritime scene of sea and sky, even though the image does contain visual elements, such as a reference to the redness of the evening sky, which suggests the notion of bleeding. The subjective image, then, tells us more about the perceiver than about the thing perceived. Prufrock’s walk in Eliot’s poem takes him through the drab and sordid streets of a city, ‘Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent’. The streets, that is to say, meander aimlessly and with no apparent purpose or direction, and this is another subjective image, with the ‘wandering’ streets as the object, and Prufrock’s life as the idea, expressing how he feels unsure of his direction in life, unable to make sense of things, and trapped within the pointless twists and turns of his own life, as if in a labyrinth. Here again, the visual element is minimal, though it is undeniably present somewhere within the image, and was probably its initial trigger in the poet’s mind. All this, however, should alert us to the fact that the word ‘image’ is actually something of a misnomer, for though a visual element of some kind is often present in imagery, it is seldom the core of the image. Think, for instance, of a commonplace poetic expression from the time of Herrick, such as ‘Her lips were like cherries’: clearly, both cherries and lips are red (sort of), and that is what ‘cues’ the image, but lips don’t actually look like cherries, and if any did they would be somewhat grotesque. Rather, what gives the image some degree of ‘settled correspondence’ between object (cherries) and idea (lips) is that cherries and lips can share a range of sensuously suggestive non-visual attributes – that both are soft, moist and sweet, for instance. And even when an image seems at first to be building primarily upon a series of visual links, those links, on reflection, often turn out to be predominantly conceptual. Consider, for instance,

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24  Reading the lines the following sonnet by Thomas Wyatt, in which the poet seems (in the persona of the unrequited lover who is also an un­rewarded diplomatic servant) to give us a step-by-step demonstration of how to build a poetic image. Wyatt was the first English poet to make extensive use of the sonnet form, which he had encountered as a youthful aristocratic traveller in Italy. In the beginning, the sonnet was almost exclusively used for love poetry, but the range of possible subject matter quickly expanded, so that the ‘love’ in question might be the love of God, with the speaker debating the ups and downs of religious experience, or it might be a more general­ised introspection concerning nature, or the self: Like to these immeasurable mountains Is my painful life, the burden of ire: For of great height be they and high is my desire, And I of tears and they be full of fountains. Under craggy rocks they have full barren plains; Hard thoughts in me my woeful mind doth tire. Small fruit and many leaves their tops do attire; Small effect with great trust in me remains. The boisterous winds oft their high boughs do blast; Hot sighs from me continually be shed. Cattle in them and in me love is fed. Immovable am I and they are full steadfast. Of the restless birds they have the tune and note, And I always plaints that pass through my throat. Wyatt, like Prufrock, feels that his life is going nowhere, and he compares himself to a barren mountainous landscape: the mountains are infinitely high, and so are his frustrations; they are full of streams and waterfalls, and he is full of tears; they are rocky and barren, and his mind is worn out with thinking and longing; no fruit grows on the mountains, and nothing he undertakes comes to fruition; the mountains are blasted by winds, and he is racked by sighs and agonised regrets; the mountains are immovable, and his love never changes; the birds on the mountains call for a mate, and he sighs and laments endlessly, probably for more or less the same reason. Though the poem begins with the linking word ‘like’, the lack of any real, deep-down ‘likeness’ between object and idea, point for point, is only highlighted by making such a list of the juxta­positions and correspondences which he enumerates. Waterfalls, for instance, are, in reality, hardly ‘like’ tears in any way at

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Imagery  25 all except that both are wet. And yet, by ‘holding’ the image of the mountains, and working it through, Wyatt does convince us and move us; as (we may surmise) he passes through mountainous terrain on one of his diplomatic missions, he looks around him and feels that he is going further and further away from what he really desires: he looks at the dreary mountains and thinks ‘Yes, that’s me, that’s what I’m like – isolated, buffeted, useless, forgotten’. Though the poem offers a catalogue of denotations, the imagery works chiefly through its connotations: thus, the poet directly denotes how he feels, telling us in so many words that his life is painful, his desire ‘high’, his thoughts hard, and his mind woeful and tired. But each denotation of feeling is linked to an image which connotes the feeling concerned in a pictorial way: thus, the pain is beyond measure, like the seemingly endless succession of mountains he passes on his journey; his desire is ‘high’, perhaps suggesting that he desires an exalted person who is above his station (he was suspected of adultery with Anne Boleyn and imprisoned in the Tower); his thoughts are hard, like the craggy rocks looming above, and his mind exhausted and un­productive, like the barren terrain he is travers­ing. The connotations of all these bleak scenic elements embody the main force of the poem, for the plain statements of denoted feeling are unimpressive in themselves, like pieces of scenery in a theatre, which have hardly any effects on their own, and require the connotative accompaniment of stage-lighting and perspective. The overall effect of all the scenic elements mentioned in the poem is to produce a vivid impression of a man trapped within his own unrelieved masculinity, and within the relentless and unproductive treadmill of his own thoughts. So Wyatt works a single ‘scenic’ image though the whole poem, not just touching it and quickly moving on, but holding it, and developing a series of underlying, subsidiary correspondences: this too is a distinction worth noting, that between the touched image and the held image, the latter being one which is sustained and explored across a whole stretch of poetic discourse. All the images in Wyatt’s poem are readily comprehensible because they keep the object and the idea so rigorously separate. Sometimes the word ‘like’ itself separates idea and object, as in the opening statement ‘Like to these immeasurable mountains / Is my painful life’, which we can re-order as ‘My painful life [the idea] is like these immeasurable mountains [the object]’. At other times, idea and object are linked to each other by placing ‘and’ between them: ‘For of great height be they [the object] and high is

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26  Reading the lines my desire [the idea]’; and sometimes they are merely juxtaposed, one against the other, with no conjunction to link them explicitly: ‘Under craggy rocks they have full barren plains [the object]; / Hard thoughts in me my woeful mind doth tire [the idea]’. So the reader is invited to think about resemblances between the two juxtaposed elements in each case, but the underlying structure is reassuringly based on simile, in the sense that, in each case, A is like B, a formulation which recognises the essential separateness of A and B. A metaphorical formulation, by contrast, sees an essential fusion of A and B, as the metaphor is a rhetorical figure which edges closer to the assertion that A is B. Thus, in the clichéd metaphor ‘the ship ploughed the waves’, sailing becomes ploughing, so that ship and plough, and the passage of each through its characteristic medium, are fused into a single imaginative entity. This kind of ‘metaphorical’, rather than ‘simileic’, image is used by Shakespeare as a kind of curtain-closer at the end of the first scene of Hamlet, as dawn approaches and Horatio says to his fellow-watchers on the Elsinore battlements, ‘But, look, the dawn, in russet mantle clad / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill’. He doesn’t say that the sun is appearing over the hill like a traveller in a red cloak coming into view over the summit of a hill, but that the sun is such a red-cloaked traveller. Of course, in the context of the play, it is obvious that this is a poetic image, not a literal indication of what the speaker has just seen. This image, too, is visually ‘triggered’, even though (as Ezra Pound says of it in ‘A Retrospect’) it ‘presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he [Shakespeare] presents.’2 This distinction between describing and presenting is in line with Pound’s definition of the poetic image given earlier in the same piece, where he says that it is a device which ‘presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’. An image, he says, isn’t a description but a presentation, which I take to mean that an image is a re-making or re-presentation of something. In almost every imaginable way, in other words, dawn is not like a person in a red cloak.  Let’s now consider a more complex example of the kind of image which has suppressed the word ‘like’ between object and idea. In the Wyatt example, as we saw, the development of a single image is sustained through a whole poem, and the structure is one of simple, 2  Ezra Pound, ‘A Retrospect’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (Faber, 1960), p. 6.

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Imagery  27 cumulative linearity. But that simplicity of structure would become a little monotonous if the poem were longer, and the more common pattern is to ‘braid’ or intertwine multiple strands of imagery.3 This is what we see in a contemporary poem called ‘The Forked Tree’, by Marion Lomax (now known as Robyn Bolam). Here is the complete poem: I killed two hares last night in the heart of the garden. Long ears in moonlight, mimicking the shape of the tree. I crept round the side of the house before they sensed me And when they heard the gun clear its throat it was too late. I hit the buck first, then the doe – stupidly standing To stare at me. Her powerful hindquarters refusing To kick and run, though I knew she could have bounded up The lane in an instant, back to her young. I can cope With hares: they are easy to cook. I feel no remorse. Now I’ll wait for the vixen who raids the chicken house. I feed my chickens. Gather and sort the eggs. I wipe The dirt and straw collage from the shells of those I sell. I have the dogs too. My husband trained them, but I was Surprised how quickly they obeyed me. I talked to them – More easily than I talked to the children. Could share The shadow with its dark gun lurking by our house wall And the silent bullet lodged inside before we knew That it was growing. His coming out of hospital, Then the sniper’s second strike when he was off his guard. In the end I could only stand stupidly and stare – Even with warning, could not believe such treachery. The children were swinging from the tree in the garden With no one to catch them. Darkness made the ground tremble With hooves which left the grass trampled and the roses spoiled. I guard this warren – small rooms and scattered outbuildings. Not even chickens shall live in fear of predators. My children shall feed better than before. Lonely nights Are not without fear, but I cope with darkness now that I have seen it bring young deer down from the wood to play. Jumping in an out in the moonlight, through the forked tree. 

5

10

15

20

25

30

3  I am indebted to Dr William Welstead for the notion of ‘braided’ imagery.

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28  Reading the lines After reading the poem a couple of times, we can talk our way through it reflectively, as we did with ‘Ironing’, so that we situate ourselves ‘in dialogue’ with it by getting a general sense of its tone, feel, pace, method, range of interests, and so on. The poem seems to concern a family living in a country cottage, the wife being the speaker, while the husband, as we gather from the second stanza, has died from an illness which sounds like cancer, leaving the speaker – determined and resourceful though she seems to be – with a permanent sense of the vulnerability of herself and her children. The feeling of insecurity and underlying anxiety is strongly conveyed throughout, but, on the whole, what emerges as the poem goes on is a sense of resilience and recovery of confidence – ‘I can cope’, ‘I cope’ the voice says (in 8 and 28), and while the forked tree of the title seems to have distinct connotations of danger, the poem ends with the vivid little moonlit glimpse of the young deer jumping playfully through it. The previous two sentences are roughly the content of my own ‘talk through’ of the poem, and, again, I began to write it down as a way of thinking through the poem, not knowing, when I started, exactly where it was leading. As a distinct stage of the ‘reading’ process in poetry, this kind of open-ended reflective writing seems potentially valuable, and is highly recommended. I find this ‘writing back’ technique particularly useful when I still feel distanced from a poem and have not yet formed any distinct impression of what it generally seems to be about, what patterns and structures feature in it, and where it is heading. But the unravelling of a poem’s imagery will often require a serious and sustained ‘second look’, after the initial mapping out, attempting to trace the ‘braiding’ or intertwining of images round which the poem is built. In this case, firstly, there is an obvious reversal pattern between the first two stanzas. In the first, the speaker with her gun is lurking outside the cottage and is the sudden killer of buck and doe: the latter is left ‘stupidly standing’ (5) and their young are now unprotected. In the second stanza, the lurking shadow by the house wall ‘with its dark gun’ (16) twice fires its ‘silent bullet’ (17) and the speaker can ‘only stand stupidly and stare’ (20). That reversal motif linking the first two stanzas is one element of the braided patterning. Another pattern – overlaid on the first – is that the forked tree introduced at the start of the first stanza returns at the start of the third (in line 22), where the children are using the forked tree as a swing, but ‘With no one to catch them’ (23). The hooves which have trampled the grass and spoiled the roses (24) are a source of imagined danger, and a ­pervading anxiety

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Imagery  29 is palpable, seen, for instance, in the phrase ‘Darkness made the ground tremble’ (23). The speaker seems to be developing a siege mentality (‘I guard this warren… / Not even chickens shall live in fear of predators’, 25–6), as if the lesson of the second verse is that the husband was hit ‘when he was off his guard’ (19), making the wife determined never to be off guard at all. But the ending seems to modulate that extreme stance; the loneliness, fear and darkness mentioned in the last four lines of the poem are real, but the sight of the young deer at play brings back some sense of balance and allevi­ ation. The moonlit image of the young at play seems to suggest that having ‘no one to catch them’ is a necessary part of their development, beyond the stage of mere ‘coping’. A third element of the ‘braiding’ structure I have been discussing would divide the poem into two more or less even parts: in lines 1–15, the female speaker almost seems to endeavour to become stereo­typically masculine: she is the cold-blooded killer ‘in the heart of the garden’ (1) who claims to ‘feel no remorse’ (9), and is immediately planning her next kill (‘Now I’ll wait for the vixen’, 10). The husband’s dogs recognise her as their new master and obey her, and they become the recipients of her locked-in emotions (‘I talked to them – / More easily than I talked to the children’, 14–15). Then in lines 16–30 she seems to be re-feminised, or even ‘re-mothered’, as if empathising with the frozen disbelief of the doe (in line 5) at the loss of her mate, and though the sentry role (‘I guard this warren’, 25) is not relinquished, it is tempered by the acquisition of a broader perspective which enables some relaxation of the defensive stance which had threatened to become almost an obsessive mania. The past few pages have illustrated the kind of detail, and the nature of the sustained pursuit of the nuances of imagery, which may be needed in the process of reflectively ‘talking through’ or ‘talking back to’ a poem. But it may be useful, finally, to look more closely at one of the most striking images in the poem in order to spell out exactly what makes us identify it as an image, rather than as a literal element (that is, as a phrase which means precisely what it literally says), for though the middle stanza mentions a gun (16) and a sniper (19), no actual gun or sniper is present. In fact, ‘The shadow with its dark gun lurking by our house wall’ (16) designates the husband’s illness, and the ‘shadow’ is probably on a scan or an X-ray which reveals the condition that eventually kills him, as a hidden sniper kills a victim. But how exactly do we know that gun and sniper are metaphorical rather than literal? Well, firstly, the most obvious indication that the bullet is metaphorical is that it is given

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30  Reading the lines attributes that a real bullet doesn’t possess; the poem says that the bullet ‘lodged inside before we knew / That it was growing’ (17–18), but real bullets don’t grow, and this is the clue which shows that it is an image, not a literal object. It is, rather, a metaphorical ‘object’, conveying the ‘idea’ of a fatal illness which has already entered the body. This kind of interpretive move (that is, reading specific details metaphorically rather than literally) is fundamental to the reading of poetry, and unpicking the mechanism of the image, as we have been doing here, shows how the process works. The final example is a composite one – two linked short poems by the same author. The points raised by this example open out to larger issues which are taken up in Part II of this book and are not so easily confined within the topic of imagery alone. Both parts of this composite example are poems by William Carlos Williams, and they first appeared in his 1923 poetry-and-prose collection Spring and All. The first poem is usually referred to as ‘The Red Wheel­ barrow’, though in the book it is simply headed ‘XXII’, indicating its position in the sequence of poems the book contains. It reads in full as follows: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. This seems at first to exemplify the most basic form of imagery a poem could have, since it merely presents a set of ‘objects’ (the wheelbarrow and chickens in the rain), and leaves it to speak for itself. We are not told what the image means or what it stands for, the diction is stripped down and stark and therefore gives few pointers, and the poet seems to be striving to present the object to us simply ‘as itself ’, unmediated through language. I mean by this that the words used are the simplest kind of verbal labels – ‘red wheel barrow’, ‘white chickens’, ‘rain’ – and they seem to hold back from any kind of slanting of significance and are given no kind

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Imagery  31 of embellishment at all. Indeed, commentators sometimes say that the poem exemplifies Williams’s influential poetic dictum ‘No ideas but in things’, and they see this poem as embodying the advice to poets (urging them to be simple, direct and denotative) which is im­plicitly put forward in that proposition. This view contains some truth, of course, but, again, it is not the whole truth, for the image isn’t quite left to speak for itself: firstly, if the title really is ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, then our attention is being directed more to one element in the scene than to others, making the wheelbarrow central, and the chickens and rain less so. On the other hand, if ‘XXII’ is taken as the title, then the ‘object’ depicted in this poem is not a stand-alone, epiphanic icon, but a single element within a sequence of many other (presumably not randomly chosen or randomly ordered) items. Also, the opening couplet (‘so much depends / upon’) explicitly directs attention to the claimed signifi­ cance of the object, whereas an implicitly trusted object might be expected to radiate its own iconic authority, without the need for any such ‘pointer’. So if it were truly to represent a strict embodiment of the ideal of ‘No ideas but in things’, the poem would need to be presented untitled and without its opening couplet, thus: a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. But I am pretty sure that nearly all readers would agree that in this form the effect of the poem is quite different. With its opening removed, it is no longer a metaphysical pronouncement, and the ‘pointing’ element is now entirely implicit, merely consisting of the fact that choosing to make the image of the wheelbarrow, chickens and rain the entire content of a poem imputes significance and cultural authority to this simple combination of objects and features, thereby inviting the reader to ponder what that signifi­ cance might be. This brings us to the second poem in the composite. The phrase ‘No ideas but in things’ occurs (among other places) in Williams’s poem ‘A Sort of a Song’, but in the context of the whole of that poem it seems less uncompromisingly clear-cut than

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32  Reading the lines when it is quoted (as it usually is) in isolation. The poem reads complete: Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. – through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks. So, firstly, the couplet containing the famous phrase reads: ‘Compose. (No ideas / but in things) Invent!’ Far from ‘merely’ presenting a ‘thing’ and having done with it, this poem seems full of ‘ideas’ about how to write, including, of course, the actually quite complex idea ‘No ideas / but in things’. The ‘ideas’ slogan is sandwiched between two imperatives which emphasise the shaping-and-making role of the writer (‘Compose’, ‘Invent!’), and the writing must ‘be of words’, which can mean both ‘made of ’ words and ‘about’ words. The writing waits like a snake to ‘strike’ reality, doing so ‘through metaphor’, which is an idea ‘of ’ words – again meaning both ‘made of ’ words and ‘about’ words. Though words might seem to be a ‘soft’ medium, the ending seems to suggest that they have the power to transform the real, and that, ultimately, is what a poetic image does. So the pronouncement which is usually taken to mean something very basic and uncompromising (that poetry must always be concrete and specific in its choice of methods and m ­ aterials) turns out to be rather less clear-cut. The poetic image is never just an object lifted out of our common environment and into the poem, for it is always constituted by the verbal craft of the poet, and always occurs within the context of the poet’s key activities, which are to ‘Compose’ and ‘Invent’. We could, indeed, turn the famous formula inside out and say that in poetry there can be ‘No things but in ideas’. And if in pedantic mood, we might even expand this to ‘No things but in verbal ideas’. This perhaps suggests a way of encapsulating what has been said in this chapter about the nature of poetic imagery: firstly, it is

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Imagery  33 always made of an ‘object’ which is the expression or embodiment of an idea; but secondly, it is often developed throughout the course of a poem, and requires that detailed and sustained response on the reader’s part which we have been calling ‘talking back’ or ‘talking through’ the material; and thirdly, the image cannot speak for itself, but has to be combined with the ‘shaping’ and ‘composing’ activity of the poet, which gives it voice and form, and thereby makes it expressive of meaning. In turning to the topic of diction in the next chapter, we now move our specific attention to the verbal art and craft that poets use in shaping their ideas.

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3. 

Diction

I Am! I am! yet what I am none cares or knows, My friends forsake me like a memory lost; I am the self-consumer of my woes, They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost; And yet I am! and live with shadows tossed Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life nor joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; And e’en the dearest – that I loved the best – Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest. I long for scenes where man has never trod; A place where woman never smil’d or wept; There to abide with my creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept: Untroubling and untroubled where I lie; The grass below – above the vaulted sky. John Clare 1 John Clare’s poem is sombre and impressive in tone, and gains extra poignancy when we know that it was written in the 1840s during his long confinement in the Northampton Asylum, where he felt himself long forgotten, indeed, almost buried alive. In reading this and the other poems considered in the present chapter, I will make use of what I see as the fundamental aspects of poetic diction, which are: register (which means something similar to style); cohesion (which refers to how phrases are linked to what

1  This version of the poem is downloaded from University of Toronto, Repre­ sentative Poetry Online, at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/i-am.

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Diction  35 comes immediately before and immediately after); tone (which designates the ‘verbal colouring’ that produces the mood of the poem); ­sequencing (the ordering of phrases within the lines and sentences of the poem); pace (which concerns how the poem gives the impression of acceler­ation or deceleration); and collocation (the patterns/­ combinations of words expected in ordinary language usage). These six elements cannot always be rigorously separated out and entirely distinguished from each other, but they do seem to provide a way of breaking the overarching notion of diction into identifiable ‘working parts’. I will not attempt to use them in any set order, or to an equal extent with every poem, and with this poem the notion of pace is a good place to begin. Pace in poetry is a crucial element, for whereas prose can usually be read at a brisk pace, good poetry readers are usually slow readers, at least of poetry. If farce is tragedy speeded up, then poetry speeded up is often hardly anything at all. When a poem is not read out (or sub-vocalised) slowly, then its chances of making an impact are much reduced. In front of an audience, professionals say, it is almost impossible to read out a poem too slowly. For the poet, one way of enforcing, or at least encouraging, a slow-paced mental performance of the poem within the mind of the reader is to use very short sentences, like this poem’s opening self-assertion ‘I am’. I would call this stark proclamation a sentence, but punctuation is always an editorial problem with Clare. He made his early living as an agricultural labourer, and his editors always felt free to tidy up his grammar and punctuation. Editions of his poetry are full of textual variations, and there are major academic disagreements about how exactly his poems should be presented. So you may find a colon, a dash, a full stop or an exclamation mark after ‘I am’, depending upon which edition you consult, but all these suggest a strong pause in performance. Beginning with a statement of such extreme and uncompromising brevity means that the poem starts and then immediately seems to stop, perhaps giving it the feel of someone groping their way through a tortuous inner argument. The ‘argument’ continues with the thought that nobody knows or cares what the speaker is. That thought is end-stopped, meaning that it is completed with the end of the line, and the next line (‘My friends forsake me like a memory lost’) begins another thought, so that though the two lines are in sequence, they are not joined together by any linking word, and hence have a disjunctive effect, rather than suggesting a continuous flow or cohesion of thought. Of course, this line has implicit continuity with the opening, in the

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36  Reading the lines sense that if nobody cares about the speaker it probably follows that any friends he may once have had have now forsaken him. But cohesion means having an explicit form of connection – as, for instance, when statements are linked with a conjunction such as ‘and’. The third and fourth lines repeat the pattern of the first two, beginning with another complete-in-itself statement, appropriately so, perhaps, since the statement is ‘I am the self-consumer of my woes’. In the fourth line, ‘They rise and vanish in oblivious host’, ‘They’ refers to the woes mentioned in line 3, but that makes a less cohesive link than ‘which’, since ‘which’ would have fused the two sentences into one. So the disjointed effect of using a series of brief, self-contained, cohesion-free statements is very marked, and prevents the poem from developing any feeling of easy ‘run’ or fluency. This, again, is a direct result of the nature of the diction, which seems to heighten the reader’s sense of being engaged with a troubled and self-doubting mind. And if each line appears isolated from every other, the effect is to build a model of the speaker himself, who is swept with the desolating feeling that he doesn’t ‘join up’ in any way at all with the rest of humanity. The description of woes in line 4 that ‘rise and vanish in oblivious host’ uses the image of a fire, so the woes rise and vanish into the air, like the smoke rising and dispersing as the fire consumes itself. Again, the image is complete in one line, but a kind of addendum or coda to the thought is added in the next line by the cohesive word ‘like’ – ‘Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost’. This is the most difficult line in the poem, and any interpretation of it must be approximate; its tone of wistful longing and regret is unmistakable, and emerges strongly, in spite of (and perhaps even to some extent because of) the difficulty of the sense. If pressed to construe it, I would offer ‘Like the spirits of past loved ones, now lost in the oblivion of death’. The final line of the stanza repeats the opening (‘And yet I am!’), and then confronts the paradox or contradiction that though undoubtedly ‘I am’ (meaning ‘I am here, and now, and living’) the speaker has also become a shade or shadow of himself, like those lost in the oblivion of death, so that he is tossed into a kind of hell, as described in the second stanza. The two lines beginning with ‘Into’ launch stanza 2 with strong rhetorical momentum – the pace now seems to quicken and this stanza runs as a single sentence. The two noun phrases (‘Into the nothingness of scorn and noise’ and ‘Into the living sea of waking dreams’) have an air of epic vastness, embodying a sense of mind-threatening loneliness. The next line has another epic-scale

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Diction  37 image – ‘the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems’ – and conveys the same aura of psychic breakdown. Then the epic scale is abruptly abandoned for the would-be homeliness of ‘And e’en the dearest – that I loved the best’, and their strangeness is all the stranger to him because he can suggest no reason for it. Abruptly at that point, at the start of the last stanza, all hope of earthly solace is abandoned, and he expresses the deep desire to pass beyond the human world which has abandoned him (‘I long for scenes where man has never trod; / A place where woman never smil’d or wept’). The final four lines accept that his release from his acute sense of isolation can only be through death: There to abide with my creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept: Untroubling and untroubled where I lie; The grass below – above the vaulted sky. Here the word ‘abide’ (used instead of the more homely ‘live’) has unmistakeably religious overtones, so that we seem to cross into the register or style of hymn-singing, where high religious and metaphysical sentiments are often combined with images of longed-for child-like security (as in the Victorian hymn ‘Abide With Me’, composed around the same time). Here the speaker longs for a place where he will be safe, and the concluding image is a reference to somewhere where he will be ‘Untroubling and untroubled’, a place envisaged not as the ‘sleep’ of the grave, but as the innocent outdoor sleep of the child on summer grassland, with no fear of danger, and with the grass below him (rather than above him, as it would be if this were an image of burial) and the ‘vaulted sky’ above. That last line – ‘The grass below – above the vaulted sky’ – is worth dwelling on, from the viewpoint of all the sub-categories of diction: the register seems very formal, partly because of the balanced symmetry between the two halves of the line, giving a tone which feels biblical or liturgical, like the formal language of a church service, or else rhetorical, like a great public speech; there is no explicit cohesive word between the two halves (as would be the case if it read ‘The grass below and the vaulted sky above’); rather, they are simply juxtaposed, and that slows the pace, and thereby increases the solemnity of the tone. The sequencing of the two halves of the line is significant, for the grass connotes the earthy, familiar world, while the sky is described in such a way as to evoke a culminating opening out of perspective to take in a world beyond. Finally,

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38  Reading the lines the collocation pattern gives a pleasing sense of closure, with ‘grass’ paired with ‘sky’ and ‘below’ with ‘above’. In considering this poem, then, we have taken a broad view of diction, have considered the pace of the poem, and thought about how the phrasing and the grammar contribute to this, and noted as well its various shifts of tone. The notion of ‘diction’ is about words in action, so to speak, within phrases, sentences, stanzas and whole poems, rather than words as individual verbal items in isolation. And, as with so many aspects of poetry, it is best appreciated by standing back from the detail and considering the effect of a larger unit of sense, rather than zooming in, with spotlight and scalpel, on isolated fragments. Of course, diction on the page takes on a different quality if we have heard the lines read in person by the poet (whether ‘live’ or on radio or CD). Even if we have not heard a particular poem read aloud, some exposure to the poet’s reading style in general can help us to get a feel for the tone and pace required for the oral performance (if only to the ‘inner ear’) of particular lines. A year or two before he died, W. H. Auden read at the ‘Poetry International’ event I attended at the Royal Festival Hall in London, and the measured pace of the reading, in a voice roughened by years of old-fashioned smoking and drinking, was unforgettable. The poem I particularly recall became the title-piece of Auden’s last (and posthumously published) book, Thank You, Fog (1974). It is about a Christmas weekend he spent with friends at a country house in Wiltshire, and it celebrates the kind of sociability and ‘support’ (as we now call it) of lifelong friends, the lack of which was so painfully felt, and so powerfully expressed, by John Clare in the previous poem. Auden thanks the fog for keeping his party of friends housebound for a couple of days over Christmas, thereby enabling him to re­ discover the feel of his own country and people. He had lived much of his adult life abroad, especially in America, and had only recently returned. In the summer of 1972, this was a new poem: he had written it in May, having spent the Christmas of 1971 in England, the first time he had been in England for Christmas since 1937: Grown used to New York weather, all too familiar with Smog, You, Her unsullied Sister, I’d quite forgotten and what You bring to British winters: Now native knowledge returns.

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Diction  39 Sworn foe to festination, daunter of drivers and planes, volants, of course, will curse You, but how delighted I am that You’ve been lured to visit Wiltshire’s witching countryside for a whole week at Christmas, that no one can scurry where my cosmos is contracted to an ancient manor-house and four Selves, joined in friendship, Jimmy, Tania, Sonia, Me. Outdoors a shapeless silence, for even those birds whose blood is brisk enough to bid them abide here all the year round, like the merle and the mavis, at Your cajoling refrain their jocund interjections, no cock considers a scream, vaguely visible, tree-tops rustle not but stay there, so efficiently condensing Your damp to definite drops. Indoors specific spaces, cosy, accommodate to reminiscence and reading, crosswords, affinities, fun: refected by a sapid supper and regaled by wine, we sit in a glad circle, each unaware of our own nose but alert to the others, making the most of it, for how soon we must re-enter, when lenient days are done, the world of work and money and minding our p’s and q’s. No summer sun will ever dismantle the global gloom cast by the Daily Papers, vomiting in slip-shod prose

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40  Reading the lines the facts of filth and violence that we’re too dumb to prevent: our earth’s a sorry spot, but for this special interim, so restful yet so festive, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, Fog.

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It will strike many readers of this modern poem that its diction is a little strange, for it incorporates many archaic elements, which, in combination, seem to conjure up the tone and register of pre-Romantic poetry. For instance, words are frequently linked up into alliterative pairs and chains, including ‘unsullied Sister’ (3), ‘Now native knowledge’ (6), ‘foe to festination’ (7), ‘daunter of drivers’ (8), ‘the merle and the mavis’ (23), and many others. Nouns and pronouns are often given initial capitals, as in eighteenth-century printing practice, such as ‘Smog’ (2), ‘Sister’ (3), ‘You’ (11), ‘Selves’ (17). Many words and phrases have a Latinate or antique tone, reviving obsolete senses or usages of words – for example, ‘festination’ (7), from Latin festinare, meaning ‘haste’; ‘volants’ (9), meaning those flying or in a hurry; ‘the merle and the mavis’ (23), meaning the blackbird and the thrush;2 and ‘refected by a sapid / supper’ (35–6), meaning ‘fed by an appetising supper’. In combination, these verbal features give the poem a certain air of whimsical, antiquarian pedantry which is deliberately suggestive of a vanished age, before mass communications and modern transport systems existed. The effect of the fog is to bring about a temporary close-down of the modern world, and hence a brief suspension of modern sensibilities, and that notion seems deliberately reflected in the poem’s diction. The fog, then, has the effect of slowing down the modern world, an effect incorporated into the very shape of the sentences used in the poem. For instance, the opening sentence (addressed to the fog itself) changes the order in which this sequence of phrases would occur in ordinary talk, which would probably be something like this (with the poem’s actual line numbers indicated): I’d quite forgotten you, fog, smog’s unsullied Sister,  and what you bring to British winters, 

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2  See John Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary (Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 544.

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Diction  41 having grown used to New York weather,  and become all too familiar with smog. But now native knowledge returns. 

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The re-ordering of these clauses in Auden’s poem seems to make us wait a longer time for the main point (‘Now native knowledge returns’), so that the ‘braking’ effect which pervades the lines is marked. It also makes the tone and register feel more formal, as an informal statement about oneself usually begins with ‘I’, rather than with a dependent clause (such as ‘Grown used to New York weather’). Within the poem, there is also an element of playful pastiche: as often, Auden revives or modifies a traditional form, in this case the ode, which in English usage since the Romantics had become a fairly loose, reflective format in which the addressee is a non-human entity (as in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode to a Skylark’, ‘Ode to Joy’, etc.). The archaism allows throw-backs to a pre-Romantic style, as when Auden refers to the fog as the country-bred ‘unsullied Sister’ of the smutty urban smog. Considered outside the notion of self-conscious pastiche, the reference to the ‘unsullied Sister’ is composed in accordance with a poetic convention worn out long ago, and even within the context of an intended effect of ‘quaintness’, the idea may seem a little weak. But the phrase isn’t designed to withstand close forensic scrutiny, and its role is really just to keep the stanza moving towards the delayed end-phrase ‘Now native knowledge returns’. A poem, in other words, is a sequence of words, always scrolling onwards towards its cumulating effect, and all poems, whether they are ‘narrative’ poems or not, have to be going somewhere. Thus, the overall momentum and dynamic of a medium-length poem of some 50 or so lines (like this one) may be eclipsed or overshadowed by something too verbally ‘arresting’ within it, that is, by something which will tend to bring the flow of words to a halt, and make us fix too much of our attention on a single phrase. So poetry of this length or greater requires a peculiar discipline in a writer, to ensure that its verbal energies are fairly evenly spread throughout, rather than ‘clotted’ or concentrated at particular points within the poem. The whole thing needs (so to speak) a suffusing phosphorescence, rather than unexpected, localised concentrations of bright flashes and sudden flares. If we could imagine ourselves as poets, we could probably imagine choosing brilliant words which stand out because of their vividness, aptness, or precision, gaining us admiration as dazzling ‘word-smiths’. But in actuality, poets writing longer pieces

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42  Reading the lines often need words which hardly draw any attention to themselves at all. And that kind of self-effacing overall control, which is an important aspect of the art of diction, is largely a matter of knowing when not to strive for an attention-getting verbal effect. Such ‘dictional restraint’, such avoidance of arresting local display, is part of the ‘secret discipline’ (Yeats’s phrase) of poetry writing. Auden’s ‘Thank You, Fog’ is a poem that certainly has that disci­ pline in abundance, and the lines which constitute its main body do their job by keeping a fairly low profile, and slowing the reader’s arrival at the final statement, using means similar to those I have illustrated in the opening lines of the poem. When we reach it, the poem ends by formally thanking the fog for having closed in at Christmas-time around the country house at which he has been staying with friends, and for giving them all time to savour the human gifts of friendship and peacefulness: … but for this special interim, so restful yet so festive, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, Fog. As with the opening, the reversing effect which forces us to wait is evident – the expected prose order would be something like ‘But thank you, thank you, thank you, fog, for this special interim, [which is] so restful yet so festive’. Two lines intervene in the actual poem between the ‘but’ and the culminating statement to which it applies, and the sense of thoughtful arrest and self-interruption is enhanced by the sub-clause ‘so restful yet so festive’, which is like an interruption within an interruption, or a parenthesis within a parenthesis. The weight then falls on the final statement of grati­ tude, using a simple double repetition of some very commonplace words. So whereas in Clare the disjointedness produced by brief statements was very noticeable, Auden uses longer sentences, so managed as to produce a relaxed evenness of tone, and an archaic turn of phrase producing an evocative verbal pastiche which is suggestive of a more leisurely age. Let us look now at two examples of ‘counter-intuitive’ diction in recent poetry, that is, at cases where the poet avoids a familiar pattern of words and instead supplies a word which is un­ expected, and perhaps seems at first bizarre. Notice that this is a counter-balancing principle to the one just discussed: we have been

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Diction  43 emphasising that the word or phrase which stands out as brilliantly ‘right’ may have disadvantages within a poem if it detracts from the overall effect by drawing too much attention to itself. What we are about to consider is how the word or phrase which at first seems odd, or inappropriate, or even wrong, may actually be advan­ tageous. It will be seen that the effect is not precisely the same in any two of these cases, even though all of them implicitly juxtapose the more obvious (and hence unchosen) word with the less predictable one actually used by the poet. An example which shows a poet’s instinct for verbal counter-intuition occurs at the start of Michael D ­ onaghy’s poem ‘Liverpool’, which was written as a BBC com­mission to celebrate St Valentine’s Day, and focuses on the romantic tattoos with which lovers sometimes decorate themselves. Ever been tattooed? It takes a whim of iron, takes sweating in the antiseptic-stinking parlour, nothing to read but motorcycle magazines before the blood-sopped cotton, and, of course, the needle, all for – at best – some Chinese dragon. But mostly they do hearts, hearts skewered, blurry, spurting like the Sacred Heart on the arms of bikers and sailors. Even in prison they get by with biro ink and broken glass, carving hearts into their arms and shoulders. But women’s are more intimate. They hide theirs, under shirts and jeans, in order to bestow them. Like Tracy, who confessed she’d had hers done one legless weekend with her ex. Heart. Arrow. Even the bastard’s initials, R. J. L. somewhere where it hurt, she said, and when I asked her where, snapped ‘Liverpool’. Wherever it was, she’d had it sliced away leaving a scar, she said, pink and glassy but small, and better than having his mark on her,

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that self-same mark of Valentinus, who was flayed for love, but who never – so the cardinals now say – existed. Desanctified, apocryphal, like Christopher,

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44  Reading the lines like the scar you never showed me, Trace, your (  ), your ex, your ‘Liverpool’. Still, when I unwrap the odd anonymous note I let myself believe that it’s from you.

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All poems seem to juggle with elements of surprise and expectation, and this one illustrates the most skilful handling of those two elements. After the title, the nature of the poem itself is something of a surprise, because it really seems to be about tattooing, we might conclude, as we get to the end of the first stanza. Then, in line 13, it starts to be a poem about ‘Tracy’, on whom the speaker seems to have something of a fixation. Finally, almost at the end (line 26) it reverts to Liverpool, seeming to look back again to the beginning in a way which signals that the poem is pretty well over. But it isn’t quite, and it then risks the anti-climax of a wistful coda, where the verb ‘unwrap’ seems to hint at the understated eroticism, and we realise that ‘Still’ combines two meanings, suggesting both ‘even now, after all this time’, and ‘all the same’, implying something like ‘in spite of your apparent lack of interest in me’. In terms of diction, the play between what is surprising and what is expected often turns on the element of collocation. In all verbal structures, some words are more expected than others: in an ex­pression that begins ‘Let’s take another …’ there is a high expecta­ tion that the missing word will be ‘look’, even though this is not a fixed and unvarying idiomatic string like ‘Nothing succeeds like success’. If you stop reading for a moment and Google the phrase ‘Let’s take another’ you can prove to yourself that this is true. It is, of course, perfectly possible to say (for example) ‘Let’s take another glance’, but the odds would be stacked against winning any bet on that. In the collocational patterns characteristic of contemporary English, ‘Let’s take another look’ is frequently heard, and ‘Let’s take another glance’ isn’t, and the occurrence of ‘glance’ in that combination therefore has an element of the counter-intuitive about it. Similarly, in the poem’s opening line ‘Ever been tattooed? It takes a whim of iron’ the counter-intuitive word is ‘whim’, behind which we perceive the ghost or echo of the more familiar collocation ‘It takes a will of iron’: thus, the word ‘will’ is almost present in the poem, since there is only the slightest phonetic variation between ‘whim’ and ‘will’. Yet the rightness of ‘whim’ is immediately apparent to the reader of the poem, for people often decide on a whim to get tattooed, as the poem says, ‘Like Tracy, who confessed she’d had hers done / one legless weekend with her ex.’ But then the

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Diction  45 inebriated whim has to face the sordid reality of being tattooed, and still hold firm, for in reality it: takes sweating in the antiseptic-stinking parlour, nothing to read but motorcycle magazines before the blood-sopped cotton, and, of course, the needle, So ‘whim of iron’ has a powerfully compressed precision and wit, though at a poetry reading an audience might easily miss the aural distinction between ‘whim’ and ‘will’, so we might therefore regard it as a ‘page’ effect, rather than a ‘performance’ effect. The poem goes on to suggest that women’s tattoos are often ‘more intimate’ than men’s, hidden ‘under shirts and jeans’, but Tracy refuses to say where she had hers done (except by rebuffing the question with the reply ‘Liverpool’). So the speaker in the poem never sees the scar left by its removal. The tattoo, therefore, is gone, like St Christopher, who was removed from the Catholic Church’s official list of saints (on the grounds that there is no proof he ever existed), just as the speaker can never be sure whether Tracy’s tattoo ever existed or not: like the scar you never showed me, Trace, your (  ), your ex, your ‘Liverpool’. Here again, in spite of the often-repeated assertion that poetry should always be ‘read aloud’ for full appreciation, we have effects which will work only on the page, or, at best, may work one way in performance and another way on the page. In performing the poem, Donaghy left a slight pause after the first ‘your’, to indicate a word left unsaid or unspoken: the usual way of doing this in print or hand-writing is to insert a short horizontal line, but Donaghy chooses the pair of spaced parentheses, which seem to make a more suggestive shape, though that effect cannot easily be conveyed in performance. ‘Ex’ in the same line will be understood as ‘ex-husband’ (or partner), as this is its second occurrence in the poem, rather than as an ‘X’, which might imply a deleted or excised tattoo, while the ironic inverted commas around ‘Liverpool’ can be conveyed orally by an ironic tone or inflection, but no precisely equivalent effect is obtainable in print. The poem, then, exemplifies verbal counter-intuition in at least two different forms: firstly, by substituting the unexpected word for the expected one, thereby breaking the more usual collocational pattern, though highlighting that unexpectedness by the closeness of the phonic near-match of

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46  Reading the lines ‘whim’ and ‘will’; and secondly, by putting no word at all where a word needs to be, so that the reader is obliged, like the poem, to fill the gap mentally and (probably) pruriently. In broader terms of register, the poem continues the theme of being teasingly counter-intuitive, for it mixes together language which has a strongly contemporary urban feel, such as ‘antiseptic-stinking parlour’ (2), ‘motorcycle magazines’ (3), ‘bikers and sailors’ (8), ‘shirts and jeans’ (12) and ‘legless weekend’ (14), with a lurid vocabulary that has sado-masochistic overtones, such as ‘blood-sopped cotton’ (4), ‘broken glass’ (9), ‘carving’ (10), ‘she’d had it sliced away’ (18), ‘pink and glassy’ (19), with a religious register which seems to combine the two, as in ‘hearts skewered, blurry, spurting like the Sacred Heart’ (7), ‘Valentinus, / who was flayed for love’ (21–2) and ‘Desanctified, apocryphal’ (24). Thus, Donaghy’s poem vividly evokes the world of pious Catholic iconography, with its extravagant and extreme images of love both human and divine, such as the statue of the Sacred Heart, in which Christ points to the burning heart in his breast, and St Thomas asks to see the traces of Christ’s wounds, and put his hand into the scar in his side, before he will believe him risen. This is the world of feeling that Tracy’s scar evokes, and her profession of her love for her ‘ex’ has the same quality of melodramatic excess. The second example of counter-intuitive diction is from Ciaran Carson, whose 1989 book Belfast Confetti gives a series of disturbingly intimate insights into life in Belfast at the height of the ‘Troubles’ during the 1970s. In his poem ‘Bloody Hand’ we ‘overhear’ what seems to be the planning of a sectarian murder, though the process consists mainly of miming hand-gestures rather than explicit verbal instructions. It’s a chilling poem, all the more so because the hand-play used to enact the required murder recalls the kind of childhood game in which animal shadows are cast onto a wall by a hand held in front of a lamp or candle and formed into different shapes: Your man, says the Man, will walk into the bar like this – here his fingers Mimic a pair of legs, one stiff at the knee – so you’ll know exactly What to do. He sticks a finger to his head. Pretend it’s child’s play – The hand might be a horse’s mouth, a rabbit or a dog. Five handclaps. Walls have ears: the shadows you throw are the shadows you try to throw off. I snuffed out the candle between finger and thumb. Was it the left hand Hacked off at the wrist and thrown to the shores of Ulster? Did Ulster Exist? Or the Right Hand of God, saying Stop to this and No to that? My thumb is the hammer of a gun. The thumb goes up. The thumb goes down.

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Diction  47 The most obvious feature of this poem when looked at on the page is the length of the lines, all of which have more than 20 syllables. All these long lines have two or more breaks within them, where either a new sentence begins, or where there is a new ‘phase’ of an utterance, giving about the same weight of pause as a sentence break, and indicated by a dash or a colon. The effect is to make the pace seem slower and more deliberate, thereby heightening the impression of the cold-bloodedness of the killing. In terms of register, we notice the use of familiar, everyday phrases or clichés – such as ‘child’s play’, ‘horse’s mouth’, ‘walls have ears’ – which convey an impression of mundane, day-to-day normality. But the use of this ‘innocent’ kind of language heightens the reader’s realisation of the extent to which such killings had become part of a mundane, everyday world. The words actually spoken by the man issuing the orders are in italics, and the remainder indicates the reactions of the auditor to whom these instructions are being given. The title of the poem refers to the symbol of the Red Hand, historically denoting the Irish province of Ulster, but used by both sides of the sectarian divide, with one side mostly using a left hand and the other a right. In some versions the thumb is stretched out at an angle to the palm of the hand, and in others not. In Irish myth and legend it is connected with the story of the boat race between two brothers for the kingship of Ulster – whoever’s hand first touched the shore would receive the crown. As the race neared its climax, the brother in the boat which had fallen behind cut off one his hands and threw it ashore ahead of the other’s boat. The incident is linked to the recurrent refusals by both sides in the modern Troubles to seek a political compromise, an intransigence which lay at the roots of the conflict (as seen in the revived slogan ‘Ulster Says No’, the rallying cry of the Unionists in response to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985). The final line of the poem has a number of details which at first seem wrong – because they deviate from the expected collocational patterns – and then seem right. ‘The thumb goes up’, for instance, is a complete grammatical sentence, but it is not a ‘unit of sense’, for the ‘sentence’, which actually has no sense, will be completed only when the gun is fired. Secondly, there is surely a strong expectation that if the first half of the line says ‘The thumb goes up’ (my italics), then the second half will say ‘The thumb comes down’, that is, with ‘comes’ rather than ‘goes’. The expectation of this ‘natural’ contrastive pairing is reinforced by the existence of everyday phrases in English like ‘coming and going’, ‘going out and coming back’, and so on. Carson’s straight repetition of ‘goes’ seems to emphasise the

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48  Reading the lines coldness and starkness of the words, and also the inevitable continuation of the chain of events which will be initiated by the action of firing the gun. ‘Comes’ is the natural obverse of ‘goes’, so using both in tandem suggests an action which is rounded and complete. But, of course, this isn’t so, for one killing will lead to another, and then another, and another, as each murder by one faction is met with its inevitable reprisal from the other.3 Also, the poem chooses the most ordinary of words – there is no hankering by the poet after a fancy, jewel-like mot juste: a teacher ‘correcting’ the line might suggest that the poet choose ‘more precise’ terms than ‘goes up’ and ‘goes down’, such as ‘The thumb rises. The thumb falls.’ But this, of course, would change the feel of a poem that seems deliberately to be made, not from the hand-crafted bricks of traditional poetic effects, but from the breeze blocks and wire mesh of a more brutal time and place. Carson’s line, then, does not give us the neatly contrastive verbal interlock which might satisfy our aesthetic sense. It gives us instead something which is drab and dreary and repetitive, just like the scene it depicts. This chapter has considered diction in poetry from several points of view, beginning with a consideration of overall effects, rather than localised instances or phrases, using notions like ‘pace’, ‘mood’ and ‘cohesion’, and then going on to look at how grammatical and syntactical means can be used to slow the reader’s arrival at a culminating phrase by re-ordering the way the words would probably occur in ordinary speech. We also noted how the momentum of a poem will often require the verbal effects to be strictly controlled and disciplined, so that the risk of distracting the reader from the sum of sense is minimised. Finally, the poet’s tendency to avoid providing the expected word or phrase was exemplified, and we illustrated poets’ frequent preference for the apparently incongruous lexical item. However, while poets frequently avoid predictable diction, until recent times they mostly used predictable rhythmic and metrical structures. So the next chapter discusses the topic of metre in poetry.

3  In discussion of the poem, it was suggested to me that the repetition of ‘goes’ seems to emphasise agency, stressing that the killing is a willed act, not an in­ evitable consequence of something which has gone before. Think, for instance, of a common sequence of actions – I throw a ball up into the air, so that first it goes up, and then it comes down. It goes up because of the impetus I apply to it, but it comes down automatically, merely as a consequence of the law of gravity, once the impetus of the force applied to it is spent.

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4. 

Metre

Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze, A visitant that while it fans my cheek Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings From the green fields, and from yon azure sky. These are the opening lines of The Prelude, William Wordsworth’s epic poem about the development of his own mind and poetic sensi­ bility. The poem is revolutionary in many ways, being essentially a poetic autobiography, but nothing about the opening lines hints at that, for they are quietly reflective and unhurried. The reflective tone of the opening partly derives from the measured and stately pace of his chosen verse form – the lines are in iambic pentameter, which is the backbone of traditional English poetry, being the metre of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, most of Shakespeare’s plays, of his sonnets and those of many others poets, and of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and much more. Poetry written in iambic pentameter uses lines of a fixed length of 10 syllables, each line having five main stresses and five ‘feet’ (the Greek root ‘pent’ denotes ‘five’, so the word ‘pentameter’ means having five feet). Lines in iambic pentameter can be either rhymed (in various formats) or blank verse (meaning unrhymed), as in the case of The Prelude. The stress patterns in the lines just quoted are as indicated below, with the stressed syllables in italics: Oh there / is bless / ing in / this gen / tle breeze / , A vis / itant / that while / it fans / my cheek /  Doth seem / half-con / scious of / the joy / it brings /  From the / green fields / , and from / yon az / ure sky / . The oblique strokes mark the five ‘feet’ of each line, a poetic foot being the basic rhythmic unit on which the piece moves forward, like an army marching to the tap of a drum. I say ‘tap’ rather than ‘beat’ to suggest that metre often functions more as a subliminal, background presence in the reader’s mind, working subtly with other aspects of the verse, rather than pushing its way to the forefront of our attention. Each ‘foot’ in iambic pentameter has two 49

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50  Reading the lines beats or taps linked together into a rhythmic unit, mostly consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, that is, the stress pattern is ‘di-dum / di-dum / di-dum’, with each foot having the pattern heard in such words as ‘begin’, ‘avoid’, ‘return’. We don’t say ‘bee-gin’ or ‘ay-void’, or ‘ree-turn’, and the stress pattern within the lines has to follow the usual stress pattern of English words. However, the divisions between metrical feet do not have to correspond to divisions between words, and, indeed, if they did the effect would probably seem too monotonous and predictable. Hence, the art of metrical composition lies significantly in contriving to make the metrical feet not correspond exactly to the word divisions most of the time. So the breaks between metrical feet may, and often do, occur within words of more than one syllable, as in the case of the words ‘blessing’, ‘gentle’, ‘visitant’, ‘conscious’ and ‘azure’ in the Wordsworth lines just quoted. But it is said that English (or, at least, English English) has a naturally iambic rhythm, in the sense that common two-syllable English words usually have the main stress on the second syllable rather than the first, as in: begin, avoid, decline, deceive, proclaim, and so on. Stressing the first syllable rather than the second in these words produces a pattern which most speakers instinctively hear as wrong – as in dee-ceive, ay-void, bee-gin. When a content word, such as a noun, verb, adject­ive or adverb, has just one syllable, then that syllable is usually stressed. So in the lines above, ‘breeze’, ‘fans’, ‘cheek’, ‘seem’, ‘joy’, ‘brings’, ‘green’ and ‘fields’ have to be stressed syllables. Many unstressed vowels in English words of more than one syllable tend to be neutralised to an ‘uh’ sound, which technically is called the schwa vowel, and is represented in the phonetic alphabet by an inverted lower-case ‘e’, like this: ‘ ’; thus, the second vowel in the place-name ‘Oxford’ is pronounced like the ‘schwa vowel’, that is, as a neutral ‘uh’, and if you hear somebody saying Ox-ford, with two equally stressed syllables, and the ‘ford’ part having exactly the same sound as the ‘ford’ of ‘to ford a stream’, then you know immediately that the person is probably not a native British speaker of English. That is why, in my discussion above, I have repre­sented the vowel in the wrongly stressed version of the listed words as ‘dee-ceive’, ‘ay-void’, and so on, since it is nearly impossible for a stressed vowel to have the neutralised ‘uh’ sound. But you will have noticed that in my transcription of the opening lines from The Prelude the first foot of the first line (‘Oh there / ’) reverses the unstress / stress iambic pattern, as does the first foot (‘From the / ’) of the final line. You may wonder whether e

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Metre  51 you would have recognised this unaided, but if you feel that you might not have done so, then simply remember that poetic metre, wherever possible, follows the natural stress patterns of English words – it just isn’t possible to say ‘Oh’ without stressing it – what could be the point of doing so, since the locution ‘Oh’ is meant to draw the attention of a hearer? A two-syllable metrical foot in which the stressed syllable comes before the unstressed one is called a trochee, and if this were the case in the majority of the feet in a passage, then the rhythm would be called ‘trochaic’. There is another trochee at the start of the fourth line, which is easy to identify, since if it were an iambic foot it would force an unnatural pronunciation like ‘Fr’m thee’. The foot which comes next has a single-syllable adjective (‘green’) followed by a single-syllable noun (‘fields’), so it follows (see above) that both syllables are stressed, giving a foot which is called a spondee, and the rhythm created, when such feet predominate (which isn’t very common), is called ‘spondaic’. The repeating ‘off /on’ pattern of the iambic metre would become monotonous if it never varied, and, in practice, variations like those just described are common in extended passages of iambic pentameter. It should be emphasised, too, that the counting of the metrical pattern within lines of traditional poetry is not a precise art – sometimes the basic rhythm seems clear, but there are occasional reversals, like those just mentioned, as well as lines which seem to have an extra syllable. The tradition of the ‘poetic licence’, as is well known, allowed poets some leeway in the representation of factual matters in poetry, but it also permitted a degree of flexi­ bility in metrical patterning, allowing minor deviations from strict form without censure. This flexibility made good sense, as the rules of metrics had originally been devised for the classical languages of Greek and Latin, so that the fit with English was never quite exact. Poets other than Wordsworth often used iambic pentameter in the format known as heroic couplets, in which each pair of lines is rhymed, as we can see in Alexander Pope’s philosophical poem An Essay on Man (1732–34), written in heroic couplets throughout, as exemplified in these lines: Two principles in human nature reign; Self-love, to urge, and reason, to restrain; Nor this a good, nor that a bad we call, Each works its end, to move or govern all: And to their proper operation still Ascribe all Good, to their improper, ill.

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52  Reading the lines The end-rhymes bind each pair of lines so tightly together into a compressed aphoristic unit that they seem almost independent of the whole and unaware of the rest of the poem. Each pair boldly makes a composite, self-contained assertion which the first line states and the second then exemplifies, explains, expands, refines, or in some way tweaks. The effect is impressive, but oddly tiring to read in bulk, for the regularity of the structure arguably becomes somewhat monotonous when reading at length from the work. Many of the lines are built on antithesis, meaning that they use contrastive pairings of words, as in ‘Nor this a good, nor that a bad we call’, in which ‘this’ is contrasted with ‘that’ and ‘good’ with ‘bad’. In such lines, the metrical tap becomes quite a heavy beat, and the metrical variation of the first foot (as in the first, second and fourth lines quoted) is a welcome relief: this is the metrical pattern, shown again with the stressed syllables italicised: Two prin / ciples / in hum / an na / ture reign; /  Self-love / to urge / , and rea / son, to / restrain; /  Nor this / a good / , nor that / a bad / we call, /  Each works / its end, / to move / or gov / ern all: /  And to / their prop / er op / er a / tion still /  Ascribe / all Good, / to their / improp / er, ill. /  The second couplet (with the exception of the word ‘govern’) is almost entirely monosyllabic, and the full rhyme of ‘call’ with ‘all’ perhaps seems to tie up the thought a little too tightly. By contrast, the first couplet is slightly loosened by the rhythmic variation of rhyming the monosyllable ‘reign’ with the two-syllable word ‘restrain’. In this line, the stress pattern begins with the spondaic foot ‘Self-love’, in which both syllables are stressed. The whole line works through antithesis – self-love versus reason, the one pushing us on (‘to urge’) and the other pulling us back (‘to restrain’). The balanced dignity of the couplets goes on and on in this elegant way, and the effect is perhaps rather like that of walking down a long street of perfectly proportioned Georgian terraced houses of the type characteristic of the eighteenth-century period in which this work was written. Well, the walk may be very pleasant, but you cannot help noticing that it is also a very long street. A poem written in iambics, but with lines of four feet rather than five, is said to be in iambic tetrameter (‘tetra’ means four, so ‘­ tetrameter’ means ‘having four feet’). This is the metre of Tennyson’s elegiac sequence In Memoriam (1849), and in Poem 123

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Metre  53 the poet meditates in sombre fashion on the new Victorian knowledge about the age of the earth and the on-going changes in the forms of continents and oceans which have taken place over aeons of time: There rolls the deep where grew the tree.   O earth, what changes hast thou seen!   There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow   From form to form, and nothing stands;   They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. But in my spirit will I dwell,   And dream my dream, and hold it true;   For tho’ my lips may breathe adieu, I cannot think the thing farewell. Here the ‘long street’ along which the traffic roars may be one of the Georgian kind just mentioned, emblematic in this poem of the familiar urban environment which has come to seem almost natural, as if it has always been there. Tone and pace are slow and stately, the beat of the rhythm sure and steady. No word in the whole three-stanza poem is longer than two syllables, and all but 11 are monosyllabic. The feeling of strength and solidity in these rugged, square-built lines is almost palpable, and this heavy, craftsman-made frame seems to focus and concentrate the force of the imagery as a lens gathers and focuses the light. The lines of the second stanza describe the hills, which look as solid as eternity, but are actually flowing gradually all the time from one form to another, just like mist, or clouds, only not as fast. This is the metrical pattern, indicated as before: The hills / are shad / ows, and / they flow /   From form / to form, / and noth / ing stands; /   They melt / like mist, / the sol / id lands, /  Like clouds / they shape / themselves / and go. /  The rugged solidity of the lines is achieved by alliterative and rhyth­ mic binding, as seen in ‘they flow / From form to form’, in which the words ‘flow’, ‘from’ and ‘form’ have a triple emphasis, first by

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54  Reading the lines a­ lliteration, second by all being monosyllabic, and thereby stressed, and third by their receiving the beat of the metrical pattern­ing. Similar effects of pattern and emphasis are seen in ‘They melt like mist, the solid lands’. This patterning shapes their pace and rhythm into a firm and predictable frame, and the firmness is reinforced by the alliterative binding of ‘melt like mist’ and ‘the solid lands’. Notice here (in the light of what was said about alliter­ation in the introduction) that I am saying that the alliteration is contributing to the form and tone of the utterance, rather than to its content. The rugged verbal solidity of the lines seems to emphasise by contrast the transience and evanescence of the land masses being ­described. But, like Alexander Pope, I would say no more than ‘seems’. The ballad metre, also called the ballad measure, is another traditional English metrical form which has the iambic foot as its basis, using short lines in quatrains (that is, four-line stanzas) with iambic tetrameter lines alternating with iambic trimeter (‘trimeter’ means having three feet), with a rhyme pattern that links lines 2 and 4 in each stanza. This pattern can be illustrated with the following stanza from Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’: The ice / was here, / the ice / was there / , The ice / was all / around: /  It cracked / and growled, / and roared / and howled, /  Like noi / ses in / a swound! /  In skilled performance (as in the recorded reading of this poem by Richard Burton1), the effect can be dramatic, and capable of subtle variations in pace and tone. Coleridge and Wordsworth, in their joint collection Lyrical Ballads of 1798, revived the ballad form, and it was revived again in the twentieth century by poets such as W. H. Auden and Charles Causley. Indeed, this became a familiar pattern in the history of English poetry, as young poets who felt oppressed by the work of the older generation have tended to go back to an earlier period still for their inspiration, just as T. S. Eliot was to do in the modernist period with his rediscovery of the work of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. The ballad metre, as seen in popular verse narrative, might be regarded as a looser system of metrics than the other forms so far considered, because it combines lines of two different lengths to produce its characteristic running rhythm. In the approach to the 1  Included in the re-release on CD of The Richard Burton Poetry Collection (Saland Publishing, 2010).

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Metre  55 twentieth century, poets seemed to be looking for more flexible formats, as if they were losing faith in the rigid discipline of the more traditional forms. The priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, for instance, identified what he called sprung rhythm as providing the rhythmic basis of his own work. He links it in his ‘Author’s Preface’ with the frequently seen reversals of stress at the beginning of lines in iambic pentameter, and also within the main body of such lines ‘after a strong pause’.2 He says that it is also ‘the rhythm of common speech and of written prose, when rhythm is perceived in them’ (pp. 48–9), and that it is found in ‘nursery rhymes, weather saws and so on’ (p. 49). The essential difference between sprung rhythm and the more traditional metrical patterns we have been discussing is that whereas metrical verse has a fixed number of stresses and a fixed number of syllables, in sprung rhythm the number of syllables can vary but the number of stresses is fixed. Hopkins himself, in his Notebooks, sees sprung rhythm as the basis of nursery rhyme, as in these well known opening lines: Ding / Dong / Bell /  Pussy’s / in the / well /  Who / put him / in /  Little / Tommy / Thin /  Each of these lines has three stresses, but the number of syllables varies from line to line (3, 5, 4, 5, respectively). The ‘feet’ (marked by the oblique strokes) all begin with a stressed syllable, and each foot has only one stress (indicated in italics). When he claims that sprung rhythm is closer to the rhythms of ‘common speech’, Hopkins must mean speech of a certain urgent and emotive kind, for that, surely, is when ‘rhythm is perceived’ in it. Thus, Hopkins aims for an overall effect which is what we might call a ‘heightened’, ‘intensified’, or ‘rapt’ form of utterance, as in the opening of his sonnet ‘Harry Ploughman’, in which he gives a vivid physical and emotive portrait of the ploughman’s strength and skill: Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue Breathed round; the rack of ribs; the scooped flank; lank Rope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barrelled shank – Head and foot, shoulder and shank – By a grey eye’s heed steered well, one crew, fall to; 2  W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (eds), The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th edition (Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 46.

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56  Reading the lines This doesn’t really sound much like ‘common speech’, but nor does it seem like any other kind of poetry, mainly because all the elements of rhythm, emphasis, alliteration and assonance are packed so densely into every line. Here the alliterative beat is strong and expressive (‘Hard as / hurdle / arms’ … ‘the rack / of ribs’ … ‘knee- / nave’), and the entwining of words through assonance and internal rhyme gives a texture of great strength and origi­nality. In a letter of 11 October 1887, Hopkins described it as ‘very heavily loaded sprung rhythm’ (my italics), and said that the poem was ‘for recital, and not for perusal’, meaning that it is designed to be performed aloud rather than read silently.3 Though it sounds anything but ‘free’, it is a step in the direction of the free verse of the twentieth century, in the sense that only the stressed syllables are counted and ‘rationed’ by the system, while the unstressed ones (‘slack’ syllables as Hopkins called them) can vary in number. So, Hopkins’s practice points towards the twentieth century, which saw the progressive abandonment by many poets of the strict metrical rules which had largely determined the shape of poetry since the Middle Ages. These rules had fixed both the number of syllables in the line and the number and arrangement of stresses. Hopkins’s idea of ‘sprung rhythm’ kept the notion of fixing the number of stresses, but allowed the line length itself (as deter­ mined by syllable count) to vary, so in that sense it dispensed with one of the two major patterning elements of metrical verse, and paved the way towards ‘free verse’, in which both line length and stress patterns became variable elements. This is true even though no other poet subsequently took up the term ‘sprung rhythm’, or tried to follow Hopkins’s practice exactly. Rather, poets who experimented with metrics in the twentieth century usually invented their own terminology, though none explained what they were doing as lucidly as Hopkins did in his (posthumously published) ‘Author’s Preface’ and in his letters and notebooks.4 A major twentieth-century poet whose thinking is reminiscent of Hopkins’s is William Carlos Williams, whom we encountered earlier. He too wanted to loosen the strictness of traditional metrics while still retaining a degree of regularity in the ‘beat’ or ‘measure’ of

3 Claude Colleer Abbott (ed.), The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 263. 4  The best and most convenient selection of all this material is W. H. Gardner (ed.), Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics: New Impression edition, 2008).

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Metre  57 the poetic line. Like Hopkins, his solution was to allow variations in the total number of syllables per line, while controlling the number of beats or stresses. He calls his system the ‘variable foot’, and this too is a term which was never really taken up by other poets. And just as Hopkins linked sprung rhythm to ‘common speech’, so, as Alice Fulton reminds us, ‘Williams’s variable foot arose from his observation that “the iamb is not the normal measure of American speech.”’5 In an interview for the Paris Review, Williams says that he discovered his ‘new measure’ in his poem ‘The Descent’, and his main reason for placing such a high valuation on this idea is that it is a better verse medium than iambic pentameter for the American voice. The theorising of the ‘variable foot’ is not such as to provide a precise technical specification for Williams’s metrical practice – rather, it indicates the aspirations which lie behind the formulation. These are the lines of his own poetry that Williams referred to as an example of the variable foot: The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned. Memory is a kind of accomplishment, a sort of renewal even an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places inhabited by hoards heretofore unrealized of new kinds since their movements are toward new objectives (even though formerly they were abandoned)

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In a letter to the American poet Richard Eberhart, Williams indi­ cates that the structure is triadic – the lines are grouped in threes, each one stepping inwards from the margin, each line representing a ‘foot’ with a single strong beat, but a varying number of syllables (hence the term ‘variable foot’). The extreme variation in line length (as between lines 6 and 7, for instance) seems to make it evident that the ‘beat’ he has in mind is more like an indication of 5  Alice Fulton, ‘Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions’, Thumbscrew, 12, winter, 1998–99; available at www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/ record.asp?id=12199.

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58  Reading the lines duration, as in musical notation, rather than a ‘stress’. No critic has fully expli­cated all the technicalities of Williams’s concept, but its aspiration is clear – he wants a modern, twentieth-century poetic line which can be stretched and varied, just like the rhythms of jazz music, while still retaining a degree of fixity, so that the verse is neither entirely free, nor entirely fixed. Just as notions of time and space themselves became relative in the twentieth-century’s scientific discoveries, so the poetic measure too acquired a degree of ‘relativity’. It is evident, then, that for some American poets, the acceptance of the older fixed metrical verse patterns seemed to involve the acceptance of a kind of anachronistic form of cultural colonialism: as Ezra Pound said, in his Canto LXXXI, looking back on the poetic revolution of the early part of the twentieth century, ‘To break the pentameter, that was the first heave’.6 In other words, he tells his fellow poets of the modern age, and especially his fellow ­Americans, that they must find their own voices and forms to express the distinctive experience of their epoch. This does not mean, of course, that British poets have been content to go on using the traditional forms, and it would be true to say that the bulk of verse being written in Britain now, in the twenty-first century, tends to be, as we might call it, ‘post-metrical’. Using without modification the rhyme schemes, verse forms and fixed metrical patterns of the past is now the exception rather than the rule. It is worth adding in conclusion that there is no particular virtue, when reading poetry, in merely identifying a metrical pattern if we cannot go on to use that identification to some purpose in the elucidation of a poetic effect. As suggested earlier, when a reader becomes very conscious of any technical aspect of a poem (of its rhyme scheme, its rhythm, its diction, its patterning, or whatever), it is probably safe to say that those elements have ceased to do their job properly, for that job is always to make a supporting contribution to the creation of a particular effect, rather than becoming the focal point of the reader’s attention. Most of us, when fully engaged with a poem, will not be directly conscious of any of these rhythmic and metrical elements as such, just as, when we listen to an engaging speaker, we are not directly conscious of the grammatical structures of the sentences being composed and delivered. All the same, a rudimentary knowledge of metrical patterns and their variations is

6  See Ezra Pound, The Cantos (Faber, 1975), Canto LXXXI, p. 518.

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Metre  59 conducive to the enjoyment and appreciation of poetry, and spelling out to oneself exactly what the metre is doing in lines which we find striking and memorable can be a good way of increasing our sense of intimacy with the poetic medium. The apparent precision of the various systems of metrical description can be attractive and satisfying to learn, or learn about; but we should always be aware that such precision is necessarily to some extent theoretical, and can exist in its ‘pure’ state only prior to our own (and probably the poet’s) encounters with the intricacies of particular poems. Indeed, the theory of metrics is always compromised by the presence of any actual poem, since no poem worth reading ever works entirely by the book, or merely follows a formulaic prescription set out in advance. Likewise, poets inherited a range of set poetic formats, but often bent the rules for those too, as discussed in the next chapter.

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5. 

Form

Some years ago, in a second-hand bookshop, I happened upon a book about ‘orthometry’, a quaint and obsolete term defined in the book’s full title, which is The Art of Versification and the Technicalities of Poetry (published by J. Grant of Edinburgh, revised edition, 1923). The second chapter is called ‘Kinds of Poetry’, of which there are seven (the book claims), the first being ‘Lyric Poetry’, which is subdivided into sections on ‘The Ode’, ‘The Ballad’, ‘The Hymn and Song’ and ‘The Elegy’. Surprisingly, the sonnet is the sixth of the seven ‘Kinds of Poetry’, rather than being just one of the sub-types of lyric poetry. But the book is not without merit. For instance, a later chapter is called ‘Poetic Trifles’, and there are seven of these too, including the sestina, a verse form first used by the medieval Italian poets Dante and Petrarch, and consisting of six six-line stanzas plus a final stanza of three lines. The sestina has what might be called a ‘verse cousin’ known as the villanelle, this being an even older French form, with five three-line stanzas, plus one of four. The family likeness between these two forms is most evident in the fact that both make use of just two rhyme sounds, alter­ nat­ing all the way through. Whatever may be the case in Italian and French, in English the risk of aural monotony is high when the rhyme pattern is so restricted and repetitive. In both forms, too, the monotony is compounded by an extra twist: in the sestina, the six end-words of the lines in each stanza are the same all the way through, but they are used in a different order from one stanza to the next. In the case of the villanelle, there are two refrain lines, which alternate as the end-line in stanzas 1 to 5, and are then both used to conclude the final stanza (thus accounting for its extra line). The effect of all this echoic sound patterning is to produce an irritating form of jangly poetic tinnitus. The sestina and the villanelle are different from (say) the clerihew and the limerick, which are both very short, and in any case are intended simply to amuse. Sestinas and villanelles, by contrast, are longer (39 and 19 lines respectively), and are meant to be poetic vehicles which can carry any kind of subject matter. But they seem incapacitated by their cumbersome weight of over-elaborated technical specification, which makes them pretty well incapable of expressing anything 60

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Form  61 but themselves. Unsurprisingly, they never properly ‘caught on’ in English poetry, and I think they are rightly categorised as trifles by the orthometrist author of The Art of Versification. So for the purposes of this chapter I have (from here on) ignored them. The ode, by contrast, is a major imported poetic form which lent itself very well to adoption, adapta­tion, Anglicisation and development over its long and fruitful history, and most of this chapter on form is devoted to this highly flexible and successful verse form. In its origins, the ode is much more ancient than any other form of verse, since it has a double ancestry which goes back to classical Greece and Rome. The Greek model is called the Pindaric ode, because it was perfected by the lyric poet Pindar, who lived from around 518 to around 438 BC. Pindaric odes were written in praise of the victors in the various athletics contests held during the games and festivals that were a feature of ancient Greek life (the best-known being the Olympic games, at Olympia, and the Pythian games, held at Delphi). The prescribed content of the Pindaric ode may at first seem somewhat limited, but in practice the themes chosen were wide-ranging, taking in the myths and legends associated with the victor’s home region, and many other aspects of Greek religion, outlook and history. The tone and treatment were highly elevated and formal, and the whole composition was designed to be sung and chanted with dance and choric accompaniment. The basic structure of these compositions was triadic, with the first verse called the strophe (pronounced stroh-fee), the second the ­antistrophe and the third the epode. A strophe is literally a ‘turn’, and it means the same thing as a verse. The antistrophe mirrors the form of the strophe, while the epode introduces a new formal variation into the composition. The shortest Pindaric ode goes through this triadic structure just once, and the longest nine times. The other model is the Horatian ode, which is based on the forms used by the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BC). These usually have stanzas of two or four lines, and the whole ethos of the poem is more reflective, private-seeming and informal than the public, elevated, rhetorical tone and treatment which characterise the Pindaric kind. In English, both Pindaric and Horatian odes are only quite loosely based on the form of the Greek and Roman originals, for it isn’t possible to reproduce those forms exactly in English. The reasons for this are manifold; for instance, the metrical basis of the rhythms of Greek poetry is quantitative, meaning that the metre is based upon alternating patterns of long and short syllables, rather than stressed and unstressed syllables: thus, a ‘long’ syllable, like

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62  Reading the lines the ‘a’ sound in ‘hate’, supposedly takes longer to say than a ‘short’ syllable, like the ‘a’ sound in ‘hat’. By contrast, the metrical patterns of English verse are qualitative, meaning that they are based on the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, as in ‘He went to work’, where ‘went’ and work’ are stressed syllables, whereas ‘he’ and ‘to’ are unstressed, even though both are ‘long’ syllables, rather than ‘short’ ones (as the same vowels would be in the words ‘help’ and ‘top’). Similarly, in Latin, the grammar and syntax are different from English, with consequent effects on word order: thus, the Latin phrase which expresses the legal right of the accused to remain silent is ‘Accusare nemo se debet’, which literally means ‘Nobody is obliged to accuse himself ’. But the equivalent word order in English of the four Latin words is: (1) to accuse, (2) nobody, (3) himself, (4) is obliged. In that order, the words do not make sense in English. So both the Pindaric and Horatian forms of the ode, which began to be used in English poetry from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are actually loose ‘adaptations’ of the ancient forms, rather than exact reproductions of them. Essentially, then, there are two traditions of the ode in English verse: firstly, the ‘Pindaric’ or ‘high’ or ‘elevated’ ode form; and secondly, the ‘Horatian’ or ‘lesser’ ode. Sometimes a third category is mentioned, designated the irregular ode, in which sometimes the two forms seem to be blended, and a looser, reflective style of poem emerges, formally structured, and quite lengthy, and addressed to an abstraction (as in Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’), an inanimate object (as in the same poet’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’), a view (as in Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’), an element (as in Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’) or a group or category of people (as in Allen Tate’s ‘Ode to the Confederate Dead’). A good example of the Pindaric ode in English is Thomas Gray’s helpfully subtitled ‘The Bard: A Pindaric Ode’ (1754–55), which tells the story of Edward I’s subjugation of Wales, and how the order was given by the English that any bards captured should be executed.1 In the melodramatic action of the poem, a grey-bearded bard denounces and curses the invading army from the slopes of Snowdon, foretelling the death of Edward I and the fall of the Plan­ tagenet dynasty, before hurling himself from the mountain into the river below. Gray uses the regular triadic Pindaric form, with strophe and antistrophe each of 14 lines, followed by an epode of 1 James Reeves (ed.), The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray (Heinemann, 1973), p. 77.

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Form  63 20 lines, this pattern being repeated three times. The 14 lines of the strophe and antistrophe look something like sonnets, rhyming abab, ccdd and efefgg. The epode has a separate rhyme scheme. In a letter, Gray suggested that the strophe and antistrophe in a Pindaric ode should be no more than nine lines long, since otherwise the shape of the metrical patterning can hardly be apparent to the reader. This is surely true, and it is unclear why Gray did not act upon his own conviction, but it might be argued that in nearly all verse forms in English poetry, the metrical patterning is usually ‘back-grounded’ rather than foregrounded by the execution. Here, for instance, is the opening of Gray’s ode: Ruin seize thee, ruthless King! Confusion on thy banners wait, Though fanned by Conquest’s crimson wing They mock the air with idle state! Helm, nor Hauberk’s twisted mail, Nor even thy virtues, Tyrant, shall avail To save thy secret soul from nightly fears, From Cambria’s curse, from Cambria’s tears! These are the words of denunciation, addressed to the English king, by the Welsh bard who will hurl himself to his death at the end of the poem. The rhyme is formal (abab, ccdd), and the overall effect is highly rhetorical, partly because of the setting (these lines are declaimed by the bard from the mountainside, arresting the invading army in its tracks), and partly by reason of the rolling cadences of the verse itself. The vocabulary is elevated (the Latin ‘Cambria’ is used in preference to the vernacular ‘Wales’, and the sense of the words is often Latinate rather than colloquial). Thus, ‘virtue’ means ‘might’ or ‘strength’, and the word derives from the Latin word ‘vir’, which means a man, rather than ‘goodness’, which was the meaning it only later assumed in English. The alliterative pairings (like ‘Ruin’ and ‘ruthless’ and ‘Helm, nor Hauberk’) intensify the high rhetorical effect of the lines. Thus, the sense of ‘elevation’ of tone and sentiment often attributed to the Pindaric form is immediately felt. Also, the implausibility of the situation is disguised by the verbal form – would an army really be daunted and stopped in its tracks by an old man shouting at them from a hilltop? Probably not, but it seems plausible in a poem when he is described thus in heroically elevated language in the antistrophe:

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64  Reading the lines Robed in the sable garb of woe, With haggard eyes the Poet stood; (Loose his beard, and hoary hair Streamed, like a meteor, to the troubled air) The long white hair and beard stream out in the wind like the tail of a comet, the eyes red and glaring, the garments black. This sight, to an army living on its nerves in bleak and hostile territory, might conceivably be enough to daunt and terrify. But, as Gray seems to realise, a reader caught up in the drama of the depicted scene may well not be particularly aware of the intricacies of the metrical and formal patterning on which the verse is built. The best-known example of the Horatian form of ode is Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, which Blair Worden describes as ‘the most private of political poems’.2 It celebrates the homecoming of Cromwell after his bloody suppression of Ireland and anticipates similar success in a forthcoming campaign against the Scots, while also coming to terms with the execution of King Charles I the year before. But it does so at the same time as expressing obvious admiration for the dead king, and without offering any extravagant praise of Cromwell. It uses the four-line Horatian stanza, and the poised and ironic detachment of the tone seems constantly to undercut the apparent triumphalism of the title. These are the opening stanzas: The forward youth that would appear Must now forsake his Muses dear, or in the shadows sing His numbers languishing. ’Tis time to leave the books in dust, And oil the unused armour’s rust, Removing from the wall The corslet of the hall. So restless Cromwell could not cease In the inglorious arts of peace,  But through adventurous war Urgèd his active star:

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2  Blair Worden, ‘The Politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, Historical Journal, 27/3, 1984, p. 525.

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Form  65 This is the time for action, not contemplation, the poem begins, opening as if with a rousing trumpet call. But what are the motives of this action? The ‘forward’ youth could just mean the ambitious young man who wants to make a name for himself – there is no mention of any idealistic principles being involved. What is it that makes Cromwell too ‘restless’ to be content with peace? Are the arts of peace really so ‘inglorious’, and is an ‘adventurous’ spirit really a sufficient reason for going to war? Is Cromwell thinking at all of such issues as he pursues what he sees as his destiny (his ‘active star’)? Thus, beneath the ringing, confident tones are constant notes of scepticism, and the weaving together of public and personal themes, which is characteristic of the Horatian ode, is seen in this poem to great advantage. The ‘irregular’ ode form, which became prominent in the nineteenth century, seems to take elements from both the Pindaric and the Horatian forms. A good example of the irregular form is Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802). The characteristics of the irregular ode concern aspects of both form and content: firstly, it is an extended lyric-reflective form – this example has 139 lines in all, in eight stanzas, which vary in length between the extremes of 8 lines for stanza III and 32 for stanza VII. Within the stanzas, traces of the Pindaric form are evident in blocks of four lines identifiable by the preferred rhyming patterns of abba, aabb and abab, but the stanzas are not arranged in the strophe, antistrophe, epode patterning of the strict Pindaric form. So there is a certain on-going ‘negotiation’, as it might be called, between the free flow of the thought (as seen in the monster stanza VII, for example) and the demands of overall poetic structures and metrical patterning. In terms of what the poem depicts, there is frequent reference back to the setting in which the meditation is taking place, and within this setting the poet attempts to delineate the mood of restless ennui and melancholy that he feels as he contemplates his unpromising obsession with Sara Hutchinson (soon to be Wordsworth’s sister-in-law), and the discontent of his own marriage, a situation that is incapable of any resolution. These characteristics are seen in the third and fourth stanzas: III My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour,

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66  Reading the lines Though I should gaze forever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. IV O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element! Thus, stanza III is built on the Pindaric 4 + 4 pattern, but with the first quatrain split into two couplets, so that we have a rhyming couplet (fail /avail), then a bccb quatrain (breast / endeavour / forever /  west) and then another rhyming couplet (win / within). Stanza IV is also made up of ‘fused’ (that is, un-separated) quatrains, which rhyme aabc (give / live / shroud / worth), bbcb (allowed / crowd / forth / cloud) and dede (Earth / sent / birth / element). The two stanzas taken together are a classic statement of Romanticist convictions about the supreme importance of the inner life and its ability to eclipse and occlude the outer world. As Coleridge puts it: ‘I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within’, and the thought runs through into the next stanza, with ‘O Lady! we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does Nature live’. As the flow of thought runs continuously through stanzas III and IV, they might be regarded as a single stanza of 20 lines, in which case they reflect the 20-line stanza that opens the poem, but the rhyme scheme and the metrical patterning of III–IV do not echo those of stanza I, as would be required if something like a stricter Pindaric style were being attempted. Thus, the ir­regular ode form allows a generous combination of struc­tur­ing and flexibility, a combination which seems ideally suited to the genius of Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley.

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Form  67 If we continue this consideration of the ode into the twentieth century, we reach a stage beyond the ‘irregular’ ode which I would call the covert ode, in which the word ‘ode’ is not necessarily part of the poem’s title, but many of the ode’s characteristics are present. The most important characteristic is that the ode is a ‘public lyric’, in the sense that it combines the personal with a range of more public or social themes, developing these in a sustained, meditative way, in a poem usually of 50 lines and upwards, and within a well defined structure (rather than ‘free verse’). The form of utterance used in an ode has a certain rhetorical or declamatory feel – it is not aiming to sound like a private word in the reader’s ear, for it usually has distinct elements of public oratory about it. It may be written in blank verse, rather than using a rhyme scheme, and there will always be stanzas, and sometimes other section breaks as well. Some examples would be the elegiac poems of W. H. Auden, which mark the passing of figures of major cultural significance, enabling a kind of social, political and cultural ‘stock-taking’ in verse, on behalf of the nation. In this category would be Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ (both 1939) and ‘At the Grave of Henry James’ (1941). Not elegiac, but also a covert ode, is Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles’ (1952), which imagines what scenes might adorn a modern-day version of the shield of Achilles described by Homer in Book XIII of The Iliad, and containing a multi­tude of scenes of war and peace. Auden’s modern-day version is filmic, and the scenes seem to represent drab, totalitarian conformist societies: A plain without a feature, bare and brown,   No blade of grass, no sign of neighbourhood, Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,   Yet congregated on its blankness, stood   An unintelligible multitude, A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign. Another post-war example of the covert ode is ‘For the Union Dead’ by Robert Lowell. This is in 17 blank-verse quatrains, and concerns the condition of contemporary (1960) New England, as seen from its capital, Boston, where the public aquarium has been demolished to make way for an underground car-park, and the memorial to a Civil War regiment of black infantry has been boarded up for the duration. Identifying Lowell’s great poem as a covert ode

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68  Reading the lines is initially prompted by the fact that it comes in a line of odes, beginning with ‘Ode to the Union Dead’ (1865) by Lowell’s ancestor James Russell Lowell (1819–91), to which Allen Tate (1899–1979), who had been one of Lowell’s teachers and formative influences at Kenyon College in Ohio, replied with his ‘Ode to the Confederate Dead’ in 1928.3 It might be argued that this covert ode does not have an addressee which is an inanimate object or an abstract quality, but that convention had already been partly abandoned even in the irregular odes of the previous century: thus, Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’, for instance, is not an ode to melancholy, since melancholy is spoken about in the third person (‘She dwells with Beauty’, it says, and ‘in the very temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine’ – both my italics). Likewise, Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’ is not addressed to the abstract notion of dejection, but (repeatedly) to ‘Oh Lady!’, with variations such as ‘O pure of heart!’, ‘virtuous Lady!’ and ‘Dear Lady!’ Hence, the lack of such an in­ animate addressee in Lowell’s poem does not exclude it from being considered within the category of the ode, and nor does the fact that it is called ‘For’, rather than ‘To’, ‘the Union Dead’. Lowell’s quatrains are unrhymed and may be considered a develop­ment of the Horatian form. The poem begins with a glimpse of the old aquarium (which Lowell vividly remembers being taken to as a child) now awaiting demolition: The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noises of the cowed, compliant fish. This is a very personal memory, and every detail is vivid and realised, but the tone is declamatory and formal, and it can glide easily from the personal into major issues of idealism, commercialism, racism and prejudice, and how the public sphere ought to conduct itself and define its goals and ambitions. And if blending or 3  See Jonathan Raban’s notes to this poem in his Robert Lowell’s Poems: A Selection (Faber, 1974), pp. 175–6.

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Form  69 combining the personal with the public or political is a key feature of the Horatian ode, then Lowell does that with unique poise in stanzas 12 and 14, when he considers the surviving ideals of New England at the dawn of the so-called ‘Camelot’ era of the Kennedys: On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic. … Shaw’s father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son’s body was thrown and lost with his ‘niggers’ ‘Shaw’ was the white colonel of the black regiment which is commemorated in the bas relief monument by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a monument which, as Lowell writes the poem, is now ‘propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake’. Lowell laments the materialism and commercialism which have eroded Boston’s austere intellectualism and liberal commitments in the post-war period, and fears for the survival of the republican ideals which ensured its support of the Union cause in the Civil War. The rampant commercialism the poet sees everywhere is crystal­lised in the concluding image: Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage civility slides by on grease. Lowell’s verse form in this poem is regular, in the sense that all the stanzas are quatrains, so this cannot be described as free verse, and both content and treatment are influenced by the tradition of the ode. The lines do not have an initial capital letter, and capitalisation follows the same conventions as prose. This had already become the ‘default’ mode of twentieth-century poetry by Lowell’s time, so that the use of rhyme becomes unusual, initial capitalisation is discontinued, and the lines do not have the regular rhythms of metrical verse, meaning that line length and syllable count become variable, but stanzaic divisions are frequently retained. Also, a

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70  Reading the lines ­ reference becomes evident in this period for shorter lines, and p a certain sparseness of diction, with simplicity of grammar, and a tendency towards what might be called ‘phrasalism’, that is, a liking for phrases rather than sentences as the basic building blocks of the poem. Often, though, there is an impression of tightness of control and precision of delineation, as if the fluent wordiness of a poet such as Lowell is no longer quite to be trusted. Several of these characteristics are seen in a poem not unrelated in subject matter to Lowell’s, which is the tribute by Rita Dove to the civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, who in 1955, on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white pass­ en­ger, thereby provoking the successful year-long Montgomery bus boycott, which became a key milestone in the growth of the civil rights movement: Rosa How she sat there, the time right inside a place so wrong it was ready. That trim name with its dream of a bench to rest on. Her sensible coat. Doing nothing was the doing: the clean flame of her gaze carved by a camera flash. How she stood up when they bent down to retrieve her purse. That courtesy. Because of its discipline and control, this kind of writing seems in­ appropriately described as ‘free verse’, for the rhythm is actually very marked: in the second and third lines, for instance, the ­antithesis between ‘time’ and ‘place’ and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and then ‘wrong’ and ‘ready’, is marked by strong contrastive stress, with the last pairing being further emphasised by alliteration. Likewise, the near minimalism of sentence phrases like ‘Her sensible coat’ and ‘That courtesy’ implicitly emphasises the directness of Parks’s charac­ter – in later life she denied reports that she was particularly tired after

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Form  71 a day’s work when the incident took place, saying ‘The only tired I was, was tired of giving in’. Interestingly, Dove avoids the odic direct address, referring to Parks throughout the poem as ‘she’ not ‘you’. This sparse kind of stanzaic form seems characteristic of a good deal of contemporary poetry. Another frequent contemporary mode can be exemplified with a poem by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch describing the unpacking (for a house move) of some pieces of Delftware, displaying that minute and intricate ekphrastic description of an art object which is so often found in contemporary poetry. This poem has something ‘odic’ in its character (to borrow a term from Lisa M. Steinman which designates something similar to my ‘covert ode’), in the sense that it addresses the little pieces of pottery which are intricately described within it. The delicacy of the pieces means that they bear the marks of their own fragility and transience, with all that implies, about a relationship, for instance, so that covert elegiac notes may also be detected. Whatever implied emotions and regrets we might sense in the poem are displaced and refracted throughout its 16 lines, which seem to enter the world-in-miniature depicted on the pieces: Delft I promise when I pack up the clogs, raise them to chime with one chipped toe your passing; when I glue back a pleat in the skirt of the lady with pale blue hair whose apron said B ugge after she fell down the stairwell revealing a bell beneath her dress on which a windmill was waving goodbye to four birds reflected in the inky water; when I wrap the cold tile where your butter flattened the sheaves of hay combed to a tuft in the still wind in which etched-in cows stared out under the low clouds looming over a walled garden whose gate I longed to walk through always, the glaze will be wet on all your Delft, on both my hands. The covert elegiac note is introduced at the start: the phrase ‘when I pack up the clogs’ is a half-echo of the expression ‘to pop one’s

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72  Reading the lines clogs’, which means to die – to ‘pop’ meant to take something to the pawnbrokers, so if shoes were ‘popped’ the implication is that they are no longer needed. This note is reinforced with the word ‘chime’ in the second line, suggesting a funeral knell, and by ‘your passing’ in the third, which again has overtones of death (as in ‘to pass away’). The female porcelain figurine with ‘B[r]ugge’ on her apron puns on the word ‘Bugger!’ (a British expression of annoyance), as ‘Brugge’ is the local name of the city of Bruges, where ‘Delft’ is also made, for this term became a generic designation for a particular style of pottery, just as the term ‘china’ came to designate not geographical origin, but a particular way of firing and glazing pottery, whatever its provenance. The remainder of the poem then details the antique, rural scenes depicted on this kind of pottery, presenting an innocent and nostalgic world that seems to be rooted in the imagery of decorative woodcuts and childhood picture books. The lady figurine in the spreading crinoline dress is actually a tiny, tinkling bell, the bell concealed beneath the dress, like an innocent and oddly transcended sexual appendage. Both the speaker’s longing to pass through the gate into a walled garden beyond, as depicted on the butter dish, and the perpetually wet glaze and hands, suggest an inchoate sexual longing. In its condensed implicitness, then, the poem hints at many fundamental aspects of human life – including innocence, experience, fulfilment and bereavement – the lines being, as it were, impregnated with meanings at several different levels. This condensed, disciplined and yet metrically irregular type of line seems to be the characteristic form of one of the liveliest strains of contemporary poetry writing.

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Part II. Reading between the lines

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6. 

Close and distant reading

It is quite unusual to find in print discussions of whole poems rather than parts of poems. This is perhaps the inevitable result of the continuing influence of the notion of close reading, which remains a common method of study at school and university, in spite of lengthy periods in which the study of literature was domin­ ated by literary theory and various kinds of historicism. Given the limited time available on academic courses, it follows from the closeness of the reading that the intensive scrutiny of parts must be paid for by reducing the time spent considering the whole. If this were not the case, and every part of the poem were scrutinised by the ultra-close method, then discussion of all but the shortest poems would exhaust the patience of nearly all critics and their readers. The detail which the critic chooses to focus on may be a phrase or a line, or some other facet of the whole, such as the rhyme scheme (or, more usually, a couple of the rhymes), or the poet’s use of asson­ance, alliteration, or particular lexical sets. The hope is that the scrutiny of judiciously chosen key details will illuminate the whole, as can indeed be the case, but we need to remember that details can become ‘luminous’ only when related to the larger structure of which they are part. If it is true that poetry readers are usually taught to focus on details, then it is striking that this is the opposite of what people tend to do in art galleries. Viewers of large paintings instinctively begin by standing further back, rather than moving closer in, so as to appreciate the impact of the whole picture, and get a sense of its overall structure. Only then do they move closer and begin to scrutinise particular details. Poetry readers should do the same, so that overview and ‘underview’ (as we might call the more localised form of scrutiny) can more easily combine. The critical habit of plunging into ultra-close readings of small parts of poems, far from being a virtue, can be symptomatic of an unease about poetry, since an effective way of avoiding direct contact with poems as poems is to concentrate instead on isolated textual details. Hence, the argument of this chapter is that ‘distant’ (or ‘stand-back’) reading should come before ‘close’ reading, or, better, that there should be a constant traffic between the two. 75

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76  Reading between the lines As a way of encouraging the reading and discussion of whole poems, rather than just words and phrases which have been carefully scissored out, I devised some years ago (with Marianne Taylor of the Department of Information Studies at Aberystwyth University) an approach to reading poetry which we called ‘The End Is Nigh – Reading Short Poems’. The suggested reading and study process is in four stages: the first and third involve what we call the ‘distant reading’ of aspects of the whole poem, while the second and fourth concern the ‘close reading’ of parts of it. The method encourages readers to say something about the whole poem before saying anything about parts of it. So the four stages alternate between distant and close reading, and the process as a whole can be represented in semi-diagrammatic form as follows: 1. Think about the flow Poems always have ‘stages and phases’ of some kind. Identify some; for example, an ‘exposition’, then a ‘development phase’, and finally an ‘exit phase’, which may double back, or break off, or transpose or intensify earlier material in some way. 2. Think about a point within the flow Poems often have a ‘crux’ – that is, a section of greater complexity than the rest. Find a section which has this extra complexity, or ‘ardent obliquity’ (the poet J. H. Prynne’s term, roughly meaning ‘passionate indirectness’) and ‘negotiate’ with it. 3. Think about the flow again Poems always have patterns, of various kinds. Identify some – they might concern line length, stanza length, rhyme, rhythm, style, angle of view, and so on. Moments when patterns are broken may be especially significant. 4. Think about a point within the flow again Identify words or phrases which seem anomalous or surprising or counter-intuitive. Try changing them to others which would seem less so, and consider how the overall effect of the poem would be changed by the substitution. Notice that at stage 2 the ‘point’ focused on is a section of the poem, which might be a substantial passage, such as a complete stanza, that would be quoted in full for discussion, thereby seeking to avoid the ‘atomisation’ of focus which occurs when phrases are snipped out from their context. Only at stage 4 do individual words

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Close and distant reading  77 and phrases become the primary focus of attention, and even then the aim is to consider them in relation to the effect of the poem as a whole. In what follows, this four-stage approach is exemplified in relation to Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (1818), to which I also return in the final chapter: Much have I travell’d in the Realms of Gold, And many goodly states, and Kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told Which deep-browed Homer ruled as his Demesne;  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new Planet swims into his ken, Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise – Silent upon a Peak in Darien.

5

10

As the first step, then, we focus on the unfolding of the poem as a whole and try to identify the ‘stages and phases’ it contains. The unfolding of the matter of a sonnet is usually ‘phased’ by the sectioning of the classic form, of which the ‘Italian’ variant consists of an eight-line octave (usually divided by the rhyme scheme into two four-line quatrains), followed by the ‘volta’ or ‘turn’ at line 9 into the six-line ‘sestet’. Thus the ‘argument’ of the poem reflects these formal divisions. So here, the first quatrain of the octave proclaims that the poet has read widely throughout literature (‘Much have I travell’d in the Realms of Gold’), while the second notes that there is, however, a major literary continent that he has not been able to explore – he has heard of Homer, but has been unable to read him in the original (‘Oft of one wide expanse had I been told / Which deep-browed Homer ruled as his Demesne’). Now comes the major ‘turn’ or development into the sestet: then he encountered George Chapman’s translation of Homer (‘Yet did I never breathe its pure serene / Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold’), and at that moment he felt as if he had discovered a whole new continent, or planet, of literature (‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / … Or like stout Cortez … / Silent upon a Peak in Darien’). So the poem unfolds in three distinct stages, culminating in the heady sense of

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78  Reading between the lines wonder and discovery which the sestet records, with the whole poem leading up to that moment. But thinking in terms of phases in the poem can also lead to the uncovering of nuances which are less formally emphasised, such as the fact that the Chapman sonnet has an ‘I’ phase and a ‘he’ phase. Thus, in the first half the ‘I’ abounds and is highly active – it travels, sees, is told things, hears, feels and longs to breathe the pure serene. But that is the last we hear explicitly of ‘I’, for now it identifies itself with another, as the powerful presence of Chapman is felt, and the ‘I’ falls silent, so that we hear the pronouns ‘his’, ‘he’ and ‘his’ again, and the speaker becomes the proxy or avatar of the com­posite explorer / astronomer who contemplates a newly encountered phenomenon. Hence, the boastful, self-assertive tone of ‘Much have I travell’d’ recedes into the background as the poem progresses, and this seems to be suggesting that the act of reading involves a kind of self-loss, and is a process whereby we allow another to think within us and for us. That is the ‘pure serene’ that Keats is talking about – a new state of being in which, so to speak, he breathes Chapman’s air. In other words, as critics have often said, in assimilating Chapman’s voice, Keats paradoxically discovers his own. At the second stage, we move closer and focus on a particular point or section, looking for a passage of greater complexity or intensity than the rest, or one which is in some way anomalous in relation to its context, and from which we perhaps tend at first to look away, postponing the eventual need to confront its ‘ardent obliquity’. In the present case, the point in the poem which stands out is the first two lines after the ‘volta’ or ‘turn’ at the end of the octave (‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new Planet swims into his ken’). The running image which goes through the whole poem, other than these two lines, is that of the exploration of terrestrial geography, but these two lines switch suddenly to ­celestial exploration, with an image usually presumed to be based on the discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781 by the Astronomer Royal, Sir William Herschel, and his sister Caroline Herschel. The lines are effective in themselves, and might even be considered the most memorable in the poem, but they seem to disturb the tenacious hold which the poem otherwise keeps on the notion of terrestrial exploration. An image which is sustained throughout a poem (or nearly so) might be called a ‘held’ or ‘running’ image (as sug­gested earlier during the discussion of the Wyatt sonnet in Chapter 2). The opposite kind, one not sustained or developed, and not obviously linked to anything else in the poem, was referred to earlier

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Close and distant reading  79 as a ‘touched’ image. Uranus was the first newly discovered planet which had not been known in classical times, a new world whose discovery revises the old world-view, as does Chapman’s Elizabethan translation of Homer. Even so, the couplet containing the ‘watcher of the skies’ incident does risk deflecting the momentum of the poem by inserting a supplementary image, one which is just briefly touched upon, which interrupts the flow of other images that run throughout the whole poem. As often, then, the ‘close’ and ‘distant’ elements of the reading seem (at least at first) somewhat at variance with each other. At the third of the four stages we again stand back and take the distant view, thinking about the flow of the whole poem, and this time looking for patterns. Having identified a pattern, it is particularly useful to look for any points at which the predominant pattern is broken, as such points usually occur in poetry at moments of particular significance. So it is especially interesting to look at the pattern made in this poem by named and unnamed people and places. Firstly, the realms, states, kingdoms and islands of the opening quatrain are all left unnamed, as are the bards, who revere them, but the god Apollo is named. In the second quatrain, the ‘wide expanse’ is unnamed, but, of course, Homer and his translator Chapman are named. In the sestet, the Herschel figure and the planet he and his sister discovered are unnamed, but Cortez is named (or rather misnamed), as is the Pacific (though Balboa – the conquistador who, rather than Cortez, first crossed Panama – did not recognise it as an ocean, and the Spanish called it the South Sea), and the region of Darien, from where he first saw the Pacific, is named. The ‘people’ named, then, are Apollo, Homer, Chapman and Cortez, and the places are the Pacific and Darien. Thus, the Mediterranean classical world is evoked, but its specific geography is entirely omitted, so that the specific geography which is admitted to the poem is actually that of the New World rather than the Old. But whereas Cortez is (mis)named as an archetypal terrestrial discoverer or explorer, the Herschel figure is merely represented in a ‘generic’ way as ‘some watcher of the skies’, perhaps because depicting two named explorers, one terrestrial, one celestial, both at their major ‘eureka’ moment, would probably mean that the impact of each would be weakened by the co-presence of the other. There are plenty of other patterns within the poem which can fruitfully be considered, one of which is the distribution of poetic inversions within it. These ‘inversions’ reverse the usual order of words in prose or idiomatic speech, and there are a great many of

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80  Reading between the lines them in the poem – they are italicised in the version below, with the putative normal prose order given after a square bracket at the end of the line: Much have I travell’d in the Realms of Gold, [I have travell’d much in… And many goodly states, and Kingdoms seen; [And seen many goodly… Round many western islands have I been [I have been round many… Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. [Which bards hold in fealty. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told [I had oft(en) been told of… Which deep-browed Homer ruled as his Demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene [Yet I never breathed its… Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies [Then I felt like some… When a new Planet swims into his ken, Or like stout Cortez, when with wond’ring eyes [when he star’d at … with … He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise – Silent upon a Peak in Darien.

Inversions of the already old-fashioned poetic type we see in the poem now tend to be regarded rather as an affectation, and Keats himself was becoming sceptical about them. But nearly all those used here have a specific reason for being used. For instance, beginning the poem with ‘Much have I travell’d’ rather than ‘I have travell’d much’ enables a strong and decisive start with the word ‘Much’. Indeed, the guiding factor in the inversions seems to be that of getting a particular word to begin or end a line, thereby producing a more ‘muscular’ verbal effect. The only verb in the poem which has ‘I’ as its subject but which is not inverted is the verb ‘heard’ in ‘Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold’ at the end of the second quatrain. Why, then, should this one be the exception to the pattern of all the other inversions? The answer is that there are a number of interlocking grammatical reasons why this one is not inverted, including (to be technical for a moment) the fact that it is the only transitive and positive (rather than negative) ‘I’ verb in the poem which is in the active rather than the passive voice. But the main reason for the non-inversion of this phrase is that it comes at the climactic moment of the poem, just before the volta, and is therefore the pivot on which everything else turns: breaking a pattern of expectancy set up in the poem draws more attention to that proclamation, and thus ensures that its central role in the poem is reinforced. One other pattern of this broader kind which is noticeable in Keats’s sonnet is that the first part of the poem

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Close and distant reading  81 e­ mphasises speaking (what the speaker has been told about the wide expanse, and the bold and loud speaking out of Chapman), while the second part puts its emphasis on silence and contemplation, such as the silence of the watcher of the skies and that of the men with their wild surmise. The fourth and final stage of this approach to poetry again moves away from overview and closes in on a specific detail, but this time going even closer than before, and identifying the word or phrase which seems (for us) the strangest or most surprising in the poem. Having fixed on one such, we might try changing that word or phrase to one which we consider less surprising, and then asking how the overall effect of the poem is altered. In this case I will take the word ‘serene’ in the line ‘Yet did I never breathe its pure serene’. We could ‘normalise’ this line, by substituting the more familiar noun ‘serenity’ for ‘serene’, or even by deleting the word ‘serene’ entirely and substituting a plainer one, such as ‘atmosphere’. The dominant view today emphasises the active role of the reader as a constructor of meaning, even, in extreme cases, seeing reading as a picnic in which the author brings the words and the reader brings the meanings. But the emphasis within this poem is upon reading viewed as a more passively contemplative activity, one in which the ‘pure serene’ of the text is ‘breathed in’ by the reader. The effect, as already suggested, is to bring about a kind of loss or transformation of the self, the self being dissolved into some larger entity, thereby removing any sense of our being separated from things, as happens when we have merely ‘seen’ them or ‘been told’ about them. The resulting feeling is almost that of being dissolved within the new planet of reading that ‘swims into’ our ken, but cannot as yet exactly be grasped. This is perhaps another reason for using the intrusive-seeming celestial image, for whereas Balboa / Cortez would be able to swim in the Pacific, if he wanted to, or plant a flag at the water’s edge to claim it for Spain, there can be no such claiming of his discovery, and no tactile contact with it, for the ‘watcher of the skies’. So Balboa / Cortez stares at his watery prize with the kind of one-dimensional fixity with which the eagle homes in on its prey; but the breather-in of the ‘pure serene’ seems in some ways very unlike the explorers with their ‘wild surmise’ who are soon going to cash in and carve up the territory. This is in spite of the fact that the poem ends with the claim that the two are ‘like’ each other, for what a poem claims it shows isn’t always what it actually shows. Again, then, we sense some interesting elements of misalignment between the ‘close’ and the ‘distant’ elements of the reading.

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82  Reading between the lines Those who advocate deconstruction, ever keen to show language at war with itself, might well draw attention to that kind of discrepancy, and they are also keen to gesture towards what the text leaves unsaid, because they see the unsaid as an essential element of texts. For the deconstructionist, the text is a presence of words around an absence of meaning, a space which readers are constitutionally programmed to fill in. In the case of this sonnet, the text moves towards the ‘wild surmise’ of Balboa / Cortez’s men, but it doesn’t actually tell us what they are surmising. It is easy, of course, to speculate – indeed, the textual effect makes it difficult not to. Are they surmising that what they are looking at is a short way home – that is, a way that leads home by going further and further away from their starting point, just like the ‘nostos’ (or ‘round trip’ or ‘return trip’) of Odysseus in The Odyssey? His journey around the ‘western isles’ is referred to earlier in the poem, eventually leading him home, simply by virtue of the fact that he keeps on going. The ‘wild surmise’, read that way, is reminiscent of the historian Xenophon’s account, in The Expedition of Cyrus, of the struggles of a 10,000-strong army of Greek mercenaries in the fifth century BC, as they strive desperately to get back to Greece when the death of Cyrus leaves them stranded in the ‘barbarian’ lands of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. The well known climax is the moment when they at last climb a slope and have sight of ‘The Sea! The Sea!’ which they realise is their way home, so that Keats’s poem seems to share a distant intertextuality with this thrilling moment. This final stage of the four-part approach began with the contemplative scrutiny of a single word in the poem (the word ‘serene’), but then moved outwards, via that point, to some broader aspects of what reading is and is like, and then to some of the ways in which reading, and especially poetry reading, challenges and dissolves the ego of the reader into something larger. This paradoxical effect of opening out a text by concentrated focus on a single detail is typical of what happens when poetry reading is at its most enjoyable. But the key idea of this chapter is that it is the combination of distant reading and close reading which produces that effect. As poetry readers, we should always seek a way of combining the spotlight of close-up scrutiny with the floodlight of overview. Using this reading method with a poem in conventional sonnet form seems comparatively straightforward, ‘comparatively’ mean­ing when compared with doing the same thing with a poem written in a less conventional format. It seems sensible, therefore, to consider, from this close-and-distant perspective, a poem of a less familiar

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Close and distant reading  83 kind, in order to test the extent of the method’s usefulness and general applicability. The following example (which will be considered rather more briefly) is by Daljit Nagra, from a collection published in 2007, and what is immediately striking about it is the unconventionality of its layout, which is so marked as to produce an initial sense of puzzlement (in this reader, at least): University On the settling of birds, this man blesses his daughter. She’ll split fast for Paddington, then slide east which may as well be the black beyond of Calcutta. The low long curving train opening its mouth gulps from his hands her bags to a far-side seat. He gawps from his thin-rivered, working town. The train roars, the tracks beyond humped with light. The rucksack’d man with whom her eyes meet… Five birds pluck their wings off the train and fly. Initially, in the close-and-distant method, we think about the overall flow of the poem, looking for ‘phases’ within it, and we will probably notice that this one is divided into three ‘stanzas’ (the first and second ending with the words ‘Calcutta’ and ‘town’ respectively). The mention of a train and a man and his daughter leads us to speculate that the man is seeing his daughter off on a journey, and from the title we probably deduce that she is going to university. The station is in a ‘thin-rivered working town’, and the destination seems to be Paddington Station in London, and the implied thought of the central persona about ‘the black beyond / of Calcutta’ may lead us to speculate that the persona is himself connected with that part of the world, being perhaps a first-generation British Asian,

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84  Reading between the lines whose UK-born daughter is going away from home for the first time. These deductions are partly based on a rudimentary knowledge of the author’s background, which is given in the preliminary pages of the collection in which the poem appears. We seldom encounter poems in complete contextual isolation, and picking up such background hints and snippets of information is always a useful penumbra of the reading process. The three ‘phases’ of the poem seem ‘stanza-like’: the first is the prelude to departure, the father blessing the daughter before she boards the train; the second brings departure closer, as he hands up the bags to her, he standing on the platform, and she inside the train; in the final phase, the noise of the engine starting disturbs the birds which have perched on the train roof, indicating that departure is about to take place. The three phases also seem to have a wider resonance – the first is the ending of the daughter’s old connections with family and home, the second marks the threshold between her old world and her new, as she stands at the door of the train, and the third the beginning of new worlds and connections, as the father notices the daughter making eye contact with a ‘rucksack’d man’ in the carriage. As the ‘crux’ to focus on at the second stage of the close-and-­​ distant reading process, I will take the phrase about ‘the black beyond / of Calcutta’: the sliding east of the train is easy to understand, as its route to London’s Paddington Station lies in a south-easterly direc­tion, hence ‘sliding’ east seems an appropriate description of the train’s direction of movement. Also, the father’s thought, that its destination might as well be the other side of the world, expresses his pain and anxiety about the approaching separation. But why mention ‘Calcutta’, and why use the phrase ‘the black beyond / of Calcutta’? The phrase seems a part echo of the expression ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’, which refers to the notorious incident in 1756 when a large number of prisoners were kept overnight by the British in a very small cell at Fort William in that city, causing the deaths of many. There also seems present a part echo of the phrase ‘the back of beyond’, an idiom which designates a place of great remoteness, and this is probably the dominant echo. But the specificity of the reference to Calcutta implies a speaker connected in some way with the sub-continent, enabling us to deduce that the poem may describe the experience of a father who is an emigrant to Britain from the Indian sub-continent. At the third stage of the process we look for patterns and breaks in patterning. The most obvious pattern is the way the three lines of each stanza suggest a shape which resembles the platforms of

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Close and distant reading  85 a railway station, as seen in a bird’s eye view from above, with the separated words on the right seeming to be in the process of emerging from this protected space into the open. These words also show a certain symmetry of arrangement, with a pattern of two, then one, then two words, in the first and third stanzas, and three isolated single words in the middle stanza. The isolated words of the first and third stanzas seem to encapsulate the father’s fears about the loss of his daughter, ‘his daughter / east / of Calcutta’ and ‘with light / meet / and fly’. Also symmetrically patterned is the mention of birds in the opening and closing lines of the poem, while the middle stanza has the bags fed into the ‘mouth’ of the train, rather as a bird feeds its young. The notion of a young bird ‘flying the nest’ seems implicit in this imagery. The final stage invites us to fix on a single word or phrase which seems counter-intuitive, or in some way surprising, and perhaps in this case it is the word ‘blesses’, right at the start of the poem, in the phrase ‘this man blesses / his daughter’, implying that the father gives the departing daughter his blessing, meaning his sanction or permission. Instead of opposing her, and insisting that she stays at home (and perhaps goes to her local university), her ‘flight’ is undertaken with his approval, so that there is a strong sense of a process of compromise taking place within the father, of two cultures or two ways of life beginning to co-exist within the same person. Thus, the poem seems to show a transition taking place in the father’s life as well as in the daughter’s, and the process of alternating between the close and distant view helps to make this more apparent. This chapter can be seen as an attempt to synthesise the material and approach of Part I of this book into a unified, short-hand method­ology. Elements of meaning, imagery, diction, metre and form can be considered from both the close and distant viewpoints. One way of putting this is to say that poems have to be both looked at (we look at static entities) and watched (we watch moving entities). Somewhere in the interaction between the seen and the watched is the poem as a whole.

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7. 

Feeling and sentiment

Meaning, imagery, diction, metre and form in poetry seem to be ‘within’ the very lines we read, but feeling is a quality which has a rather more ephemeral presence. Feelings can only be implied by lines of poetry, and have to be taken on trust by the reader, for (as with any other form of utterance) there is no way of knowing whether the sentiments professed are actually felt by the claimant or not. So feelings seem to hover somewhere ‘between’ the lines, and any discussion of them necessarily has an element of the tenta­ tive and the impressionistic. In an influential essay called ‘Sincerity and the Sonnet’, the critic Inga-Stina Ewbank argued that sin­cerity in literature ‘is not a matter of there being no gap between the writer’s avowed and actual feeling, but of his [sic] ability to create in the reader the impression of genuine feeling’.1 Perhaps we can best understand how poets create this ‘impression’ by beginning with an example in which the poet seems to create the inadvertent impression that the feelings evoked are not quite genuine at all. We can then try to establish what exactly has gone wrong. The example in question is a sonnet about the sonnet, one in which the poet writes about how it feels to write a sonnet, which may initially seem a matter of little interest to readers who are not themselves also poets. The sonnet as a literary form attracts poets because it is so challenging; it imposes many restrictions, giving them the opportunity to astonish an audience by their Houdini-like ability to slip the knots which seek to prevent poetic self-expression. Likewise, readers find sonnets fascinating because they like watching how poets make their escape from the intricacies of the form. So the artistic attraction of the sonnet’s confining form – its ‘little room’, as he calls it – is what Wordsworth celebrates in his well known sonnet on the sonnet (the first line of which is usually taken to be the title). The poet seems to make his sonnet (or meta-sonnet) distinctly expressive of something deeply felt, but as I read it, I begin to lose faith in ‘the impression of genuine feeling’ which he

1  Inga-Stina Ewbank, ‘Sincerity and the Sonnet’, in Essays and Studies 1981, ed. Anne Barton (English Association and John Murray, 1981), p. 20.

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Feeling and sentiment  87 is ­obviously striving to create. I will try to explain exactly what I think goes wrong: Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room And hermits are contented with their cells; And students with their pensive citadels; Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom, High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells, Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells: In truth the prison, into which we doom Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground; Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as I have found. The octave offers a list of five human subjects, and one non-human. All these (to the poet) seem happy in their confined spaces. They are: nuns in their convent room, hermits in their cells, students in a study, women spinning thread at a wheel, a weaver at his loom, and bees taking nectar from flowers. The nuns and the hermits seem like the same example twice, or like male and female versions of the same instance, since both choose their confinement for unworldly, religious reasons. Likewise, the spinners and the weaver make an obvious female / male pairing, since the primary reason for their confinement is the ‘worldly’ fact that it provides them with their daily sustenance. The first three and the last three also have something in common – the student has an affinity with the nun and the hermit, since all three use their confinement as a way of eventually entering a wider world in order to reap either heavenly or earthly rewards; similarly, the last three all accept their confinement happily, or so Wordsworth believes, because it is the work they do to gain a living. Having set out the ‘proposition’ in the octave of contentment-in-confinement, the sestet must now put a counter-proposition and attempt to reconcile the two in some way. In effect, the counter-proposition is that the prison into which we confine ourselves voluntarily is not really a prison at all, but simply a ‘brief ’ game or ‘pastime’ of incarceration; and further, it has the therapeutic (if paradoxical) benefit of freeing us from the burden of too much liberty.

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88  Reading between the lines But all this seems perhaps a little unfeeling on the matter of choice, and the degrees of it, for the poet seems to be wilfully ignoring an obvious disparity between his own ‘recreational’ confinement and the more circumscribed ‘choices’ of others. For the poet, freedom is the norm, so a bit of confinement makes a change and a challenge, but for the others, the opposite is the case. It is true, of course, that the nun and the hermit elect the silence into which they enter, but once they have done so, their vows oblige them to stay where they are. The original election of their confined state is the product of a sense of vocation, which may, at least partly, be imposed by social and moral pressures over which they have little control. Likewise, the spinner and the weaver have probably not been able to make a free survey of all the forms of trade open to them before finally selecting this one as best suited to their talents and temperament. As for the student, being born into a higher stratum of society would probably have eliminated the need to study for years in an academic ‘citadel’, meaning that this choice too is hardly entirely free and open. Nor is the bee, presumably, a worker who would be able to select an alternative occupation if the hours spent in foxglove bells began to pall. Clearly, then, the poet’s situation is too obviously very different from that of all the cited exemplars of contentment-in-confinement: deciding to write a sonnet today, rather than an ode or an elegy, has no bearing at all on what verse form (if any) may be chosen tomorrow. Indeed, those ‘Souls’ who have ‘felt the weight of too much liberty’ must be an extremely select and privileged group. They can never have been candle-makers, or labourers, or servants, and can only be gentlefolk whose daily routine is a matter of their own choice. So the feeling professed fails to convince, not because Wordsworth himself as an individual stands accused of insensitivity to social differences, but because the effect of grouping together as similar so many different kinds of people actually has the contrary effect of highlighting their dissimilarities. The little community of kindred ‘Souls’ envisaged by Wordsworth at the end seems a rather too exclusive readership, drawn from the leisured classes alone, with which we might well hesitate to identify ourselves. I have started this chapter with an example of feeling in poetry that at first seems quite touching, but on closer examination doesn’t go any deeper than a touch, and so is unable to ‘create in the reader the impression of genuine feeling’. Hence, the poem goes wrong essentially because of mismanagement. Claiming to know the state of mind of nuns, weavers and students is just too much of

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Feeling and sentiment  89 a claim for a poet to make, causing us to realise that Wordsworth, in reality, has no way of knowing that nuns ‘fret not’, that hermits are content, and that spinners and weavers are ‘blithe and happy’. Isn’t there, after all, something oddly unfeeling about all these complacent propositions? It is even possible, though it might be taking things a little too far, to suggest that the mismanaged air of sincerity is embodied in the very form of Wordsworth’s sonnet, for in fact he seems slightly less willing than he professes to be confined within the sonnet’s narrow formal limits. Thus, the sonnet is written in the Italian or ‘Petrarchan’ form, with an octave broken into two quatrains, both rhyming abba, followed by a sestet rhyming cddccd. But this is a most unusual rhyming pattern for the sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet, so Wordsworth, while professing the virtue of his elected confinement within the sonnet form, isn’t quite accepting that confinement on this occasion. Feeling, then, can be professed in poetry without entirely convincing the reader of its sincerity. This, of course, is a failing of the poem rather than the poet. Perhaps in real life Wordsworth was more capable of empathy with the situations of others than a reading of this poem might lead us to suppose. But the point to make here is that, on its own terms, the poem fails to embody effectively some of the feelings it professes. Let’s move on to an example which modern readers might be inclined to suspect of something like insincerity, on the grounds of its sexual politics. Indeed, I approached this poem with a degree of scepticism (the reverse of my experience of the Wordsworth poem), but ended by finding it moving. What makes it so is the complex of unresolved and conflicting feelings which come to light when it is closely examined. The summit of John Milton’s career is, of course, his religious epic Paradise Lost, but many of his sonnets are surprisingly vivid and apparently heartfelt pieces of a more intimate and personal kind. The opening line of this sonnet is also its title – ‘Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint’, roughly meaning ‘I thought I saw my saintly wife, who is now dead’. The line refers to Katherine Woodcock, the second of Milton’s three wives. They were married in 1656, when Milton was already blind, so the poem is about a wife he never actually saw.2 Katherine gave birth to a daughter in October 1657, but the daughter died, and then she

2  Some scholars have suggested that it could be about the first wife rather than the second, but most take Katherine to be the subject. Milton’s most recent scholarly biographer writes: ‘I think it a near certainty that Milton wrote his poignant sonnet “Me thought I saw my late espoused saint” sometime during the

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90  Reading between the lines herself died, in February 1658. My argument here is that the sonnet has three distinct and conflicting levels of sentiment: Methought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave, Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave, Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint. Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint  Purification in the old Law did save, And such as yet once more I trust to have Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint, Came vested all in white, pure as her mind; Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight  Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined So clear as in no face with more delight. But Oh! as to embrace me she inclined, I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

5

10

The first level is an account of loss and mourning, written by a deeply pious man who is trying to find religious consolation for his human grief. In the dream, he is overjoyed at the sensation that his dead wife had been restored to him, just as in Greek mythology Alcestis was brought back to her husband from the underworld. Milton’s wife returns radiant with divine grace, following the ceremony of purification which takes place some weeks after childbirth. Her whole being glows with divine goodness and benevolence, but as she leans forward to embrace him in the dream (‘as to embrace me she inclined’) the spell is broken and he suddenly wakes, or, as it is expressed in the poignant final line, ‘I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night’. Here, of course, the night which day brings back is the inner darkness of living without her. The first level, then, is a moving and powerful expression of the renewed pain of bereavement which follows his awakening from the dream. The second level, by contrast, is more rooted in the poet’s sense of his own identity and ego as it is represented in the verse. The most severe suffering of Milton’s life, apart from his many family bereavements, was caused by the loss of his eyesight, which he felt had unmanned him and reduced him to helplessness (this is the subject of another famous sonnet, ‘On His Blindness’). difficult weeks following Katherine’s death’. Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Blackwell, 2000), p. 355.

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Feeling and sentiment  91 At this second level, there is an extraordinary, but perhaps inadvertent, emphasis on the physical act of seeing, so that the pain of the loss of his sight emerges just as strongly as the pain of losing his wife, forming, as it were, an embedded counter-current of feeling within the poem, implying that almost everything in Milton’s life returns of its own accord to this theme. Consider, for instance, these phrases, in all of which the literal notion of seeing, whether clearly or obscurely, is paramount: ‘Methought I saw’ (1); ‘though pale and faint’ (4); ‘I trust to have / Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint’ (7–8); ‘Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight / Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined / So clear as in no face with more delight’ (10–12); ‘and day brought back my night’ (14). In all of these lines, it seems, the longing expressed by the poet to see his wife is literal – longing to see her seems more powerful, even, than longing to have her back. A sense of what is pale, or faint, or veiled is acutely rendered in the poem, and is opposed to what is white and clear and full, and the poem opens with the ecstatic ‘Methought I saw’ and ends with the despairing ‘and day brought back my night’. At this second level, then, the night which day brings back to Milton is the renewed realisation, after the fading of his intensely vivid dream of seeing (‘Methought I saw…’), that he is blind. In focusing in this way on the poem about his blindness which is embedded within the elegiac poem about the dead wife, we are doing what Terry Eagleton calls ‘reading against the grain’, that is, we are reading the poem in such a way as to tune into an aspect of it which runs counter to its ‘official’ or intended meaning. Reading in this way makes it at the same time a poem about a sense of self-loss. Perhaps many elegiac poems contain within themselves that hidden, self-pitying poem about the self, which is full of a slightly maudlin – and yet supremely human – feeling of loss and helplessness. But there is a third level of feeling too, one in which the devout man’s acceptance of the loss of his wife is eclipsed and challenged by the erotic longings of a highly sexed individual. This feeling emerges primarily in the following phrases: ‘And such as yet once more I trust to have / Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint’ (7–8); ‘Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined / So clear as in no face with more delight’ (11–12); ‘But Oh! as to embrace me she inclined, / I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night’ (13–14). At the beginning of the poem, we see the efforts the poet makes to avoid any explicit sexual overtones – he calls Katherine his ‘saint’, not his ‘wife’; he emphasises her loss of bodily vigour – she is

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92  Reading between the lines ‘pale and faint’ – and he stresses her sexual purity – she is ‘washed from spot of child-bed taint’ and ‘vested all in white’, with her body ‘pure as her mind’. Yet the poem moves towards a highly erotic conclusion, for if Hercules, the son of the pagan god Jove, could bring Alcestis back to life and restore her to her husband Admetus, then surely, the poem implies, the Christian Son of God could do the same for his faithful servant John Milton. The intensely imagined moment almost succeeds in achieving the sense of erotic re-union, as the visionary woman in white walks towards him, her face hidden, so that a powerful aura of ‘delight’, which is surely the mutual delight of the anticipated sexual act, seems to shine from her body. Yet, as she leans towards him at the moment of the longed-for consummation – the full union ‘without restraint’ – the thread of the enacted moment breaks, and the dreary reality of his lost paradise returns to him, with, of course, a renewed sense of bitterly felt loss. This ‘masculinist’ or ‘gendered’ way of reading the poem brings out patterns of male sexual desire and fantasy, and illustrates how the intense idealisation of the sexual object shows the man seeking, perhaps somewhat desperately, to square his earthly sexual desires with his high religious ideals of conduct and aspiration. The three levels of feeling within the poem are brought to light by the considered act of viewing and re-viewing the poem from the standpoint of these three different forms of feeling, which are, firstly, the pain of bereavement and loss, secondly, the continuing sense of loss of selfhood which is the consequence of his blindness, and finally, the sexual deprivation which is the result of the poet’s widowhood. In the case of this poem, then, what ‘create[s] in the reader the impression of genuine feeling’ is the fact that conflicting feelings are vividly implied, with religious, egotistical and sexual feelings shown in unresolved and contradictory turmoil. Often in life the deepest feelings are mixed or conflicting in this way, and the fact that the poem does not attempt in any facile way to solve or resolve matters gives it its air of authenticity or truth to feeling. Another poem concerning bereavement is Ezra Pound’s ‘Liu Ch’e’, which is a free translation from the Chinese poet Li Po. Here the expression of the feeling is more oblique and restrained than is the case with Milton’s sonnet, and it is this element of restraint which creates the effect of profound feeling:

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Feeling and sentiment  93 The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the court-yard, There is no sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold. The various lines in the poem seem to have distinct functions: lines 1–4 present a sequence of actions or non-actions – the silk is not rustling, the dust is drifting, the footfall is not sounding and the leaves (initially) are scurrying. Line 5 explains the situation – she, ‘the rejoicer of the heart’, is dead, and line 6 presents an image which is intended to embody or encapsulate the feeling, and ‘anchor’ the emotion implicit throughout. The penultimate line, which explains the situation, might have been expected to come last, but perhaps that would have given too great an air of finality, implying a sense of accommodation with the fact of the death. Instead, the poem ends with something more open-ended – who, for instance, is doing the clinging? Is it the dead person envisaged as somehow attempting to cling on to life, or is it the speaking persona who is clinging to the memory of the dead person, unable to come to terms with what has happened? As already suggested, the feeling implied throughout is intensi­ fied by the poem’s reticence and restraint. For instance, the word ‘discontinued’ is usually used of unemotive things, such as a line of manufactured articles withdrawn from sale, so that its use here is harshly incongruous, and almost brutal in its apparent coldness. Likewise, ‘footfall’ seems a less emotive word than ‘footsteps’, and the drifting dust and scurrying leaves are noted with a kind of listless regard which seems to echo the indefinable emptiness of the speaker’s sense of loss. Further, saying what isn’t there has a dull poignancy, and the single overtly emotive term (apart from the oddly formalised ‘she the rejoicer of the heart’) is the word ‘cling’, with its air of compulsively grasping, or attempting to grasp, something which is going or gone. A variant on this ‘reticent’ formula for expressing feeling in poetry is the poem in which the speaker seems to be imagining their own demise, as in this one by Denise Riley, whose poems are not usually as short as the one seen below. It is called ‘Shantung’, which is a kind of fabric, a heavy material with a rough, nubby surface, used for making skirts, which perhaps indicates that it is a poem particularly about women’s concerns:

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94  Reading between the lines It’s true that anyone can fall in love with anyone at all. Later, they can’t. Ouf, ouf. How much mascara washes away each day and internationally, making the blue one black. Come on everybody. Especially you girls. Each day I think of something about dying. Does everybody? do they think too, I mean. My friends! Some answers. Gently unstrap my wristwatch. Lay it face down.3 This is a poem which changes its tone, without explanation, in almost every line: thus, we can hear the reassuring tone of the magazine agony aunt in ‘anyone can fall / in love with anyone at all’; then comes the tone of a perhaps slightly tipsy female amateur philosopher on a bar stool in ‘How much mascara washes away each day’. Then, in the phrase ‘making the blue one black’ there is an echo of Shakespeare’s guilt-ridden Macbeth lamenting the fact that if he tries to wash the blood off his hands in the sea it will result in ‘making the green one red’; we also hear a snatch of the tone of a pop song (‘C’mon everybody’), plus a tone of self-mocking irony (‘My friends! Some answers’), and at the end there is a kind of solemn, funereal tone as the speaker gives the instruction ‘Gently / unstrap my wristwatch. Lay it face down’. The disjunctive structure of the piece – typical of the phase of writing often referred to as postmodern – makes it difficult to imagine a single line of narrative in which all these sentences and phrases could occur. Yet the tone of reflective melancholy persists all the way through, and feelings of resignation and regret emerge strongly. There is a presented sequence of comments and actions, but also a withholding of any linking narrative within which the sequence would make overall personal or biographical sense. This kind of cohesion-defying structure is sometimes called ‘disjunctive poetics’ – nothing is dwelt upon, or commented upon, and there is no overarching narrative coherence, and that kind of rawness seems to have the effect of releasing the feeling, so that it floats free of any clearly definable incident. The appreciation of a poem of this kind 3  To hear the poet’s own reading of ‘Shantung’ go here: www.poetryarchive.org/ poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=437.

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Feeling and sentiment  95 is not necessarily to be found in achieving a sense of having totally understood it. Rather, it lies in the appreciation of some aspect of its shape, form, or pattern, such as my suggested reading in terms of its tonal unevenness and narrative discontinuity. The final example of the poetic representation of feeling is an early poem by Lee Harwood, who was influenced by the methods of the New York poets of the mid-twentieth century. It seems to work in a similarly oblique and narrative-defying manner to Riley’s piece. It has, though, a familiar-looking poetic shape, for the stanzas are all of either two or three lines. But the poem declares itself as ‘free verse’ by not using a capital letter at the start of each line, and by using very little punctuation, giving it a sparse and informal look: Brighton. October a cloud passes by the stuffed animals in the museum continue to stare straight ahead at sea three freighters wait on the tide to enter the small port load of timber cargo of coal a man walks along the edge of a park beneath the trees that have just begun to shed their leaves I am thinking of the forms of peace, or, rather, pure pleasure All the punctuation is introduced in a rush in the last two lines, producing a kind of slowing effect which seems to enhance the feelings implied by the words. The starkness elsewhere in the poem is notable – there are no ‘descriptive’ adjectives, no embellishments of any kind at all, no crafted and honed images. The scene is depicted in an almost forensic way. The rhythmic effects seem to be crafted from zero, rather than from any pre-existing template of form, as in the central couplet ‘load of timber / cargo of coal’, in which the second foot of the second line (‘cargo / of coal’) is a reversal of the rhythm of the second foot of the first (‘load of / timber’). There is movement only at the start and near the end of the poem: at the start, a cloud passes by, and towards the end a man

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96  Reading between the lines walks along. In between, the stuffed animals continue to stare, and the freighters continue to wait on the tide. The whole poem has a kind of savoured stillness and symmetry: the first five lines and the last five are broken into sections of three lines then two lines, and in the middle is a two-line hinge or pivot – ‘load of timber / cargo of coal’ – which is perfectly balanced. So the poem has an end-to-end design which is clean and simple – no capitals, and no punctuation until the flurry of commas at the end, so that all the emphasis, and hence the implied weight of feeling, falls quietly on the last two words. It takes a lot of confidence to trust words so completely, and simply let them get on with doing what they do. The poet in this instance seems to feel no need to infuse the words with overt feeling, for the feeling seems always already there in the quiet pace of the telling, so that it is a difficult matter to locate the point of its emergence in any particular word or phrase. The effect is that of suffusing the feeling evenly all the way through, like a substance which is dissolved and suspended in a liquid, and hence present in every part of it. It is done so perfectly that we might be deluded into thinking it an effect easily achieved. So in all three of these last examples, the impression of feeling is created by exerting tight emotional control all the way through, and avoiding overtly emotional words until the last lines of the poem, when we get the word ‘cling’ in Pound, the sentences ‘Gently / unstrap my wristwatch. Lay it face down’ in Riley, and the phrases ‘the forms of peace’ and ‘pure pleasure’ in Harwood. Even in the case of Milton’s sonnet, in which strong feelings are evoked all the way through, there is a distinct increase in intensity in the powerful final line. In all cases, then, it is the skilful management of feeling which produces that vital impression of sincerity, whereas in the Wordsworthian example we started with, the impression of insincerity is created by the mismanagement which has the poem seeming to claim an implausible degree of knowledge of the feelings of others. In this chapter, then, we have begun to move a little beyond the lines themselves to the dimension of feeling, which can only be implied somewhere ‘between’ them. The remaining three chapters in this middle part of the book continue the progression towards broader considerations. The next three chapters explore, in different ways, the relationship between text and context, a topic which is considered in broad terms in the next chapter, and then, in the two following, in a more specific way, first looking at poems in which a major part of the context is a work of pictorial art, and then at poems whose major context is other poems.

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8. 

Text and context

When we read prose, we scan lines of print that fill the page from margin to margin, leaving blank only the border areas required by the printing and binding processes. But poetry is different. The panel of poetic print takes up a relatively small area in the centre of the page, and the rest contains nothing but white space. So a poem is usually presented on the page rather as a picture is displayed in a gallery, which is to say, isolated against a blankness that endows it with a certain ‘aura’ of implied significance. We might note in passing that it has not always been thus for either poetry or pictures – in the Victorian period, printed pages tended to be more tightly packed than they are today, even in the case of poetry, and a gallery wall would usually be so crowded with pictures that the frames of adjacent paintings would almost touch each other. The generous amount of white space surrounding a poem on the page of a modern book or poetry magazine seems to insulate it – emotionally, intellectually and aesthetically – from the world in general. Indeed, approaches to poetry for nearly a century have tended to include some form of what we might call ‘separatism’ as part of their practice, for instance separating the speaker in the poem from the author, arguing that statements made in poems do not have the same status as statements made elsewhere, and asserting, as I will in Chapter 11, that time and place in a poem are not quite the same as time and place as we know them in day-to-day life. It follows that there is a widespread feeling that the connection between a text and its context is less direct and palpable in the case of a poem than it usually is with other forms of literature, such as novels or plays. All the same, the apparent insulating effect of the broad white margins cannot possibly be absolute, and poems are not unworldly, art-for-art’s-sake icons. So it is important to address directly the issue of text and context in poetry, and that is the purpose of the present chapter. In recent years, academic debate about the relationship between literature and context has seemed never ending, and largely in­ conclusive.1 In most of these discussions, no precise definition of 1 See as examples of such discussion: Rick Rylance and Judy Simons, Litera­ ture in Context (Macmillan, 2001); Peter Barry, Literature in Contexts (Manchester

97

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98  Reading between the lines context has been felt necessary, and it is common to assert that litera­ture can be understood only in context. The identity of the text is finite and unproblematic, since it is those words on the page surrounded by white space, but context is infinite, for it is poten­ tially everything which lies beyond. The inevitable consequence is that more time will be spent discussing context than text. So a tighter definition of context is needed, and we can redefine it like this: context is something specific outside the text and potentially relevant to it, which is imported into the text by something specific inside it. This formulation avoids extremes – for instance, it does not assert that context is everything outside the text, or even everything potentially relevant outside the text. Clearly, not everything about the seventeenth century is relevant, or even potentially relevant, to every seventeenth-century poem, which means rejecting the view that an understanding of seventeenth-century poetry is possible only if we have first immersed ourselves in seventeenth-century history. Of course, our understanding of specific seventeenth-century poems may well benefit in some cases from knowledge of specific facts about the seventeenth century, but if the poem were incomprehensible without knowledge of those facts, it would not be a poem at all, but a historical document. A work of literature, by definition, must be capable of having an ‘after-life’ which is to a large degree independent of the context and era in which it was produced, since otherwise it could not have survived that context and era in the first place. It may seem unnecessary to state such truisms, but after 20 years or so of insistence by literary critics that literature can be under­stood only in the historical context which produced it, it may be sensible to do so. The key proposition made here is that the specific aspect of context which we want to claim is relevant must ‘cue’ or ‘declare’ itself within the text of the poem, so that we can point to textual specifics which justify reading the poem in that way. The three examples which take up the remainder of this chapter are all either by Irish poets or by poets closely associated with Ireland. I have used this Irish set because the consensus is particularly strong within Irish studies that it is impossible to understand Irish literature without first understanding Irish history. If that were true, it would place the study of Irish literature beyond Ireland in great jeopardy. In the poems considered here, our reading can

University Press, 2007); and Adrian Barlow, World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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Text and context  99 benefit from an awareness of specific items of historical informa­ tion, rather than from a knowledge of Irish history in general. The first poem is Ciaran Carson’s ‘Edward Hopper: Early Sunday Morning, 1939’, and, as its title indicates, it is about Hopper’s paint­ ing Early Sunday Morning.2 Here is Carson’s poem in full: clear blue sky above upper storey blinds half drawn not a soul about the strip of shop fronts only a red white and blue barber’s pole and a fire hydrant casting shadows on the sidewalk from the east beyond the frame immeasurably long another shadow falls

2  To see the picture go here: www.artchive.com/artchive/h/hopper/earlysun.jpg. html.

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100  Reading between the lines from what we cannot see to what we cannot see dawn before the War The picture is not reproduced with the poem, and you might wonder why I am not discussing this example in the next chapter, which is on the specific topic of poems and pictures. The reason is that it seems a perfect illustration of what I want to argue about the relation­ship between text and context in literature, as Carson’s poem makes a specific adjustment of the date of the picture, which allows it to be ‘read’ (meaning interpreted) within a particular context. Hopper’s familiar painting shows a deserted section of a two-storey block of American store fronts, lit by strong early morning light that comes from the right of the picture, as we look at it, but with the rising sun itself being outside the frame. The picture was painted in 1930, and, knowing that, we might well interpret it as a comment on the worldwide Depression of the 1930s, especially as the row of shops looks distinctly run-down and un-prosperous, with at least one of them seemingly abandoned. But Carson has added the date ‘1939’ to the poem’s title, and by 1939 the world Depression was over.3 The external light of the sun casts long shadows into the picture, and Carson’s poem ‘reads’ these shadows as the context of the picture, and as representing the approaching war, which is still (in 1939) outside the ‘frame’ or ‘mind-set’ of the archetypal American scene depicted, but already threatening to disturb the peace and stillness of such scenes in due course. The war is about to erupt in Europe, and Carson’s interpretation of the picture is made explicit in the last stanza of the poem, ‘dawn / before the War’. This reading of the shadows may seem gratuitous, but it plausibly imagines a viewer for whom this quintessentially 1930s street scene has already gathered nostalgic and regretful overtones of the pre-war

3  David Wheatley says that Carson gets the title of the picture wrong, but the date 1939 is not part of the title of the picture (which is italicised in Caron’s title) but part of the title of the poem. David Wheatley, ‘“Pushed next to nothing”: Ciaran Carson’s Breaking News’, in Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (Four Courts Press, 2009), p. 55, n. 23.

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Text and context  101 period. Without the date, we would look at the picture and lose ourselves in its serenity, a serenity intensified by showing an urban scene but indicating that it is Sunday morning, and obviously early, so that the absence of the usual noise and bustle of such places is particularly felt (an effect similar to that achieved in Wordsworth’s ‘Westminster Bridge’ sonnet). It might be argued against this that Carson’s reading of the painting is slightly complicated by the fact that 1939 was not, for the USA, the first year of the war, but the poem makes no claim to be reading the picture ‘as an American’. In fact, I believe that in adding the date ‘1939’ and using the phrase ‘before the War’ Carson reads the picture precisely as an Irishman, for 1939 was not the start of the war for most of Ireland, just as it wasn’t for the USA, since the Irish Republic remained neutral throughout the war, which was referred to as ‘the Emergency’, and only for Northern Ireland was it the first year of the war, as it was for the rest of the UK. For the purposes of reading a poem contextually, we should emphasise again that the context – which, we will claim, reaches into the poem like those long shadows in the picture – has to have a verbal ‘trigger’ of some kind within the poem itself. This will not always be so explicit a mention of the context as occurs here, when the poem ends with the two lines ‘dawn / before the War’, and the title includes the date 1939. Even so, the point is that all contextual readings depend upon the importation of a context which is never ‘simply there’, and needs no definition or defence by the reader-critic. On the contrary, context is always constructed by the reader – every context, that is to say, is also a construct. Thus, in Hopper’s picture, we cannot see the rising sun, but we can deduce its presence from the long shadows it throws across the foreground. We justify the validity of the context we evoke by pointing to the fact that the text, manifestly (which is to say, in a specific phrase or detail we can point to), ‘reaches right out to it’ (to adopt a phrase from Wittgenstein) to meet the context which reaches right in. Thus, Carson’s poem provides a vivid illustration or allegory of the relationship between text and context in literature. My other reason for starting with it is that it makes a nice transition to a similar set of considerations in another Irish poem. ‘To the Man After the Harrow’ by Patrick Kavanagh describes a farmer ploughing a field, an apparently timeless subject, one which has attracted other major figures, such as Seamus Heaney, an admirer of Kavanagh, whose poem ‘Follower’ (about his father plough­ing) was greatly influenced by it. Kavanagh’s poem reads in full:

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102  Reading between the lines Now leave the check-reins slack, The seed is flying far today – The seed like stars against the black Eternity of April clay. This seed is potent as the seed Of knowledge in the Hebrew Book, So drive your horses in the creed Of God the Father as a stook. Forget the men on Brady’s Hill. Forget what Brady’s boy may say. For destiny will not fulfil Unless you let the harrow play. Forget the worm’s opinion too Of hooves and pointed harrow-pins, For you are driving your horses through The mist where Genesis begins. The poem has a majestic confidence of utterance: the slow, un-self-conscious pace is like that of the ploughman himself. It doesn’t matter what other people say or think about what the ploughman is up to (stanza 3), for he has an unquestioned belief in the significance of what he does, which is that he is taking part in the work of creation (stanza 4). The air of conviction conveyed by the writing is serene and total. It moves slowly and surely and doesn’t trouble itself – this is Kavanagh the Monaghan countryman, quietly voicing his confident ‘parochialism’, quite a different thing, he said, from provincialism, which is always anxiously measuring itself against the opinions of the metropolis.4 In some printings of the poem, the date of composition is included in parentheses after the title – ‘(1942)’ – and the potential significance of the date is like that of the date in the title of Carson’s poem, for it immediately sets the poem in the context of the Second World War. At the time, and since, it required a considerable effort of self-justification for 4 ‘Parochialism and provincialism are direct opposites. The provincial has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis – towards which his eyes are turned – has to say on the subject. This runs through all his activities. The Parochial mentality on the other hand never is in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish’. Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Parish and the Universe’, in Patrick Kavanagh: A Poet’s Country. Selected Prose, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Lilliput Press, 2003), p. 237.

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Text and context  103 Ireland to assert the value and validity of its neutral position, and it is difficult not to link this national situation to the sentiments expressed in the poem. Thus, the poem asserts that the opinions of by­standers about the usefulness or otherwise of one’s activities have to be ignored – ‘Forget the men on Brady’s Hill. / Forget what Brady’s boy may say.’ Brady’s Hill is a piece of higher ground on a neighbouring farm from which others can look down and criticise how he is doing things.5 It corresponds to the North, beyond the border, which was part of the UK, and adjoining County Monaghan, a region from which the criticism of Irish neutrality was especially acute. What is needed in the face of such hostility, the poem says, is confidence and the conviction that what one does is useful, and will be productive in its time of a new way of things, even though it is not possible at the present moment to imagine what that still remote time might be like. That, at least, is the meaning packed into the lines ‘For you are driving your horses through / The mist where Genesis begins’, for those lines seem to accept the view that at the moment of the creation or conception of an idea, it is impossible to imagine what its future consequences might be, for all of that is shrouded in the mists of the future. The poem, therefore, in the context of ‘1942’, seems to assert, in the face of widespread criticism, that what Ireland is doing by remaining on the sidelines of the war is useful, and in its way even progressive, and will contribute to a new and improved life in the future. Note again that the contextual reading posited here is highly specific – it pertains to the situation of Irish neutrality in the Second World War, and it is triggered by the inclusion of the date ‘1942’ after the title of the poem in early printings. Grasping it does not require any especially deep immersion in Irish history, and setting up a historicist cordon sanitaire is both unnecessary and undesirable. The main body of the poem itself does not make any further explicit reference to this situation, and seems, indeed, rather self-consciously ‘timeless’, as references to ploughing in poetry tend to be.6 Ploughing tends to be seen as an activity which transcends 5  In discussing this poem with a class, I was asked what check-reins are, and had to admit I didn’t know. A student said she had a farmer friend and would phone him during the break to find out. His response was ‘I wouldn’t use check-reins for a job like that’, which is a very ‘Brady’s Hill’ kind of comment (that Kavanagh would have ignored). The check-rein is a short extra rein which is designed to keep the horse’s head up. 6 An example would be Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘In Time of the Breaking of Nations’, actually a very similar piece to Kavanagh’s, as its context is both the

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104  Reading between the lines the exigencies of a particular political situation and is self-evidently useful. But the contextual reading introduces an element of doubt into this familiar set of assumptions. It is striking, too, that the contextual reading changes the poem pretty well completely. Instead of its being a poem about ploughing, and the kind of solitariness and single-mindedness that tends to go with it, it becomes a poem justifying a particular political decision in the face of widespread condemnation or disapproval. It is natural to ask whether the two ‘poems’ can co-exist, and, if we think they can, how they are related to each other. The ‘speaking presence’ in the poem seems to eschew all modern forms of knowledge, preferring a kind of fatalism, whereby matters are felt to be decided by ‘destiny’, so that the seed may land anywhere at all, and prosper, or not, accordingly. On this view, long-held creeds and deep-rooted practical experience are more significant than scientific knowledge, and future outcomes are hidden in a mist. Kavanagh seems to link these attitudes to the mind-set of a then predominantly rural nation, seeing a certain indifference to public and international experience as being part of the Irish character. Perhaps the two ‘poems’ within this one may be reconcilable along these lines, as being, ultimately, about Irishness. The final, and rather more complex, example takes us further back in literary history. It is a poem by Edmund Spenser from his Elizabethan sonnet sequence Amoretti and Epithalamion (meaning ‘Love Songs and Wedding Song’), which was written in celebration of his marriage to Irish heiress Elizabeth Boyle. Spenser is a notorious figure in Irish culture, being an English writer who received land grants in Ireland as a reward for taking part (as secretary and administrator to the commander) in a ruthless and punitive ex­ pedition against the Irish. The poem (among other things) expresses his thanks to Queen Elizabeth for his rewards, though without saying what they were for. So I cannot find a specific ‘trigger’ for that wider historical context in this single sonnet, though there are plenty when the sequence is considered as a whole.7 Instead, I suggest a context of a more puzzling kind, which certain oddities in the language seem to evoke. The sequence charts the ups and

Franco-Prussian war of the 1870s, and the European carnage of 1915, and this context, as with the Kavanagh poem, is ‘triggered’ and brought in from outside the frame by the title of the poem. 7  I consider some of these in Literature in Contexts (Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 24–6.

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Text and context  105 downs of Spenser’s protracted courtship, covering roughly two years, and running in parallel with the unfolding of the Anglican Church’s liturgical year. One of the best-known sonnets in the sequence is number 74: Sonnet 74 Most happy letters framed by skilful trade, With which that happy name was first defined: The which three times thrice happy hath me made, With gifts of body, fortune and of mind. The first my being to me gave by kind, From mother’s womb derived by due descent, The second is my sovereign Queen most kind, That honour and large richesse to me lent. The third my love, my life’s last ornament, By whom my spirit out of dust was raised: To speak her praise and glory excellent, Of all alive most worthy to be praised. Ye three Elizabeths for ever live, That three such graces did unto me give. The three women to whom the poem is addressed are all named Elizabeth, the first being his mother, the second his Queen and the third the woman who is now his wife, and the poet attempts the feat of paying a compliment to these three women simultaneously. The three have made him happy in different ways, with, respectively, ‘gifts of body, fortune and of mind’, but the sonnet has a number of puzzling features, over and above the puzzle of its being in the courtship sequence at all. The main strategic problem which the poem sets itself is at once apparent: as each woman in turn is praised for bestowing a certain gift upon the speaker, the other two are at the same time implicitly dispraised for not having that gift in their power to bestow. Thus, when the poet praises his mother for giving him life, he implicitly draws attention to the Queen’s avoidance of marriage and motherhood; likewise, in praising the Queen for giving him honour and riches, he draws attention to his mother’s lower social position, which made her unable to provide him with a noble or genteel birth-right. Finally, in praising his wife for raising his mind to higher things, he seems implicitly to dispraise her as a wife and lover. There is also the ‘tactical’ matter of the order in which the three women should be praised: the poet

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106  Reading between the lines takes the apparently safest option of putting them in chronological order of their influence upon his own life and well-being, so the order is mother first, then Queen and finally wife. The first puzzling element occurs in the opening lines, ‘Most happy letters framed by skilful trade, / With which that happy name was first defined’. The name in question is, of course, ‘Elizabeth’, by which the speaker says he has been thrice blessed, but drawing attention to the letters which make up that name seems to direct us to scrutinise the structure of the word ‘Elizabeth’ in some way. The phrase ‘three times thrice’ seems to prompt consideration of the nine letters of the name in three blocks of three letters each – Eli / zab / eth – perhaps suggesting that there is some kind of acronymic encoding of an additional message within the text of the poem. But if there is, I have not been able to find it. So I conclude that the poet must be drawing our attention to the letters of the name for some other reason. Mentioning that these letters are ‘framed by skilful trade’ reminds us of the process of printing the letters on a page, a process then still new, and so unfamiliar to most lay people as to seem almost magical. Anyone visiting a printer’s shop of the period would see work going on of such speed and intricacy that printers came to be looked upon with superstitious awe: each line of type was set up in reverse order in a ‘composing stick’ held by the compositor in one hand, while his other hand flew with ceaseless rapidity over the racks of upper-case and lower-case boxes containing the tiny individual metal letters, sliding each letter in turn along the stick until the full line had been set up. Then the completed line of leaded type was slid out of the stick into the frame which would eventually hold a full page of type (Figure 8.1). When the whole page was complete, it would be fixed immovably into place with blank strips of metal, so that the page formed a solid structure that could be inked in the printing press and then brought down repeatedly on the sheets of paper until the required number had been printed. The type would then be broken up, another process of dazzling rapidity, as each tiny piece of metal type was thrown into the right box. Even a medium-sized printing house might have only enough type to set up a ‘gathering’ of 16 or 32 pages at once, and once the type had been disassembled the process would begin again for the next set of pages of the book. In the 1499 woodcut reproduced as Figure 8.2, we can see the compositor at work on the left, sitting with the copy-text in front of him and the composing stick in his left hand, with two men operating the printing press, and the proprietor ready to sell the completed books to customers. Three devil-like creatures seem intent on ­interfering

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Text and context  107

8.1  Compositing stick, from Mechanick Exercises (1694), by Joseph Moxon (1627–91).

8.2  Compositor, printer and bookseller at work; woodcut from The Dance of Death (1499), printed by Matthias Huss, in Lyon.

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108  Reading between the lines with the work, and the belief was that there was something super­ natural about the process of printing, and something unnatural, or even blasphemous, about producing precisely identical multiple copies of an original. All this is quite a lot of ‘history’, but it is history of a very specific kind, namely the history of the printing process. And the poem seems to ‘cue’ the subject of printing by its strange opening line ‘Most happy letters framed by skilful trade’. But why would Spenser begin the poem by evoking the process of printing in this highly specific way? Well, perhaps he is seeing the three Elizabeths as miraculously produced copies of a divine original, devolving their graces (or ‘gifts’) to him, just as the virtues and wisdom of the original hand-written copy of a book can be dispensed to thous­ ands by the reproductive act of printing. The essence of printing is to multiply an original and, in the case of his own life, it seems to him that he has been the beneficiary of a kind of divine production line of Elizabeths. Elizabethan printing practice, then, is one aspect of historical context which has a specific ‘cue’ in the poem itself. Perhaps we cannot quite understand this emphasis on the materiality of the word – words viewed as letter shapes on the printed page, and the craft of printing thought of as repeating the divine act of infinite reproduction of copies of an original (as each of us, according to religious teaching, is made in the likeness of God). It seems unlikely that any degree of historical immersion in the sixteenth-century context could entirely remove a modern reader’s sense of not having quite unravelled these features of the poem. And saying that is merely to accept the pastness of the past, to accept that it is futile to imagine that some total-immersion form of contextual literary study might one day be able to make us ‘read as an Elizabethan’, for even the context explicitly ‘cued’ by the poem may never entirely reveal itself, as with this one, behind which hovers a notion of printing (at the dawn of the age of printing) as something magical and almost uncanny. Contextual reading, in the second decade of the millennium, is very much the kind most widely taught in universities. But this chapter has argued that we cannot usefully apply to a poem a generalised and open-ended notion of social or historical context. Contexts of that limitless kind are like oceans by which poems will inevitably be engulfed. Rather, the poem itself must ‘cue’ the claimed context, in such a way that the context we discuss can plausibly be taken as the ‘deep’ (or built-in) context of the poem. And by ‘deep context’ I mean (paradoxically) the context that is

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Text and context  109 inside the poem rather than outside. The next chapter is about a particular kind of deep context, namely those special cases in which the context is a specific picture or art object which the poem names, evokes, or describes.

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9. 

Poems and pictures

This chapter concerns poems which are about an art object. It may be a vase, a piece of sculpture, or, more frequently, a painting or photo­graph, hence the chapter title. This kind of work is now usually called ekphrastic poetry. The word ‘ekphrasis’ is derived from Greek roots, ek, meaning ‘out’, and phrasis, meaning ‘speech’, and hence denotes an act of description, a ‘speaking out’ or speaking plain. It is given to this kind of writing because these poems often begin with something like a description of the object, before going on to a more speculative phase or stage which investigates some aspect of the object’s significance. Ekphrasis might be considered merely a special instance of the relationship between text and context, in which the context (the art object in question) is made unusually specific and is described at length in an unusually explicit way. Ekphrasis is given a chapter of its own, firstly because it is so increasingly prevalent in contemporary poetry. In his book on ekphrasis, David Kennedy mentions ‘the current thriving of ekphrastic practice and criticism’, which he attributes to the growth of ‘creative writing as a pedagogic practice’, though ekphrasis has ‘boomed’ and thrived in other periods too, as he points out.1 A second reason for treating ekphrasis separately is that it facilitates a consideration of the more general relationship between poems and their subject matter because the art-object poem seems to function as a kind of hinge, or halfway house, between word and world. Thus, the ekphrastic process provokes consideration of how poetic representation works (which is the subject of this book), partly because it embodies the Ancients’ view that there is an intimate relationship between pictorial art and poetry. This view is encapsulated in the saying that ‘A poem is a speaking picture; a picture is a silent poem’ (a saying which Plutarch attributes to the poet Simonides). This pronouncement means that the two art forms are complementary, for poems say what pictures cannot show, and pictures show what poems cannot say.

1  See David Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Ashgate, 2012), p. 14.

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Poems and pictures  111 Ekphrastic poetry has a long history, and the earliest well known example is the description of the shield of Achilles in Book XIII of Homer’s Iliad (as mentioned in Chapter 5). The most frequently cited examples of ekphrasis in English poetry are: Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, which describes the processional scene painted around the sides of a Greek vase;2 Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, which describes an imaginary portrait of a woman, and its history;3 and W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, which is about the painting The Fall of Icarus, usually attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in the Brussels museum of the title.4 These poems effectively constitute the ekphrastic canon and critics conventionally use them to analyse and classify the various elements and devices seen in ekphrastic writing.5 For instance, an ekphrastic poem ‘addresses’ an image or object, but this can be done in several different ways. Firstly, the poem can speak to the object, as Keats does, beginning the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ with ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ (my italics). The poet knows, of course, that he is speaking to an inanimate object which isn’t going to answer back, but its silence is made to seem pregnant, and it therefore seems to par­tici­ pate in a relationship or an exchange, for, as the poet says in the final stanza, it will in the end ‘tease us out of thought’. Secondly, the poet can speak, not to the object itself, but (in the case of portraits) to the person depicted in the painting or photograph, as if that person were actually present. This is like dissolving the frame of the picture, so that the subject seems to come alive and step out into the real world, like Galatea (the statue which comes alive, so that its sculptor, Pygmalion, falls in love with it). A third option is that the poem speaks about the painting or photograph, rather than to it or its subject, as Auden does in ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, where he chats as if informally to the reader about the kind of images we see in paintings and what they mean (‘About suffering they were never wrong, / the Old Masters’). Here, the situation is again deceptively simple: Auden tells us directly that he is talking about a painting (‘In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance’), and what might be

2  To read the poem, go here:www.bartleby.com/101/625.html. 3 To read the poem, go to the excellent ‘Victorian Web’ site, here: www. victorianweb.org/authors/rb/duchess/duchess.html. 4  To see the picture and read the poem (and several other ekphrastic poems on the same painting), go here: www.eaglesweb.com/IMAGES/icarus.htm. 5 As I do in Chapter 6 of Literature in Contexts (Manchester University Press, 2007).

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112  Reading between the lines called the hypothetical performance situation for this chat is the one most usual in poetry – namely, that the poet is musing or reflecting privately, but we are able to overhear, as if a door into the world of the poem had been left ajar; and the implied location of this musing chat (as the title indicates) is the gallery in which the picture in question is exhibited. The reader is thus a kind of privileged inner auditor who overhears the poet’s interior monologue. Here, in thinking about the situation of an ekphrastic poem, we are also considering elements which are crucial to all poetry, such as aspects of time and place (which will be the subject of Chapter 11). A fourth option is that the poet talks about the painting, as before, but this time as a persona, the words being addressed to hearers who are within the poem, and are part of its dramatic situation. This is the case in Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, which begins ‘That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall’, a remark made as he draws aside the veil from the painting, and addressed by the Duke to a guest who has come to his palace as an ambassador to negotiate a potential match between the Duke and his master’s daughter. The whole poem is addressed, in the persona of the Duke, to this ambassador. It is worth emphasising here that ekphrastic poems do not always declare themselves as such or invariably make it explicit to the reader that a painting, photograph or object is being described, rather than an actual landscape, photograph or person. Indeed, the most interesting ekphrastic poems often have ‘clues’ only, which merely hint that a painting or photograph is being referred to, or allow it to be deduced from the detail of the description (as with Charles Causley’s poem, examined later). Also, ekphrastic poetry tends not to be the place for resounding proclamations of faith, feeling, passion or identity, and in many cases the emotion is left implicit, so that on the surface the poem seems purely denotative, just mentioning quietly what is there to see. Paradoxically, the effect of this, if done well, can be to give the depicted scene or person a strong emotional charge (as with Jeremy Hooker’s poem, below). The poet could make the emotion explicit, but the effect in this kind of writing is usually achieved by the reader’s sensing the nature of the emotion, rather than being told what it is. Another important aspect of ekphrasis is that it begins with an already given, that is, with a situation, or, rather, with a repre­ sentation of a situation, already fully developed in visual form. So the writing starts, not with the usual ‘degree zero’ of the blank sheet of paper, but with an image often already well known to

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Poems and pictures  113 the reader, and possibly depicting a moment in a familiar story or legend, already redolent with cultural and moral associations and implied meanings. Thus, as we saw in Chapter 5, in his ekphrastic poem ‘The Shield of Achilles’, Auden is able to join in a conversation about the nature of war which was instigated by Homer in ancient times. This suggests that ekphrasis as a genre is inherently collaborative and often seems to be engaged in on-going dialogue or conversation. Poets seem to find ekphrasis an attractive way both of making a link to a well defined context, to ‘something specific outside the poem’, and of exploring themes and ideas about representation while being in dialogue with a visual artist’s ‘take’ on a similar set of concerns. Finally, it should be emphasised that ekphrastic poems should be able to work independently of the image concerned, which is not usually printed alongside the poem. Sometimes the image will be a familiar one, like The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, used in Paul Durcan’s ‘The Arnolfini Marriage’ (discussed later), which many readers will be aware of in their mind’s eye as they read the poem. But the ekphrastic object is just as likely to be (say) a photo­graph which has never been published before, though it may be used as the cover of the book in which the poem appears (as in the case of Jeremy Hooker’s poem about Southampton, also discussed in this chapter). In some cases, it may even be a picture which does not actually exist (as in the case of Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’). In such cases, where the poem imagines an art object into existence and then purports to describe it, there is a sense in which the descrip­tion provides merely a ‘surrogate’ presentation of the material, for the poet has initially to imagine it in pictorial rather than poetic terms, and then ‘translate’ it into the verbal medium of poetry. And even when the image is real, and presented alongside the poem, or on the cover of the book in which the poem is printed, the ekphrastic description in the poem needs to establish a degree of independence from the physical co-presence of the image it ‘addresses’ (which is perhaps a better term, because a little looser, than ‘describes’). When the picture is actually present in this way, or already familiar, or easily available, the poem must still become the readers’ surro­ gate eyes, looking at the picture on our behalf, and seeing things in it which we might not otherwise have noticed. This is rather like a gallery visit with an expert guide, who ‘reads’ the picture for us, even though it is in front of our eyes too. Thus, nobody has ever complained (so far as I know) that in order to understand Keats’s poem, we need to be able to see the urn that Keats describes in

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114  Reading between the lines his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, since the poem makes us ‘see’ it as he does, effectively making the actual art object redundant. In other words, what the ekphrastic poem can add to the existing art object is what we might call an ‘explicit thematisation’, so to speak, a set of articu­lated themes or ideas which the poet sees as the silent utter­ance of the picture or object presented. Hence, even when the picture is printed alongside the poem, it should be an optional extra, like an illu­stration in a novel, rather than an essential aid without which the text cannot function. An image of the object itself should always be a supplement to understanding, appreciation and enjoyment, rather than a prerequisite. No single set of poems can represent ekphrasis in general, but the following three examples cover most of the characteristics just mentioned. The first is an ekphrastic poem of place, a poem written in response to (or in dialogue with) a photograph of Southampton docks: the picture is taken in early-morning sunlight when everything is still, so it is, as it were, a busy scene waiting to happen (again, rather like the effect of Wordsworth’s ‘Westminster Bridge’ sonnet). It is from Jeremy Hooker’s collection Solent Shore and the photograph he writes about is reproduced on the cover of the book (and here as Figure 9.1): On a Photograph of Southampton Docks for Brian Maidment Blinding silver on grey, a suntrack points deep into this average morning. All is ready for work: launches at their moorings, small tubs off the pierhead, warehouses; and above all the cranes, these flying high or with pulleys dangling, those far back, more spidery. No, it is not their function to please the eye. Yet they do – more so for the common goodness of their function, for grace extra to a working world

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Poems and pictures  115

9.1 Cover of Jeremy Hooker’s collection Solent Shore (Carcanet, 1978), with the photograph which is the subject of ‘On a Photograph of Southampton Docks’.

that neighbours sky and water, drawing from all some ordinary tribute; for that reason too, more beautiful, as they say; like birds, like dancers. What can we say about this poem, and how it conveys the emotive charge which most readers will immediately sense in it? Notice, firstly, the use of words that deny the presence in the scene of anything special – words like ‘average’, ‘common’ and ‘ordinary’, where the explicit down-playing of the effect actually seems to heighten it. This seems to me typical of the way ekphrastic poems tend to underplay or understate emotion. Secondly, the tone is quietly and musingly introspective, as if the poet were talking to himself, engaged in an inner dialogue about what he sees, and supplying a low-key ‘voice-over’ as the reader’s inner eye mentally pans across the scene described. Thus, words occur which are character­ istic of dialogue, words like ‘No’, for instance, which enable us to

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116  Reading between the lines deduce that one side of the internal dialogue has said ‘But isn’t this aesthetic way of looking at the scene beside the point? After all, cranes aren’t designed to be beautiful – they’re designed to do a job’, and the other side of the dialogue has replied, thoughtfully but firmly, ‘No, it is not their function / to please the eye. / Yet they do’. So the effect conveyed is of something being debated within, with a conviction gradually being established, rather than a pre-held view simply being professed. This seems typical of the dialogic or conversational element so often part of ekphrastic writing. Yet, thirdly, while mainly using this down-to-earth, conversational register, the poem holds in reserve a more elevated tone: hence, the phrase ‘like birds, like dancers’ links the workaday world to the aesthetic world in a phrase which moves suddenly right away from the low-key ‘talking / thinking’ tone of the rest. Thus, the repeating structure of the phrase ‘like birds, like dancers’ goes as far away as it is possible to go from a natural speech idiom. In ordinary utterance, ‘like’ would not be repeated, and indefinite articles would be used (‘like a bird or a dancer’, someone would say). The ‘heightened’ phrasal form seems finally to release an emotional charge which has been implicit throughout the poem. Hence, a ‘controlled explosion’ of emotion has been planted within it, timed to go off right at the end. After this, the effect would be ruined if the poem were then to return to the low-key denotation which has taken up most of the main body of the piece. So it knows how not to say too much too soon, and it knows exactly when to make its exit, and these are some of the crucial elements which make it enjoyable. Ekphrastic poems demand the most meticulous crafting, and Hooker manages the poem perfectly. Having created the effect, the poet gets out quickly, with no attempt to round off, or sum up, or make anything explicit. These are the elements which combine to make it successful, or, as I say, combine to produce a poetic effect. Another frequent form of the ekphrastic technique is to take an oblique angle on the material, avoiding the initial descriptive phase of the typical ekphrastic poem almost entirely, and devising a mode of address which relates more obliquely to the content of the image, presuming upon the reader’s familiarity with it, as is the case with Paul Durcan’s ‘The Arnolfini Marriage’, which is about the fifteenth-century painting by Jan van Eyck which is sometimes given that name:6 6  To see the picture, go here: www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jan-van-eyckthe-arnolfini-portrait.

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Poems and pictures  117 We are the Arnolfinis. Do not think you may invade Our privacy because you may not. We are standing to our portrait, The most erotic portrait ever made, Because we have faith in the artist To do justice to the plurality, Fertility, domesticity, barefootedness Of a man and a woman saying ‘we’: To do justice to our bed As being our most necessary furniture; To do justice to our life as a reflection. Our brains spill out upon the floor And the terrier at our feet sniffs The minutiae of our magnitude. The most relaxing word in our vocabulary is ‘we’. Imagine being able to say ‘we’. Most people are in no position to say ‘we’. Are you? Who eat alone? Sleep alone? And at dawn cycle to work With an Alsatian shepherd dog tied to your handlebars? We will pause now for the Angelus. Here you have it: The two halves of the coconut.

This is, in every way, a strange poem: firstly, it belongs to a surprisingly large sub-group of poems which directly insult the reader: in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for instance, there is a moment in the final line of Part 1 when the speaker (quoting Baudelaire) recognises ‘You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon sembable, mon frère!’ A similar moment occurs at the end of Don Paterson’s poem ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ (in Nil Nil, 1993, pp. 20–1), in which the poet tells of the patronising treatment of his father by a salesman in a hi-fi shop, and ends ‘I’d swing for him, and every other cunt / happy to let my father know

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118  Reading between the lines his station, / which probably includes yourself. To be blunt.’ Similar moments occur in poems by Peter Reading and Tom Leonard, the latter in his dialect sequence Six Glasgow Poems (1969), where again the assault on the reader comes at the end, in the final piece, which is called ‘Good Style’, when the poet voices what he assumes would be the middle-class reader’s frustration with this kind of thing: ‘helluva hard tay read theez init / stull / if yi canny unnirston thim jiss clear aff then / gawn / get tay fuck ootma road’. Durcan seems, in a similar way, to taunt the poetry reader for what he assumes will be conventional expectations of what might be found in such a poem as this. He seems rather to despise us for being middle class, and reading poetry, and already knowing the famous picture, so we know as readers that we are in for a rough ride. In the poem we overhear, as it were, the intimate inner monologue of the couple depicted in the picture, so this is the Galatea effect, in which the beings depicted in art come alive and begin to interact with us, and the voice in the poem is that of a persona from within the depicted situation, rather than that of the poet. The couple speak as one, as a logical extension of the confident aristocratic male gaze which confronts the viewer of the picture. The tone is mocking and taunting, with the opening line – ‘We are the Arnolfinis’ – recalling the old radio advertising jingle from the 1930s, ‘We are the Ovaltineys, Little girls and boys’, which preceded one of the earliest children’s radio programmes. The two speakers in unison who deliver the words of the poem are, by implication, the couple depicted in the painting, but this is clearly not a ‘voice’ in any real sense, nor are they what we would conventionally refer to as the ‘speaker(s)’ in a poem. Rather, ‘they’ are a kind of verbalised projection of the mental attitudes which might be inferred from the stance, demeanour and privileged air of the two figures depicted in the painting. The historical overview which would allow the couple to call their own picture ‘The most erotic portrait ever made’ is also a projection rather than a plausible line of thought which could be attributed to the figures in the picture (who are, after all, in the picture, rather than looking at it). Likewise, terms such as the ‘plurality, / ­Fertility, domesticity, barefootedness / Of a man and a woman saying “we”’ move us radically away from what the picture shows, and if it is indeed a betrothal scene, then the couple only become ‘we’ by each saying ‘I’ at an appropriate moment in a ceremony. Nor is any ‘barefootedness’ shown in the picture, though some may be implied if the viewer chooses to ‘read’ in that way the pair of sandals in the lower left-hand corner of the picture. The final proclamation

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Poems and pictures  119 and challenge of the couple in the poem on the matter of ‘we-ness’ seems to entail a way of thinking about words that would be more characteristic of a contemporary poet than of a well-to-do couple in the fifteenth century, for the composite ‘we’ of the poem is conscious of having ‘a vocabulary’, and seems to feel that individual words have a ‘character’ – for them, the word ‘we’ is among the sub-group of words describable as ‘relaxing’, and, indeed, is virtually the paradigm word of that sub-group: The most relaxing word in our vocabulary is ‘we’. Imagine being able to say ‘we’. Most people are in no position to say ‘we’. The couple invite us to imagine the state, real for themselves, but barely imaginable (they imagine) for ‘us’, in which it is possible to say the word ‘we’, to apply it to oneself and another person. This taking of an almost philosophical view of language is extended in the proposition that ‘Most people are in no position to say “we”’. Twinned into a single voice, and living in a bizarrely suspended word of abstract nouns – ‘plurality, / Fertility, domesticity’ and the rest – these two are no more to be read as real people than are the figures that chase each other around the surfaces of Keats’s Grecian urn, or adopt the warrior poses of the forms on Homer’s shield of Achilles. If it is truly the case that ekphrastic poems are often quite ‘tricksy’ – verbally, conceptually and poetically – beneath their proclaimed function of ‘plain speaking’, then what we see in this one is certainly a prime and extreme example of that characteristic. Ekphrastic poems seem to reach out and touch a reassuringly solid and tactile ‘referent’, in the form of the image or art object to which they refer. By interposing the ekphrastic object as a kind of mediating hinge between the two, they seem to simplify the conundrum of how exactly poetry relates to the ‘real’ world. That notion of sympathetic mediation seems, as a concept, manageable, comprehensible and reader-friendly. But in this poem, the poet adopts an aggressive and contemptuous stance towards the reader, just as the figures in the Arnolfini picture do towards those who look at the image in a gallery or an art book, at least in the poet’s reading of them. They too, one imagines, would look down on us as riff-raff, resenting the fact that we can just walk into the art gallery and gawp at their joint portrait, with its seemingly inexhaustible load of arcane high-art symbolism which they would doubtless assume

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120  Reading between the lines us to be incapable of understanding.7 Poetry readers expect poets to handle language in such a way as to produce, in some form, a pleasing aesthetic effect. But there is little of that sort here – the reader is taunted and pushed around, and it is made pretty clear where the power lies (and, yes, lies in that other sense too). How, then, can the effect of such a poem ever be enjoyable? It is about a double portrait whose subjects seem to resent our being there looking at it, and we are additionally insulted by the fictive poetic composite persona, rather than directly by the poet, which may amount to saying little more than that the insult arrives by a circuitous route, after being refracted through the ekphrastic hinge that mediates between the poem’s world and ours. In a way, though, the routing of the insult hardly matters, for the poem seems to mean it. What is it, then, that keeps us reading? Well, perhaps it is something to do with the way ekphrastic poetry presents itself as so down to earth: initially, its subject matter seems very solid and concrete, being based upon an actual object, which in many cases we can actually go and see in a gallery, and which the poet begins by merely describing, so that we probably feel that we know where we are, and what the topic is, rather more so, perhaps, than in the case of the average poem. Durcan’s poem shows how misleading this assumption sometimes is, and how dislocating and disorientating an ekphrastic poem can be when it lacks its traditional descriptive opening phase. In my piece on ekphrasis in Literature in Contexts I attempted a classification of the many different types that can be identified, drawing on the work of earlier critics. The basic types identified by John Hollander are actual ekphrasis, where a real picture is ­ escribed, and notional ekphrasis, where the picture is imaginary.8 d I subdivided the former into open and closed variants: in the open type of actual ekphrasis, the scene in the picture is described as if it were real, so that (for instance) a landscape in a painting is ‘unframed’ and described as if it were a description of an actual scene, initially, at least. In the closed type, by contrast, it is made clear from the start that a picture is being described. However, some of the most interesting examples of actual ekphrasis seem to hover between open and closed, remaining ajar, and that is the case in

7  For a fascinating and readable account, see Carola Hicks, Girl in a Green Gown: The History and Mystery of the Arnolfini Portrait (Chatto and Windus, 2011). 8  See John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art, 2nd edition (University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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Poems and pictures  121 ‘Eden Rock’ by Charles Causley, in which the scene evoked seems to be based on a memory of a family photograph: They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock: My father, twenty-five, in the same suit Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack Still two years old and trembling at his feet. My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat, Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass. Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light. She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue. The sky whitens as if lit by three suns. My mother shades her eyes and looks my way Over the drifted stream. My father spins A stone along the water. Leisurely, They beckon to me from the other bank. I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is! Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’ I had not thought that it would be like this. Something about the name ‘Eden Rock’ (which Causley says he invented9) seems other-worldly, and the whitening sky at the beginning of stanza 4 can be read as representing the moment of dying. We realise that a soldier, dying in an explosion in battle (the moment when ‘The sky whitens as if lit by three suns’), sees his long-dead parents calling to him to cross the stream and come to them. The moment is painless, visionary and easy, and nothing like he had feared. But the scene which is presented in such transparent ekphrasis is rendered in simple and specific detail, fully sketched in, and very precise over brand names, materials, details of clothing and so on. It seems to hover ‘ajar’ between a picnic vividly recalled 9 To hear the poem read by the author, go here: www.poetryarchive.org/ poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=127.

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122  Reading between the lines from childhood, which seems etched upon the memory, and the same scene caught in a photograph of his parents taken by the child from a viewpoint on the opposite bank. If the poem told us unambiguously whether the ekphrastic scene is a memory or a photo­graph, the poem would lose some of its beautifully calculated visionary poise, and the air of strangeness and suspension would be lost. Here, then, is another example of the importance in poetry of a certain strategic indefiniteness. This brief chapter cannot, of course, provide an overview of the full range of possibilities opened up by poetic ekphrasis, but it does, I hope, give a glimpse of the great versatility of this kind of poetry, and of its capacity for raising fundamental issues about poetry. The next chapter concerns poetic sequences of various kinds, that is, poems whose primary context is other poems.

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10. 

Sequences and clusters

Lyric poems are usually brief and compressed utterances, so it would be surprising if poets always wrote just a single poem on each theme or topic that interested them. Quite often an individual poem is merely the interim product of an extended train of thought and speculation. After all, the thoughts which generate a poem must be connected to others, for consciousness is a stream, not a series of separate flashes like those given out by a lighthouse. Frequently, one poem will lead to another, resulting in an identifiable group which addresses the same topic from a range of different angles. Each successive poem will probably be at variance, to some extent, with its predecessor, so that an on-going internal debate develops between the various poems within a group. Such groupings tend to be re­ferred to as ‘sequences’ of poems, but this word implies the existence of a cumulative and progressive argument from poem to poem, whereas many identifiable groups seem less orderly and system­atic than that. Groupings of this less orderly kind might better be called a ‘cluster’ than a sequence, but even that suggests something like an assemblage of material around a central theme. So it is tempting to see a third category, in which the constituent poems seem almost to be at war with each other, with no synthesising resolution being reached. For this third kind of group­ ing I cannot suggest a neat technical term, but I think of such groups as ‘tangles’ of poems. All three types consist of poems which are obviously inter­linked, so that the constituent poems benefit from being read together. In this chapter I will look at one major example of each of the three types of poetic togetherness, as well as citing other examples more briefly. A rough distinction between the sequence and the cluster is that the former is usually intended as a group from the outset, and is given a distinct structure with recognisable phases, as seen, for instance, in the Elizabethan sonnet sequences of Shakespeare, Sidney, or Spenser. Edmund Spenser’s sonnet sequence Amoretti and Epithalamion (mentioned in Chapter 8) was published in 1595, and records the progress of his protracted courtship of the Irish heiress 123

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124  Reading between the lines Elizabeth Boyle, when he was in his forties.1 The time-span of the courtship is emphasised by the two New Year poems, 4 (‘New year forth looking out of Ianus gate’) and 62 (‘The weary year his race now having run’). A recent editor also sees a sustained parallel with the progress of the Christian year: thus, 22 (‘This holy season fit to fast and pray’) refers to Ash Wednesday, and 68 (‘Most glorious Lord of life that on this day’) to Easter Sunday, with the sonnets in between marking the 46 days of Lent. Sonnet 75 (see below) corresponds to the Sunday after Easter, a traditional day for baptisms, hence the references to water in that sonnet. Another important literary context, running consistently through­out, is the ‘courtly love’ tradition, a frequent feature of the Eliza­bethan sonnet sequence, in which a goddess-like woman is praised and adored by a male wooer. In the conventional treatment, the former never speaks, and the latter can’t stop speaking. But the later poems of the Amoretti have a slightly more ‘unconventional and characterized’ mistress.2 For example, in the well known 75, the mistress answers back: the poet has written her name in the sand, repeating the action when it is washed away by the waves, for which she modestly rebukes him: One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washèd it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide and made my pains his prey. Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay A mortal thing so to immortalise; For I myself shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wipèd out likewise. Of course, the poet has the last word in the sestet of the sonnet, asserting his power to immortalise her name in verse. In 74 (‘The three Elizabeths’ sonnet, considered earlier) social and familial considerations were emphasised, and this is balanced by 75, which is more private and personal, while both 74 and 75 concern the writing of the name ‘Elizabeth’. Indeed, there is evidence all the

1  To see the complete Amoretti sequence, go to the Electronic Text Center of the University of Virginia Library at http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/ Spe2Amo.html. 2  See Dominic Head (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, 3rd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 27.

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Sequences and clusters  125 way through of similar strategic shaping and juxtapositions of poems. In addition, a sonnet sequence usually has a gradual shift of atmosphere which becomes evident as it goes on. For example, in the second year of the Amoretti, after sonnet 62, the tone and content become more overtly erotic as the lover’s fortunes begin to change and a sense of ‘closure’ prevails as the speaker’s goal of marriage is successfully attained. Such development of ‘plot’, mood and colouring is another feature which makes the term ‘sequence’ seem appropriate for these large-scale sonnet collections. Further, most sonnet sequences run continuously from start to finish, without formal sections or divisions into sub-groups, so an alertness to gradual shifts as the sequence moves on is one of the qualities expected of the reader. This alertness, by definition, must run across the boundaries between individual sonnets, recognising sub-groups or sub-clusters within which all the poems focus on a particular trope or issue, and picking up progressive shifts of mood within the speaking persona from pessimism towards optimism, or from bafflement to realisation. Of course, not all poetic sequences are sequences of sonnets. The epic poem is another kind of sequence, usually written in blank verse, like John Milton’s religious epic Paradise Lost (1667), which tells the Christian story of the Fall and Redemption of humanity, and was originally divided into 10 ‘books’. The latter term misleadingly implies the self-sufficiency of each of these constituent parts, but they are actually much more like chapters in novels. Similarly, Wordsworth’s personal epic The Prelude, which was published after his death in 1850, is also in blank verse, and is made up of 14 books, which had been 13 in the original 1805 text. Wordsworth himself called the books ‘parts’, indicating more directly that each is merely a portion of a larger whole, and the titles of the parts were added by the first editor of the poem, Ernest de Sélincourt, while the overall title (The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind) was given to it by his wife Mary. Each of The Prelude’s major parts is a continuous stretch of narrative and reflection covering a significant episode or period in the poet’s early life. The poem was originally intended to be the prepara­tory piece for ‘a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society, and to be entitled The Recluse; as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retire­ment’. That poem was never written, except for the single part which became The Excursion, so the autobiographical poem, in spite of its title, is not a prelude to anything except the life whose early years it describes. The notion of ‘philosophy’ in the

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126  Reading between the lines never-executed poem gives a rationale for the preliminary poem in which reflecting on events, and on their causes and effects, is given equal weighting to the narration of the events themselves. These examples of the epic sequence suggest that, while a sequence is usually planned as such from the start, the large scale of the enter­ prise often means that the overall plan is not carried out in full, but is revised and modified in the course of composition. By contrast with the formal sequence, the ‘cluster’ is a set of poems which grows without being formally planned. In some cases, the group might not even have been formally named as such by the poet, and may have been retrospectively identified as a group only by critics. There are many such clusters in the canon of English poetry, all of which repay ‘co-textual’ reading. Poets have frequently used the extended cluster as a way of working through the unpredictable stages of grief and bereavement, as in the case of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, discussed earlier. Another example is the set of 18 (later 21) poems included in Thomas Hardy’s Satires of Circumstance (1914) under the title ‘Poems of 1912–13’. These were written following the sudden death of his first wife (from whom he had long been estranged, though they had continued to live in the same house). They are indebted to such predecessors as Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Following his wife’s death, in November 1912, Hardy revisited many of the sites of their courtship 40 years earlier, and in the poems he seems to be seeking some form of retrospective (or back-dated) recon­ ciliation with her. Critics have debated the question of whether this group has an overall form and structure, but it is arguable that the goal of reconciliation, which in this context really just means peace of mind, is never attained.3 A more recent cluster, which is frequently compared with Hardy’s ‘Poems of 1912–13’, and may, in turn, have been inspired by them, is Douglas Dunn’s poems in response to the death of his first wife, Lesley Dunn, who died of cancer in 1981. Dunn’s book Elegies was published in 1985 and won the Whitbread Prize that year. Dunn says: ‘I didn’t think of it as a collection at first. I just wrote a number of poems, although I knew I was writing about the same subject again and again.’4 This remark encapsulates the

3  For a useful essay on this topic by Tim Armstrong see: http://personal.rhul. ac.uk/uhle/012/Poems%20of%201912-13.pdf. 4  Douglas Dunn, ‘Profile: Speaking from Experience’, Guardian, 18 January 2003, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/jan/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview24.

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Sequences and clusters  127 improvisatory element which often seems present in the extended cluster. The poems gain their strength from a starkness of diction that seems a correlative of grief (as in the first two and a half lines of the four lines quoted below, from ‘The Kaleidoscope’), but this is combined with a constant ingenuity of metaphor and effect (as in the remaining line and a half of the quotation): I climb these stairs a dozen times a day And, by that open door, wait, looking in At where you died. My hands become a tray Offering me, my flesh, my soul, my skin. Another collection in the line of In Memoriam, the ‘Poems of 1912–13’ and Elegies is Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters of 1998, a collection which breaks his long silence about his wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, who had committed suicide in 1963. Published soon after Hughes’s own death, this collection sold over half a million copies and was much praised for its ‘rawness’ and directness of feeling. A final recent example of the ‘bereavement cluster’ is Christopher Reid’s A Scattering, which won the Costa Book Award for 2009. The spousal bereavement cluster seems mainly a male phenomenon, and part of its interest lies in how often (in male hands, at least) it exemplifies the ‘reticence’ which Auden saw as the essence of poetry.5 But at the same time, the spousal elegy, as we might call it, tends to become more overtly emotional than men usually allow themselves to be. It is, at any rate, a sub-genre which has produced some of the best-selling poetry books of recent years. Personal bereavement, however, is largely a private matter, and these clusters have the ostensible air of privacy which per­vades a diary. By contrast, we can take as our main example of the cluster Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, first published in 1939, which records at length the public mood and atmosphere of London during 1938, as it became increasingly obvious that war was inevitable. Significantly, a ‘journal’ is a less private and personal document than a diary, and though it can also contain personal elements, these are usually subordinated to the exposition of more public concerns. The cluster was written in the build-up to and in the

5 At the end of ‘The Truest Poetry’ he says ‘love, or truth in any serious sense, / Like orthodoxy, is a reticence’; quoted by Barbara Hardy, ‘The Reticence of W. H. Auden’, in The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling Poetry (Athlone Press, 1977), p. 87.

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128  Reading between the lines aftermath of the Munich Crisis, and it begins as the speaker returns to London after the summer holidays: ‘And so to London and down the ever-moving / Stairs / Where a warm wind blows the bodies of men together / And blows apart their complexes and cares’. The animated neon whisky advert in Piccadilly Circus, in which ‘Johnny Walker moves his / Legs like a cretin’, seems to promise the only possible escape, and in the Lyons Corner House, like a nightmarish premonition, ‘the carpet-sweepers / Advance between the tables after crumbs / Inexorably, like a tank battalion’ (p. 109). Arriving back at Parliament Hill Fields near where he is living, the speaker notices with foreboding the preparations for the building of anti-aircraft batteries. This is the spot from which the whole of London seems spread before the viewer, with St Paul’s Cathedral visible in the distance, the place where an onlooker is most likely to be struck with a sense of the vulnerability of the city to air attack – from here the narrator of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds gazed out across the ruins of London, and noticed ‘a huge gaping cavity’ in the western side of the dome of St Paul’s. Such are the speaker’s fears as: Hitler yells on the wireless, The night is damp and still And I hear dull blows on wood outside my window;   They are cutting down the trees on Primrose Hill. The wood is white like the roast flesh of chicken,   Each tree falling like a closing fan; … They want the crest of this hill for anti-aircraft,   The guns will take the view And searchlights probe the heavens for bacilli   With narrow wands of blue. (p. 113) The cluster ends with a Christmas visit to Barcelona, a city which shows London its future, already enduring black-out and bombing, with people sleeping in the Metro. ‘Tonight we sleep / On the banks of the Rubicon – the die is cast’ (p. 153). This sequence, then, achieves a powerful blend of public events and private life. A certain balance between the public and the private spheres is also achieved in a major post-war example of the extended politicised ‘journal’ poem – Robert Lowell’s Notebook, 1967–68. Lowell explained in an interview how ‘for six years I wrote unrhymed

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Sequences and clusters  129 blank verse sonnets’, the aim being ‘to snatch up and verse the marvellous varieties of the moment’.6 This remark again encapsulates the open-endedness which is characteristic of the cluster, and the way it is allowed to unfold along with the events it records. It is true that private psychological and marital crises in Lowell’s life are also reported in Notebook, but as Steven Gould Axelrod argues in Robert Lowell: Life and Art (1978), Lowell’s political activism is the ‘motive and thematic centre’.7 Thus, his description of the October 1967 peace march on the Pentagon in opposition to the Vietnam War (‘March 1’) gives a vivid sense of the uneasy exhilaration of the middle-aged intellectual’s first participation in a group action – ‘lovely to lock arms and march absurdly locked / (unlocking to keep my wet glasses from slipping) / to see the cigarette match quaking in my fingers’ – and the historical contextualisation compares the unaccustomed demonstrators to the raw recruits of the Union Army in the first battle of the Civil War, which had taken place nearby: then to step off like green Union Army recruits for the first Bull Run, sped by photographers, the notables, the girls … fear, glory, chaos rout … our green army staggered out on the miles-long green fields, met by the other army, the Martian, the ape, the hero, his new-fangled rifle, his green new steel helmet. When his generals expressed anxiety about the fact that his army was untrained, Lincoln had said that both sides’ armies were ‘green’, and Lowell’s account of the day of the march gains resonance from this allusion, placing the bathos of the vulnerable middle-aged self against the backdrop of American history. The third type of poetic grouping is the kind I provisionally called the ‘tangle’, in which the constituent poems seem to be seriously at variance with each other. A good example is the four-poem set written by W. B. Yeats about Robert Gregory, a much younger man who was the son of his friend and patron Lady Gregory. He was an army pilot, and was killed when his plane was shot down on 4 March 1918. The first of the four poems, ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’, written in the immediate aftermath of his death, is the longest piece in the group, and is in the form of a quasi-dramatised narrative. The second is a calmer, reflective poem of 12 eight-line stanzas called ‘In 6  See note below. 7  Drawn from www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=4181.

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130  Reading between the lines Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, written in May–June 1918. The third and best-known is the brief elegy ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, begun at the end of June 1918, and the last is ‘Reprisals’, a bitter, unversed poem of 24 lines, written in 1920. This group, in turn, falls into two distinct sub-groups: the second and third are public, rhetorical poems which are widely studied and admired, while the first and last are like the troubled ‘sub­conscious’ or ‘repressed’ of those two glamorous, popular and confident poems. These two poems are seldom much liked by readers, and they bring up distinctly unedifying subjects, such as the violence of the Irish Civil War of the 1920s, and the airman’s pride and pleasure in killing.8 The four can fruitfully be considered together as a very troubled ‘textual continuum’. The reader needs to take them as a group, tuning into the ‘dialogue’ between them, and eavesdropping on the ‘quarrel with the self ’ which Yeats thought so vital to poetry.9 An internal quarrel is certainly seen in this group, for Yeats had very mixed feelings about Robert Gregory. But the quarrel is expressed between the poems in the cluster, rather than within the individual poems. For instance, the unnamed subject of ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ has a single, definitive identity – he is an Irish airman, as the title says, and he is identified with and by that role. He is portrayed as an embodiment of the gentlemanly ideal of absolute self-possession and calm certitude, lost in his ‘lonely tumult’ in the clouds, swayed by no personal animosities, casting a cold eye on life, on death, in that lofty manner idealised by Yeats in the epitaph he composed for himself ‘Cast a cold Eye / On Life, on Death. Horseman, pass by’. By contrast, the Robert Gregory of ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ is just one figure in a procession of the illustrious dead, and he is a man with a triple identity, three times repeated – ‘Soldier, scholar, horseman, he’, rather than someone governed by a single overmastering impulse or vocation. But the soldiering and the scholar­li­ness are not illustrated in the poem, only the horsemanship. He is called the Irish Philip Sidney, a Renaissance all-rounder,

8  I am drawing, here and throughout what follows, on Colm Tóibín’s brief and enlightening book Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (Picador, 2002). 9  Yeats’s oft-quoted remarks on the source of poetry being the ‘quarrel with the self ’, in contrast to the ‘quarrel with others’, which is the source of politics, are in ‘Amina Hominis’, at the start of section V, in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, 1917; see William H. O’Donnell (ed.), The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume V: Later Essays (Scribner’s, 1994), p. 8.

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Sequences and clusters  131 therefore, but based on an English model. The activity most emphasised is hunting, that epitome of the Anglo-Irish ruling class. So that is the argument, the quarrel, encapsulated – is he an Irish airman or an English horseman? Actually, Yeats himself mainly thought of Gregory as a painter, but the words of praise in the poem for Gregory the painter are rather stilted and ambivalent, as if Yeats is tacitly comparing his own status and achievement as a literary artist to this man’s standing as a painter. The poem says ‘we dreamed that a great painter had been born’, strongly implying that this estimation of Gregory’s status was mistaken. Gregory has the ‘sprezzatura’ (that is, the ‘feigned ease’ or natural-seeming facility) of the accomplished artist, so that he sometimes produces high-quality work in several different fields without apparent effort. But while (in Yeats’s view) he may therefore have had the intensity of temperament that an artist needs, he lacks ‘our secret discipline’ (the phrase is used in stanza 9) which is the foundation of real and sustained achievement in the arts. So Gregory is being measured against Yeats himself, and (perhaps inevitably) comes off badly. He emerges as a talented jack-of-all-trades, a kind of failed Peter Pan, though he was already 37 when he died, old enough, Yeats seems to imply, to have produced something of lasting significance. By contrast, ‘Reprisals’, shows an airman who enjoys the thrill of the chase and the kill, so much so as to have neglected his duties as a landowner in Ireland in order to fight an English war abroad. Having downed ‘some nineteen German planes’, the ‘battle joy’ which is ‘so dear / A memory, even to the dead’ inevitably ‘chases other joys away’, and the poem calls on Gregory’s spirit to rise from his Italian grave and have second thoughts ‘about the cause you served’, for, back home, ‘Half-drunk or whole-mad soldiery / Are murdering your tenants’. In truth, the poem’s message is that Gregory is one of the ‘cheated dead’ of Ireland, one of those who were duped into fighting a war on behalf of Britain. Not surprisingly, Lady Gregory, mother of the dead airman, hated this poem, and it was not published in Yeats’s lifetime. It turns the beautifully poised ‘Irish Airman’ poem inside out and lays bare the dark anti-poem which is fighting to get out of it. ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’ is in the form of an eclogue (a variety of pastoral poetry) which presents a stylised conversation between a shepherd and a goatherd, who lament the fact that ‘He that was best in every country sport / And every country craft … / Is dead.’ This ‘all-rounder’ figure is recognisably the multi-talented Robert Gregory of the second poem, but this piece does not name him, and

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132  Reading between the lines switches much of the attention onto the bereaved mother. The two speakers recite in turn their memorial verses, the shepherd speaking of the dead man as a migrating bird whose presence on the demesne was always transitory, and the goatherd commemorating a dreamer ‘Jaunting, journeying / To his own dayspring’, a being reminiscent of the Gregory figure of ‘An Irish Airman’ who is engrossed in his ‘lonely tumult’ in the skies. The culpable rootlessness of this central figure is implicitly contrasted with the situation of the two speakers, who are named only for their country occupations, which root them to a particular bit of ground, so that they seem like the orphaned voices of the territory left behind by the migrating heir of the great house. So Yeats’s argument with himself in these poems is really an argument with a potential self or surrogate self, for he defines and justifies his own life choices through his consideration of Gregory’s. The sequence also engages with issues at a national level, and the order of composition reflects Ireland’s growing disillusionment with its English connection, and its sense of where its own interests and allegiances more truly lay. Increasingly Yeats comes to see Gregory’s abandonment of the home struggle as an act of self-indulgent ir­ responsibility, so that this ‘tangle’ of poems also embodies the shift in Yeats’s own political allegiances after 1916. Sequences, clusters and tangles all bring a number of poems together, the first as a planned progression, the second as a more open-ended group which responds to the unfolding of the events which form it, and the third as a group within which irreconcilable opposites seem to be engaged in civil war. All three can be seen as ‘families’ of poems, some more happy than others.

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Part III. Reading beyond the lines

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11. 

Time and place

This chapter considers how time and place are represented in poetry. The gist of the argument is that time and place as repre­sented in poems can never be precisely aligned with time and place elsewhere in our experience. Poems often focus on a moment in the past at which a particular thought is represented as taking place, and they seek to recreate that moment within the moment of writing the poem. When a reader reads the poem, the thought is recreated again, within the reader’s mind. So time in poetry is always triple layered, comprising the moment of the experience, the moment of the writing, and the moment of the reading. As all events must happen in a particular place, it follows that place, as represented in poetry, must also be triple layered. Hence, there are always three distinct chronotopes, to use the term coined by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). A chronotope is a dual entity, literally a ‘time-place’, and it designates the way time and place are represented in literature. Thus, as the chrono­tope is never fully present in any of the three layers, because it partakes of all of them, so it can never align precisely with time and place as we otherwise know them. That is the argument I pursue in this chapter, using two well known Victorian elegiac poems, one by Tennyson, and one by Matthew Arnold. I should emphasise that the aim is not the provision of a philosophical account of these matters, but an investigation of the precise nature of certain poetic effects. Tennyson’s In Memoriam sequence, comprising 133 poems (or ‘cantos’), was written over a period of 17 years following the death of his university friend Arthur Hallam (1811–33). The early cantos depict the feelings of grief experienced in the immediate aftermath of the death, and in the seventh poem of the sequence the poet represents himself as standing outside the house in which his friend once lived: Dark house, by which once more I stand   Here in the long unlovely street,   Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, 135

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136  Reading beyond the lines A hand that can be clasp’d no more –   Behold me, for I cannot sleep,   And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away   The noise of life begins again,   And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day. The event described in the poem may well have taken place as ­described – that, unable to sleep because of grief at Hallam’s death, Tennyson rose in the early dawn and stood outside the Hallam family home in Wimpole Street. But that event is not taking place as he ‘speaks’ or ‘thinks’ the poem, even though he uses the present tense (‘I stand’, ‘I cannot sleep’, etc.) and calls that place ‘Here’, as if he were writing the poem on the spot, and as if we were reading it or hearing it on the spot with him. Indeed, we could go further and say that the effect of our presence-by-proxy on the scene is to make the reader not just a witness, but a participant in – even the participant in – the event. Lyric poems, which always seek to create the illusion that the ‘I’ is speaking directly to us, try to achieve this effect by a fusion of the three foundational levels of the chronotope – those of the experience, the writing and the reading. But the precise sequence of thought designated in the poem as taking place in that place could not actually have happened then and there. This becomes evident if we think about what is being said, and how it is being said. Firstly, we don’t usually talk to houses, even mentally, or address them (as ‘Dark house’) and invite them to witness what we are doing (‘Behold me, for I cannot sleep’), but that is what the poet seems to be doing here. True, the grammar is a little ambiguous – the house might be taken just as being referred to rather than addressed, but in that case who or what is being asked to ‘Behold’ the poet? And even if the house is just being mentioned, that too is strange, for we don’t usually have to remind ourselves where we are, as Tennyson seems to do when he says the words ‘Dark house, by which once more I stand’. Indeed, the fact that he specifies exactly where he is turns the remark into something like a stage direction, and thereby anticipates the presence of an audience which would need to be given this information. Secondly, if the represented thought were actually taking place on the spot outside the house, the linguistic register would be different. It would probably be more colloquial in tone, for instance,

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Time and place  137 rather than grandly rhetorical, perhaps something like a wry ‘Here I am again, outside the same old house’. So the line ‘Dark house, by which once more I stand’ has a rhetorical formality of tone, as if the words know they are already part of a poem, which is a public performance. Thus, the linguistic form, with its maintenance of poetic decorum, acknowledges the presence of an internalised auditor-listener, or ‘over-hearer’. So we readers are already present as the thought takes place, even though, in the depicted event, the whole point and poignancy of the situation is that the speaker is, and will remain, completely alone. Thirdly – and this is harder to formulate – a thought may indeed sometimes be a sequence of formulated sentences silently articulated in the mind, but thoughts are surely not like this most of the time. Thoughts become fully verbalised only if we are (for instance) rehearsing what to say in a forthcoming awkward, delicate or intense encounter, or getting ready for a formal discourse event, such as an interview or a presentation of some kind. Even then, to be able to recall prior or preparatory thoughts in their fully articulated, verbalised form is unusual. So if the mental events that took place outside Hallam’s house were exactly those written down in the poem, then the poem was already being composed mentally as the poet stood there (which is conceivable), and is not actually a recollection or re-creation of any prior experience at all, but is more like a running commentary on an event which is still taking place. It follows from this that poems are not the recalling of a prior event (as might be required of an eyewitness under police questioning), and are not even ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, as Wordsworth defined poetry in the Preface to the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads. Rather, a poem is an event ‘staged’ for the benefit of a reader, in this case, one whose presence is already anticipated as the silent witness of the speaker’s grief. As Tennyson himself said (according to his son, Hallam Tennyson, in his memoir of his father), In Memoriam is ‘a poem, not a biography…. The different moods of sorrow, as in a drama, are dramatically given … “I” is not always the author speaking of himself.’ So Tennyson’s ‘drama’ metaphor introduces the useful notion of staging or acting the ‘I’ in poems. Thus, the ‘I’ of the dawn moment is retrospectively given a ‘script’ to think with, and this script writes in the presence of an audience that needs to be told where the thinker of the thoughts is as he thinks them. Further, the script writes the thought as if it were still in the process of coming into being, using the present tense throughout. And achieving a sense of that time-suspended state – the state of being forever

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138  Reading beyond the lines thought – seems the essence of lyric poetry, and the primary effect for which it aims, though almost every aspect of it is (to use the word in a neutral sense) ‘contrived’. In the second stanza, the poet asks to be observed, explicitly acknowledging the presence of the implied audience: grammatically, it is possibly the ‘Dark house’ and the ‘Doors’ which are instructed to witness what is happening, but the effect is that the reader is appealed to, and the poet then sees himself as, and as if, seen by others – ‘for I cannot sleep, / and like a guilty thing I creep / At earliest morning to the door.’ The phrase ‘like a guilty thing’ oddly evokes the first scene of Hamlet, also a dawn scene, when, at cock-crow, the ghost of Hamlet’s father ‘started like a guilty thing / Upon a fearful summons’. But what could the speaker in Tennyson’s elegiac poem be guilty of, and why is the notion of guilt raised at all at this point? The ghost in Hamlet represents the victim of a murder, of course, but the speaker in the poem who ‘creeps’ guiltily to a particular door seems more like a criminal drawn back to the scene of a crime. This is the ‘wobble’ moment, frequent in elegies, where the elegist seems momentarily to accuse himself of some kind of complicity in the death, even seeing himself, in extreme cases, as the dead person’s assassin. Here, it takes the form of entertaining a suppressed sense of relief at the removal of a potential rival (Hallam had been viewed by many as a young poet of great promise). So if the middle stanza briefly revives Hallam, by imagining him emerging as usual from the door and shaking his friend’s hand as of old, then in the final stanza the brute fact of his death is reasserted, as ‘life begins again’, but ‘He is not here’. The ‘here’, again, is teasingly multi-layered, and the implication is that he might or might not be elsewhere, like the risen Christ, whose followers arriving at the deserted tomb are told by the angel who sits on the rolled-back stone ‘He is not here’. The unsettling of notions of time and place in poetry, as illustrated here, is particularly marked in the case of elegiac poems, for the dichotomy between absence and presence is also deconstructed as a consequence of the chronotopic disturbance. After all, the phrase ‘He is not here’ usually means that he is somewhere else. We can now consider another great Victorian elegiac ‘moment’ – Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Thyrsis’, written in memory of his friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough, with whom he had shared his undergraduate years at Oxford.1 In the poem, Arnold returns 1 In the poem, Clough is given the name ‘Thyrsis’, taken from the mode of pastoral poetry which Arnold draws upon in his elegy. To read the complete poem, go here: www.bartleby.com/254/95.html.

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Time and place  139 to Oxford after Clough’s death, and retraces one of their favourite walks from student days. The walk leads towards an isolated elm tree on the crest of a hill, and the tree had come to symbolise for them their youthful ideals and ambitions. Hence, the poem culminates (in italics) in a resounding proclamation of faith in the continuing validity of those ideals: Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill. In the poem, Arnold undertakes a commemorative retracing of those earlier walks of many years before. It takes place in what we might call re-created ‘real time’, so that, as we read, we partici­ pate in Arnold’s walk as if it is happening now. The poem uses the word ‘here’ in its first line, as if we readers were already tuned into his thought flow, so that our ‘here’ is where he is, and therefore halfway to becoming by proxy the lyric ‘I’ of the poem: How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!   In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same;    The village street its haunted mansion lacks, And from the sign is gone Sibylla’s name,   And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks –    Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men   To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays!   Here came I often, often, in old days – Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then. If we continue to think of a poem as a ‘staged’ (rather than a spontaneous) event, then we recognise this again as ‘a-chronotopic’ thinking, that is, as thinking which resists the notion that time and place are singular entities. The speaker enters the mental ‘stage’ of the poem, pausing, looking round for a few moments, and then making an opening statement which expresses the wonder­ ing realis­ation that everything around ‘here’ has changed: ‘How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!’ But the mental stage has as yet no visible scenery, so we ask ourselves where ‘here’ is, and again the answer must be that it is multiple: it means both ‘here’ in general – the earth itself, in the eyes of the middle-aged man – and also a specific place, which is the Oxford of his youth. As with Tennyson’s poem, the poet addresses inanimate objects (‘Are ye too changed, ye hills?’), reassuring them that no intrusive strangers are

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140  Reading beyond the lines near (‘See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men / To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays!’). As in Tennyson, there is the strange little guilty wobble, as the phrase ‘unfamiliar men’ seems to revive Clough, and imagine the two of them walking together. But the ‘foot’ which precedes the phrase ‘unfamiliar men’ is oddly singular, and Clough is casually eliminated even from the old-time student walks – ‘Here came I often, often, in old days’ (my italics) – and then hastily (guiltily?) reinstated – he says ‘Thyrsis and I’, with the surely unnecessary self-reminder that ‘we still had Thyrsis then’ (my italics, again). Here the ‘we’ strangely generalises the relationship, as if Arnold knew him no better than anybody else. The second stanza intensifies the sense of actuality and re-​ enactment and further highlights the problems with time and place: Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm,   Past the high wood, to where the elm-tree crowns    The hill behind whose ridge the sunset flames? The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs,   The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames? –    This winter-eve is warm, Humid the air! leafless, yet soft as spring,   The tender purple spray on copse and briers!   And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening. The word ‘here’ in the first line seems to locate the utterance on the ground itself, as if Arnold is speaking these precise words, or, more accurately, sub-vocalising these precise thoughts, actually on the spot. Of course, the poem is more likely to have been composed retrospectively in the poet’s study, so it ought strictly to say ‘there’ rather than ‘here’. But the convention is otherwise, for poems often talk through and walk through a past event, revitalising it, re­visit­ing the spot, rethinking the thoughts. But, we need to emphasise, more explicitly than we did with the first example, that, paradoxically, poetry often re-creates a ‘past’ moment of reflection which in fact exists only in its poetic re-creation; or, to put it more strongly, poems repeat an event which never happened the first time.2 ­Doubtless Arnold really did walk the ground on occasion, and 2  The Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis means something similar when she says that ‘a poem is a translation for which there is no original’ in the preface to Keeping Mum: Voices from Therapy (Bloodaxe, 2003).

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Time and place  141 doubtless he thought about Clough with fond melancholy as he did so. Indeed, there is evidence to this effect in his letters; Clough died in November 1861, and in January 1862 Arnold wrote to his widow, telling her of ‘Oxford, where I shall go alone after Easter – and there, among the Cumnor Hills where we have so often rambled, I shall be able to think him over as I could wish’. However, the composition of the poem seems to have taken place during 1864–65, quite a long time afterwards, if the intention stated in the letter was carried out.3 The poem’s formalised act of imagined ambulatory mourning, with its willed restoration of the aspirational sense of purpose of youth, is made in tribute to Clough, and it ends with a defiant proclamation of the continued validity of the youthful idealism they shared. This represents a typical trajectory in Victorian poetry, whereby the poet begins with a gloomy registering of change or decay, and then assertively proclaims a hope or a resolution to continue to strive, against the odds, and in the face of that pessimism (this movement is seen, for instance, in Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, and in Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’). Yet in the poem the visit to the familiar locale is happening, not a few years earlier, but ‘To-night’, in a moment transposed to the present, as the speaker is in the act of seeking out the once familiar route again (‘Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm’). So the powerful impression conveyed by the poem is that the walk is taking place now, at this moment when we are reading about it, and, indeed, that we ourselves have become Matthew Arnold, carrying out that action, for how else could we know his thoughts as they are still in the process of becoming thoughts? Thus the poem purports to make Arnold’s thoughts think within us. An extreme way of formulating this would be to say that the persona in lyric poetry is always none other than the reader. And this fusion of identities is the logical end-point of the chronotopic triple layering we have been exploring, for the end-point is that we ourselves as readers are thinking the represented thinking of the poet. The nature of the poetic effect of causing the poet’s thoughts to think (or rethink) within the reader was brought vividly home to me on a rainy day when I was due to give a talk based on the material of this chapter. Because of bad weather that morning, I had avoided the path I usually take up to the campus, knowing it would be muddy, and used a route that joined another path further 3  For all these details, see the note to the poem in Miriam Allott (ed.), Matthew Arnold (The Oxford Poetry Library; Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 206.

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142  Reading beyond the lines up – but I wasn’t exactly sure where, and ‘heard’ myself wondering ‘Runs it not here, the track up to the sports centre?’ So Arnold’s poetically staged thought was thinking within myself, not really surprisingly, because, as I walked, I was mentally working out what I would say that evening on the subject of time and place in poetry. Even so, when actually giving the talk, I was not merely repeating the thoughts on the subject I had had earlier in the day. I was building upon them, but also rethinking the topic as I spoke. So the relation between the talk and the preparation on which it was based is similar to that between the poem and the thoughts and prior experiences on which the poet draws, but is never merely reproducing in the resulting poem. In neither case is the end-product (the talk or the poem) merely a copy of something which previously existed, or a replaying of a thought-event which took place at an earlier time. So Arnold stages a ‘now’ (‘This winter-eve is warm’) and a ‘here’ (‘Runs it not here’), but in reality the poem is its own time and place. We cannot enter it, but we are allowed to look into it, rather as visitors to a country house might be allowed to look into a carefully composed period room from behind a perspex screen or a rope barrier. The room’s careful composition is designed to give it an air of spontaneous everyday life (a dress is thrown, as if casually, over the back of a chair, a book left open on a bedside table). But the tell-tale ‘frozen’ effect of the depicted ‘life’ cannot quite be effaced, and there is an indelible sense of a casualness which has been too meticulously thought out and contrived. Or, to put it differently, in the poem there is always a professed ‘now’ which for us can only ever be an artificially frozen ‘then’, and a pretended ‘here’ which must always remain a ‘there’, from which we are separated by a screen or barrier of one kind or another. Thus, when John Donne begins a poem with the exclamation ‘I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did till we loved’, he uses the present tense ‘I wonder’ – but when, we might ask, did he wonder that, exactly? For isn’t his use of the present tense in ‘I wonder’ quite different from what is happening when someone looks up suddenly and says ‘I wonder what time it is’. In that instance, the wondering is being done simul­taneously with the making of the remark, and Donne too tries to sound as if he has just had this thought, and has just looked up and said it to the person concerned – he uses, for instance, the casual spoken phrase ‘by my troth’. So likewise, in his elegiac poem, Arnold tries to impart a hint of the drifting quality of thought as it is in process by occasionally evoking the tone of casual speech

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Time and place  143 or thought patterns. Thus, he asks himself ‘Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm’, showing the typical inversion pattern of many casual utterances; thus someone might say ‘He’s quite a talker, your dad’, an inverted form which feels more casual and friendly than ‘Your dad is quite a talker’. A non-inverted form of Arnold’s sentence might be ‘Does the track by Childsworth Farm run [somewhere] here?’ But this seems a more polite and formal turn of phrase, as might be used if stopping to ask directions of a passer-by, and the colloquial inversion Arnold employs seems more suggestive of reflective self-address. That, at least, is the intention. In reality, it probably has the effect of reminding us that nobody is actually thinking, here and now, in the poem, just as the opened book by the bedside in the displayed room reminds us that nobody, in fact, is halfway through reading it. The speaking and thinking depicted within the space of the poem are never exactly what they purport to be, and the events are ambered within their artificial ‘here’ and ‘now’ and fixed into an oddly ‘frozen’ kind of virtuality. As readers, we can only look into it, never able to lift the velvet rope and pass into its suspended world. It is, in the fullest sense, a composition, a performed locale, a lyrical space set apart in which is staged a timeless time and a placeless place. I will end by briefly explaining why, in writing about the representation of time and place in poetry in general, I have chosen to use examples which are both elegies. The elegy is in many ways a puzzling form of poetry, but a key motif is always to seem to want to suspend time and circumstance. Though one person is dead, another continues to speak to them, often addressing them directly as ‘you’. It is not really speech, because the addressee cannot hear what is being said, but even while knowing this, the speaker creates the illusion that there is a listener, and that a communication really is taking place. Often, a past moment is intensely relived in the memory, so much so that time seems to be reversed or suspended, and all these features are ones I am suggesting are found in lyric poetry in general. On these grounds, it seems natural to take the elegy as in some way axiomatic, and potentially representative of fundamental aspects of poetry. Elegies often contain conflicting and contradictory feelings which are held together in an uneasy stasis, the distinction between past and present is often blurred, and the elegist often returns to the ground of first encounters with the person who is now dead (as Thomas Hardy does in his 1912–13 sequence of poems about his first wife). But often the motives and effects of these revisitations are to some degree obscure or

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144  Reading beyond the lines ambiguous. All these elements make the elegy seem the natural ‘ground’ for a discussion of time and place in poetry. In the next chapter, by contrast, the chosen ground for discussion is a range of ideas put forward by recent literary theorists.

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12. 

Poetry with theory

In the 1980s and ’90s, at the height of the so-called ‘theory wars’ between traditional and theoretical approaches to literature, the notion of close reading was treated with great suspicion. Terry Eagleton, for instance, wrote that calling for close reading ‘suggests an attention to this rather than something else: to the “words on the page” rather than to the context which produced and surrounds them’.1 If it were true that the context ‘produced’ the text, there would be little point in studying anything but context. But it isn’t, of course. The recommended antidote to close reading was theorised reading, the kind practised by structuralist, poststructuralist, feminist and Marxist readers, and first identified as a distinct approach to reading in Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice (1980). It might be concluded from the widespread acceptance of this dichotomy between the close and the theorised that theorised reading isn’t close, and close reading isn’t theorised. With the benefit of hindsight, it has become clear that neither of those statements is valid, for a great deal of theorised reading is very close, and much close reading is very theorised, especially when the underlying theory is not made explicit. But matters at the time seemed otherwise, since close readers were happiest when getting on with their (literary) reading and least so when called upon to set out the theories and assumptions upon which their practice was based. Likewise, theorists seemed best pleased when there was no (literary) text at all in the classroom, and they could conduct their blue-skies discourse about the concept of ‘the literary’ without much reference to any specific works of literature. So the false antithesis between close and ­theorised ways of reading remained dominant in litera­ ture teaching for more than 20 years. The theorists insisted that we should look outwards from the text – towards concerns hitherto those of history, psychology, linguistics and philoso­phy – while close readers continued to look inwards at the text itself, pondering its structure, vocabulary, formal devices, nuances and literary prece­dents. What we actually needed was a Janus-faced critique

1  Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1983), p. 38.

145

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146  Reading beyond the lines which could look both ways at once, but the fog of war made that difficult to see, and the result was the dominance of a way of doing literary studies which pushed literature to the edge of its own disci­ pline. Indeed, it sometimes seemed that the discipline of literary studies was about to disappear. This is not the place for a detailed summary of the history of that time, and all that needs to be said now is that that time is self-evidently over. After all these years, I still believe that the intro­ duction of an element of literary theory into our reading remains a valid practice which can enable us to see afresh, so long as we aim to read the text with theory, rather than by theory, and seek to use theory rather than merely apply it. That is the process, and the distinction, which I seek to exemplify in the present chapter. It is perfectly possible, of course, to read poetry without reference to any specified literary theory at all, but my point here is that the use of theory can help us to appreciate and enjoy poetry and see unfamiliar aspects of it. To illustrate this, I will discuss three poems about women. These are contemporary poems by different authors, but they form what seems to me a cohesive set, and in reading them I will use varieties of literary theory related to feminism. The three poems all show women working, but they are working in ‘extreme’ occupations, raising issues about ‘gender roles’, among other things. And all three of the figures depicted in these different ‘extreme routines’ are in some sense putting on a performance. When you have read the poems, you may or may not be surprised to learn that they were all written by university lecturers in English, but I won’t name the three authors, so that you can, if you wish, explore your own assumptions about the gender of the authors as you read the chapter. However, if you would rather know the gender of the author before reading each poem, the titles of all three can be found in the ‘List of poems discussed’ at the end of the book. Here is the first: The Peepshow Girl Amongst the long grass Of down-town Berlin Manet settles Behind shutter five And begins to sketch.

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Poetry with theory  147 She flexes her back, Turns on a stare. Other shutters shoot up. She rotates – her back Curved to Picasso She knows that Degas Is watching her legs. Coins fall through the slots The shutters shoot up For a minute; clatter down. Her limbs drift through postures The minutes fall. She will leave fully clothed – A throng already gathering For the next session – Take the U-Bahn with tourists, Schoolboys out after hours, The unmarriageable, the deserted, The curious street artist – Disquieting them with avid eyes. In this poem, there is a juxtaposition or blending of two scenarios. The first shows men in a sex club in the Berlin red-light district putting coins in a slot to look at a naked woman, each customer occupying an individual booth in a circle of booths which surround the ‘peepshow girl’. The second scenario shows the (male) artists Manet, Dégas and Picasso making paintings of nude models to produce famous works of art. The juxtaposition of the two scenarios is potentially reductive, tending to reduce art to the ­ level of furtive voyeurism, and we will ask later whether the poem accepts, or resists, or in some way finesses that view. The poem is externally focalised, meaning that the woman in the centre, who is being peeped at by punters and readers alike, is not the ‘speaker’, but the ‘spoken about’, and is referred to as ‘she’. As a way of reading this poem with theory, we might begin by drawing upon works of art history, art theory, literary theory, film theory or feminist theory. For example, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Art (1956) by the art critic Kenneth Clark (1903–83) is one relevant and highly influential text in art history. In writing

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148  Reading beyond the lines about a better-known (but not a better) poem about an artist’s model – Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Standing Female Nude’ – Danette DiMarco draws on Clark’s distinction between ‘the naked’ and ‘the nude’: the naked is the raw, corporeal matter of the body which is the object of erotic desire, tender reactions, sadistic impulses and so on. The nude, by contrast, is the body as represented in art, idealised and re-formed, presented in terms of symmetry and order, and prompting reactions concerned with the spiritual, the sublime and quasi-religious feelings of awe.2 But when practised by the male artist on the female model, DiMarco says, we have an example of ‘male theorizing about the nude, itself the visual art form which is probably the most concrete example of this gender imperialism’. So the process of producing an image in art of a naked woman is being read in ‘colonial’ terms (as indicated by the critic’s use of the word ‘imperialism’): what is going on, says the critic, in this process of imposing ideals of ‘order and symmetry’ on images of the female body is actually a form of ‘gender imperialism’, that is, the imposition of the will of the stronger on the terrain of the weaker. According to Clark, the artist sees, not just a naked, or nearly naked, woman (as do the punters in the nightclub where the peepshow is taking place), but also a ‘nude’, which is an idealised, transcendent figure, a figure more at home on the walls or ceiling of a great palace, rather than the walls of a laddish bed-sit. This idealised female form, for art theorists like Clark, becomes a spiritual emblem; it is not primarily a representation of the fleshly being of a specific person, so much as the disembodied essence of the ‘human-as-divine’. Thus, Clark’s emphasis on the way ‘the nude’ differs from ‘the naked’ foregrounds the male artist’s act of imposing an ideal order upon the female body, and thus has the effect of categorising the naked as belonging (says DiMarco) to ‘the inferior, female set of the body, whereas the nude is an extension of the elevated male attributes associated with the mind’. Clark’s is the kind of thinking which is challenged in both Carol Ann Duffy’s well known poem and in ‘The Peepshow Girl’. But note a difference: Duffy’s poem is internally focalised – in other words, it

2 See Danette DiMarco, ‘Exposing Nude Art: Carol Ann Duffy’s Response to Robert Browning’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 31/3, 1998. Chosen for issue 3 (‘Representing Women’) of a four-volume set entitled  The InterArts Project. To read the Carol Ann Duffy poem, which is a dramatic inner monologue by an artist’s model, go here: http://lacymarschalk. blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/napowrimo-poem-carol-ann-duffys.html.

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Poetry with theory  149 presents the thoughts of a poetic ‘character’ or persona who refers to herself as ‘I’: an extremely reductive view of art, we might think, is being expressed in that poem, but by a ‘character’ or a ‘persona’ whose circumstances would make it difficult for her to view the matter in any other way. In Duffy’s poem, we are the model as we read – we become the lyric ‘I’, in the process of identification with the speaker described in the previous chapter. But in ‘The Peepshow Girl’ we look at the model, and thereby inevitably (it can be argued) collude in her objectification. Yet, importantly, she looks back at us in the poem, and there is a good deal of textual emphasis on her looking – early on she ‘Turns on a stare’, as if this is a defensive attribute in which she can ‘clothe’ herself at will, while towards the end, when ‘She will leave fully clothed’, the stare becomes an o­ ffensive, rather than a defensive, weapon, and she disquiets ‘with avid eyes’ those who seem sexually disadvantaged or disempowered – ‘Schoolboys out after hours, / The unmarriageable, the deserted’. So the gaze, or the predatory stare, is not seen here as an exclusively male attribute; rather, the predatory ‘gaze’ is itself a technique in a performance repertoire available to both men and women. This notion of the ‘male gaze’ was coined by the film critic Laura Mulvey in her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, first published in the film journal Screen in 1975.3 Mulvey talks of ‘the controlling male gaze’ (p. 33), which presents ‘woman as image’ (or ‘spectacle’) and man as ‘bearer of the look’ (p. 27). Men do the active looking; women are there to be passively looked at. The cinematic codes of popular films, she says, ‘are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego’ (p. 33). By contrast, the peepshow girl in the poem ‘returns the gaze’, so to speak, as if empowered rather than intimidated by the prurient male stares under which she performs. Another influential book – famously so in opposing the views of Kenneth Clark – is John Berger’s counter-polemic Ways of Seeing (1972). Berger remarks that the cultural norm in western society is that ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’, and he holds that women are ‘depicted in a different way to men, because the “ideal” spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him’. These three texts, produced in the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s (Clark, Mulvey and Berger), focus on the ‘sexualised look’ in relation to art, and 3 Reprinted in her book Visual and Other Pleasures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edition, 2009).

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150  Reading beyond the lines they surely help us to read ‘The Peepshow Girl’, a poem which is about that kind of looking, since they home in on issues and debates which seem to lie at its core. The poem asks questions which the critics and theorists cannot resolve for us, so we haven’t read the poem by these three theorists, as if they could just tell us, and the poem, what it means, and what the truth of the matter is. Instead, we have placed the theory texts alongside the poem and set up a dialogue between them, using their formulations to clarify some of the issues raised by the poem. Here is the second poem in the ‘extreme routines’ group: Interview with the Knife-Thrower’s Assistant I am here as warm flesh which could scream and bleed we nurture this potential our living and their pleasure’s need. did it begin with love? a ritual prelude to his nearer aim; or maybe my dramatic hope that if I did, indifference must flame? Whichever, I was wrong our nightly floodlit stare stiffens the deeply wavering gaze the intimate alone may bear. ours is routine communion I chart the boredom in his face he reads the dream of movement in my eye: no unpredicted waking can take place. they wait for blood and their loins stir at the repetition of the hope. he waits for his eye to fail his hand to slur senility signalled in my blood. I wait until I fall cut by one careless thought this is my life and this is all.

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Poetry with theory  151 This poem takes the form of a dramatic inner monologue in which the woman ‘speaks’ or ‘thinks’ within the dramatic situation, without there being any external authorial commentary framing her viewpoint. The situation is that she is partaking in the knife-throwing act, in which she stands with arms outstretched against a cork-lined board, with the knife-thrower hurling the blades so that they land very close around her, so that when she steps away from the board at the conclusion of the act, an outline of her figure is revealed in knives. One of the features of this form of ‘reading with theory’ is that we read a group of related poems together, so that overlaps and symmetries of various kinds begin to emerge. So we might begin by noting the relevance of ideas of looking and the gaze, within the context of issues of gender, to this poem too. And again in this poem, the gaze is reciprocated, and is not just a male-to-female predatory look – ‘our nightly floodlit stare’, the poem says (my italics). The stage act depicted is a kind of public form of eroticism, but the ‘stare’ and the ‘gaze’ are differentiated: the former ‘stiffens’ in a phallic way, whereas the latter is ‘wavering’ and is associated with sexual mutuality and intimacy, rather than with sexual preda­ tion. Indeed, it is worth saying that the ‘gaze’ in current theory is somewhat misnamed: a ‘gaze’ is (surely) a look in which the self is lost, not a look which challenges or scrutinises. Would anybody say, to a person looking at them fixedly, ‘Why are you gazing at me?’ Such a question might betray a considerable capacity for narcissistic self-regard: the question would probably be ‘Why are you staring at me?’ In this poem, the erotic charge of the interlocked gaze of the knife-thrower and the assistant is felt vicariously by the audience, and ‘their loins stir’ (my italics again). The homophone ‘stir’ means (says the Concise Oxford Dictionary) ‘to move an implement round and round in a liquid or other substance’, a process crudely sexualised in the Carol Ann Duffy poem mentioned earlier. The act which is performed on stage is facilitated by the mutually engaged gaze; it is an act of collaborative symbiosis, like love-making, a lifelong phallic ritual which begins with courtship and deflowering, and ends with impotence and senility. In writing a poem, a man might write ‘as’ a woman, that is, he might use an ‘I’ persona who is female (and vice versa): so this poem could be a male erotic fantasy depicting how a man would like to imagine a woman would feel in the circumstances depicted. Equally, it could be a woman writing as she imagines a man might feel about this act; or a woman writing ‘as’ a woman, that is, consciously performing ‘womanliness’, without believing that her

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152  Reading beyond the lines performance is thereby necessarily the more ‘authentic’ of the two (though she might equally, of course, believe precisely that). After all, a real woman plays the role of a woman in a film, so a woman can at the same time both perform womanliness and be a woman. Presumably the gender we ‘are’ and the gender we habitually ‘perform’ will overlap, and usually they will overlap a great deal, but that does not mean that they are identical. Indeed, some theorists would say that there isn’t really a genuine distinction here, since gender is itself a performance, not an essence. This highly influential view of gender is put forward by the critic and theorist Judith Butler, originally in her book Gender Trouble (1990). In linguistics, a ‘performative’ is a set-piece verbal formula, such that to utter the formulated words in appropriate circumstances is to perform the act it designates, as with the words ‘I name this ship…’ or ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’. Such utterances do what they say and constitute, says Judith Butler, ‘a discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names’. Likewise, Butler continues, ‘gender is an “act”, broadly construed, which constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority’.4 If gender is like a linguistic performative, that is, if it is a product which is produced by performing itself, by acting it out, by speaking the appropriate lines and performing the appropriate actions in the appropriate circumstances, then gender is a socially produced entity, at least to some extent, rather than a natural, or wholly natural, one. If, in a certain kind of old-fashioned upbringing, boys had to be told that boys don’t cry, then that very fact is a tacit admission that they do, until they are told they don’t, and then learn not to. All this is a great simplification of Butler’s highly influential thesis, of course, but if we place this kind of gender theory too alongside the knife-thrower poem, how might the poem be read? Firstly, we might point to attitudes or acts which seem stereotypically feminine: the woman is identified with her body, which is presented passively to be looked at and used in a certain way (‘I am here as warm flesh / which could scream and bleed’), her motive for doing what she does is love (‘did it begin with love?’ she asks), and it constitutes the essence of her life (‘this is my life and this is all’). Secondly, the fact that the stage performance is presented as an enactment of a lifelong partnership, beginning at a period 4 From Judith Butler’s essay ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (Routledge, 2003), p. 399.

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Poetry with theory  153 now barely remembered (‘did it begin with love?’) and ending with senility, seems to make the poem itself readable as an enactment of the Butlerian thesis of gender as performance. Thirdly, the knife-throwing act is performable only when the woman is completely still and in a state almost of suspended being (‘he reads the dream of movement in my eye: / no unpredicted waking can take place’), as if the performance can happen only in an atmosphere which is somnambulistic, as if she is in a hypnotised state, living a moment in which she has stepped outside her own being. Fourthly, there is much emphasis in the poem on how the performance is not a coercive act, but one which is collusive and consensual (‘we nurture this potential’, ‘our nightly floodlit stare’, ‘ours is routine communion’, all italics mine), so if it is to be regarded as entirely a matter of ‘gender imperialism’, then there must be a high degree of identification with the oppressor on the part of the oppressed, though this is a well attested phenomenon within studies of imperialism and colonialism. All the same, the degree of mutuality required suggests at least a notional equality between them, for each has to be minutely tuned into every nuance of mood and concentration in the other (‘I chart the boredom in his face / he reads the dream of movement in my eye’) and they have to share ‘the deeply wavering gaze / the intimate alone may bear’.5 As before, Butler’s thesis cannot ‘solve’ the poem for us, but, placed alongside the poem, it certainly heightens and starkens the issues it raises. When I first came across this remarkable poem I was convinced that I had somewhere read another poem about a knife-throwing act, and when I searched Google on ‘Knife-thrower poem’ I was amazed at the number of poems this threw up, most of them not very good.6 One cruder working of the theme, for instance, contains the lines:

5  It is possible that this line contains a transcription error: it would make more obvious sense if it read ‘the deeply unwavering gaze / the intimate alone may bear’. However, this may be an example of what is known as the lure of the facilior lectio (the easier reading), which can prompt interpreters of documents to refuse to entertain a difficult thought and assume that something more commonplace must have been meant or actually written. 6 The poems unearthed by the search include: The Knife-Thrower’s Partner, Douglas Burnet Smith; ‘The Woman and the Knife-Thrower’, Rosita Boland; ‘The Knife-Thrower’s Wife’, Mekeel McBride; ‘The Knife-Thrower’s Assistant Gets It Off His Chest’, Philip Wilson; ‘Cosmo the Fairly Accurate Knife Thrower’, Les Barker; ‘The Dagger Thrower’s Assistant’, Charles Edward Eaton; ‘The Knife Thrower’s Assistant’, James Magorian; ‘The Knife-Thrower’, Violet McDougal.

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154  Reading beyond the lines The knife-thrower holds still, aims. The woman’s outline bristles with steel. She’s been sullen with him. He’s thinking of drawing blood. This seems crudely one dimensional, as do these from another poem, in which the attitudes are similar: The knife-thrower’s wife stands stranded in danger’s glittery geography. A paper heart is pinned in sequin to her breast. She would be afraid if she could see her husband caress each knife, mouth her name before aiming. But the spot-light sews her eyes shut. ‘Slut,’ he says to himself, ‘you whore.’ Now she hears them coming, a sound like bees, a sound of bullets. She wonders if there is a war somewhere. Applause. A held-breath pause. In both these poems, the knife-thrower thinks simple, predictable, misogynistic thoughts. The authors of both poems have written a piece which is focalised on the male knife-thrower, which is to say that though these are not persona poems in which a male ‘I’ is speaking, they are nevertheless constructed from the crudely imagined viewpoint of the male participant in the act. But clearly, both poets feel that they have got to the heart of the matter without much trouble. The poems don’t bother to ask why the woman is just standing there as the knives come whizzing at her, and there is no interest at all in the event as a collusive, reciprocal act which must have behind it a peculiar and complex psychology. What distinguishes ‘Interview with the Knife-Thrower’s Assistant’ from the many inferior poems on the same subject is precisely its interest in the nature of that collusive mutuality, and its convincing attempt to actualise the psychological complexity involved. My own sense of the complexity of the underlying psychology is the direct result of thinking (with a degree of scepticism) about the Mulveyan notion of the male gaze, and an interest in Butler’s much-debated thesis, so

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Poetry with theory  155 in this case it is by reading the poem with the theory that a deeper level of appreciation has, I hope, been reached. Here is the final poem in the ‘extreme routines’ group: Gun Girl Chicago 1929 The gun is at the top of my left stocking On the inside Don’t try to grope me when you draw It’s a 41 on a 44 frame He’s over there two tables from the door Electric blue suit and matching tie And a blonde that matches too. With the second and third shots You shoot out the lights in this bar Then you replace the gun, Don’t worry about the heat of the barrel, I’ve done this before, And then like everybody else Dive to the floor. The poem is about a gangland assassination in 1920s Chicago. The deed is carried out by a professional hit-man at a speakeasy: men entering such places were searched at the door for hidden ‘artillery’, but women weren’t, so the gun girl’s job was to bring the gun into the club and inform the hit-man who the intended victim is and where on her own person the gun is hidden. The other customers would see the killing, but none would dare to testify, and the gun would immediately be re-hidden in the manner described in the poem. This is another dramatic monologue, the words of the poem being what the gun girl whispers to the hit-man to convey the necessary information. Like the previous poem, this one juxta­ poses eroticism and violence. Using terminology derived from narra­tology, we might note that the words give us a prolepsis (or preview) of what is about to happen, and it is also an analepsis (or flashback), in the sense that it relates, by implication, an event that has happened before (‘Don’t worry about the heat of the barrel, / I’ve done this before’) – this is her job, her ‘extreme routine’, hence the poem’s inclusion in this set. In discussing it further I will mainly use the ‘cyborg’ theory of Donna Haraway, as put forward in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinventions of Nature (Routledge, 1991), ­especially

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156  Reading beyond the lines in Chapter 8, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. The ‘cyborg’ is a being which is part human and part machine, the word being derived from cybernetics, ‘the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary); it comes from the Greek word kubernetes, meaning a steersman, which is also the origin of the word ‘governor’. I take the essence of the cyborg to be its hybridity, which rejects the fundamental dichotomy between animate and inanimate, and postulates a being made up of ‘transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities’ (Haraway) representing the abutting edges between human and machine. The cyborg is ironic and perverse, not singular, but internally contradictory, without innocence, and not governed by a single vision. All these ideas come from the cyborg chapter of Haraway’s book, and they seem to sum up the gun girl: she is sexy and erotic, but not feminine in the conventional sense – the reason women were not searched for guns on entering a speakeasy was that it was thought that shooting people was not the kind of thing women did, but in the poem, the gun girl’s emotions are detached and suspended, like a man’s. For instance, she makes ironic quips while engaged in killing, like characters in Jacobean tragedies and James Bond movies (see, as an instance, her remark about the ‘blonde that matches too’) – as Haraway says, ‘the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity’. The gun girl’s skin doesn’t quite seem to be human skin because it doesn’t react to the heat of a smoking gun barrel. Is the killing a bizarre act of public revenge by a woman privately scorned, or does she merely note the blonde as the ideal fashion accessory to accompany an electric blue suit, without having any personal or moral feelings at all about the couple? She is, of course, ‘without innocence’, another of Haraway’s cyborg characteristics, but she is also oddly and disturbingly without malice. For her, there seems to be nothing personal about this killing, no hard feelings – it’s just part of her day’s work. The gun girl’s name seems to identify her as part gun and part girl, and she seems to know the gun more intimately than anything else (‘It’s a 41 on a 44 frame’); she does not seem to require erotic satisfaction (‘Don’t try to grope me when you draw’), or, if she does, the removal and replacing of the gun from the top of her left stocking seems to be enough, and, as Haraway says, ‘cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction’. Significantly, all the other figures in the poem seem to have elements of this ‘cyborg’ quality too, as if the

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Poetry with theory  157 whole population has gone cyborgian: thus, the victim is identified by his ‘Electric blue suit’, with its matching tie and blonde, the clientele of the speakeasy will dive to the floor as one when the action begins, and the hit-man to whom the words are whispered will do his job, no questions asked, like an automaton. But it is the gun girl herself who most transgresses boundaries and deconstructs notions of the feminine: in her different way she is as much of a cyborg, as much a human / machine hybrid, as the Stepford Wives seen in Bryan Forbes’s 1975 film of that name, or a RoboCop, as portrayed in Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film RoboCop. Here again, then, the reader’s ‘placing’ and working out of the gun girl in the poem is facilitated by reading the poem in specific juxtaposition with cyborg theory. These three examples, I hope, show what is meant by ‘reading with theory’: in each case, a specific aspect of theory is juxtaposed with the poem, the ‘aspect’ used being quite specific in its relevance and ‘fit’ with the subject matter, and much more tailored-to-topic than the kind of theorised reading mentioned at the start of the chapter usually was. In that earlier approach, the aim was usually to provide, simply, a feminist reading or a poststructuralist reading of the poem, with the inevitable result that the text tended to emerge as merely an exemplary enactment of feminist or poststructuralist arguments or positions, and thereby deprived of its distinctive identity. By contrast, in reading with rather than by theory, the aim is to juxtapose a precise text and a precise bit of literary theory, knowing full well that neither side can entirely explain the other, and hoping that the text will re-read the theory as well as vice versa (as, for instance, notions of the ‘male gaze’ are partly revised by ‘The Peepshow Girl’ and ‘The Interview with the Knife-Thrower’s Assistant’). So the relationship between text and theory advocated and demonstrated here is the same as the relationship between text and context discussed in Chapter 8. In other words, the theory used should be ‘deep’ in relation to the literary text, rather than ‘broad’, and the text should seem to ‘call for’ or ‘cue’ that particular bit of theory by presenting a problem or a difficulty with which it seems uniquely capable of entering into dialogue. Theory will probably not be able to ‘solve’ a poem’s difficulty and complexity, and make them go away, nor would we want it to, but it should be able to clarify the precise nature of the problems. The problems with the poems discussed in the next chapter arise because the poems themselves are so tiny that almost everything has to be left out.

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13. 

Minimalism and micro-poetry

Compression in some form is widely felt to be a fundamental aspect of poetry, and it is an obvious feature of the short lyric poem, typic­ ally of 12–20 or so lines. But there are two further possible steps down in scale, firstly to minimalism, as seen in forms such as the haiku – a rigidly codified verse style which, in its western form, properly consists of just 17 syllables made up across three short lines, each line usually containing only two or three words. On a similar scale is the imagist poem, popular in the early twentieth century, which is looser and freer in form, and usually a mere two or three lines long. Beyond this, there is an extreme form of com­pression which we might call ‘micro-poetry’, where the page contains a single word, or a modified form of a word, or a fragment of a word, or even just a gesture that draws attention to the absence of words (such as two spaced brackets, with only blank space between them). This chapter considers these two forms of poetic com­pression, and in doing so it will cover some of the more extreme forms of poetic expression. We can begin by looking at the roots of minimalism, which is mainly a twentieth-century phenomenon in poetry. Indeed, mini­ malism, in various forms and across all the arts, was fundamental to modernism, as the twentieth-century cultural revolution in the arts is now known. Minimalism is the most ascetic of all aesthetic ideals, and in its more intense versions it aspires to a stark and austere formalism which stipulates the ruthless removal of all decora­tive accretions until an essential inner core of realised significance is exposed. Several of modernism’s best-known, non-negotiable, cultural pronouncements embodied the minimalist ideal, especially those of major architectural figures, like the Austrian Adolf Loos, who announced, presumably to a shocked bourgeois audience, that ‘Decoration is a crime’ (in his 1908 collection of essays Ornament and Crime), and informed his readers in the same book that he had ‘discovered the following truth and present it to the world: cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles in daily use’. Similar ideas were expressed by fellow architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with his slogan ‘Less is more’, and by Le ­Corbusier, whose guiding principle was that ‘The house 158

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Minimalism and micro-poetry  159 is a machine for living in’ (see his collection of essays Towards an Architecture, 1923). Modernist practitioners in all the arts were inspired by this kind of powerful, almost mystical, rhetoric which talked (sometimes rather worryingly) of honesty, of stripping away, cleansing, purging and so on. The literary figure whose philosophy and rhetoric were most similar to that of Adolf Loos was the American poet Ezra Pound, who was living in London just before the First World War, and was keen to make a radical break with the literary past. Pound said that the average British poem around the turn of the century was like baked compost. In the compost there would be lumpy, half-melted blobs of Keats, Wordsworth and Tennyson. He himself, he said, had been cured of this kind of thing when he read out one of his early poems (from his 1911 collection Canzoni) to his friend Ford Madox Ford, and Ford had literally rolled around on the floor in hysterical laughter. Pound used to say that that roll saved him at least two years of wasted poetic effort.1 The first wave of modernist poets were the imagists, including Pound himself, and his fellow Americans Amy Lowell and Hilda Doolittle (usually called HD), as well as the British writers Richard Aldington and T. E. Hulme. They believed in using ordinary words and subject matter, and in writing brief ‘snap-shot’ poems which focus on a single image (hence the name). An early example is Hulme’s poem ‘Above the Quiet Dock’, which is simply a picture of a dockside scene at night: Above the quiet dock at midnight Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play. This is the kind of minimalism in which the object, or the sequence of actions or perceptions, is presented without comment, and what is striking is how much has been stripped away; many of the elements readers expected to see in a poem are removed, and it is pared down to basics, which is a moment of perception in which some familiar element of life is seen by the poet in a new way. There is no message, no build-up, no scene-setting – all we are given is the 1  See Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (ed.), Pound/Ford, the Story of a Literary Friendship: The Correspondence Between Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and Their Writings About Each Other (New Directions Publishing, 1982).

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160  Reading beyond the lines image itself. But the imagists weren’t satisfied with poems like this and wanted to take the stripping-down process even further. For instance, isn’t the poet doing too much prompting in setting up the antithesis between near and far, between the sublimely remote moon and the homely, childlike balloon? Furthermore, the imagists had read and admired Chinese verse in translation and Japanese haiku poetry, and felt that they needed to trust the image more and allow it to speak for itself. So Pound and his fellow imagists went back to basics and formulated the aims of imagism in a more radical way, and their imagist manifesto was published in a Chicago poetry magazine simply called Poetry. Pound was obviously influenced by the language and findings of the theoretical physicists of his day, and he defined the poetic image as a kind of vortex of compressed, higher-energy material; he called the image ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’. The imagist manifesto called on poets: (1) to offer direct treatment of the ‘thing’, whether subjective or objective; (2) to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation; (3) regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome. The meaning of the third point is roughly that poetic rhythm should seek to follow the rhythm of natural speech, rather than imposing the fixed and regular beat of conventional metrical forms like the iambic pentameter. Notice how the second of the three principles is a direct equivalent of the anti-decorative functionalism which Adolf Loos, in the 1920s, was striving for in architecture; and taking the three imagist principles together, it could be said that they amount to agreeing with Loos that ‘Decoration is a crime’, so that the imagist poem is a poem stripped bare of all verbal adornment, like the stark three-storey façade of Loos’s famous ‘Steiner House’ in Vienna.2 Like Loos, too, Pound had an apocalyptic sense of mission; he wrote ‘As for the future, the Imagists have that in their keeping’. The result of the determination to remove words that made no contribution to the poetic effect (‘the presentation’, as the imagist manifestation calls it) was that imagist poems got even shorter, as if 2 For an image of the house go here: www.jbdesign.it/idesignpro/steiner%20 loos.html.

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Minimalism and micro-poetry  161 they were striving to disappear altogether. Both the next examples are complete poems by Hulme. Sounds fluttered, like bats in the dusk Here, in an effort to convey the quality of certain sounds, Hulme employs a visual metaphor – the sound in question is not like the sound of the bats, but like the sight of them. So the reader has to try to imagine the nature of this synaesthetic visual equivalence, but without being helped by knowing what it is the sound of, for the poem doesn’t tell us that. Nor are we told how the poet feels about it, or why it is being made the subject of a poem. So the imagistic process of stripping away goes very far indeed, so far that it might be wondered whether any essential core of significance has actually been expressed. But that is a risk which every minimalist poem takes, the risk of paring away so much that meaning itself either evaporates and disappears, or else proliferates uncontrollably because too little defining context remains to stabilise it. The piece reads rather like a sawn-off haiku, as if it is waiting for its final line – perhaps something like ‘and your voice is no more’ – which would make this a poem about absence and tender regret. But the imagist, if being true to the Poundian manifesto, would probably reply that the added line would go beyond the image, supplying a ‘bolted on’ significance which would effectively close down the poem’s semantic energy field, and thereby defuse the emotive potential of the image. However, another of Hulme’s two-line imagist poems does rather seem to supply its own closure: Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling This example perhaps gives a better idea of what is meant by seeing the image as an ‘intellectual and emotional complex’. The poem seems to be about very traditional themes, such as the passing of time, and the inevitable cycle of change and decay, themes which are more usually dealt with in poetry in a discursive, meditative, reflective manner, as in Thomas Gray’s eighteenth-century poem ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. If that is the case, then this is a different kind of minimalism from that of Hulme’s ‘Sounds fluttered’ poem, for whereas that one is almost completely open-ended, embodying a pretty well infinite potential for implied significance, the ‘Old houses’ piece seems to crystallise

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162  Reading beyond the lines and compress the residual effect of reading a much longer work, like Gray’s poem, again, or like an Anglo-Saxon poem such as ‘The Ruin’, which has that same poignant sense of the surviving work of long-gone genera­tions. Or even, to be more extreme, like a novel such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which is about youth and age, promise and disappointment, and themes of that grand order. When saying that Hulme’s minimalist poem is ‘like’ a novel, I mean a novel in its residual form, as it exists in the mind a few years after reading, by which time it has probably reduced itself to a couple of images. For myself, in the case of Middlemarch the two residual images are firstly, from Book III, Chapter 27, the old pier-glass; this is seen to be minutely criss-crossed with scratches in all directions after being cleaned innumerable times over the years, but when a candle is held up to it, the scratches seem to arrange themselves into ‘a fine series of concentric circles around that little sun’. Of course, while I could recall the image in general terms, I had to look up the verbal formulation in order to quote it. The second is the famous phrase about hearing the grass grow, which occurs right at the end of the novel. So we have identified in Hulme’s three poems three distinct kinds of minimalism: firstly, the closed kind, where the significance of the image seems to be underlined for us; secondly, the open kind, where the image is left as if uncompleted; and thirdly, the crystallising or compressed kind, where the image seems like a form of poetic heavy matter full of compacted themes or ideas. The first has actual significance, though of a limited kind; the second is all potential significance, because nothing in the poem has been speci­fied and closed down by denotation, and the words operate as a kind of penumbra of suggestibility, hinting at, implying, or suggesting meanings which are never fully spelled out and made present; the third, by contrast, is all distilled significance, for it seems to compress or distil a large amount of meaning into a tiny space, so that we feel, somehow, that whatever we would want to say about the issue or topic in question has already been intuited or anticipated by the formulation in the poem. Whatever form it takes, the imagist poem merely juxtaposes things and seeks to allow the juxtapositions to speak. In the ultra-bare formula, the hinge-word (‘like’, or the phrase ‘is like’) is silently deleted. We can see the word ‘like’ in the Hulme poem which compares a ripple of sound to the flicker of bats in the air; but the effect is more radical if the ‘like’ is left unstated, as in the most famous imagist poem, Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’, which reads:

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Minimalism and micro-poetry  163 The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Pound doesn’t say ‘The apparition of these faces is like petals on a wet, black bough’. What he records in the poem is the impression made on him by faces glimpsed among the crowds in the Metro which stand out strikingly, like wet, glistening petals stuck to the dark, damp bough of a tree. Pound tells us3 that this poem began as a piece of 30 lines, and was gradually reduced to its two-line essence, constituting the compressed, high-energy distillation of the thought, or, in other words, the ‘intellectual and emotional complex’ which constitutes the ‘naked’ poem, the Loosian, stripped-bare artefact. A useful question to ask would be which of the three paradigmatic Hulme poems it most resembles. It certainly feels rather unlike the first, in which the dichotomies are so diagrammatic, with the contrast between the distant and ethereal moon and the child’s forgotten balloon made so explicit, a poem which is made to seem very wordy by being juxtaposed with this one: yet it does embody a contrast just as absolute, that between the modern urban scene of the crowded Metro station in the first line, and the timeless rural image of damp woodland in the second. Perhaps the rural scene represents the escape for which the commuter longs, as exploited in many advertisements in under­ground stations. It doesn’t have the complete openness of the second Hulme poem (the one about the sounds fluttering), if only because of that polarised contrast between its two lines, but it has been read as embodying the extreme compression of the third (the one about the old buildings which were once new). Thus, the bright faces glimpsed in the crowd are linked to something fragile in the natural scene, as if the petals have been blown from the flowers in stormy weather, meaning that they are now dead. So perhaps something traditional about the fragility and transience of life and beauty is being said, but in a highly compressed way. Subject matter of that kind might well be the content of a sonnet, and it has also been noticed by critics that the form of this poem seems to gesture towards that of the sonnet, since it contains just 14 words, with the first line acting as a single-line ‘octave’ with eight words, and the second as a sestet, with six words. Thus the poem seems, as it were, to flaunt its own minimalism, as if taunting lesser poets for their addiction to wordiness.

3 In Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916).

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164  Reading beyond the lines This seems to take us naturally to the ‘micro’ level of minimal­ ism, from where Pound’s two lines may themselves appear self-­indulgently verbose, for at this level, as indicated at the start of this chapter, a poem may consist of just a single word. A controversial instance of the single-word poem is by Aram Saroyan, which was first published in 1968 in the prestigious journal The Chicago Review, then edited by poet Robert Duncan. It was subsequently selected by editor George Plimpton for inclusion in the second volume of The American Literary Anthology, a volume published with the help of a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. The grant enabled a generous payment of $750 to be made to each contributor to the anthology, so Saroyan received that amount for his single word, which led to angry exchanges in Congress.4 It may be illegal to name this poem in print, since it consists of a single word only, which must also serve as its title, and copyright law prohibits quoting such a recent poem in full. However, I have no option but to quote it fully here, if I hope to say anything coherent about it. It reads as follows:  lighght It is perhaps wrong to say that this poem consists of a single word, for perhaps it is not even that, but, rather, just a sequence of letters. Yet within that sequence we can see the English word ‘light’, though the ‘gh’ is repeated within it. What are we to make of it? Firstly, it is worth admitting at the start that minimalist poetry often seems to generate and require ‘maximalist’ commentary. The extreme brevity we are confronted with means that nearly all the elements that usually contribute clues to meaning have been removed, so there is more for the reader to reconstruct. In the same way, if the only clue to a crime were a tiny thread of fabric, then the whole event would have to be reconstructed from that. This would be done by working outwards rather than inwards, for little could be gained by just staring at the fabric. So an enquirer might ask what this kind of fabric is used for, where it is manufactured and sold, who generally buys it, what it means socially, and so on, and in such an enquiry any contextual information at all might turn out to be relevant. 4  I am drawing freely for most of the contextual information on Saroyan’s poem on an article called ‘The Poetry of Light’, available at www.litguild.org/content. php?filename=poetryoflight.html. See also www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/ article.html?id=179985.

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Minimalism and micro-poetry  165 In the case of the one-word poem, the author’s own comments on it are one promising contextual route towards interpretation. He writes that it was inspired by the famous and much-debated closing lines of Archibald MacLeish’s poem ‘Ars Poetica’, which read ‘A poem should not mean / But be’. Saroyan claims that changing the familiar spelling pattern of the word ‘light’ seems to ‘make this ineffable (light) into a thing, as it were – to change it from a verb (the agency of illumination) to a noun that yet radiates as light does’. This seems to return us to the territory of ‘no ideas but in things’, for behind that pronouncement is the frustrated feeling that language is always at one remove from reality. It is a kind of substitute medium which can only gesture towards reality and can never fully partake in it. The shift in the spelling ‘materialises’ the word ‘light’ – ‘The double ghgh seems to work in that way’, Saroyan says. Later he realised (‘while designing a family Christmas card’) that the ‘materialising’ effect could be achieved in other ways – ‘It was a lesson to me that, if you embossed the word, the extra gh was unnecessary’. But, apparently, not just any modification would do the necessary work of ‘materialising’ the concept: when the poem was later reprinted as part of an international survey of avant-garde poetry in which it figured as one of three ‘historical documents’, this happened: ‘the book had been retyped and I was astonished to find the poem misspelled’ (as ‘lightght’). So spelled, says the poet, ‘it doesn’t work. It did not achieve what it was meant to do.’ It isn’t quite clear to me how it doesn’t work, or works differently from the correct version, but it is certainly worth noting that, in the poet’s view, only a specific de-familiarising modification of the visual pattern of the word will create the desired ‘materialising’ effect. The difficulty of knowing how exactly to quote micro-poems also arises, but for different reasons, with the next two examples, where the intended effect might be called conceptual or gestural. They seem at first like different versions of the same poem, but I think they are actually different in effect, as I will try to explain. The first is by Tom Raworth, and is entitled ‘University Days’: it reads complete (on an otherwise blank page): ‘This poem has been removed for further study’. The difficulties of quotation are, firstly, that it seems necessary (and unusual) to have to indicate that the quotation marks are not part of the quotation, and also to say that on the page the statement is enclosed in a box frame, thus: This poem has been removed for further study

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166  Reading beyond the lines The effect of this is to suggest that the words are printed on a piece of card, and the implication is that the card is placed inside an empty display case in a museum or gallery, as when an exhibit has been removed for cleaning or restoration. But the poem works with its title, which is listed on the contents page of the book – ‘University Days’. In the light of this title, the words ‘further study’ acquire an element of irony and humour which they would not otherwise have had, for ‘further study’ is supposedly what ‘university days’ are for. In reality, we presume, no poem called ‘University Days’ actually existed but was withdrawn by the poet before publication, for if that were the case there would be no indication in the finalised book that something was missing. So the poem needs for its effect the adjacent presence of the contents list in which the absent poem is marked as present (so to speak). The suggestion has been made that the piece is actually making a political point about what is allowed to be said in public, who makes the necessary decisions, and how they are enforced, so that we are meant to wonder, when we turn to this page, who did the removing, and who gave them the authority to do so.5 On this ‘reading’, the ‘poem’ (or its absence) invites us to consider how the ‘authorities’ acquire their power to regulate public discourse, prompting us to question social power structures. I do not find this ‘political’ line of argument particularly convincing, but if it were accepted it would make this piece a good example of the ‘extreme compression’ variant of minimalism. A poem which is obviously similar in method is by Charles Bernstein. In the contents list of the book containing this poem, the title is given as ‘This Poem Intentionally Left Blank’, and the page number indicated is 245. Page 245, uniquely in the book, does not have any page number printed on it, but the page occurs in the numerical sequence in its expected position between pages 244 and 246. Page 245 therefore contains only what follows, not in the enlarged bold typeface used for the titles of poems throughout the book, but centred in the position high up on the page where the first line of a poem would normally be: THIS POEM INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK The typographical features used here are as close as I can get to reproducing what I see on the page, on which the above ‘poem’ is capitalised, and italicised, and in bold, sans-serif type of the Arial 5  See http://pathologos.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-is-john-latta-so-bitter.html.

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Minimalism and micro-poetry  167 kind. A blogger’s view of the effect of Bernstein’s piece is that, in a typically modernist way, it is drawing attention to blankness itself. The effect is rather like that of the musician John Cage’s 1951 composition 4’ 33” (‘Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds’), which requires a pianist to sit in front of a piano for that length of time without playing it, thereby making the audience listen to all the ambient noises of the concert hall as if they were music. Cage’s inspiration was the ‘White Paintings’ series of artist Robert Rauschenberg, made at Black Mountain College, USA, in 1951, with white house paint applied to canvas, and nothing else: Cage memor­ably said they were like ‘mirrors of the air’. When displayed on the white walls of a gallery, they draw attention to the absence of all the elements on which the art of painting is based, such as repre­sentation, abstraction and colour. Bernstein’s piece, I agree, gestures back to this high-modernist minimalism, seeking to ‘mirror the air’ verbally rather than visually, and the word ‘intentionally’ within it seems to assert the agency of the poet, as if he is insisting that the medium of poetry exists of and for itself. The final example of minimalism is another poem by Paul Durcan, which is certainly of the conceptual kind, but otherwise difficult to classify: ‘Aughawall Graveyard’ Lonely lonely lonely lonely: The story with a middle only. According to the old cliché, a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, so one which has only a middle would be incomplete, and perhaps thereby made lonely. On the other hand, it might be a short story, for Anton Chekhov’s formulation for writing a short story is that you first write one that has a beginning, a middle and an end, and then remove the beginning and the end, leaving a story which is all middle, but presumably not lonely. However, in the graveyard context indicated by the title, the loneliness and the implied sense of incompleteness suggest a life which is characterised by lack of fulfilment, so a pervasive air of disappointment is conveyed. Seeking information beyond the page, a frequent necessity with minimalist material, as indicated before, one might wonder if there is something particular about Aughawall Graveyard which it would be useful for a reader to know. But Googling the title returns no references to any actual place, and

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168  Reading beyond the lines the only ‘hits’ are references to this poem itself. The most useful is a 2007 news item from Western Queensland, Australia, which is headed ‘Paul Durcan: Irish poet out west’ and gives an account of an outdoor reading by Durcan, who had been doing a period as poet in resi­dence there. This poem is mentioned, and described as ‘the feelingful two lines composed for his father’s gravesite’, which is presumably based on something Durcan said to the audience before reading the poem. As an epitaph, the poem would seem, at best, to defy the convention that something of a comforting nature is appropriate for a gravestone. In reality, no such actual place seems to exist, and Kevin De Ornellas of Ulster University, who provided me with this example, e-mailed in response to my further enquiry that Aughawall is ‘absent from Brewer’s [Dictionary of Phrase and Fable] and from a gazetteer I looked at, so I think that Durcan has invented the proper noun as a sort of generic name for any quiet, western Irish place of reflection and thinking too much’. This poem, then, raises issues about literary composition and its relationship to the rest of our world, and to our processes of introspection and feeling, but in the most oblique and enigmatic way. In their minimalist, or micro-minimalist manner, all the poems considered in this chapter seem to generate a maximalist commentary. Enough said. The next chapter is about poems which cross the boundary be­tween poetry and visual design.

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14. 

Concrete canticles

This chapter is about poems in which aspects of their overall shape are in some way representational or pictorial. One of the earliest practitioners of this kind of poetry in English was George Herbert, whose book The Temple contains well known examples such as ‘The Altar’ and ‘Easter Wings’. In the latter, the two stanzas are formed into the shape of an angel’s wings, as conventionally represented in religious paintings – this poem is further discussed below. Until around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries poems like this were occasional oddities, but, since then, a considerable tradition has grown up of poems which have to be looked at for meaning as well as read for meaning. I will try to map out this tradition in what follows, identifying different ways in which the ‘looking at’ and the reading elements are balanced or blended. I will suggest three basic categories of poems of this type: firstly, the verbal / visual type, in which the verbal element is dominant, and the visual element secondary (as in the case of ‘Easter Wings’); secondly, the visual / verbal kind, in which the visual is dominant and the verbal secondary; and finally, the visual / verbalist kind, in which the visual element again dominates, but the verbal is merely residual, in the sense that the poem actually has no words at all, but traces of some aspect of the reading process are present, as will be illustrated. Again, items in this last category might be considered to be on the extreme edge of the field of poetry. The chapter will consider three examples of each of these three types. For the reader’s convenience, this schema is set out in Table 14.1. The verbal/visual tradition in poetry has a long history. The poem, in such cases, is a mainly verbal artefact of the traditional kind, but it also includes an ‘iconic’ element which tacitly reinforces the meaning. Thus, Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’, celebrating the poet’s belief in the Christian act of redemption, is shaped like the objects named in the title, which are presumably an angel’s wings:1 1  For an image of the poem as first printed in The Temple, go here: http:// churchmousec.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/easter-poems-from-an-inspiredanglican-the-revd-george-herbert/. For a facsimile image of the manuscript of the poem, go here: www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/ view/145/195.

169

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Characteristics

Reading is the dominant element, with looking as a minor level

Looking is the dominant element, with reading as a minor level

Looking is the strongly dominant element, with just a trace element of reading

Type of text

Verbal / visual

Visual / verbal

Visual / verbalist 1. Mary Ellen Solt 2. David Miller 3. Álvaro de Sá

1. Bob Cobbing 2. Ian Hamilton Finlay 3. Ana Maria Uribe

1. George Herbert 2. Guillaume Apollinaire 3. Edwin Morgan

Examples

Table 14.1  Schema for poems whose shape is representational or pictorial

The same applies to this type, which also has strong affinities with conceptual art

This type belongs mainly to the twentieth century and has international roots

This type has a long, cross-cultural history and connections with the culture of religion

Comment

Concrete canticles  171 Easter Wings Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, Though foolishly he lost the same, Decaying more and more, Till he became Most poore: With thee Oh let me rise As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day thy victories: Then shall the fall further the flight in me. My tender age in sorrow did beginne: And still with sicknesses and shame Thou didst so punish sinne, That I became Most thinne. With thee Let me combine And feel this day thy victorie: For, if I imp my wing on thine Affliction shall advance the flight in me. This visual motif perhaps refers to the angel encountered by the women in the Christian story as they come to the tomb of Christ on Easter morning, and are told by an angel that it is empty. So the main iconic or ‘looking at’ element of the poem is the wings shape into which the words of the two stanzas are arranged. When printed as above, the iconic or pictorial shape of the wings is partly lost, since they are lying sideways on the page. So the poem was origin­ally printed vertically, making the wing shape more prominent, though the book would have to be turned sideways to actually read the words, effectively separating the two operations of first looking at the poem and perceiving the shapes which are representative of angels’ wings, and then turning the book and reading it. The title ‘Easter Wings’ is horizontally positioned in the original printing in the usual way at the top of the two pages, at right angles to the direction of the text. So when the book is turned sideways to actually read the poem, the iconic element disappears, in effect, since the shape of the two stanzas no longer seems wing-like, and becomes rather more like an anvil or a slightly squashed hour-glass.

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172  Reading beyond the lines Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, Though foolishly he lost the same, Decaying more and more, Till he became Most poore: With thee Oh let me rise As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day thy victories: Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne: And still with sicknesses and shame Thou didst so punish sinne, That I became Most thinne. With thee Let me combine And feel this day thy victorie: For, if I imp my wing on thine Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

A number of interesting subsidiary iconic effects become evident as the poem is read, and these are more closely interwoven with the text into a verbal / visual fusion. Thus, the ‘waning’ of the penitent without Christ, as set out in the first five lines, and the subsequent ‘waxing’ in the next five, when Christ lends the penitent his help, are enacted in the progressive shrinking of the line lengths from 1 to 5, and their progressive expansion in lines 6 to 10. The same process of waning and waxing is repeated, visually and verbally, in the second stanza. The structuring is carefully measured, so that the progressive linear shrinkage follows a series of equal steps – each stanza begins with a ten-syllable iambic line (iambic pentameter); the second is an eight-syllable (iambic tetrameter) line; the third a six-syllable iambic (iambic trimester) line; the fourth is a four-syllable line with two iambic feet; and the fifth is the single iamb, ‘With thee’ (which is the sixth line of both stanzas), and this structure is then mirrored (that is, reversed) in lines 7 to 10. The ‘thee’ at the end of the shortest line (6) in each stanza is rhymed with the ‘me’ at the end of the longest line (10), which further crystallises the devotional message of the poem, or perhaps we should say Christalises it, a pun Herbert might have liked. In effect, then, textuality and iconicity are more closely fused in these subsidiary effects than in the (literally) overarching ‘wings’ effect, which requires reading and looking to occur in sequence, rather than together. This discussion shows how a verbal / visual poem can be so at a number of different levels, allowing for considerable subtlety and complexity.

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Concrete canticles  173 A similar balance of verbal and visual elements is seen in the ‘calli­grammes’ of the Franco-Polish poet Guillaume Apollinaire, which were published soon after his death in 1918. A calligramme can best be defined as a verbal communication that looks like what it represents, as in Apollinaire’s ‘Il Pleut’ (‘It’s Raining’), in which the poem is patterned into an icon representing the subject matter, so that the lines of the poem are arranged so as to suggest falling drops of rain (Figure 14.1). The effect, though, is precisely visual, suggesting, not the rain falling on us while we are outdoors (in which circumstances, no particular drops or streams would stand out in exactly this way), but the rain viewed from indoors, as it trickles down a window pane, thus making the page itself the containing window frame, through which we look out onto the rain. This idea cues a certain feeling of melancholy, and that is the mood of the actual ‘content’ of the raindrop lines that trickle down the page.2 Here is Roger Shattuck’s translation of the French text: It’s raining women’s voices as if they had died even in memory And it’s raining you as well marvellous encounters of my life O little drops Those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular cities Listen if it rains while regret and disdain weep to an ancient music Listen to the bonds fall off which hold you above and below

These five lines translate the five strings of raindrops in the image, reading them from left to right. In comparison with the Herbert poem, the balance between the verbal element and the iconic element is tipped (literally tipped as we turn the page) a little more towards the latter: thus, the iconic element seems to suffuse, rather than merely frame the text, but the ‘lines’ of the poem, as with Herbert’s, have to be made horizontally linear in order to be read, and as we turn the page round in order to read the text, the iconic effect disappears (since the raindrops cannot be flowing upwards). The third example of the verbal  /  visual mode is from the mid-twentieth century. Edwin Morgan published ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ in 1968. The visual element lies in the way the poem is presented in an upright, card-shaped form, reminiscent

2  I am taking my cue from an article entitled ‘Winged Type’ by Edward Hirsch, available at www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=177216. It re­ prints Roger Shattuck’s English translation of Apollinaire’s French text. He draws attention to Dick Higgins’s comprehensive 1987 book Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (State University of New York Press, 1987).

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174  Reading beyond the lines

14.1  Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Il Pleut’, from Calligrammes (1918).

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Concrete canticles  175 of a traditional Christmas card, while the typeface and lineation are suggestive of the earlier forms of the then high-tech computer print-out (Figure 14.2). The humour of the piece depends upon a top-to-bottom reading of the column of text, as the computer seems to grope its way towards the simple greeting ‘Merry Christmas’ through a series of seasonal approximations, indicating that its memory seems to have located the correct lexical set, and beginning ‘jollymerry / hollyberry / jollyberry’, until it triumphantly reaches, at the foot of the lengthy column, the near-miss of ‘MERRYCHR /­ ­YSANTHENUM’. The computer manifests an en­ dear­ ing naivety and its slightly misguided eagerness to please, rather like that of a clumsy dog, debunks the mystique of impersonal ­efficiency often associated with computers. Thus, the effect lies partly in the visual contrast between, on the one hand, an old-fashioned Christmas card, with its robins, stage coaches and snow-covered villages, and, on the other, the grid-like regularity of the computer print-out. The computer’s inability to hit the target of the clichéd phrase mitigates our latent (and then nascent) fears that computers might be clever enough one day to take over our lives. In the visual / verbal poem, by contrast, the balance of power between the two elements seems to be reversed, so that we first see a visual design which happens to be made of words, and then read the words, if they can be made out. But the words may just be one word, or a repeated phrase, or even just a verbal fragment, rather than a sequence of structured lines of poetry (Herbert), or sentences making a narrative (Apollinaire), or a series of obviously related phrases (Morgan). A good example comes from the work of the ‘sound poet’ and ‘visual poet’ Bob Cobbing, who performed both sound and visual texts in the 1970s with a group known as Koncrete Canticle (from which I have taken the title of this chapter). Texts of this kind were known in the 1960s and ’70s by the generic term ‘concrete poetry’, and recent critics have identified ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ schools of this art. The ‘clean’ school liked to produce texts characterised by cool typographical symmetry and crispness of line and contrast (as will be exemplified in the next two examples), whereas the ‘dirty’ school (to which Cobbing belonged) favoured the incorporation of slips, blurs, typos, overlays and accidents. For instance, Cobbing liked to use sheets that had been over-inked in the duplicator, or had slipped slightly on the drum at one corner, producing a slight twist or ‘torque’, and these characteristics can be seen in ‘Beethoven Today’. In 1971 a poster version was published by Covent Garden Press, and I had it on my wall for many

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176  Reading beyond the lines

14.2  Edwin Morgan’s ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ (1968).

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Concrete canticles  177

14.3  A version of Bob Cobbing’s ‘Beethoven Today’ (1971).

years. It exists in several different versions, most of them monochrome, with a single, circular ‘verse’ (Figure 14.3).3 It seems to be vibrating with energy like a dynamo, humming silently with sound, perhaps suggesting how sound was experienced by Beethoven in his deafness. When the text is scrutinised closely, the word ‘­Beethoven’ can be made out in the centre, emerging from a series of what look like truncated attempts at writing that word, as in the Edwin Morgan poem. The effect is that of words emerging into being from a primal or pre-verbal chaos, as if the act of artistic creation is being imagined. When the eye pulls back from the overall design, it seems to hold the viewer’s eye, as if drawing it into infinity. The second example of a visual / verbal piece is the poster poem ‘Acrobats’ by Ian Hamilton Finlay, a piece which originated in

3 See Lawrence Upton, ‘Bob Cobbing: And the Book as Medium; Designs for Poetry’, Readings, issue 4 (Birkbeck College), available here: www.bbk.ac.uk/ readings/issues/issue4/upton_on_cobbing.

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178  Reading beyond the lines

14.4 One of several versions of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s ‘Acrobats’ (1964).

1964 and shows the characteristics of ‘clean’ concrete. The image is beauti­fully formal and precise, and it exists in various forms, including a colour screenprint, a black on white version,4 and a version on the side of a white-painted house, using letters made out of cork. But it is most effective as shown here, with white letters on black (Figure 14.4). Like the Cobbing piece, it is a static image which gives a strong sense of movement, for it requires the eye to undertake a series of visual gymnastics, causing the viewer to enact the agility and criss-crossings of a troupe of acrobats. Thus, the word is spelled out in various ways across the 15 lines and 9 columns of the piece. Reading downwards from lines 1 to 8 spells out ‘acrobats’, and upwards from 15 to 8 does the same, as does zig-zagging either downwards or upwards from any of the letters ‘a’ in the top or bottom line. As Stephen Bann has said, ‘This is a work that reflexively thematizes a strategy of reading, a process that 4  See Alec Finlay (ed.), Ian Hamilton Finlay (University of California Press, 2012), p. 140.

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Concrete canticles  179

14.5  ‘Catarata’ (‘Waterfall’), a ‘tipoema’ (type-poem) by Ana Maria Uribe (c.1997).

many other successful concrete poems also explore’.5 The text is an image, but the image has to be looked in a ‘readerly’ way, tracking in various orderly lines, rather than ‘sweeping’ more randomly as we would normally do with a picture. In her book Poetic Closure, Barbara Hernstein describes this piece as a ‘visual epigram’, in which ‘one’s tendency and ability to read the letters in various sequences conflicts directly with one’s tendency and ability to look at the symmetrical and stable spatial pattern’.6 I would add that it is the tension between the conflicting urges to read and to look that is precisely the destabilising effect which such texts seek to create. A similar ‘look’ is seen in the work of Ana Maria Uribe, who pro­duced two main series of texts, ‘Tipoemas’ or ‘Type-poems’ and ‘Anipoemas’ or ‘Animated-poems’, in which digitalised texts are programmed to incorporate an element of movement. As she explained in an e-mail to the Canadian organisers of an exhibition of her work in 2003, the Type-poems were ‘limited by one fixed font, the size and position of the page on the typewriter, and the black ink ribbon’.7 The one reproduced here as Figure 14.5 is called ‘Catarata’ (‘Waterfall’), and it is immediately apparent that the piece needs

5  See: http://www.poetrybeyondtext.org/concrete-poetry.html. 6 Barbara Hernstein, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 270. Original emphasis. 7  See www.vispo.com/uribe/datos/aboutAnaMariaEnglish.htm.

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180  Reading beyond the lines only to be looked at, rather than read, for it is made up entirely of the two typewriter characters used to open and close a parenthesis. In combination with the title, we see it as representing a curtain of water, as it might appear to a person looking at a water­fall cascading, or even standing on a ledge within, immediately behind the curtain of water. This way of looking at the text seems at first to have no verbal element at all, since the parentheses are treated entirely as pictorial elements. But what is the factor which justifies our disregarding the parenthetical function of the parentheses? If they had been used (for instance) to make a smiley face, as in the ‘emoticons’ sometimes attached to e-mails, then we would justifiably disregard the bracketing function because they are not positioned in those devices as brackets usually are, which signals that they are to be seen as purely pictorial elements. At this point, though I had looked at this simple design many times, and had used it in lectures, I realised that I had been misreading the title, for it reads in full: ‘Catarata (o Le Parc)’, in the Spanish version, or ‘Waterfall (or Le Parc)’, in the English version. This reminded me that text enclosed within brackets acquires a quasi-invisibility, since brackets (as a teacher of mine once said) always seem to confer the writer’s forgiveness on the reader who skips over the text they contain. So Uribe’s full title suggests that the piece is a double representation of a ‘Waterfall or The Park’, though ‘The Park’ is given in French in both the Spanish and English versions of the title. If a park is considered as a peaceful place, then the pairs of empty brackets may suggest the silence of the space it offers, and the symmetry of the design may imply the formal symmetry which is common in a French park. This is specu­ lative, of course, but it is striking that in a design so simple there should be so much to speculate about. The third and final category is the visual/verbalist, in which the text is entirely visual, but uses some aspect of the reading process. The first example is ‘Moon Shot Sonnet’ by Mary Ellen Solt (1920– 2007) (Figure 14.6).8 Solt’s own gloss on the poem is printed on the illustrated page: This silent poem was found on the first photos of the moon surface published in the New York Times, Sunday, August 2, 1964. There were fourteen lines each containing five symbols (‘accents’) superimposed by scientists to mark off the lunar surface. The

8  Jeff Hilson (ed.), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008), p. 26.

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Concrete canticles  181

14.6  ‘Moon Shot Sonnet’ by Mary Ellen Solt (1967).

moon had relinquished its romantic aura to become a scientific object. The twentieth-century poet cannot address the moon as Sir Philip Sidney did in 1582: ‘With how sad steps, Oh Moon, thou climb’st the skies.’ But ‘Moonshot Sonnet’ affirms the tradition from which the sonnet evolved in the fourteenth century as an international form to be used, like the new concept of form ‘concrete poetry’, by poets writing in many languages in many countries. The fourteen lines the scientist ‘wrote’ could be divided into the ‘octave’ and ‘sestet’ of the traditional Italian sonnet. But the silent language of the symbols was new and commensurate not only with the moon’s new scientific status but with its timeless mystical silence.

So which aspect of the reading process does this wordless poem require us to use? Firstly, we have to look at the grid-line pattern as if it contained words, seeing in it the classic shape of the sonnet. There are just three different ‘characters’ used in the grid, one of which (the ‘+’) has only one orientation. But the other two have

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182  Reading beyond the lines four different orientations, making each of them equivalent to four different letters, according to orientation, just as ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘p’ and ‘q’ could be the same character reflected or turned. So Solt’s piece reminds us that, in reading, word recognition is a combination of recognising shapes and orientations in a coordinated way. If we hadn’t grasped this principle early in our career as readers, words made up of (or containing) characters with multiple orientations (such as ‘pun’ and ‘bun’) would cause us a great deal of confusion. Additionally, the format raises questions about how we read poetic texts, and particularly questions about the relationship between a poem and its (author-provided) notes or ‘gloss’. For instance, is the ‘gloss’ which Coleridge added to later printings of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ part of the poem, or part of large body of critical commentary on the poem? Because of the positioning of the words of Coleridge’s gloss in the adjacent margins to the relevant lines of the poem, it is probably taken in by the reader as part of the process of reading the poem, particularly because its style or register is distinctly poetic, rather than scholarly. In the case of the long poems of David Jones (The Anathemata and In Parenthesis), the poet’s extensive notes, though almost entirely scholarly in register, are probably read by most readers in scrolling sequence with the poem. They are placed in the lower part of the page, separated from the poetic text by a horizontal line, but since they often take up as much space as the poetic text itself, ignoring them would probably not feel like a full reading of the poem at all. The poetic text is dense throughout with historical, mythological and liturgical references and allusions; few readers today, beyond the circle of seasoned Jonesian scholars, would feel themselves competent to do without them. All the same, there is, for typographical reasons, less of a feeling of fusion between text and commentary than in the case of Coleridge. A yet more distant connection between poetic text and authorial commentary would be represented by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where the notes are far less extensive, and were added to the poem retrospectively at the request of the publisher. Because they are printed at the end of the poem (as end-notes at the back, rather than as on-page footnotes), the poem seems to ask the reader to read the poem without them, at least initially, so that they seem distinctly an optional authorial adjunct to the poem, rather part of it. Hence, we might think of them as being in the same category as an author’s preface, foreword or afterword. So Solt’s wordless sonnet prompts reflection on how we read in general, and how we read poetry in particular.

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Concrete canticles  183 Read in combination with this gloss, this visual ‘sonnet’ enacts the form of the traditional sonnet, and provides a potted reprise of its history. The sonnet’s structure (in its ‘Italian’ mode) of eight plus six lines, each line with five stresses, as in iambic pentameter, is perceived within the patterns of grid-lines superimposed by NASA scientists on photographs of the moon’s surface. Perceiving this pattern requires the reader to mime the top-to-bottom, left-to-right, scanning action which we perform when reading. Of course, it may be that this action is not actually physically performed, but is brought to consciousness, in something like the way that when we read a poem silently we are not actually speaking it, but may be sub-vocalising it in the mind’s ear. So the poem, though primarily visual, evokes a ‘trace’ or residue of the process of reading, and in that sense, though not verbal, it might be referred to as ‘verbalist’. The information concerning the cultural history of the sonnet is initially evoked by the title, and then specified in the author’s gloss that accompanies the piece. From the same volume of experimental sonnets is the sonnet sequence ‘Untitled (Visual Sonnet)’ by David Miller (Figure 14.7). They thus have no explanatory title and no words, and the 14 ‘lines’ in each are literally ‘lines’, as they are made with strokes from an inked brush, and the two shown are the first and last of the sequence. What can be said about these? As we do not know what the subject matter is, we can only comment speculatively on the implica­tions of the form. We might note, for instance, that the beginning seems very confident, with thick, firm lines, nearly all unbroken, starting with six dark grey lines, and ending with eight, which are either lighter in tone, or thinner. In this sense, the first sonnet seems to be upside down, with the sestet coming before the octave. By the end of the sequence, the confidence seems to have faded, as suggested by the way the underside of most of the lines seems to have been nibbled away or eroded, though the top edge is continuous. The strokes seem to have been made much more carefully and self-consciously, not with the careless sweep of the lines in the first sonnet, and white space is meticulously maintained between the lines. To make these observations requires the line-by-line scansion which is characteristic of reading, so again there is a ‘verbalist’ shadow­ing process behind the façade of a text which is entirely visual. The ‘point’ seems to have something to do with the closeness of the observation induced by a visual text which proclaims itself a sonnet, and thereby implies a linear progression. It is this verbalist ‘shadow’ which prevents the text from being perceived as completely abstract.

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184  Reading beyond the lines

14.7  David Miller, two texts, both called ‘Untitled (Visual Sonnet)’ and first published in Jeff Hilson (ed.), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008).

The final example of the visual/verbalist text is more complex than the first two, and will be treated at greater length, in order to bring out the element of linear progression mentioned above. In this piece, the linear-progressive element is more elaborate, so that it can be read as a narrative. It is by Álvaro de Sá and is entitled ‘Thaloc, No. 21’ (Figure 14.8). The presence in this piece of ‘panels’ and ‘speech bubbles’ of the kind found in comic strips (these being frequent motifs for de Sá) cues the left-to-right, top-to-bottom linear sequencing which is typical (in western culture) of reading. Hence, the text is ‘read’, by the reader/viewer, even though it contains no words, and can only be ‘looked at’. ‘Read’ in this fashion, however, a narrative unfolds, and reaches a dramatic climax. I will number the panels 1–9, starting at the top left, with 1–3 in the top row, 4–6 in the middle row and 7–9 in the bottom row. It may be relevant to note that ‘Thaloc’ is a shape-changing figure in Egyptian myth­ ology, and, in turn, that texts like ‘Thaloc, No. 21’ can be classed as asemic, a term which designates ‘a wordless open semantic form of writing’, whereby texts have ‘no specific semantic content’, and so create ‘a vacuum of meaning which it is left for the reader to

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Concrete canticles  185

14.8  ‘Thaloc, No. 21’ by Álvaro de Sá (1969).

fill in and interpret’.9 What is on the page in such work is, strictly speaking, asemic, or sign-less, in the sense that it is a code without a key, a sign system without a referent. But the text behaves like a code – for instance, it has discernible patterns, repetitions of elements, alignments, paralleling, regularities of line and shape, and so on. All that is lacking is pre-supplied meaning. All that is lacking, so it has to be supplied by the reader, and what is supplied has to be sustained and systemic, as the ‘text’ appears to be, and must run in parallel with it, and be capable of being pinned to it, point for point. That is what I now attempt to do with ‘Thaloc, No. 21’. In panel 1, a ‘voice’ speaks, apparently coming from a being who is in the void of space beyond the panel itself. The voice says (I speculate) ‘Let there be two right angles’. I make this speculative deduction retrospectively, because in panel 2 two right angles have appeared. They have positioned themselves in diagonally opposite corners of the panel, the smaller above and the larger below. In panel 2 the speech bubble ‘speaks’ again, calling forth four straight

9  These definitions are quoted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_ writing.

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186  Reading beyond the lines lines, two longer, two shorter, and these, too, come into being and position themselves within panel 3, but replacing, rather than supplementing, the right angles, though another ‘reading’ might see this as merely a re-arrangement or metamorphosis of the two elements that made up the right angles. What has been said so far gives the paradigm for a panel-by-panel ‘reading’ of the whole piece. But something strange begins to happen in panels 6–8, for the elements ‘predicted’ by the bubble seem to assume greater autonomy, almost as if they had begun to acquire free will. Thus, in panel 6, a random-looking bundle of eight long and short sticks is ‘predicted’, but these arrange themselves (in panel 7) into two highly patterned groups of four, each group comprising two parallel sticks arranged at right angles to the other two, which is not exactly what the ‘voice’ had ‘predicted’. Previously, the ‘voice’ had allowed the predicted elements a degree of relative autonomy – it hadn’t ‘told’ them where to go in the frame – but now the elements seem to be assuming more autonomy still, and a crisis of some kind seems to be looming. Thus, in panel 7, the ‘voice’ seems to test its authority, predicting four sticks or lines arranged in a kind of cross-hatch pattern. And then, in panel 8, there is an act of outright rebellion, and, for the first time, what is produced in response is not a direct reflection of the elements in the previous speech bubble, for what results is two versions of this figure, retaining the basic ‘cross-hatched’ shape, but doubling it. This is too much for the ‘voice’, which ‘speaks’ an emptiness, and in the final panel, the authority of the voice is reasserted, for it has returned to the emptiness from which it emerged in the first panel. So my ‘reading’ of this wordless text sees it in terms of Christian myth­ology, making it, in effect, a quickie version of Paradise Lost, a version which rushes through the creation and the fall and supplies an alternative ending. The above reading is entirely linear – it decodes the text from left to right, top to bottom, as if it were a verbal text of a conventional kind. But why not look at the panels in any order at all? Well, it is certainly true that if the piece were seen in that ‘open-field’ way, many other readings would be possible, but it is worth noting that though the piece itself is indeed wordless, and the shapes abstract, the presence of a signature in the conventional position at the lower-right corner does indicate that it must have a right and a wrong way up. Added to that, the presence of panels and speech bubbles seems to identify this as a ‘poemic text’, and the co-occurrence of all these features strongly cues a reading-like linear

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Concrete canticles  187 progression.10 The interest and effects of texts like these are clearly akin to those of the minimalist texts considered in Chapter 13, but these go a little further, since most of the familiar attributes of poetry are progressively pared away as we move through the three types of minimalism considered. But a residual signifying element of a readerly kind seems to refuse to be entirely disabled, no matter how extreme and radical the paring down. The final chapter will go back to the beginning of the poem, in the literal sense.

10 A ‘poemic’ text is one which ‘combines elements of poetry and comics’: the term was coined by Alvaro de Sá in his 1991 book Poemics. For examples of such work, see www.scribd.com/doc/24714508/Poemics-is-an-Art-CombiningElements-of-Poetry-and-Comics.

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15. 

Textual genesis

One morning in October 1816 Charles Cowden Clarke woke at 10 and went down to breakfast at his lodgings at Clerkenwell in London. He was in his late twenties, working as a teacher at his father’s school in Enfield, and he had not slept long that night. In fact, he had stayed up till daylight with a friend he had taught at Enfield, a young man whose poetic tastes and interests he had helped to form. Clarke had borrowed a copy of the translation of Homer made by the Elizabethan poet John Chapman (a large and valuable folio volume first published in 1614–15), and the two friends had spent the night reading out passages to each other, delighting in the power and forcefulness of the verse. When Clarke sat down at the breakfast table, he found there a sonnet which had been delivered to the house a little earlier. It might have been (but wasn’t) entitled ‘About Last Night’, and it came from the friend with whom he had enjoyed the Homeric experience of the night before. The friend, of course, was John Keats, and the poem was called ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’: Much have I travell’d in the Realms of Gold, And many goodly states, and Kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told Which deep-browed Homer ruled as his Demesne;  Yet could I never judge what men could mean Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new Planet swims into his ken, Or like stout Cortez, when with wond’ring eyes He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise – Silent upon a Peak in Darien.

5

10

Both Keats and Clarke had been deeply excited by the rugged and earthy lines of Chapman, and they had turned for comparison to the well known passages of Homer which had long been familiar 188

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Textual genesis  189 to them in the translation made in the eighteenth century by ­ lexander Pope. Pope’s elegant lines embodied the norms of taste A and poetic decorum which dominated his own era, but his rendition of Homer had always left Keats cold. Indeed, Homer had remained a closed world for him until the revelatory moment celebrated in the poem, when, in the small hours, and in the company of his friend, he heard Chapman’s robust and direct voice for the first time. As he walked back to his lodgings (on the other side of the Thames, in Dean Street, Southwark) still ‘high’ on Chapman, he was already forming in his mind the now-familiar cadences of his famous sonnet. And this is the moment, in the raw morning air, when he found his own voice, and was able to ‘speak out loud and bold’ as a poet for the first time. By the time he reached his own doorstep and ran upstairs to his room, the poem already existed, and had merely to be transcribed quickly onto the page. But wait – how can we be so sure about the experience that produced the poem, and how can it be so confidently asserted that Keats was composing as he walked? Firstly, many years later Charles Cowden Clarke (1787–1877) published an account of the events of that night, by which time Keats was long dead and had acquired the status of a major English poet. The account was included in an article called ‘Recollections of Keats’ in the journal Atlantic Monthly in 1861, and was later revised for inclusion in the book Recollections of Writers, published in 1878. The knowledge we gain from this external biographical source – especially knowledge of the fact that the poem was already in writing by breakfast-time next morning – means that it must have been composed in the immediate aftermath of the experience it records. And secondly, because an early manuscript version of the poem has survived, it can be examined for the evidence it gives us about the process of composition. If we are fortunate, and have the right credentials, we may be able to have the manuscript placed in front of us in an archive, but a great deal of manuscript material can now be viewed online, which is the case with this one.1 ‘On first looking into’ a manuscript, it is best to do just that – to begin by just looking at it, without actually reading it. In this way, we start by viewing the material ‘passively’, so to speak, rather than immediately looking for the features we hope to find. This is better because what we expect to find is probably what we will find, but possibly at the cost of missing something of 1  The manuscript at Harvard can be seen here: http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/ view/15365299.

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190  Reading beyond the lines equal importance. As we first look at the manuscript of this poem, it will strike us that it has very few deletions or insertions. Indeed, it has the initial appearance of a mere transcription of the poem (which is really just means a fair copy), though one written out quite rapidly, because there are a few slips (which I will comment on shortly). In contrast to a transcription document, a composition manuscript – that is, one written as the act of composition itself is taking place – will usually contain deletions, substitutions and re-positionings of words and phrases. Indeed, composition manuscripts survive for several of Keats’s poems, so we have some idea of how the manuscript would look if Keats had actually been still composing the poem as he wrote this manuscript. But it is evident that the characteristics of this one are quite different. There are, to repeat, a couple of corrections, but they are amendments of hurried slips, made as the mind races slightly ahead of the pen, rather than genuine changes of mind. For instance, looking closely at the fifth line we see that Keats had first written ‘Of of one wide expanse’ instead of ‘Oft of one wide expanse’, and then has had to squeeze in the letter ‘t’ at the end of ‘Oft’. This kind of slip is typical of what happens when a writer is writing out or copying a document quickly and concentrating more on transcription than composition: on the majority of occasions, when we begin a word by writing the letter ‘o’ followed by the letter ‘f ’, the word will be ‘of ’, and a space will follow. So the hand is likely to insert the anticipated space automatically, especially when the mind is already moving on to the next word, which actually is ‘of ’ in the case of the awkward sequence ‘oft of ’, and that makes the slip of the hand and mind all the more likely. And in the next line Keats first writes ‘low brow’d’ Homer’ rather than ‘deep brow’d Homer’, probably because ‘low’ frequently occurs with the word ‘brow’ in ordinary speech.2 In the same line, ‘Homer’ was first written with a lower-case ‘h’ and then corrected to a capital. The fact that these slips were left in the transcript strongly suggests that the writer did not wish to interrupt the flow by beginning again. It also shows that this document is not an authorial ‘fair copy’ of a completed poem, the kind a poet would write out as a definitive version for publication, or as a gift for a friend or relative. It follows that the most likely explanation for the precise collection of features evident 2 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest occurrence of ‘lowbrowed’ in print is in the 1890s, but the term must have been current in informal speech much earlier than that.

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Textual genesis  191 on the page is that the poem is being committed rapidly to paper before any of it can fade from the mind. The rapidity of the transcription is perhaps further indicated by the long dashes across the riser of the letter ‘t’ (as in ‘states’ in line 2, ‘fealty’ in 4, and ‘stout’ and ‘Cortez’ in 11), though the ‘t’ in ‘watcher’ (line 9) is left uncrossed. The horizontal and vertical lines in the right-hand margin of the opening octave suggest that Keats was checking the ‘abba / abba’ rhyme scheme, which he was now seeing (rather than ‘hearing’ in his inner ear) for the first time, having composed the poem mentally during his early-morning walk home. All this is strong circumstantial evidence in support of the view that, while this is not the actual document which Clarke opened at his breakfast table, it may well be the first written-down version of the poem, dating from the morning of the poem’s composition, and from which he copied out the version (now lost) which he sent to Clarke. What is known of the provenance (that is, the history) of the manuscript seems consistent with that view. When the poem appeared in the Examiner, in December of the same year, Keats changed his mind about line 7, ‘Yet could I never judge what men could mean’, which he felt was weak in its original form, and therefore altered to ‘Yet did I never breathe its pure serene’. The other change he made was to replace the phrase ‘wond’ring eyes’ in the eleventh line of the manuscript with ‘eagle eyes’ when the sonnet appeared in book form in 1818. From the ‘cleanness’ of the manuscript, then, it can be deduced that Keats wasn’t composing the poem when he wrote it, but merely transcribing it, and it follows that the most likely proceeding is that he composed the sonnet as he walked home in his excited state, dashed upstairs once there, and immediately wrote it out, then copied it out a second time and left the house to have that second copy posted to his friend while the originating experience was still vivid in both their minds. For Clarke it remained vivid for 40 years, and the survival of the holograph ensures that it remains as vivid for later readers such as ourselves. So we have an account of the experience which produced the poem, and we have the poem itself. But poetry is not the same as biography, and we know that a poem never simply reproduces the experience which generated it. Rather, the poem is built out of that experience, which is just the ‘launch pad’ or spring-board of the poem, so that the poem travels away from the experience towards something new, which it shapes for its own ends. For example, we can see evidence of the poem’s independence of the originating experience in the fact that the presence of Clarke alongside Keats

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192  Reading beyond the lines that night is nowhere mentioned, or even implied, in the poem, which becomes an account of a solitary reader’s transformative experience. Just as ‘Cortez’ in the poem climbs the peak and sees the Pacific alone, viewing for the first time a great expanse he hadn’t known was there, so the ‘voice’ of Chapman that Keats hears in the poem is heard by him alone, as a solitary figure reading, just like the astronomer when the new planet swims into his ken for the first time. But while the generating facts of the experience are actively ‘produced’ by the poet, rather than just passively reproduced, there is elsewhere a pin-pointing of factual detail which is sometimes difficult to account for with the required precision. ‘Darien’, for instance, has what might be called a superfluity of geographical specificity, and the question of why Keats names the district so precisely is not easily answered. This is especially so in view of the fact that when Clarke pointed out the Cortez error, Keats did not feel that it affected the poem sufficiently to require correction. Further, Keats’s discovery of Chapman’s Homer is presented as a specific moment of revelation, so it seems fitting to celebrate it by recalling in the poem another moment of precisely located discovery. But Keats removes the ‘social’ element of his intellectual breakthrough by not including his friend Clarke in the poem. In the same way, Wordsworth’s ‘To Daffodils’ proclaims that the poet was wandering ‘lonely as a cloud’ when he had the well known visionary moment of coming upon the lakeside daffodils. His sister Dorothy Wordsworth is excluded, even though she was with him on the walk which produced the poem, and her diary account of that walk provided him with several of the key details in it. Likewise, ­Hershel’s discovery of the planet Uranus, which Keats refers to in lines 9 and 10, was not, as a matter of historical fact, a genuinely solitary achievement and realisation, for his sister, Caroline Hershel, took part in all the observations and calculations, though that would not have been known to Keats at the time.3 And Balboa, of course (see p. 79), made his expedition as the leader of a large band of men, but he ensured it was a solitary first-sighting

3 Herschel’s discovery of the new planet was not a case of instantaneous recog­nition – it took months for the facts to be recognised and confirmed. His observations of the heavens over many years were made in close collaboration with his sister Caroline, so it wasn’t a solitary discovery. For a vivid account of the discovery of Uranus, see Richard Holmes, ‘Herschel Among the Stars’, in The Age of Wonder (Harper Press, 2008), Chapter 4, particularly pp. 206–8, on Keats and starlight.

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Textual genesis  193 experience by ordering his men to wait behind while, Moses-like, he climbed the final peak alone. So we know a good deal about the textual genesis of this poem, including how it came to be written, how it modifies the generating facts, and how it reached its final form. But how much of that knowledge is useful when it comes to reading it? One position on this question would be to insist that the appreciation of poetry does not require any additional ‘external’ information at all, because everything that is needed to understand a poem must be located within the poem itself. Hence, whatever takes the reader’s attention away from the words printed on the page is a distraction – we must fix our attention on the page itself, as if with a spotlight, thereby throwing anything beyond the page into shadow. And if we followed such advice to the letter, our only resource, in every instance, would be to devote all our attention to the precise structure and verbal specificity of the poem. Thus, the ban on taking into account ‘external’ evidence would drive us towards the kind of excessively ingenious internal scrutiny described in the introduction. Beyond this, we need to bring a certain sense of proportion, combined with a tuned alertness, to our reading of a poem, and this will include a readiness to ponder the surface sense of words, rather than diving down too readily in search of the poem’s supposed ‘secret life’. Deep-sea divers, after all, have to wear a heavy diving suit, which in many ways cuts them off from the medium it enables them to enter. Keats’s silence on some matters may be strategic – this is a short poem, and it therefore cannot accommodate (for instance) an ethical discussion of European colonisation of the Americas. A short poem needs a single focus, and the focus here is on the eureka moment of discovery, and on the overpowering emotions and sensations that moment produces, and not on the moral dilemmas that may come later. So Keats compares his own discovery of a new writer – and, ultimately, a new way of writing – to the discovery of a new continent. His eagle eyes have certainly spotted a new route, and it opens up for him a whole new territory of poetry. That is what Keats was so excited about as he walked rapidly home from his friend’s house during the early hours in October 1816. Yet Keats recognises that admission to the metaphorical ‘Realms of Gold’ is not open to everybody, for the very term in itself implies the existence of lesser realms, which must have their citizens too – realms of silver and bronze, for instance. If Keats in his reading were reliant on translations of Homer, and not able to read Homer’s text in the original Greek, then this indicates that he did not belong to

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194  Reading beyond the lines the social elite which would be taught Greek at school and university. Hence, stating so resoundingly his preference for the ‘uncouth’ Chapman translation over the measured elegance of Pope means taking up a distinct position in the ‘culture wars’ of his day. The conservative position maintained that true poets are properly educated and know European literature at first-hand in its original languages. This left Keats at a disadvantage, and he was sneered at by critics as a poetic upstart belonging to the ‘Cockney school of poetry’. Proclaiming his preference for Chapman over Pope makes this, as it were, a badge of honour, and defiantly assumes an al­ legiance outside the polite consensus of good taste inherited from the previous century. And just as Wordsworth and Coleridge, in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, had by-passed their eighteenth-century predecessors and claimed allegiance with the ballad writers of the century before, so Keats here proclaims that he is of a mind with these older Romantic poets. Thus, he not only discovers his own voice – he also takes the crucial step of identifying with a specific group of like-minded artists. It is a ‘breakthrough’ moment, a moment of realising who he is and also where he stands. Again, the information supporting this reading lies, at least partly, ‘outside’ the poem, but it offers evidence for a particular way of reading it. So our enjoyment of the poem, our sharing of Keats’s excitement, is assisted by all that ‘external’ information about it. The whole poem, indeed, seems to evoke the world of books, whether gifted, borrowed, or bought. The valuable Chapman folio was lent to Clarke by a journalist friend. Clarke was slightly older than Keats, and had already been a strong influence on his tastes and reading: the detail in the poem about the discovery of a new planet probably came into the poet’s mind from John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy, a book which Keats had won as a school prize in 1811; likewise, the ‘stout Cortez’ image is from William Robertson’s History of America, first published in 1777, which Keats had been reading, and from which he conflated two different scenes, confusing Cortez with Balboa. So the subject matter of the poem is books and knowledge and reading, and the memory of what we have read, including how what we have read becomes part of ourselves, and helps us to discover and construct our deepest sense of identity. We make use of whatever contextualising data may tend to increase and intensify the pleasures of the text. Such data will often include information about the source of a poem and the various stages it passed through before it reached the form in which it is now most familiar.

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Textual genesis  195 I will end with a more general comment on textual genesis. It is possible to identify two opposed views on the matter. The first is based upon an evolutionary model of text production, seeing publication as the birth of the text, before which is an avant-texte (or pre-text) period corresponding to embryonic growth. After publication there may be a long period when the text passes through a series of modifications in successive published versions, until it reaches its final mature form. This model of textual emergence (that is, the process by which a work of literature comes into being, stage by stage) is hierarchical and progressive, with each stage of composition being superseded, and relegated to draft or interim status, by the one which follows. Genetic criticism in this model sees the composition and text-production process as teleological, or goal-oriented, meaning that it leads to the goal of the definitive version of the text which is eventually canonised by literary critics. By analysing examples of texts in process in this way we reach an understanding of the genesis of literature. It usually turns out to be the case that each work whose genetic development is studied seems to reach maturity by a progression which is usually, in some way, unique to itself. The second view of textual genesis is rather different: it views instability and the existence of multiple variations as the fundamental condition of the literary text, seeing, not a succession of drafts, each getting closer and closer to the final canonical text, but a network of notionally equal versions. Rather than privileging the textual end-product as the one true text, as the first model does, this one tends, if anything, to privilege the versions at the earlier end of the process. Indeed, it even favours the pre-publication ­avant-texte period, that is, the period before the purity of textual conception becomes contaminated by the assistance and interference of editorial midwives, and by that ‘friction with the market’ (Henry James’s phrase) which makes authors tend to accommodate their genius to public taste and morals. This second view, which sees every text as being in a state of permanent provisionality, is partly the product of the influence of poststructuralism, with its liking for the endless flicker of textual difference, and its tendency to see the literary work as innately plural, polyvalent and unstable. So the text, in this second view, is not any one specific manuscript or printed document, but the sum of all existing versions and variants. Thus, ‘the’ text is not so much actual words on actual pages, as a kind of notional Platonic fusion or suspended constellation, within which all versions exist co-equally.

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196  Reading beyond the lines In this view, then, the ‘true’ text may be a notional synoptic blend of many fragments, manuscripts, author-corrected page proofs and successive editions which has no identifiable existence as a material entity in the world of writers, readers and publishers. This text has never been the means of bringing fame, status or wealth to any author, with the possible exception of the editorial-theorists and academics who put forward such views. As you will have realised, I tend to favour the first view over the second, though without believing that the text will necessarily be improved each time the author goes back to it. Those who are not poets tend to regard the writing of poetry as an act of the utmost privacy. But poets themselves often view writing as more of a social affair – there are plenty of poets’ workshops in which members (who are often published and established writers) meet regularly to read out drafts of poems in progress and respond to criticism, discussion and suggestions. But one seldom hears of workshops of this kind being organised by writers of prose fiction. Much can be learned, then, by studying the process of textual genesis, and engaging in the practice of the fascinating and growing art of genetic criticism.4

4  For an account of the origin of ‘genetic criticism’ as ‘critique genetique’, in France in the 1970s, see Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden (eds), ‘Introduction: A Genesis of French Genetic Criticism’, in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), Chapter 1; and also Finn Fordham, I Do, I Undo, I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves (Oxford University Press, 2010).

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End-note

The poet Lee Harwood, whose ‘Brighton. October’ was considered in Chapter 7, is one of the best performers of poetry I have ever heard. He sometimes uses a ‘break-off ’ ending, in which his reading of a poem seems to stop in mid-air, hanging on a slightly rising inflection of the voice, as if more should follow, with the grammatical sequence suddenly interrupted. So a poem might end ‘It’s so simple, so clean, so …’. There would be a slight pause, and then he would slowly lower the sheet he was reading from, and begin flicking through his folder for the next item, and the audience would realise that the poem was over. I found this technique fascinating, for it seemed as if the silence of the surrounding acoustic space, or the blankness of the encompassing margins on the printed page, were being invited to flood back into the poem which had briefly held it at bay for the duration of the reading. I like the idea of ending in the middle of a sentence or a train of thought, but not everyone does. The critic Frank Kermode wrote a book called The Sense of an Ending, which argues the impossibility of a conclusion, but recognises the need for books to have, at least, the sense of an ending. My publisher agrees, and suggested it might be nice to round off a little at the end of this one, rather than suddenly disappearing. So I am sitting down again with the same glass of wine I started with (honestly), to make a few suggestions about what might come next. It will be obvious from reading this book that there are certain poets that I like a great deal and frequently return to. I would suggest that one way to progress is to get to know the work of a few poets very well. If some of them are living poets, it is good to buy or borrow each new book as it appears, so that a sense of the shifts and developments across a complete career gradually become apparent. It is a difficult feat for writers to retain the characteristics which brought them a readership in the first place, while at the same time providing enough that is new in each new volume to develop a long-term commitment from those readers to their themes, quirks, techniques and enthusiasms. By adopting a smallish personal ‘stable’ of writers whose work is followed in this long-term way, a poetry reader can develop the kind of intimacy with authors that brings a sense of confidence and purpose. This seems to me the 197

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198  End-note best way of maturing and gaining pleasure as a poetry reader, or acquiring the necessary depth as a scholar or critic, if that is your aspiration or your on-going enterprise. A second way of achieving this goal is to keep a log-book or diary (or their electronic equivalents) of your reading in which you ‘talk back’ to the poets whose work you have adopted. You should write, not just in general terms, making an overall review of each book as you read it, but also in the form of detailed responses to, and critiques of, individual poems, perhaps using facets of some of the readings and analyses which have featured in this book. In this way you will build up a record of your own development as a reader, and be able to see how your own concerns and capabilities develop alongside those of the poets you are following. Thirdly, an additional layer should be added to your ‘stable’, consisting of a couple of the best-known contemporary or historical poets, on whom there is a large or growing body of critical writing. Read some of this material too, including reviews, critical essays in academic journals and articles in poetry magazines. In the case of the household names, you may even want or need to read complete books about them, or about some of the major themes in their work. All this material can easily be tracked down via web-searches, and then obtained from academic or central libraries. Engaging at this level will mean that you will be in dialogue with a wider community of poetry readers, not in order to think as they do, but so as to keep your own thinking active, responding and questioning. When the poets you have adopted are in the earlier stages of their careers, full-scale academic and critical material may be quite scarce, but you will usually be able to find interviews in online sources; probably the best ones are conducted via e-mail, rather than face to face, a process which allows time for questions to be pondered and fully thought-out answers delivered. On the British Council website, you will also be able to find audio files of poets reading five or six of their own poems, sometimes including illuminating introductory comments on the circumstances in which they were written, and on YouTube you will probably be able to find videos of your poets doing live readings. All this material is most helpful in building a sense of understanding between reader and poet. If you are engaged in formal academic study, it is probable that the poets set as required reading will be major figures on whom a great deal of critical material already exists. This is reassuring, but it can give a sense that you are expected to spend the bulk of your time weighing up, and adjudicating between, the various voices engaged

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End-note  199 in an academic debate, a process in which your own role can come to seem entirely spectatorial. Though you would probably like to spend your time reading more of the poetry itself, it might seem better worthwhile, in terms of your eventual results, to devote your major efforts to untangling and classifying the secondary material, which is an unfortunate state of affairs. Having read the critics, and being on an assessed taught course or research degree, you may well find it difficult to stray too far from the critics’ ways of seeing things, and it can feel as if a complicated line of defences has been erected, like a series of tank traps around the poetic territory you would like to enter and explore in detail. All I can say here is that if you talk to your tutors you will probably find that they are more sympathetic to a compromise position on these matters than you might have expected, so that a balance between reading more of the poetry and not quite all of the criticism might prove to be acceptable. Given the choice, I often feel that students on my own courses benefit more from overview reading about reading poetry than they do from author-specific critical books. Generally, though, I compromise, and recommend articles or single chapters on specific aspects of a particular poet’s work. At the same time, I set critical works which are more general in focus, being either general books about the poetry of a given period viewed as a distinct body of work, or books about the poetry of a specific region, or a specific genre, plus books about poetry reading in general. Finally, the best way to maintain your interest in poetry is to attend live poetry events whenever you can. These days, every new book seems to have a ‘launch’ (or several), most often at a town-centre bookshop or a local college or university. Copies of the books are often available at these events at discount prices, and you can usually have a brief chat with the poet and get your copy signed by the author. Poets never just read out their poems without comment, and many give fascinating information about the circumstances and background of the poems they read out. Sometimes audience members have an interest in writing poetry themselves, and every town and city will have poetry workshop groups, often with a history of monthly meetings stretching back 20 or 30 years. Joining such groups can be of enormous benefit to members, both as poetry readers and as poetry writers. Indeed, it is often said that being the one is the best way of being the other. And perhaps that is a good note to break off on.

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List of poems discussed

Apollinaire, Guillaume, 1880–1918, ‘Il Pleut’, Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, New Directions, 1971 Arnold, Matthew, 1822–88, ‘Thyrsis’, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, Long­man, 1965 Auden, W. H., 1907–73, ‘The Shield of Achilles’, ‘Thank You, Fog’, Thank You, Fog, Faber, 1974 Ball, Patricia M., 1933–88, ‘Interview with the Knife-Thrower’s Assistant’, English, The English Association, 1997 Bernstein, Charles, b. 1950, ‘This Poem Intentionally Left Blank’, All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010 Bolam, Robyn (Lomax, Marion), b. 1953, ‘The Forked Tree’, ‘The Peepshow Girl’, The Peepshow Girl, Bloodaxe, 1989 Brown, Eleanor, b. 1969, ‘What Song the Syrens Sang’, Maiden Speech, Blood­ axe, 1996 Carson, Ciaran, b. 1948, ‘Bloody Hand’, Belfast Confetti, Bloodaxe, 1989; Edward Hopper: Early Sunday Morning, 1939, Breaking News, Gallery Books, 2003 Causley, Charles, 1917–2003, Eden Rock, Charles Causley: Collected Poems, Picador, 2000 Clare, John, 1793–1864, ‘I Am!’, John Clare: Major Works, Oxford University Press, 2008; University of Toronto, Representative Poetry Online, at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/i-am. Cobbing, Bob, 1920–2002, ‘Beethoven Today’ (poster poem), Covent Garden Press, 1971 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Dejection: An Ode, S. T. Coleridge: Poems, Oxford University Press, 1994 Donaghy, Michael, 1954–2004, Liverpool, Dances Learned Last Night: Poems 1975–1995, Picador, 2000 Dove, Rita, b. 1952, ‘Rosa’, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, Norton, 1999 Dunn, Douglas, b. 1942, ‘The Kaleidoscope’, Elegies, Faber, 1985 Durcan, Paul, b. 1944, ‘The Arnolfini Marriage’, Give Me Your Hand, Macmillan 1994; Aughawall Graveyard, A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems, Harvill/Harper Collins, 1993 Eliot, T. S., 1888–1965, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems 1909–1962, Faber, 1963 Feaver, Vicki, b. 1943, ‘Ironing’, The Handless Maiden, Jonathan Cape, 1994 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 1925–2006, ‘Acrobats’, Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections, University of California Press, 2012 Fisher, Roy, b. 1930, ‘A Sign Illuminated’, Birmingham River, Oxford University Press, 1994 Gray, Thomas, 1716–71, ‘The Bard: A Pindaric Ode’, Thomas Gray: Complete Poems, Oxford University Press, 1966

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List of poems discussed  201 Harwood, Lee, b. 1939, ‘Brighton. October’, Lee Harwood: Selected Poems, Shearsman Books, 2008 Herbert, George, 1593–1633, ‘Easter Wings’, George Herbert: The Complete English Poems, Penguin, 2004 Herrick, Robert, 1591–1674, ‘To Daffodils’, Robert Herrick: Selected Poems, Carcanet, 2003 Hooker, Jeremy, b. 1941, ‘On a Photograph of Southampton Docks’, The Cut of the Light: Poems 1965–2005, Enitharmon Press, 2006 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1844–89, ‘Harry Ploughman’, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, Oxford University Press, 2009 Hulme, T. E., 1883–1917, ‘Above the Quiet Dock’, ‘Old Houses’, ‘Sounds Fluttered’, Imagist Poetry, Penguin, 1972 Kavanagh, Patrick, 1904–67, ‘To the Man After the Harrow’, Patrick Kavanagh: Selected Poems, Penguin, 2005 Keats, John, 1795–1821, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, John Keats: The Complete Poems, Penguin, 1977 Lowell, Robert, 1917–77, ‘For the Union Dead’, Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007 MacNeice, Louis, 1907–63, ‘Autumn Journal’, Autumn Journal: A Poem, Faber, 1998 Marvell, Andrew, 1621–78, ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, The Complete Poems, Penguin, 2005 Miller, David, b. 1950, ‘Untitled (Visual Sonnet)’, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, Reality Street, 2008 Milton, John, 1608–74, ‘Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint’, The Complete Poems, Penguin, 1998 Morgan, Edwin, 1920–2010, ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’, Edwin Morgan: Collected Poems, Carcanet, 1990 Nagra, Daljit, b. 1966, ‘University’, Look We Have Coming to Dover!, Faber, 2007 Pope, Alexander, 1688–1744, An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope: The Major Works, Oxford University Press, 2008 Pound, Ezra, 1885–1972, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, ‘Liu Ch’e’, Ezra Pound: Selected Poems, 1909–1968, Faber, 2004 Raworth, Tom, b. 1938, ‘University Days’, Tom Raworth: Collected Poems, Carcanet, 2003 Riley, Denise, b. 1948, ‘Shantung’, Denise Riley: Selected Poems, Reality Street, 2000 Sá, Álvaro de, 1935–2001, ‘Thaloc, No. 21’, 12 × 9, edição particular, 1967 Saroyan, Aram, b. 1943, ‘lighght’, Aram Saroyan: Complete Minimal Poems, Ugly Duckling, 2007 Sharrock, Roger, 1919–90, ‘Gun Girl Chicago 1929’, Windows 9, East Sussex College of Higher Education, 1979 Smith, Charlotte, 1749–1806, ‘Sonnet 44’, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, Oxford University Press, 2007 Solt, Mary Ellen, 1920–2007, ‘Moon Shot Sonnet’, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, Reality Street, 2008 Spenser, Edmund, 1552?–99, ‘Sonnet 74’, Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, Norton Critical Editions, 1993 Tennyson, Alfred, 1809–92, ‘Dark House’, ‘Poem 123’, Alfred Tennyson: The Major Works, Oxford University Press, 2009

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202  List of poems discussed Uribe, Ana Maria, 1944–2004, ‘Catarata’, Tipoemas, Anipoemas, VispO Langu(im)age, 1997–2003 Williams, William Carlos, 1883–1963, ‘A Sort of a Song’, ‘The Descent’, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, William Carlos Williams: Collected Poems, Volume 1, Carcanet, 2000 Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850, The Prelude, ‘Nuns Fret Not At Their Convent’s Narrow Room’, William Wordsworth. The Prelude: The Four Texts, Penguin, 1995 Wyatt, Thomas, 1503–42, ‘Like to These Immeasurable Mountains’, Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, Penguin, 1978 Wynne-Rhydderch, Samantha, b. 1966, ‘Delft’, Banjo, Picador, 2012 Yeats, W. B., 1865–1939, ‘Adam’s Curse’, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, ‘Reprisals’, ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Wordsworth Editions, 2000

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Glossary

A term may be included in the glossary even when a complete chapter includes that term in its title, because many technical terms occur in advance of the chapter which is exclusively devoted to them. Terms for which there is a glossary entry are printed in bold in the text on first occurrence. No glossary entry is longer than 40 words, but fuller definitions will often be found in the text itself. Actual ekphrasis  A poem which is about a real (and usually identifiable) picture, photograph or art object. Alliteration  When successive lines or adjacent words in a poem begin with the same initial letters. Analepsis  A term from narratology which literally means a flashback to events which took place earlier in the represented story sequence. Antistrophe  The second verse or section in the three-part structure of an ode. Antithesis  A contrast or opposition between two things, usually expressed in a form which heightens the contrast by juxtaposition of paired elements. Aphoristic unit  A couplet which encapsulates an idea or observation with force and economy, in the manner of an aphorism, such as these (from Richard Lovelace’s ‘To Althea, from Prison’): ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage’. Asemic poetry  Literally means sign-less poetry, as in experimental poetic forms which aim to have no specific semantic content until the reader has devised a way of encoding them – as discussed in Chapter 14. Assonance  When successive lines or adjacent words in a poem contain the same vowel sounds. Avant-texte  Literally the ‘before-text’, meaning the various embryonic or manuscript versions of the text which pre-date its birth as a published work. Ballad measure  The format of the traditional ballad, consisting of four-line stanzas in alternating lines of four feet (iambic ­tetrameter) and three feet (iambic trimeter) rhymed abcb. 203

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204  Glossary Blank verse  Verse which has a regular metrical pattern but is un­ rhymed. Calligramme  Early twentieth-century term coined by Guillaume Apollinaire denoting a poem which is patterned into an icon ‘drawn’ with words and representing the subject matter visually. Canon  Collective noun for the list of key works, or ‘classics’, of a given literary genre. Chronotope  Term coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, meaning literally a ‘time-place’, and designating as a fused entity the setting of a literary narrative (for example, nineteenth-century Vienna). Clerihew  Humorous four-line poem based on a biographical fact about a famous historical personage. Close reading  The discipline of sustained scrutiny and analysis of the literary text which has been taught in schools and univer­ sities roughly since the first quarter of the twentieth century. Connotation  What a word or series of words implies but doesn’t make explicit – can be thought of as the edge or penumbra of its meaning. Content word  A noun, verb, adjective or adverb – the complement of conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns, which are known as form words. Context  The setting or circumstances (literary, social, political, historical and personal) in which a literary text is produced. Covert ode  A variant of the ode in which the word ‘ode’ is not necessarily part of the title, but many of the ode’s characteristics are present, including its combination of public and personal themes. Deconstruction  A form of reading (based on Jacques Derrida’s linguistic philosophy) which aims to dismantle, or untangle, the threads of the text in such a way as to reveal its underlying contradictions. Diction  The language of a text considered in broad terms. It can be broken down into its various components, such as style, pace, tone, sequencing and cohesion. Diegesis  One of the two basic ways of narrating an event. Primarily, it means telling what happens in summary terms, rather than showing it in detail as if being acted out before our eyes. Disjunctive  A text which has little obvious continuity between successive lines or sections, and an overall effect which is disjointed and fragmented, may be described as disjunctive. Eclogue  A form of pastoral poetry first practised by the Latin poet Virgil.

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Glossary  205 Ekphrastic  Poetry which is about an art object of some kind (actual or notional), usually beginning with a descriptive over­ view, then developing some kind of literary, imaginative or philo­sophical engagement with the object. End-stopped  Poetry in which most lines are a complete unit of sense, rather than having the sense run over to be completed on the following line, may be described as end-stopped. Epode  The third and final verse of each section of a formal ode, coming after the strophe and the antistrophe. Foot  A group of either two or three syllables making up a metrical unit in traditional forms of poetry. Lines of metrical verse have two, three, four or five feet, combining stressed and unstressed syllables into a regular syllabic beat. Free verse  Verse which is unrhymed, and has no fixed metrical pattern, so that line lengths can vary considerably. Genetic criticism  An approach to literature which seeks understanding of the text by tracing its development from first draft through to its final definitive canonised form. Haiku  A short poetic form of Japanese origin containing three lines of five, seven and five syllables (or words) respectively, usually with a seasonal reference, and centred on apparently trivial observed events (such as a leaf falling). Heroic couplet  Rhymed pair of lines in iambic pentameter, each line being end-stopped. The form has been used since Chaucer for epic poems, and was at its height in the eighteenth century. Holograph  An original manuscript in the author’s own hand-­ writing. Horatian ode  Form of the ode based on the practice of the Latin poet Horace, usually with stanzas of two or four lines, reflective, private and informal in tone, though often dealing with social and political subject matter. Iambic pentameter  The most common form of metrical poetry (poetry with a fixed rhythmic beat) in English, consisting of lines of ten syllables with five feet (feet are groups of syllables), each foot having an unstressed and then a stressed syllable. Idea and Object in imagery  The former is the notion the poet wishes to convey (such as freedom) and the latter is the material item used to symbolise or represent it (such as a drifting cloud). Image  A word picture in poetry used to convey an idea. A single image may be developed throughout a poem (a held or running image) or the poem may flick rapidly from one image to another (touched images).

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206  Glossary Imagism  An early twentieth-century British and American form of poetry based on the use of single images in very short poems. Intertextuality  The presence of one text within another, by quotation, allusion, formal parallels, direct response or inadvertent echo. Irregular ode  A blend of the Pindaric and Horatian ode forms, producing a looser, reflective, informally structured poem, often quite lengthy, and usually addressed to an abstraction (such as ‘melancholy’). Lexical set  The vocabulary typically associated with a particular topic (for instance, the lexical set of ‘archery’ contains words like arrow, quiver, target and bow). Limerick  A humorous five-line verse form with a characteristic jaunty rhythm, usually obscene, or obscene by implication, in which lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyme with each other, and lines 3 and 4 make a rhyming couplet. Lyric poetry  Originally a song sung to the accompaniment of the lyre, but now means poetry of a personal kind which is taken as directly expressing the feelings and experiences of the ‘lyric I’ (the personal self) who ‘speaks’ the poem. Metaphor  A figure of speech which represents one thing in terms of another; for example, the statement ‘It knocked the wind out of his sails’ represents a suddenly disappointed man in terms of a suddenly becalmed sailing ship. Meta-sonnet  A sonnet which is about the process of writing a sonnet. Prefixed to any literary form, ‘meta’ signifies that the item under discussion is self-reflexive, so that the piece is about writing itself. Metrical poetry  Poetry written in lines which have a regular rhythmic beat, and a fixed syllable count, following one of the traditional formats (such as iambic pentameter or the ballad measure). Mimesis  One of the two basic ways of narrating an event: it means showing what happens, moment by moment, as if viewed on a stage, rather than merely telling it. Minimalism  Poems in ultra-short forms, such as the haiku and imagist poetry. They may be as brief as a single word, and often deliberately challenge the interpretive ingenuity of their readers. Modernism  Name for the period dominated by various forms of experimentation in all the arts, including literature. It is usually said to have been at its height from the turn of the century to the mid-1920s.

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Glossary  207 Mot juste  ‘The exact word’, pursued as an aesthetic ideal. The term is associated with the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, and is important in modernism, but if overemphasised in poetry it can result in surface glitter rather than depth. Narratology  The study of the workings of narrative fiction, involving the classification of its technical features and devices. The term is useful in poetry criticism too, since most poems have a narrative element. Notional ekphrasis  A poem which is about an imaginary picture, photograph or art object. Octave  The first eight lines of a sonnet, usually comprising two quatrains (four-line sub-sections), and arranged according to a fixed rhyme scheme. Ode  A versatile poetic form originating in Ancient Greek and Roman times, and especially popular in English from the ­seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Odes tend to be reflective pieces of 30 lines or more, often addressed to an abstract entity. Odic writing  Poems which show some of the formal and content characteristics of the ode, but without having the word ode in the title. Persona  A character, whether a real or an imagined person, who is the speaker in a poem, often in a specified setting or dramatic situation. Pindaric ode  The more formal or elevated type of ode, deriving from the practice of the classical Greek poet Pindar, and public and rhetorical in subject matter, with a set three-part structure. The less lofty ode form is the Horatian. Poemic text  Text which combines elements of poetry and comics. The term was coined by Alvaro de Sá in his 1991 book Poemics. Poetic effect  The cumulative impact of a poem upon a reader. It includes, but is not restricted to, the combined force of its meaning and its aesthetic and formal elements, but emphasising what it does above what it says. Poetic inversions  The old-fashioned convention whereby parts of the usual structure of English sentences can be reversed or modified in poems, as when Keats says ‘Much have I travell’d’ instead of ‘I have travell’d much’. Prolepsis  A ‘leap forward’ to, or anticipation of, events which will take place later in the represented story sequence. The term is taken from narratology. Qualitative verse  Metrical verse based upon alternating patterns

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208  Glossary of stressed and unstressed syllables (as in English verse) rather than long and short syllables (as in Greek and Latin verse). Quantitative verse Metrical verse based upon alternating patterns of long and short syllables (as in Greek and Latin verse), rather than stressed and unstressed syllables (as in English verse). Quatrains  Stanzas of four lines, usually, but not invariably, rhymed. Rhyming couplet  Two lines one after the other which rhyme, as occurring, for instance, at the end of the English (or Shakespearean) form of the sonnet. Romanticism  The pan-European movement in the arts which occurred largely across the hinge of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which championed imagination and feeling in the face of the rationalism of the previous era. Schwa vowel  The so-called ‘dark’ or neutral vowel which sounds as ‘uh’, like the first syllable of ‘success’ or the second of ‘Oxford’ in standard British pronunciation. Sestet  The six lines which make up the second section (after the octave) of the Italian-form sonnet. Typically they respond to or modify the matter set out in the octave. Sestina  An intricately rhymed verse form, similar in spirit to the villanelle, first used by the medieval Italian poets Dante and Petrarch, and consisting of six six-line stanzas plus a final stanza of three lines. Simile  A figure of speech similar in effect to a metaphor but con­taining the word ‘like’ or ‘as’, for example ‘He moved like lightning’. Sonnet  A verse-form imported from Italy during the Renaissance period consisting of 14 intricately rhymed lines, and often made into sequences of 100 or more such verses detailing (for example) the progress of a love affair. Spondee  A metrical foot consisting of two stressed syllables. Sprung rhythm  Verse with a fixed number of stresses per line but any number of syllables, thus providing a bridge between traditional metrical verse, popular forms like nursery rhymes and modern free verse. The term was invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Stanza  The same thing as a verse. Strophe  The first section or verse of the three-part structure of a traditional ode. It literally means a ‘turn’. The second section is the antistrophe, mirroring the form of the strophe, while the third, the epode, introduces a new formal variation.

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Glossary  209 Subjective image  An image aiming to show how something is perceived or seems, rather than how it actually is. For example, ‘He was walking on air’ expresses a feeling of exhilaration, not an actual physical sensation or a literal truth. Sub-vocalised reading  The silent ‘hearing’ of a poem in the mind as we read it. Textual emergence  Similar in meaning to ‘textual genesis’ (see below), but places greater emphasis on the idea that there are a series of landmark stages that a text passes through on the way to reaching its eventual maturity. Textual genesis  The process whereby a text moves through vari­ous stages of development, mainly before and sometimes after publication, until it reaches its final form. Theorised reading  This term means reading with theory, that is, reading a literary text in juxtaposition with specific concepts, passages or ideas drawn from literary theory (see Chapter 12). Touched image  See entry for ‘Image’, above. Triadic  A three-part structure, for example that of the Pindaric ode, which has a strophe, antistrophe and an epode, sometimes repeated a number of times. Trochee  A metrical foot in which a stressed syllable comes first, followed by an unstressed syllable. Villanelle  An intricately rhymed verse form, French by origin, and similar in spirit to the sestina, with five three-line stanzas, plus one of four.

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Further reading

Curtis, Tony, How to Study Modern Poetry (Macmillan, 1990) Curtis, Tony, ed., How Poets Work (Seren, 1996) Eagleton, Terry, How to Read a Poem (Blackwell, 2007) Fry, Stephen, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within (Arrow, 2007) Furniss, Tom, and Mike Bath, Reading Poetry: An Introduction (2nd edition, Longman, 2007) Hirsch, Edward, How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (Roundhouse, 2000) Kohl, Herbert R., A Grain of Poetry: How to Read Contemporary Poems and Make Them a Part of Your Life (Harper, 2000) Padel, Ruth, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: A Poem for Every Week of the Year (Vintage, 2004) Raffel, Burton, How to Read A Poem (Plume, 1994) Rozakis, Laurie, How to Read and Interpret Poetry (Prentice Hall, 1996) Steinman, Lisa M., Invitation to Poetry: The Pleasures of Studying Poetry and Poetics (Blackwell, 2008) Wolosky, Shira, The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem (Oxford University Press, 2008)

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Index

Note: Page references to quotations of complete poems are given in bold, in square brackets. ‘A Sign Illuminated’ (Roy Fisher) 17–20 [18] ‘A Sort of a Song’ (William Carlos Williams) 31–2 [32] ‘Above the Quiet Dock’ (T. E. Hulme) 159–60 [159] ‘Acrobats’ (Ian Hamilton Finlay) 177–9 [178] ageas 5 alliteration vii, 4, 5, 7, 40, 53–4, 56, 63, 70, 75, 203 Amoretti and Epithalamion (Edmund Spenser) 104–8, 123–5 ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (Andrew Marvell) 64–5 analepsis 155, 203 antistrophe 61, 62, 63, 65, 203 Apollinaire, Guillaume 173–4, 175 Armstrong, Neil 1–4 Arnold, Matthew 135, 138–43 asemic poetry 184–5, 203 assonance 4, 5, 7, 56, 75, 203 Auden, W. H. 38–42, 54, 67, 111, 113, 127 ‘Aughawall Graveyard’ (Paul Durcan) 167–8 [167] avant-garde poetry 165 avant-texte 195, 203 Axelrod, Steven Gould 129 Bakhtin, Mikhail 135, 203 Ball, Patricia M. 150–4 ballad 54, 60, 194 ballad metre/measure 54, 203 Bann, Stephen 178 ‘Beachy Head’ (Charlotte Smith) 15 ‘Beethoven Today’ (Bob Cobbing) 175, 177 [177]

Belsey, Catherine 145 Berger, John 149 Bernstein, Charles 166–7 blank verse 49, 67, 125, 129, 204 ‘Bloody Hand’ (Ciaran Carson) 46–8 Bolam, Robyn 27–9, 146–50 braided imagery 27–9 ‘Brighton. October’ (Lee Harwood) 95–6 [95] Brown, Eleanor 23 Browning, Robert 111, 112, 113 Butler, Judith 152–3 Cage, John 167 calligramme 173, 174, 204 Carson, Ciaran 46–8, 99–102 ‘Catarata’ (‘Waterfall’) (Ana Maria Uribe) 179–80 [179] Causley, Charles 54, 112, 121 chronotope 135–6, 138, 139, 141, 203 Clare, John 34–8, 42 Clark, Kenneth 147–9 Clarke, Charles Cowden 188–9 clerihew 60, 204 close reading 75–85, 145, 206 Cobbing, Bob 175, 177, 178 Cockney school of poetry 194 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 54, 65, 66, 68, 182, 194 connotation 12, 20, 25, 204 content word 50, 204 context ix, 2–3, 26, 32, 76, 78, 84, 96, 97–109, 110, 113, 124, 145, 157, 161, 164, 204 covert ode 67–8, 71, 204 criticism viii, x, 5–6, 14, 58, 75, 98, 111, 120, 126, 148, 150, 195, 198–9

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212  Index De Ornellas, Kevin 168 de Sá, Álvaro 184–7 deconstruction 82, 204 ‘Dejection, An Ode’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) 65, 68 ‘Delft’ (Samantha Wynne-­ Rhydderch) 71–2 [71] diction 1, 30, 34–48, 70, 127, 204 diegesis 14, 206 DiMarco, Danette 148 disjunctive effect 35, 94, 204 Donaghy, Michael 43–6 [43–4] Donne, John 142 Doolittle, Hilda 159 Dove, Rita 70–1 Duffy, Carol Ann 148–9, 151 Duncan, Robert 164 Dunn, Douglas 126–7 Durcan, Paul 113, 116–20, 167–8 Eagleton, Terry 21–2, 91, 145 ‘Easter Wings’ (George Herbert) 169, 171–2 [171, 172] Eberhart, Richard 57 eclogue 131, 204 ‘Eden Rock’ (Charles Causley) 121–2 [121] ‘Edward Hopper: Early Sunday Morning, 1939’ (Ciaran Carson) 99–101 [99–100] ekphrasis 71, 110–16, 119–22, 203, 205 actual 120, 203 notional 120, 207 elegy 52, 60, 67, 71, 88, 91, 126–7, 130, 135, 138, 142–4, 161, 189 Eliot, George 162 Eliot, T. S. 21–3, 54, 117, 182 end-stopping 35, 205 epode 61, 62, 63, 65, 204 Essay on Man (Alexander Pope) 51 Ewbank, Inga-Stina 86 Feaver, Vicki 11–14 Finlay, Ian Hamilton 177–9 Fisher, Roy 17–18, 20 foot 49–52, 54, 55, 95, 205 variable foot 57 ‘For the Union Dead’ (Robert Lowell) 67–70

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Ford, Ford Madox 159 free verse 56, 67, 69, 70, 95, 205 Fulton, Alice 57 genetic criticism 195, 196, 205 Gray, Thomas 62–4, 161 ‘Gun Girl Chicago 1929’ (Roger Sharrock) 155–7 [155] haiku 158, 160, 161, 205 Hamlet 26, 138 Haraway, Donna 155–6 Hardy, Thomas 6, 103n6, 126, 141 Harwood, Lee 95–6, 197 HD 159 held image see imagery Herbert, George 169–72, 173, 175 Hernstein, Barbara 179 heroic couplet 51, 205 Herrick, Robert 21, 23 holograph 191, 205 Homer 67, 77, 79, 111, 113, 119, 188–9, 193 Hooker, Jeremy 112, 113, 114–16 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 55–7 Horatian ode 61–2, 64–5, 69, 205 Hughes, Ted 127 Hulme, T. E. 159, 161–2, 163 ‘I Am!’ (John Clare) 34–8 [34] iambic pentameter see pentameter ‘Il Pleut’ (‘It’s Raining’) (Guillaume Apollinaire) 173–4 [173, 174] image see imagery imagery 21–33, 53, 72, 85, 205 braided 27–9 held image 25, 78, 205 touched image 25, 78–9, 205 imagism 158, 159–62, 206 ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (Ezra Pound) 162–4 [163] intertextuality 82, 206 ‘Interview with the KnifeThrower’s Assistant’ (Patricia M. Ball) 150–4 [150–1] inversion see poetic inversion ‘Ironing’ (Vicki Feaver) 11–14 [11] irregular ode 62, 65–6, 206 Jones, David 182

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Index  213 Kavanagh, Patrick 101–4 Keats, John vii, 62, 66, 68, 77–82, 111, 113, 119, 159, 188–94 Kennedy, David 110 Kermode, Frank 197 Le Corbusier 158 Leonard, Tom 118 lexical set 75, 175, 206 ‘lighght’ (Aram Saroyan) 164–5 [164] ‘Like to These Immeasurable Mountains’ (Thomas Wyatt) 24–6 [24] limerick 60, 206 ‘Liu Ch’e’ (Ezra Pound) 93 [93] ‘Liverpool’ (Michael Donaghy) 43–6 [43–4] Lomax, Marion 27–9, 146–50 Loos, Adolf 158, 159, 160, 163 Lowell, Amy 159 Lowell, Robert 67–70, 128–9 lyric poetry 60, 61, 65, 67, 123, 136, 138, 141, 143, 158 MacLeish, Archibald 165 MacNeice, Louis 127–8 Marvell, Andrew 64–5 metaphor 1, 12, 14, 21, 26, 29–30, 32, 127, 137, 161, 206 metaphysical poetry 37, 54 meta-sonnet 186, 206 ‘Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint’ (John Milton) 89–92 [90] metre viii, 2, 5, 7, 49–59, 61, 72, 85, 86, 160 see also metrical pattern; metrical poetry; rhythm metrical pattern 5, 48, 51–4, 58, 62–3, 64, 65–6 metrical poetry 15, 48, 55, 58, 69 qualitative 62, 207 quantitative 61, 208 micro-poetry 163–8 Middlemarch (George Eliot) 162 ‘Middleton Church’ (Charlotte Smith) 15–17 [15] Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 158 Miller, David 183

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Milton, John 49, 89–92, 96, 125 mimesis 14, 206 minimalism 158–68, 187, 206 modernism 21, 22–3, 54, 158–9, 167, 206 ‘Moon Shot Sonnet’ (Mary Ellen Solt) 180–3 [181] Morgan, Edwin 173, 175–6 mot juste 48, 207 Mulvey, Laura 149, 154 Nagra, Daljit 83–5 narratology 155, 207 ‘Nuns Fret Not At Their Convent’s Narrow Room’ (William Wordsworth) 86–9 [87] nursery rhyme 55 octave 77, 78, 87, 89, 163, 181, 183, 191, 207 ode vii, 41, 60–9, 88, 111, 114, 207 covert 67–8, 71, 204 Horatian 61–2, 64–5, 69, 205 irregular 62, 65–6, 206 Pindaric 61–2, 63, 207 ‘Old Houses’ (T. E. Hulme) 161–2 [161] ‘On a Photograph of Southampton Docks’ (Jeremy Hooker) 114–16 [114–15] ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (John Keats) 77–82 [77], 188–94 [188] orthometry 60, 61 Paterson, Don 117 pentameter 49, 51, 55, 57, 58, 160, 172, 183, 205 persona 24, 83, 93, 112, 118, 120, 125, 141, 148–9, 151, 154, 207 Pindaric ode 61–2, 63, 207 Plimpton, George 164 Plutarch 110 Poe, Edgar Allan 4–5 ‘Poem 123’ (Alfred Tennyson) 52–4 [53] poetic effect ix, 20, 48, 58, 116, 135, 141, 160, 207 poetic inversion 79–80, 143, 207 poetry criticism see criticism

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214  Index Pope, Alexander 6, 51, 189, 194 poststructuralism 145, 157, 195 Pound, Ezra 26, 58, 92–3, 159–60, 162–3 prolepsis 155, 207 Prynne, J. H. 76 ‘Purloined Letter, The’ (Edgar Allan Poe) 4–5 qualitative verse 62, 207 quantitative verse 61, 208 quatrain 54, 66–9, 77, 89, 208 Raworth, Tom 165–6 Reading, Peter 118 rhyme 5, 16, 49, 51–2, 54, 58, 60, 63, 65, 66, 69, 75, 76, 77, 89, 191 internal 56 rhyming couplet 16, 66, 89, 208 rhythm 2, 5, 48, 49–59, 61, 69, 70, 76, 95, 160 sprung rhythm 55–6, 57, 208 see also metre Riley, Denise 93–6 Romanticism 16, 41, 66, 194, 208 ‘Rosa’ (Rita Dove) 70–1 [70] running image see imagery, held image Saroyan, Aram 164–5 schwa vowel 50, 208 sestet 16, 77–8, 79, 87, 89, 124, 163, 181, 183, 208 sestina 60, 208 Shakespeare, William 26, 49, 94, 123 ‘Shantung’ (Denise Riley) 93–5 [94] Sidney, Philip 123, 131 simile 26, 208 Simonides 110 Smith, Charlotte 15–17 Solt, Mary Ellen 180–3 sonnet 15–16, 24, 55, 60, 63, 77–8, 86, 89–90, 104–5, 123–5, 163, 180–2, 183–4, 188 blank verse sonnets (Robert Lowell) 129 English sonnet 16 Italian sonnet 89 meta-sonnet 86 Petrarchan sonnet 89

Barry.indb 214

‘Sonnet 44’ (Charlotte Smith) 15–17 [15] ‘Sonnet 74’ (Edmund Spenser), 105–8 [105] ‘Sonnet 75’ (Edmund Spenser), 124 ‘Sounds Fluttered’ (T. E. Hulme) 161 [161] Spenser, Edmund 104–8, 123–5 spondee 51, 208 sprung rhythm 55–6, 57, 208 strophe 61, 62, 63, 65, 208 structuralism 145 subjective image 22–3, 209 sub-vocalised reading 35, 140, 183, 209 symmetry 2, 37, 85, 96, 148, 151, 175, 179, 180 Taylor, Marianne 76 Tennyson, Alfred 49, 52, 126, 135–9, 141, 159 tetrameter 52, 54, 172, 203 textual emergence 195, 209 ‘Thaloc, No. 21’ (Álvaro de Sá) 184–7 [185] ‘Thank You, Fog’ (W. H. Auden) 38–42 [38–40] ‘The Arnolfini Marriage’ (Paul Durcan) 116–20 [117] ‘The Bard: A Pindaric Ode’ (Thomas Grey) 62–4 ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ (Edwin Morgan) 173, 175–6 [176] ‘The Forked Tree’ (Marion Lomax/ Robyn Bolam) 27–9 [27] ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (T. S. Eliot) 21–3 ‘The Peepshow Girl’ (Marion Lomax/Robyn Bolam) 146–50 [146–7] The Prelude (William Wordsworth) 49–50, 125 ‘The Red Wheel­barrow’ (William Carlos Williams) 30–1 [30] ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) 54 ‘The Shield of Achilles’ (W. H. Auden) 67, 111, 113, 119 theorised reading 145, 157, 209

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Index  215 ‘This Poem Intentionally Left Blank’ (Charles Bernstein) 166–7 [166] ‘To the Man After the Harrow’ (Patrick Kavanagh) 101–4 [102] touched image see imagery triadic structure 57, 61, 62, 209 trochee 51, 209 ‘University’ (Daljit Nagra) 83–5 [83] ‘University Days’ (Tom Raworth) 165–6 [165] ‘Untitled (Visual Sonnet)’ (David Miller) 183 [184] Uribe, Ana Maria 179–80

Barry.indb 215

variable foot 57 villanelle 60, 209 Welstead, Dr William 27n Williams, William Carlos 30–1, 56–8 Worden, Blair 64 Wordsworth, William 49–50, 54, 65, 66, 86–9, 96, 101, 114, 125, 126, 137, 159, 192, 194 Wyatt, Thomas 24–6 Wynne-Rhydderch, Samantha 71–2 Yeats, W. B. 22, 42, 129, 130–2

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