Music of Verse Continued
I left an earlier post on the music of verse suggesting that, while there was an aural symbolism lying deep in the unconscious, and perhaps most evocative when experienced in the semi-hypnotic condition induced by verse, the conscious mind still has to be satisfied. Kubla Khan’s magic, I noted, disappeared on parody.
It’s possible to analyze actual examples -though there are many difficulties (2-3) – and Ronald Carter and Walter Nash’s simple introduction to styles in English in fact devotes several pages to the verse patterning exhibited by Browning’s Meeting by Night, which readers will remember starts with:
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.
Sprinkled through their introduction to and analysis of the piece are such comments as: (4)
But sounds in verse-or the sounds implied by the verse text-have more than musical value. While they decorate the poem, they may also help to organize it, acting as more or less emphatic markers of the phrase, the line, the stanza. Rhyme, for example, offers something more than a pleasant variation of sonorous chimes; it is also a kind of acoustic punctuation, a designator of the boundaries and overlaps of verse form and grammatical form. Alliteration occurs quite commonly as a device which not only picks out the balancing halves of a line, or the matching lines of a distich, but also gives emphasis to the grammatical shape of clause and phrase.
But rhyme is rarely used today in serious poetry, or indeed any verbal music at all, as Alex Lemon’s Your Life is The Bed I’m Gonna Lay Down in the prestigious Kenyon Review perhaps illustrates. (1) It may help if I run through the ‘prose meaning’ of the piece quickly. It starts with:
Nothing is quite the savor
That was promised.
And that statement is then illustrated with inconseqential quidities, probably from dreamland:
No salvage
In the rough & tumble but still
The darksome bellows down
Below songs:
The emptying darkness cracks
Open.
This body wants
To break out of itself.
Tentatively,
I’m long dead.
From which he’ll wake:
Come sunup
Everyone will taste brutal,
Become a vessel of waltzing
Light.
And be himself more:
The fun
Cage is open for business, always.
Though leaving his sleeping partner behind:
You’ll be all
Light, turned inside out & never
Going back. You’ll be glowing no
Sleep the whole paradise tomb.
Or possibly so: the sequence is difficult to follow, but was perhaps made intentionally so, to mimic the initial confusion of gaining consciousness.
That, I suggest, is the motive of the poem. It does not want any semi-hypnotic condition seducing us to accept the conventional, but expects us to follow with all our senses alert from word to word. Not all the poem is successful, I think, but to comment on the excerpts quoted here:
Nothing is quite the savor
That was promised.
A straightforward introductory sentence, with a pause after ‘savor’ to emphasize the disappointment that follows in the second line.
No salvage
In the rough & tumble but still
The darksome bellows down
Below songs:
Images of the sea, shipwreck and thwarted salvation in the sea of waking consciousness.
The emptying darkness cracks
Open.
We wake up.
This body wants
To break out of itself.
Painfully or reluctantly.
Tentatively,
I’m long dead.
Wondering what has happened while we were asleep.
Come sunup
Everyone will taste brutal,
Become a vessel of waltzing
Light.
We join the others everywhere also waking up to the sharp sunlight, perhaps a little dazed.
The fun
Cage is open for business, always.
Perhaps hungry for sex or simply aware of our extended anatomy.
You’ll be all
Light, turned inside out & never
Going back. You’ll be glowing no
Sleep the whole paradise tomb.
The partner is also flooded with sunlight,
turned inside out & never
Going back.
You’ll be glowing
Or glows with inner happiness, resolving to stay with him/her.
no
Sleep
Remembering the night.
the whole paradise tomb.
Which has become – possibly, it’s an ambiguous image-both a paradise and something now dead.
One role of verse (returning to our main topic) is its ability to frame the poem, to signal that words are being used in a special and interdependent way. Poems are not slices of life, generally, but deeply pondered creations, and that removal from reality is signaled by the verse texture, rhyme and stanza shape- i.e. the music of verse.
Contemporary verse uses other devices to gain aesthetic distance, often, as here, an extremely unlikely diction or word order. No one outside the madhouse speaks quite like this poem.
Yet if these devices give the contemporary poet more freedom, and they most certainly do, how is that freedom to be paid for? Why should we accept such compositions: on what authority or conceived goodness of craftsmanship? We have to take a lot on trust, particularly the last line, which is difficult to fathom, and many sections I haven’t quoted. And while the experienced ear soon judges traditional styles, there is little here to stamp a ‘seal of quality’ on the work.
Here, I think, we meet the usual strategy of poets today – the scramble to get into the better magazines, the importuning of friends for glowing reviews, and the resort to difficult and somewhat dubious theory to buttress experimental sections. But what else is possible? Poems and poets have to be marketed as any other commodity in a consumerist society, and if the reviews are less than honest, any PR executive will tell you that negative marketing (i.e. pointing to flaws in rival products) only reduces sales in the market sector overall. Excellence has to be seen against an agreed connoisseurship, which is difficult to achieve in the fast-moving contemporary poetry scene.
But why should there be any ‘seal of quality’ at all? What is to stop us following our own preferences and reading on if the opening lines encourage us to do so?
Perhaps the time involved. Poems don’t always yield their full meaning on a first reading, and we commonly have to study a fair bit of a poet’s output before we really know what makes it distinctive and worth investigating. Hence the need for critics and criticism. And for critics to be well-read, honest and informative in explaining exactly what they admire and do not admire in a particular work. Their reasons are important, and we expect them to find them supported with illustrative excerpts, allowing us to draw our own conclusions as to the critic’s abilities and frames of reference. Sometimes the last are so different to ours that there is little to been gained by following their appraisals: we shall never agree or find pleasure in what they recommend.
Of traditional poetry two things were expected. Firstly that it said something well, indeed memorably, if at all possible. Secondly, that what it said was worth saying. The techniques of verse were expected to help in the first, and at least not hinder in the second. Ezra Pound, I think it was, remarked that poetry should be as well written as prose, and today, when it commonly isn’t, we find ourselves at sea in both areas, in the how and what poems say. If the rules of composition are suspended for contemporary poetry, as this poem rather illustrates, then we have only the showcasing of prestigious magazines to guide us, which is a circular argument if they are simply authoritative for the prestige of their writers, i.e. for famous for being famous. It’s not only that diminishing band of readers who are let down by this, but poets themselves, who need to learn from their better contemporaries. The music of verse was only one aspect of poetry, but one that did at least require the poet to properly understand what it was he was trying to convey: meaning and expression were closely linked.
References
1. Your Life is The Bed I’m Gonna Lay Down In, by Alex Lemon.
http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2013-fall/selections/alex-lemon-763879/
2. Sound in Poetry. http://www.textetc.com/traditional/sound.html
3. Rhythm in Poetry: Rhythmic Analysis. http://www.textetc.com/traditional/rhythm.html
4. Carter, R. and Nash, W. Seeing Through Language: A Guide to the Styles of English Writing. Blackwell, 1990. 119-129.
The interpretation is my own, but I have drawn heavily for details on Chapter 4 in John Press’s The Fire and The Fountain: An Essay on Poetry. OUP, 1955.
Related Website Pages
Sound in Poetry. http://www.textetc.com/traditional/sound.html
Rhythm in Poetry. http://www.textetc.com/traditional/rhythm.html
Sociology of Poetry. http://www.textetc.com/theory/sociology-of-poetry.html
Art as Purposeful Activity. http://www.textetc.com/theory/purposeful-activity.html
