POETICA : 3

 

Poem of the Week

 

My poem

The Leaf

 

Look at me

I am only a leaf

Torn from my branch

Where I was born and blossomed

Where I played and sang

Fluttered in the gentle breeze

Now lying torn and lonely here

All alone and musing

For many days now

Days I have lost count, in fact,

Here I lie on sodden coaltar

Since the rowdy wind rose

Howled and rattled, jarred and jolted,

And tore me off with a single slap

From the topmost branch

Of this old and timeworn tree

Bringing in its wake

Cool monsoon showers

Riding piggyback merrily

Yes, the wind was rude and rowdy

It shook the branches wildly

Swaying them sideways

Upwards and downwards

Wickedly in every which way it will

Tearing at them, at us the leaves

Till we flew helter-skelter in the wind

And fell here on the bluehued coaltar

And then came the burly rain

With huge buckets of water

With grating rasping laughter

And with angry crazy booms

In the dark sparring clouds above

While suddenly, very stealthily

The wind slunk away

Quietly to where it had come from

And then the rain drizzled freely

And whispered and sang cheerily

Throughout the afternoon

Then again fitfully in the small hours

Of the night gone by

And left me in the morning

Totally soaked and shivering

When the sun rose to dry me up

And make me warm and cosy

In my loneliness and brooding,

Till you came and paused

To look at me.

 

Theme

Poetry and Punctuation -I

 

Poetry is the oldest form of art. It began with the beating heart even before the mind awoke. The heart gave it its rhythm and music which was regular, cyclical and free-flowing.  It was as spontaneous and natural as the leaf growing on a tree. “If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all”: we have that famous quote from Keats. Poetry came with its own form and content which were inseparably fused into one. It had its own music and its own rhythm when that could be heard (or seen) - as it fluttered in the wind. It was like the innocent laughter of a child – with its music and rhythm.

 

Then the mind awoke and tried to impose order and symmetry on it. And the mind went even further by bringing in embellishments. The folk song – the earliest form of poetry – was naked and pure like a flower with its radiance and fragrance. Then gradually it turned into a lyric holding a lyre, a sonnet to the ‘dark lady’, or an ode to a nightingale. But still, when it was born, it retained its primordial form of Keats’ leaf, soft and effulgent. And that reminds me of my own poem ‘The Leaf’ which I have quoted above.

 

As I said in my previous note, you can see the story even in my poem with a clear, perceptible sequence. It was on a monsoon morning. I was on my morning walk. It had rained the previous night after a raging storm. Suddenly I noticed a big leaf lying on the road. It was as if the leaf had made me stop and look at it. As if it wanted to tell me a story. With my mobile I took a snap of that forlorn leaf. Back home, the story of the poem unfolded itself to me, as if being narrated in the leaf’s voice. I just had to write it down. It came with all its imagery, its music, rhythm and diction. As Lawrence had said in my foregoing discourse, it was as if, ‘the wind was blowing through me’! Indeed, it was the poem singing itself out like a whistling wind through me. I was only – like a flute - the medium for that song!

 

As I wrote the poem, the lines came in their own measured length, one after another, in a disciplined stride. It flowed on like a stream taking natural turns wherever it will. I found the flow of words, coming naturally in measured lines, with the meaning following its bends. And I realized, it needed no regular punctuation, except, only at one or two places, to keep the syntax untangled. I wrote it in a single continuation and the lines bended at their own turnings, in accordance with the poem’s own archetypal design. As each burgeoning leaf has its own form and shape!

 

The period (.) at the end seemed unnecessary. It was there as if only to suggest the completion of the song. Though the end was as obvious as the sun gone down behind the hills! The couple of commas also were intruders like unavoidable doorbells of prose syntax. Alas, poetry had perforce to be written in accordance with the regimen of syntax!

 

And that brings me to the kind of ‘unsyntaxed’ poetry of e.e. cummings with unconventional orthography (‘lowercase’), modernist free verse poetry, without rhyme or metre. But we shall go there by and by.

 

This brings me back to our professed subject – poetry and punctuation. Just as free verse (‘verse libre’) jettisoned metre and rhyme -  markers of traditional poetry - to return to the rhythms of normal speech, preferring to use internal musical devices like – alliteration (‘wanton wiles’), assonance (‘down some dull tunnel’), consonance (‘black/block’), and so forth, just to augment the music and the rhythm. Like the music you can hear in my poem, in – only/leaf, torn/branch, born/blossomed, flew/bluehued/burly, etc. The leaf told me its story like a song with its music playing in those words. And that brings us to the question of the hesitant incompatibility between music of poetry and syntactical punctuation.

 

Let’s hear what a modernist American poet, William Carlos Williams, says on this point:

 

 From the first I used rhyme independently. I found I couldn’t say what I had to say in rhyme. It got in my way. With Whitman I decided rhyme belonged to another age; it didn’t matter; it was not important at all. I quit rhyme. I began to begin lines with lower case letters. I thought it pretentious to begin every line with a capital letter. The decision lasted all the rest of my life.

 

I shall talk about these poetic devices; in particular, the use of capital letter to begin every line in poetry – how much they have added or not, to the beauty of poetry. It’s easy to see where poetic devices detract from the spontaneity of poetry. And the definition of the music of poetry, as held in olden times, has to change according to the changes in the character of poetry of the modern age. After all, poetry is not always an arabesque stone-carving or ornamental filigree work. Poetry is nearer to music than to sculpture or architecture.

 

We have endless examples of experimentation of all kinds in modernist poetry the world over. Blends are another marker – words like ‘mud-luscious’ (cummings), or my own ‘bluehued’. Such experimental coinages or new words are also a feature of modernist ‘free form poetry’. (Read Hopkins or Heaney.) Freedom of pure communication is a natural characteristic of poetry. Modernist poetry sought to take poetry back to its primeval form, when syntactical punctuation was not invented, and poetry had the essence of music in its being. In fact, punctuation is a mechanism of semantics that came much later, when prose developed as a literary medium in the modern age. If you read ancient parchment manuscripts, you don’t find punctuation there. And poetry is certainly older than the parchments or even the invention of the technique of writing. Indeed, punctuation is an imposition on poetry by the grammar of a language – grammar which poetry is always shy of. Grammar pertains primarily to prose rather than to poetry. Poetry has its own grammar of lineation, stanza breaks, spacing, elisions, repetitions and refrains, even a highly pliable syntax.

  

If regular grammar and its rules of syntax are secondary for poetry – in any language – it follows that punctuation, an aid to syntax, has little priority in poetry. And yet, poetry must have its own syntactical signification, different from that of prose. Let me end today’s discussion with a typical poem of e.e.cummings – it begins like this. The whole poem can be read on Google.

 

          timeless

 

          ly this

          (merely and whose

           Not

 

            numerable leaves are

            fall

             i

             ng)he

            …..

We see how he plays with orthography, words and spacing. We shall have more of this contrariety between poetry and grammatical syntax in part- II of this discussion.

 

Meanwhile look at what e.e. cummings says about poetry:        

 

 “A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t.” 

 

In case you want any clarifications on any point, you may please record your query in the comment box below the post. Or even your own comments.

 

© Dr BSM Murty

Photo : © Dr BSM Murty

& Courtsey: Google

 

e.e. cummings

“In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.”

 

Know more about Cummings and other poets mentioned here from the Poetry Foundation website. You can even listen to some of their poems on audio.