----------------------------
ENJOYING POETRY - by John Enright
working copy of a talk given at the IOS (now TOC) summer seminar
including some parts I skipped, and probably including typos, too.
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1. How Poets Make Sense
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a. "saying what isn't
so"
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Let's start with some lines you've probably heard.
Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage.
Let's stop right there.
What is this guy talking about?
Stone walls do not a prison make. That is, Stone walls
don't make a prison.
Has he been to a prison lately?
In his day, in fact, stone
walls were exactly what prisons were made from.
Nor iron bars a cage.
That is, iron bars don't make a cage, either.
They don't? What makes a
cage then?
Is he denying that prisons have stone walls and that cages
have iron bars? Is he...
speaking nonsense?
No. Of course not. But he's got our attention by making
bold statements that SEEM to contradict the obvious. But
that somehow sound as if they contain a higher truth.
Oops. Think about what I
just said. Seems to contradict the
obvious. Sounds like it
contains a higher truth.
If you heard this in a different context... say in a
discussion of some New Age religious text... you might very
well say:
What rank mysticism! You
don't get to truth by contradicting
the obvious! You have to
begin by accepting the reality of
the obvious. And you build
FROM the obvious up to higher
levels of conceptual knowledge.
So here - for many people - is the first obstacle to the
enjoyment of poetry. Most
poetry includes non-literal
statements, the meaning of which may be hard to figure out.
Why bother?
Because these non-literal statements, at their best, WORK for
us. They grab our
imagination and they stir our souls.
A good illustration is found in Rand's introduction to the
Fountainhead, where she offers a quote from Nietzsche. She
says this quote is "perhaps the best way to communicate The
Fountainhead's sense of life".
She says: "I cannot endorse its literal meaning: it proclaims
an indefensible tenet - psychological determinism.
But if one takes it as a poetic projection of an emotional
experience ... then that quotation communicates the inner
state of an exalted self-esteem...". [2:19]
Let's turn the page, and look at the full stanza - that is,
the full verse-paragraph - these lines appear in.
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.
Let me pause, and say, by the way, that I really like these
lines.
I've been talking about how poets make sense, and how poetic
meaning is often non-literal.
But the building blocks of
poetic meaning are, nonetheless, particular words, all of
which come with literal meanings as well as a host of
associations or connotations.
If you don't know what a particular word means, if often
helps to look it up.
There's just one funny word in these 8 lines. Hermitage.
It's not a word in common usage right now. It has 2
dictionary definitions, closely related. It means the
place where a hermit lives, or any secluded dwelling place.
I want to mention, while we're on the subject, 2 other funny
facts about the word in this poem.
One: It's preceded by "an" not "a". This has to do with the
British tendency to treat leading aitches as silent, so that
hermitage, or rather ermitage, then sounds like it begins
with a vowel. And it's the
sound of the word that determines
our usage of "an" or "a".
Two: Hermitage doesn't
exactly rhyme with cage. It LOOKS
like it might rhyme. But
it doesn't. There's a special name
for this. It's called an
eye-rhyme. And we'll come back to
it later when we talk about rhyme.
Now, back to the poem's meaning.
I asked, earlier, has this
guy ever visited a prison?
So he tells us that he did.
The title of the poem, is "To
Althea, from Prison."
And a trip to the Encyclopedia tells us that the author,
Richard Lovelace, lived in 17th century England, was twice
imprisoned because of his political opinions and activities.
[4:26]
So this is a poem of defiance, by a man who has been locked
up, proclaiming that even though he is physically confined,
he is still free in what matters most to him - his heart and
his mind.
But it sounds better - has more emotional impact - when he
says it than when I summarize it.
Why is this?
It's partly because he uses a wealth of direct images. Stone
walls and iron bars are things we can directly perceive when
we encounter them in real live.
Stone walls and iron bars are
real to our senses.
Especially as compared to "physical confinement"
which is a rather abstract phrase.
Ayn Rand's theory of art holds that art works by taking important
issues in human life and presenting them with apparent physical
reality - so that big ideas are brought down to earth - so that we
can
grasp and feel
as real
what in fact
is abstract
----------------------------
b. metaphor & simile
----------------------------
One way - or perhaps two ways - in which poetry often does this is
through a couple of rhetorical devices known as metaphor and
simile. I've got to
mention them, but I have to warn you that
metaphor
and simile
are about as similar
as can be
Both involve finding resemblances.
Let's start with examples.
O, my love is like a red,
red rose
That's newly sprung in
June.
That's a simile. And it's
a simile because that "like" is in there.
If Robert Burns had said instead:
My love IS a red red rose
That would be a metaphor.
The distinction's not really very important. What's important is
that the poet is expressing his feelings about his love by
presenting us with an image of a red, red rose.
He's speaking apparent nonsense, of course. How much apparent
resemblance is there, really, between his love and a rose?
Okay, sure, you might be able to find some points of resemblance
if you really looked. But,
for scientific purposes, they'd be
rather far-fetched resemblances.
Aristotle, that sober Greek, had something interesting to say
about
metaphor when he wrote about poetic style.
"Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to
something else;" [poetics 21]
and
"But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of
metaphor. It is
the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is a sign
of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception
of the similarity in dissimilars." [poetics 22]
So, let's look a little at Burns' rose and ask where the
similarity
might lie.
O, my love is like a red,
red rose
That's newly sprung in
June.
O my love is like the
melody
That's sweetly played
in tune.
The easy answer that comes to my mind is that the point of
resemblance
lies in beauty. Being
beautiful is one of the standout features of
roses. That's the quality
people most prize them for.
So he's saying his love is beautiful.
But Burns says more than that his love his like a rose. He says it's
like a red rose. And not
just red, but "red red". What
is the effect
of this?
Repeating the red like that is a way of intensifying the quality
of the red. It's a very
simple, almost childish way of saying "very
red". Like when a kid
today says "it was really really red."
Repeating the red draws our attention to a particular visual
quality, of deep redness.
Then Burns tells us something else about the rose: That's newly
sprung in June. He's
giving us the rose's life story so far.
It's
a nice fresh rose that just burst forth on the scene as the
climate
warms up.
We could go on exploring.
We'd find that people, if they put their
minds to it, can read a lot into these two lines. Someone might
mention the implication, for example, that love is a natural
healthy
process, like the springing forth of a flower. Poetic comparisons
tend to be open-ended - poets leave us to fill in the blanks - to
fill in the points of resemblance - based on our own experience.
How do we do that?
We mostly do it subconsciously.
Rand gave a nice description of
the basic process, though it wasn't particularly poetry she had
in mind:
"a process of emotional generalization, which may be
described as
a subconscious counterpart of a process of abstraction, since it
is
a method of classifying and integrating. But it is a process of
emotional abstraction: it consists of classifying things according
to the emotions they invoke--i.e. of tying together, by
association
or connotation, all those things which have the power
to make an individual experience the same (or a similar)
emotion."
[philosophy and sense
of life, p 27]
Of course, not everybody comes up with the same associations and
connotations. If you
somehow have never seen a rose, you're going
to draw more of a blank when it's time to fill in the blanks. Or
if you somehow associate roses mostly with their flesh-ripping
thorns, you may think that Burns is making a claim that love is
painful. The remarkable
thing, in a way, is what a good job
of communicating poets actually do manage to do with metaphor.
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c. irony & ambiguity
----------------------------
Inherent in the use of metaphors is a certain kind of ambiguity
- a certain kind of open-endedness of meaning. And other kinds
of ambiguity frequently creep in as well.
To be ambiguous, is to possess two or more meanings, or, to be
vague in meaning.
Ambiguity has a close cousin in irony.
To be ironic is to possess incongruous meaning.
Some statements are both ambiguous and ironic.
Consider, for instance, the following line:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.
Standing by itself, it may seem neither ambiguous nor ironic.
But these qualities will emerge for you when we place the
line in context.
It's from near the end of a poem by Shelley. It's a poem
about a giant statue of a tyrant.
And I'm going to tell you,
one thing Shelley hated was tyrants of all varieties.
Anyway, it's a very ancient statue, and it's out in the desert,
and
all that's left of it are two enormous legs of stone, and nearby,
a
head that's half-buried in the sand, on the face of which can
still
be observed a "frown / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold
command"
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair."
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
So, let's look at that sentence again, and it's
two conflicting meanings.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.
First, let's paraphrase it into contemporary English.
Hey! All you other
powerful people!
Plunge into a state of depression as you stare
at all the stuff I've done!
The tyrant's original intent was to impress people with what a
great
guy he was. Other people,
particularly other rulers, were supposed
to despair in the face of his competitive greatness. They were
supposed to give up any hope of ever out-doing this Ozymandias
guy.
They were supposed to walk away from this monument muttering
something like: "Gee whiz, that Ozymandias is truly
unbeatable."
Presumably, too, there were other works of his in the area,
something
besides this statue. He
doesn't just say look at this statue, he
says look at my works.
They must have been there once.
They're just
not there now.
So the original meaning of despair is something like:
Despair of ever outdoing me.
The ambiguity comes in, because he doesn't say that. He just tells
them to Despair. Period.
And, by the time this poem gets written, it turns out there's
something new to get depressed about.
Namely, that the statue's wrecked, and all his other works are
gone.
Completely gone. Wiped
from the face of the earth. By the
sands of
time, so to speak.
This immediately puts the original claim in an ironic context.
That is, the situation described undercuts and contradicts the
original intent. Shelley
pointedly tells us that there's nothing
here to actually impress us anymore.
And the new ironic meaning that emerges for our line is something
like:
Hey. All you other
heartless ruler types. Look at my
wrecked
statue. Look how all my
public works are gone and forgotten.
Give
up on making a lasting impression with big stupid monuments. They
don't last.
I think Ozymandias is a good example of the use of irony and
ambiguity
in the interest of clear communication. But they are not the end-all
and be-all of poetry. In
twentieth century poetry criticism, however,
there has been a tremendous stress on ambiguity and irony as
positive
features.
There was a very influential essay called "Seven Types of
Ambiguity"
by William Empson, extolling its virtues. And other important
literary critics insisted that all good poems were ironic in some
way. And students of
literature were particularly drilled on looking
for ambiguities and ironies.
The danger is pretty obvious.
If the poem is too loaded with
ambiguities and ironies, your message gets lost. Multiple levels of
meaning are great, as long as they somehow end up making sense of
one
sort or another.
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d. compression
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Multiple levels of meaning are one way of achieving another
characteristic feature of poetic style: compression.
Compression is the art of saying a lot with a little.
A good example of this is found in a couple of lines of poetry
which were among Ayn Rand's favorites.
And the world began when
I was born
And the world is mine
to win.
You'll note, right away, it's another good example of a poet
making his point by saying what's not so. But, ask yourself,
how much is compressed here?
You might feel like there's
a philosophy of life squished in there.
Let's look at the whole stanza.
It's the beginning of "The
Westerner" by Badger Clark.
My fathers sleep on the sunrise plains,
And each one sleeps
alone.
Their trails may dim to the grass and rains,
For I choose to make my
own.
I lay proud claim to their blood and name,
But I lean on no dead
kin;
My name is mine, for the praise or scorn,
And the world began when I was born
And the world is mine to
win.
Let me say right off, this is not an example of especially
compressed poetry. As a
matter of fact, this is not particularly
compressed at all, and it's rather easy to understand, as poetry
goes.
My fathers sleep on the sunrise plains.
His fathers? No one has
more than one father. So he means his
forefathers. They
sleep. Not really. They're dead. Sleep as
a substitute for death is nothing radical, but it does suggest a
benign sort of acceptance of the fact that they're dead.
On the sunrise plains.
What does that mean? I think
that's short
for "on the plains that lie in the same direction as the sun
comes
up." Namely,
east. And what's the title of this
poem? The Westerner.
So he's saying his forefathers are buried on plains to the east.
And each one sleeps alone.
So perhaps they have been part of this
country's westward migration, or perhaps he just comes from a line
of
loners none of whom stayed to live in the place they were
born. Each
one sleeps alone. This
could sound lonely. But what he seems
to
be establishing for himself is a family tradition of striking out
on your own. A tradition
of leaving traditions behind, if you will.
So he hasn't defied his fathers' traditions by leaving them
behind.
He has honored them by doing so.
Saying they're sleeping on sunrise plains is kind of odd in one
way,
since sunrise is associated with waking up, but they're obviously
going to stay asleep. Of
course, it's just sunrise relative to the
speaker. But he's
associating their ends with his beginning, in
a positive way.
Their trails may dim to the grass and rains
For I choose to make my
own.
This part about the trails is a bit compressed. What he means, I think,
is something like: My forefathers' trails may get overgrown by
grass
or washed away by rain, because I'm not bothering to maintain
them,
because I'm out blazing my own trails.
Note that we get the feeling that it's all right that the trails
should
fade. It has none of the
air of calamity or disaster that was present
in the case of the fading of the empire of Ozymandias.
Let's skip to the third to last line, because there's a typical
sort of grammatical compression going on in that line.
My name is mine, for praise or scorn.
Actually, the line starts off with a funny sort of logical
redundancy. My name is
mine. Well, of course it is. The underlying
thought here is that he is the owner of his own reputation. And
"name" is a nice short striking stand-in for
"reputation."
This phrase "for praise or scorn" seems compressed,
too. What does
it mean to say is name is "for" praise or scorn,
exactly? I suppose
that's one of the things a name is for. The phrase is also rather
reminiscent of the phrase "for good or ill".
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e. interpreting
----------------------------
Now let's look at that "the world began when I was born"
claim
in context. He says this
after talking about his fathers who were
here before him. So he
clearly doesn't mean it literally. But
he
does mean something. What
is it exactly? As we ask that question,
we step into the task of interpretation.
Actually, we've been dancing in and out of this task for quite
some
time. We've been
interpreting metaphors, ambiguities, ironies and
compressed expressions.
We've been going through the nuts and bolts
of interpreting a poem.
The basic procedure is really just a more intensified version of
what
we do everyday when we have normal conversations with people we
know.
Because the people we know do use metaphors, ambiguities, ironies
and
compressed expressions.
They just don't use them with the same
sort of frequency that we find them in poetry. And, very importantly,
we get to ask our friends what they mean when we don't understand
them.
Then our friends explain by giving us more words. But once we've
read a poem, it's given us all the words it's going to.
However, if we know who wrote the poem, we frequently do have
access
to more words, after all.
A reading of the poet's other poems, or
or his letters, or fiction, or reading a biographical account of
his
life... all these things give us a big context for understanding
his intentions in writing the poem. Of course, you've got to be
pretty damned interested to do that.
Back to "the world began when I was born", I'd say in
context it's
clear that the meaning is something like "I'm not bound by
traditions.
I take a fresh look at everything and decide for myself what to
do."
But someone might say: "No.
The poem's about a crazy person who
really thinks that the world began when he was born. It's a case
study in insanity."
Or someone might say: "No.
The poem's an ironic attack on America's
westward expansion. The
poet deliberately puts ridiculous claims
in the character's mouth to make him appear foolish."
Now, I'm not saying you need to take these sorts of
interpretations
seriously. I'd say you
should usually feel free to trust your own
judgment and your own common sense about what a poem means.
However, if you for some reason did want to treat these
interpretations seriously, there are two basic steps you might
take:
Step 1. Examine the
poem. Ask if anything in the poem
contradicts
the interpretation. Ask if
the interpretation is needlessly
complicating the poem.
Step 2. Examine what's
known of the author and his likely
intentions. Above all,
look at his other poems. If the author
wrote lots of poems extolling the cowboy life, which, as it
happens,
he did, then these interpretations look even sillier than they did
before.
Sometimes people object, on principle, to step two. They say that
the poem is meant to stand on its own, as an independent creation.
Ayn Rand, for instance, wrote something that can be taken as
an objection to my step two:
"In essence, an objective evaluation requires that one
identify
the artist's theme, the abstract meaning of his work (exclusively
by identifying the evidence contained in the work and allowing
no other, outside considerations)..."
[Art & Sense of
Life]
I have to say I don't exactly agree with this.
I think it's right to approach the poem as being, in a sense, a
work that stands on its own.
Just as it's right to approach a
building as a work that stands on its own. But just as a building
is designed to fit into a particular location, so a poem is
designed
to be understood within a cultural context.
The present poem affords a good example. Imagine that you didn't
know anything at all about America's westward expansion, or
cowboys.
Do you agree with me that the poem would lose something for you?
But suppose that even this state of ignorance, the poem still
intrigued you, because much of the meaning still got across, and
suppose you really liked it?
Then that might be the time for you to
do a little research - just to enhance your own enjoyment - just
to
bring out a bit more of the flavor of the poem.
Finally, I want to say a word about what you might call personal
meaning. Especially in the
case of a poem that really seems to speak
to you, that somehow echoes and ties together with your own
emotional
associations in a really big way.
When that happens, there's an
important sense in which those words become your own. The poem
has special personal meaning for you.
That's a meaning to hold onto, even if you happen to decide it's
not
the meaning the original poet had in mind.
Or, as we might say:
The poem began when I
heard it,
And the poem is mine to
interpret.
Let me give you an example from my own life:
Irish poets, learn your trade
Sing whatever is well made
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
This is from Yeats' poem "Under Ben Bulben." It has deep personal
meaning to me as a call to create well-crafted poetry, as opposed
to the widespread formlessness of modern poetry.
I'm pretty sure, from looking at the lines that follow, that this
is
not what Yeats had in mind.
And if I were teaching the poem to somebody, I wouldn't offer it
as
an interpretation.
But when I say those words to myself, they remain a rallying cry
for
well-crafted poetry.
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2. The Sound of English
----------------------------
We've been talking about words and what they mean, but we also
need
to talk about words and how they sound. Because poetry is the art
form that uses both sound and meaning to achieve its main effects.
Most of poetry's special sound effects are based on repetitive
patterns
of sound - and on variations within these repetitive patterns.
This is true of rhythm and rhyme, to take two major examples.
Rhythm is a repetition of time-counts of syllables. Rhyme is a
repetition of word endings - such as June and tune or ceiling and
peeling.
Let's talk about rhythm and rhyme, as they occur in English, in
turn.
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a. rhythm and meter
----------------------------
The simplest form of poetic rhythm, perhaps the only form that
many
people consciously notice, is repeating patterns of line length.
In the excerpt from Ozymandias, for example, all the lines look
about
the same length, and also sound about the same length.
If we try counting the syllables per line, we'll find that each
line
has exactly 10 syllables.
And on the pe-de-stal these words ap-pear: 10
"My name is O-zy-man-dias, king of kings: 10
(or 11?)
Look on my works, ye Migh-ty, and de-spair." 10
Noth-ing be-side re-mains.
Round the de-cay 10
Of that col-los-sal wreck, bound-less and bare 10
The lone and lev-el sands stretch far a-way. 10
Actually, to be really precise the second line here might have
eleven syllables. It
depends on how you count the "dias" in
Ozymandias. One syllable
or two? Or is it one and a half?
For now, since such a regularity has emerged, let's call
"Ozymandias" a four syllable word and keep the overall
line
count down to 10 syllables for every line.
Well, you say, what a regular pattern. Is that how we keep
time in classical English verse - by counting syllables?
No. It's not that
easy. If this were French, it would be
that
easy.
But this is English, and we do count syllables, but we count
something
else as well - an attribute of the syllables that we call stress
or
accent.
English is a language that uses stress a lot. Almost all two syllable
words in English come with one stressed and one unstressed.
He was content with the content of the memo.
In this example, what looks like a repetition of the same word -
that
word beginning with "c" - turns out to have two
different stress
arrangements, dictated by the two different meanings.
conTENT is an adjective.
CONtent is a noun.
If you look up words with more than two syllables, you will find
that they generally fall into patterns of alternating stresses.
Two unstressed syllables may occur in a row, as in:
e MO tion al IS tic
But it will be almost impossible to find any words with three
unstressed
syllables in a row.
Anyway, the natural tendency of English speakers is to speak in
alternating patterns of accented and unaccented sylliables.
By the mid-1300's, the time of Chaucer, English poets had
abstracted
from these tendencies, and worked out a system of rhythm that's
sometimes called accentual-syllabic meter. It's a way of keeping
time that involves measuring (or metering) both stresses (or
accents)
and syllables.
There are 2 main counts, double and triple.
Either
soft HARD soft
HARD...
or
soft soft HARD soft soft HARD...
The repeating part of the pattern is called a "foot".
So "soft hard" is the foot of the double time rhythm.
And "soft soft hard" is the foot of the triple time
rhythm.
The technical name for soft-hard is iambic, and the technical
name for soft-soft-hard is anapestic. These are names taken over
from ancient Greek terminology.
In general, double time is far more common among poets than
triple time. That is,
iambic is the main meter of English
verse.
5-stress double-time, also known as iambic pentameter, sounds
like this:
He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
But, soft! What light
through yonder window breaks?
It is the east and Juliet is the sun!
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
4-stress double-time, more technically known as iambic
tetrameter, sound like this:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of golden daffodils
Now, let's take a look again at our Ozymandias excerpt and
its rhythm pattern. I've
already gone ahead and figured out
what I think the pattern is.
Figuring out the rhythmic pattern
is called scanning, and it's something of a learned skill. It's
based on a kind of attentive listening to the way
you naturally are inclined to stress the words in the line.
But there's some trial-and-error to the method, and there are
sometimes judgment calls involved. Experts can disagree
on details of how best to count the stresses and syllables in a
line.
I've capitalized the syllables I count as stressed.
Over to the right I've charted a completely abstract
diagram of the soft and hard pattern, with soft syllables
showing as hyphens and hard syllables showing as apostrophes.
As I've charted it, the poem is basically iambic pentameter -
5 stress double-time.
Now I'll read it aloud, overemphasizing the emphases:
and ON the PE-de-STAL these WORDS ap-PEAR: -'-'-'-'-'
"my NAME is O-zy-MAN-dias, KING of KINGS: -'-'-'-'-'
LOOK on my WORKS, ye MIGH-ty, AND de-SPAIR." '--'-'-'-'
NOTH-ing be-SIDE re-MAINS.
ROUND the de-CAY '--'-''--'
of THAT col-LOS-sal WRECK, BOUND-less and BARE -'-'-''--'
the LONE and LEV-el SANDS stretch FAR a-WAY. -'-'-'-'-'
You'll notice, looking at the abstract chart, that there are only
4
places where Shelley runs two unaccented syllables next to each
other. He actually does it
simply by inverting the expected order of
some of the soft-hards - substituting hard-softs in their
place. He
does it quite carefully, so that it gives him a bit of variation
within what remains a pretty stable and tidy rhythm pattern.
I do want to show you a triple-time poem, as well, so I'm going
to share with you a limerick I wrote for my daughter Felicia.
There was a young girl
named Felicia -'--'--'-
Who giggled much more
than a geisha -'--'--'-
But call her a name
- -'--'
Her temper would
flame -'--'
And she'd growl like a
dog on a leasha. --'--'--'-
If you look at the abstract stress chart, over to the side,
you'll see that most of the lines seem to start double time but
then shift into triple time, and you'll see that three of the
lines end with what might be called an extra leftover unstressed
syllable. These are well
within the normal range of variations
for limericks.
That horrible rhyme on the last line is also within the normal
range for limericks, which often feature, for their humorous
effect, purposely mis-pronounced rhyme words.
----------------------------
b. rhyme and its cousins
----------------------------
I decided to talk about rhyme after rhythm, because one of rhyme's
major functions is to emphasize where the line endings are, so that
you can hear the patterns of lines more clearly.
Two words rhyme when they have identical endings. We can be more
specific than that. Two
words rhyme perfectly in a poem when they are
identical sounding - starting from a stressed vowel sound.
For instance:
badly &
sadly rhyme
free & me
rhyme
but badly
& me, don't make a perfect rhyme because the
last stressed vowel in badly is "a" sound and there's
nothing like
that in "me".
Let's test it:
She was mean to me
I took it
badly
Compare that to:
She was
mean to me
I set her
free
The second set of rhymes, I think you'll agree, is much stronger.
Most rhymes in English are simple one syllable rhymes like
Flunk & Monk
These are called masculine rhymes
Less common are two syllable rhymes like
Flunkie and Monkey
These are called feminine rhymes
Truly rare are rhymes of 3 or more syllables
America & Esoterica
To them, we assign no gender.
They have a tendency to show
up in humorous verse.
Another type of rhyme that has a tendency to show up in humorous
verse
is rhymes involving more than two words. For instance:
Very gravely --'-
I forgave Lee. --'-
I would say this still sounds a little less than perfect to the
ear,
because the real truth is that we don't really pronounce those 2
Lee's the same. We might
think that each "lee" is relatively
unstressed within the poem - as compared to the "ave"
syllable
just before. But it's also
the case that we hear the name Lee
pronounced more sharply than the L-Y lee.
Rhyme has many cousins, and poets sometimes use these relatives as
stand-ins where you might have expected a rhyme. That's right,
poet's just whip out their poetic license and say:
Officer, let this pass as a rhyme.
You remember, back in that first poem we looked at, To Althea
from Prison, we mentioned the so called "eye rhyme"
between
cage and hermitage.
It looks like it should rhyme - but you know how deceptive English
spelling is - all we get really is a sorta-rhyme, what you might
call a near rhyme. Because
the trailing consonant sound the "j"
sound is the same, but the two "a" sounds are really
quite different
here. You might call this
a consonant rhyme with similar vowels.
It's still a noticeable sound effect, just a weaker one than
normal.
My own impression of the effect caused by various sorts of
near-rhymes
in places where full rhymes are expected, is that they have a
slight
emotional flattening effect... a subduing of tone.
Let's look at Lovelace's stanza again:
Stone walls do not a prison make, -'-'-'-'
Nor iron bars a
cage; -'-'-'
Minds innocent and quiet take -'-'-'-'
That for an
hermitage; '--'-'
If I have freedom in my love -'-'-'-'
And in my soul am
free, -'-'-'
Angels alone, that soar above '--'-'-'
Enjoy such liberty. -'-'-'
What's interesting here is that free & liberty, while normally
categorized as a full rhyme, is probably not heard as strongly as
love & above. Nor as
strongly as make and take. The liberty
rhyme
sounds a little weaker because the "tee", while markedly
stressed
in the poem's metrical pattern, doesn't have the feeling of being
stressed quite as much as the "free". Because, within the word
Liberty, the "ty" has to stay stressed somewhat less
than the LIB.
We say liberty, liberTEE.
I feel this works fine in this poem. It seems to give it, for me,
a very sober emotional ring, that plays nicely against the extreme
intensity of his claims.
After all, he's claiming that a long as his mind and love are
free,
he's as free as an angel.
Pretty strong stuff from someone sitting
behind bars. I would s ay
there's a real danger of sounding
hysterical when expressing such sentiments. I think the off-rhyme
on heritage, and the slightly flat rhyme on liberty, help make him
sound more serious about what he's saying.
Rhyme, when used in combination with rhythm, is an extremely
powerful technique. But it
is possible, by intensive use of
other sound effects, to write poems in English that sound
as musical as a poem that does rhyme.
A good example is a poem of Tennyson's. Here's the first stanza:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking at the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
You'll notice he has a strong rhythm going. You'll notice he
repeats the word tears 3 times.
You'll notice he has 3 important
words beginning with d on line 2.
You'll notice he actually does
have a rhyme, between rise and eyes, at the first word and last
word
on line 3.
And it turns out that there are three more stanza's, all of which
end with the phrase "the days that are no more."
Tennyson's poem, while not rhymed, would never be called
"free verse."
For something to be called "free verse," in English, it
has to be
lacking in rhyme AND lacking a noticeable regular structure of
stresses
and syllables.
And even free verse can sometimes sound pretty good:
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is,
Nice sentiments.
That Walt Whitman, of course, from Song of Myself, the beginning
of verse 48.
While his rhythms don't fall into a very regular pattern, the
lines
still come out - at least for these three - at about the same
length.
And there is a lot of verbal repetition - the same words and
phrases
repeated completely.
----------------------------
c. tracing patterns
----------------------------
Now that we've talked about rhythm and rhyme, we can talk a little
bit about verse forms.
Verse forms are are particular arrangements
of meter and rhyme - formal little recipes for building a poem
that
probably will sound good.
We're going to talk about two very typical forms of English verse:
the sonnet, and the ballad or hymnal like form that's called
common measure.
The very first poem we looked at is an example of common measure.
Here it is again.
Stone walls do not a prison make, -'-'-'-' a
Nor iron bars a
cage; -'-'-' b
Minds innocent and quiet take -'-'-'-' a
That for an
hermitage; '--'-' b
If I have freedom in my love -'-'-'-' c
And in my soul am
free, -'-'-' d
Angels alone, that soar above '--'-'-' c
Enjoy such liberty. -'-'-' d
Way over to the right, those abcd letters - those are an abstract
indication of the rhyme. A
letter is assigned to each rhyme-ending.
So a=ake, b=age, c=ov, and d=ee
Anyway, here's a recipe for strictest sort of common measure:
You build the poem in 4 line units,
All the lines are double-time.
The first line has 4 stresses,
the second line has 3 stresses,
the third line has 4 stresses
the fourth line has 3 stresses.
The first line rhymes with the third.
The second line rhymes with the fourth.
This pattern evolved out of folk ballads, and you will see it,
and things that resemble it, a lot. Sometimes only the second
and fourth lines rhyme:
For instance:
O, my love is like a red,
red rose --'-'-'-' a
That's newly sprung in
June. -'-'-' b
O my love is like the
melody --'-'-'-' c
That's sweetly played
in tune. -'-'-' b
As long as we're looking at the poem again, look how much
verbal repetition Burns has going here. "O my love is like" at the
beginning of 2 lines and the other 2 lines both begin with
"That's"
and have utterly parallel grammatical structures.
The other verse form I want to discuss is the Sonnet, just because
so many have been written, and it's regarded as a form for poets
who really know what they're doing.
There are somewhat different varieties of sonnet, but a general
recipe is 14 lines, all double-time, 5 stresses each, each line
rhyming to at least one other line.
It has a very different feel to it than common measure does.
Where the common measure retains a song-like quality, the sonnet
has
a much more talky kind of feel to it.
Earlier, we looked at the last six lines of Shelley's Ozymandias.
Now let's look at the first eight lines as well, which combined
with
the last six is the whole poem - all 14 lines of it. Yes, it's
a sonnet.
Before we read it, let me mention that antique, as it's used in
this
poem, means ancient, and that visage, which is a 25-point
vocabulary
word, means face.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near
them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair."
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I'm not going to analyze this poem much more right now. I just wanted
you to hear what it sounds like as a unit.
------------------------------
3. Sound / Sense
Integration
------------------------------
We've talked about sound and sense. Let's talk a little now about how they
integrate into a single work of art - a single mode of expression.
I'm going to talk about this at the simplest level - because it's
a level I understand pretty well.
At this simplest level, integration has occurred as long as there
aren't any really ugly clashes.
So let's talk about the very basic
ugly clashes that the poet wants to avoid.
------------------------------
a. tortured vs. smooth
syntax
------------------------------
The first ugly clash occurs when the poet has so much trouble
trying
to get his words into a pattern of some sort that he renders his
sentences almost unreadable by knocking the sentence out of its
natural pattern.
Consider the sentence:
Let me not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds.
Then consider this order:
Let me not, to the marriage of true minds, admit impediments.
This may not seem quite as natural, but it's still pretty
understandable. And this
is how Shakespeare opens up one of his
sonnets:
Let me not, to the marriage of true minds,
Admit impediments. Love is
not love
That alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove;
You see, he's managed to line up minds so it rhymes with finds.
Now let's really botch some syntax.
Give me liberty
Or death me give.
Unless I'm wild and free
I just can't live.
My second line here is simply an abomination. It's normal order
is painfully out of line - all for the apparent purpose of getting
give to the end of the line so I can rhyme it with
"live".
------------------------------
b. forced vs. natural
rhymes
------------------------------
Okay. Let's put the second
line back to normal and find a different
way to rhyme the last line with something like the same meaning:
Give me liberty
Or give me death.
Unless I'm wild and free
I can't draw breath.
How's this. A little
better, maybe. Or maybe just bad in a
different
way. What's wrong here is
that godawful last line. It rhymes very
nicely - but the sense isn't quite right. Yes, in theory "to live" is
"to draw breath", but to me the new version sounds like
the word choice
has been unnaturally forced in order to hit the rhyme.
If it's extremely obvious to you that a word is present "just
because"
it rhymed, and it doesn't seem to serve the meaning of the poem
too
well, then the integration of sound and sense has failed.
------------------------------
c. testing by changing
------------------------------
A somewhat different way of looking at the unity of a poem, is to
start with a poem that really works for you - and try fiddling
with
it - just to see what goes wrong.
Change a word here and there and
see whether the magic mysteriously goes out of the chant. Then try
to figure out what happened.
Let's go back to the first poem we looked at, and let's try
changing
two syllables:
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor cold steel bars a
cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
What's happened here? The
second line is no longer so flowing as it
was before, it seems to trip on those cold steel bars. After all,
even
though we count iron and cold steel as two syllables each, it's
clear
really iron is much faster to say.
From a sense point of view, we've lost the conventional phrase
"iron bars", and we've introduced a distracting element
of temperature.
And we've lost the pure parallelism of stone walls and iron bars,
of
raw material and fashioned barrier.
From a sound point of view, we've picked up a starting-consonants
echo
of steel with stone and cold
with cage. That looks like it could be
a plus.
But we've lost a subtle echo between prison and iron.
Overall, I'd say I've seriously damaged the line.
------------------------------------
4. Approaching the Poem
------------------------------------
a. listening vs. reading
------------------------------------
You may have noticed, as we've talked about making sound and sense
walk hand in hand, that I've switched back and forth between
asking you to
use your ears and asking you to use your eyes. I've said: listen to
this and look at that.
Listening is more important, but when we first approach a poem it
is
usually looking that has to come first - because most of us
encounter
poems on the printed page.
We don't just happen to overhear them when
we're walking down the street.
I just want to encourage you, when you read a poem to yourself, to
at
least "sub-vocalize" it. Even if you can't really say it out loud,
read it slowly enough so that you can imagine hearing it. Poetry's
a form of literature where speed-reading rarely pays off.
If you can read it aloud, that's where I think the real fun is.
If you want to analyze the poem, having the poem on paper is very
helpful. Abstract rhyme
and meter diagrams are things I personally
am fascinated by.
-----------------------------------
b. Entering the World of
the Poem
-----------------------------------
But analyzing the poem is different from the experience of
"entering
the world of the poem."
This is a hard experience to describe. There's something relaxing
about it when you do it.
You have to kind of "let down your guard"
and temporarily accept the poet's words - kind of let them wash
over
you - and see what happens - see how it makes you feel.
Rand has a brief description of this kind of experiencing, as
applied to
music, in an early scene in Atlas Shrugged, where Dagny, falling
asleep
in a railroad car, experiences a melody of her favorite
composer.
Rand describes Dagny as feeling - okay, this is it, you can just
let go
and surrender to this experience.
Well, if you can get to that state of mind, that's the way you can
get
the maximum effect a poem has to offer.
Spending time on the poem, reading it over and over, can be a big
help.
-----------------------------------
c. Holding off the Internal Critic
-----------------------------------
Another thing that can be a big help is putting a temporary muzzle
on
what I would call your own internal critic - the little voice
inside
you that may be in a big hurry to decide such questions as:
- exactly what is this poem saying
- does this poem meet my criteria for a good poem
- do I approve of this poem
- am I capable of ever understanding this poem
Instead, give your sense of life a chance to feel the poem, notice
what it is your emotional side likes and dislikes. Then
you can let your critical faculty look at WHY you like and dislike
what you do. But, first,
accept the fact of what you really like and
dislike - or love and hate!
This approach lets your critical faculty be your friend.
Accept the fact that you may just love some poems that on a
critical
level you are inclined to say: gee, that isn't written too well,
or
some of the ideas are awful, or whatever.
Just to share a personal experience on this. When my daughter Noelle
died, we had a non-religious funeral, and it involved reading some
poems. A couple of poems
by me, but some others as well.
The poems by other people I chose are not poems I would point to
as
great poems. But each of
them captured something about what I felt
about her life and death.
I hesitated in particular over the poem we read at her graveside,
called "Prayer for a Very New Angel," by Violet Alleyn
Storey.
I hesitated because the explicit form of the
poem is of a mother asking God to take care of her little girl on
her
first night in heaven.
Now, I don't believe in God or heaven, but that poem perfectly
captured, for me, the anguish of still wanting desperately to take
care of a little girl who was gone.
I should warn you: there IS a risk in holding off your internal
critic
and immersing yourself in the experience of the poem. The risk is
that you may get pretty disgusted or upset with what you
experience.
When this happens, note the name of the poet, and think twice about
doing that with him again.
-------------------------------------
5. Finding and Keeping What You Like
-------------------------------------
a. Sampling
-------------------------------------
Of course, experiencing poetry is only an end in itself when you
enjoy the experience at some level. How do you find poems that
will do this for you? I
follow two strategies: sampling and
searching.
Sampling is where you don't go for total immersion right
away. You
happen to see a poem, you've got lots on your mind, you don't want
to waste your time, etc.
So don't go diving. Stick a toe
in first.
Just read a couple of lines and watch whether it makes you feel
anything interesting. If
it does nothing for you, move on.
This lets you try a lot of new things, and sometimes lets you find
something surprising that you came across quite by accident.
-------------------
b. Searching
-------------------
Searching is the broader strategy that makes sure you have things
to sample.
What I tend to do is:
1) Look for other things by poets I already know I like.
[Wilbur/Badger Clark]
2) Go to the poetry section of a book store or library and just
open books by people I
don't know and just sample - stick my
toe in for a couple of lines.
3) Look at anthologies and poetry textbooks and sample there, too.
These are particularly
valuable for finding the may "one hit wonders"
of the poetry worlds.
Anthologies and textbooks usually embody a lot of
intelligence that went
into find poetry that would engage people.
And the textbooks often
include valuable explanatory material,
including help with the
odd vocabulary you come across in a lot
of poems.
-----------------------------
c. Carrying
-----------------------------
Once you find a poem you love - that inspires you or reassures you
or
soothes your troubled soul, why not keep it handy?
You may not have thought of it, but poetry is a preeminently
portable
art form. You can write
down the lines you really like onto a small
piece of paper, or you can photocopy the poem and cut out the part
you really like, and you can fold it up and carry it with you.
Stick your favorite verse
In your wallet or your purse.
Then read it
When you need it.
-------------------
d. Memorizing
-------------------
The ultimate in carrying convenience, however, is when you carry
poetry
in your head.
And poetry's practically designed to be carried this way. The
repeating patterns of verse makes it easier to memorize than
prose.
If you were forced to memorize poems in school, this may sound
like
total drudgery. But it's
not so bad if you just do it with stuff
you like. And it's easier
than you might think.
--------------------------------
Well,
This is the end
Of our whirlwind tour
I hope that it wasn't
Too much to endure
Thanks for listening. And
now, I'm ready to listen to your questions
and comments.
-----------------------------------------------
Note from Q & A period:
1 poetry recording I somehow forgot to mention:
Linda Abrams' Berton
Braley tape.
Outline:
1) How Poets Make Sense
a. "saying what isn't so"
b. metaphor & simile
c. irony & ambiguity
d. compression
e. interpreting
2) The Sound of English
a. rhythm & meter
b. rhyme & its cousins
c. tracing patterns
3) Sound / Sense Integration
a. tortured vs. smooth syntax
b. forced vs. natural rhymes
c. stilted vs. varied meter
d. testing by changing
4) Approaching the Poem
a. listening vs. reading
b. entering the world of the poem
c. holding off the internal critic
5) Finding and Keeping What
You Like
a. sampling
b. searching
c. carrying
d. memorizing
For further reading (all in
print):
Some short introductory
works about poetry:
Poetry Handbook, by Babette Deutsch, 1982, Barnes & Noble, New
York
The Poet’s Handbook, by Judson Jerome, 1986, Writers Digest Books,
Cincinnati, Ohio.
Rhyme’s Reason, by John Hollander, 1989, Yale University Press
Big textbook with many poems:
Introduction To Poetry, 1997 (now in 9th edition), edited by X.J. Kennedy,
Addison-Wesley.
Advanced reference work:
The New Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,
edited by Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, Princeton University Press.