POETICA : 2

 Poem of the Week

 November

By Walter de la Mare

 

 

There is wind where the rose was,
Cold rain where sweet grass was,
And clouds like sheep
Stream o'er the steep
Grey skies where the lark was.

Nought warm where your hand was,
Nought gold where your hair was,
But phantom, forlorn,
Beneath the thorn,
Your ghost where your face was.

Cold wind where your voice was,
Tears, tears where my heart was,
And ever with me,
Child, ever with me,
Silence where hope was.

Theme

Poem as story

 

Is poetry really a free flowing wind?

 

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!

 

Was D.H. Lawrence speaking here about poetry - great poet as he was. Perhaps.

Look at these lines from his famous poem ‘Snake’.

 

A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,

To drink there…..

 

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused

             a moment,

And stooped and drank a little more,….

 

Lawrence is telling a story in this poem. He was primarily a story-teller. ‘The wind that blows through me’…gives us his poems. But it also blows through his short stories, and often in his longer stories – his great novels. In fact, in Lawrence, it is difficult to disentangle poetry from story. The ‘Snake’ is both a poem and a story. Read his stories – ‘The Odour of Chrysanthemums’ or his autobiographical novel  Sons and Lovers. Poetry is there in almost everything he wrote: it’s ‘the wind blowing through me’. You will find even true poetry in human sex in his Lady Chatterley’s Lover. As I said, poetry is everywhere – both outside and inside. It’s like breath. And the continuum of breath reveals the story of life. Poetry and story are the two facets of life. We meet all three in that moment of Lawrence’s Snake coming to his water trough in Sicily. Poetry is like the sky enveloping the earth – our life. And the earth’s rotation is a story, and its revolution – a novel.

 

There is a story in every poem. And all good stories have a poetic element underpinning them which makes them touch your emotions. Lawrence is, perhaps, the best example of this concord of poetry and story. And if we find this concord between poetry and story fulfilling in one superb instance, we tend to believe in this concordance. We find this concordance in the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe. He also wrote stories and poems which had an identical trait of pure lyricism.

 

When we go back into the past, in folklore, this identification of poetry with story-telling is more clearly palpable. Both lyric and epic were earlier forms of the short story and the novel. And that takes us to the idea of recited poetry. We had both the lyric and the epic in the oral folk tradition. And both had the story element in them. If the story is like the backbone, poetry is like the heart: one is for continuity (revolution), as the other, poetry, is like the heart-beat (rotation).

 

What Lawrence suggested as the ‘wind that blows through me’ – the poetic spirit – is also sustained by the story underlying it as its unseen structure. We can have innumerable examples of ‘poem as story’ – as long as ‘The Ancient Mariner’ by Coleridge or ‘The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S. Eliot or as short as ‘A Slumber did my Spirit Seal’ by Wordsworth or the countless 14-line sonnets by Shakespeare and almost all major poets – old and modern: Spenser, Donne, Milton, Shelley, Poe, Frost, Auden, Sylvia Plath, et al. Sonnets shall be a topic for a separate post for this blog.  

 

Look at even your own poems – however simple and ordinary, and you will find this dance of poetry and story in harmony even in your own poems. Each poem has a story behind it, and the reader finds the meaning of the poem by guessing at the story behind it. Remember, there are many poems that read like stories, and many stories that read like a poem.

 

We will continue with this idea of harmony and movement in ‘poem as story’ in our next post.

Meanwhile, you may read my Hindi translation of Lawrence’s ‘Snake’, or my own poem ‘The Leaf’ further down this blog, and also my short story ‘Kahani ka Ant’ on my another blog, to understand my point more fully. I can’t write a poem without a story in it, or a story without a poem in it.

 

© Dr BSM Murty

Photo of Lawrence: Courtesy Google Images

 

 

Know more of D.H. Lawrence [1885-1930] on the Poetry Foundation website.

 

English writer D.H. Lawrence’s prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, and literary criticism. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct. After a brief foray into formal poetics in his early years, his later poems embrace organic attempts to capture emotion through free verse.

 

Also browse all mentioned poems on the link given below. Find out how the story plays like a background musical score in a poem.

   

Reference

‘Snake’ (orig. poem) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148471/snake-5bec57d7bfa17

 (My trans) : vagishwari.blogspot.com (2020 May 23)

‘The Leaf’ (my poem) : vibhutimurty.blogspot.com (2013 Oct 8)

 ‘Kahani ka Ant’ : vibhutimurty.blogspot.com (2015 Mar 9)

 

Hint for opening my blogs on Google Chrome. Open blog. Click on Archive year (e.g. 2015). Go to month (e.g. March) to find the post easily.