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POETICA : 4

6 Dec 20  Sun

 

Poem of the Week

 

Between Walls

By William Carlos Williams

          

 

            the back wings

            of the

 

            hospital where

            nothing

 

            will grow lie

            cinders

 

            in which shine

            the broken

 

            pieces of a green

            bottle

 

Theme

Poetry and Punctuation –II

 

Punctuation is a marker in syntax which is an important area in grammar. It simply means ‘connecting words in a meaningful order’. And punctuation is its handmaiden of syntax in this process of organization. What is important to see is that poetry communicates meaning by a different kind of grammar of the same language. It operates on a higher level of semantics. All the ingredients of language – clause, phrase, collocations, word-formation, etc - regularly used in prose, and fully organized according to the set rules of its grammar, change their character as they enter into the realm of poetry. They become more fluid and flexible to innovative experimentation. For example, in the poem quoted above: it’s one single sentence from ‘the back wings’ to ‘green bottle’. The first ‘the’ does not begin with a capital ‘T’, as in a normal sentence, and there is no comma after ‘grow’ which would be a definite requisite in a normal sentence. Also, there is no full stop to end the sentence. All this pertains only to orthography, or the normal accepted way of writing or printing a sentence.

 

Obviously, it doesn’t follow the normal rules of grammar – of normal prose. It’s on a higher level of communication, where you need a different set of equipment to experience and respond. The only ruse is that the words look all too familiar and easy. Though some of the words, too, are sometimes fractured, like pieces of a broken mirror. And it’s all arranged in a new form, as you saw in e e cummings’ poem quoted in P-2, where ‘fall-i-ng’ was a fractured word. That poem (or piece of a longer poem) wasn’t even a regular sentence – but, rather, pieces of a sentence in a jumble. No capital letters, no full stop. An end bracket with its first counterpart missing. You notice many other quirks.

 

No, it doesn’t even look like normal poetry. In fact, Cummings was one of the most innovative experimenters in modernist poetry. Modernist poetry had experimenters of all kinds, indeed! You heard Williams about not using rhymes and capital letters beginning each line of written/ printed poetry. ‘Between Walls’ has no capital letters(except in its title, which is only an identification tag). In fact, it’s all about fluidity of thought in poetry. After all, we are not saying or hearing something ordinary, as we do in prose. Poetry is not of the ordinary. It works on a frequency that is much higher.

 

William Carlos Williams [1883-1963] is a major modernist American poet. He was a doctor (paediatrician) by profession. Here in the poem he presents only a single vivid image – just as in Imagist poetry: ‘hard, concrete image captured in the minimum words’. Williams was a close friend of Ezra Pound and Hilda Dolittle. The single image of a ‘broken bottle’ looked at intently evokes a response; may be a personal response by the reader, as intended by the poet. The crucial words are – hospital, cinders, green bottle, and ‘where nothing will grow’. The poem works by symbolism where every object has an apparent as well as a metaphysical meaning.

Like so many of Williams poems, Between Walls also is experimental. It lacks punctuation, relies on erratic or unusual lineation, and generally dissolves the traditional boundaries between one thing, or idea, and another. He had a famous maxim, No ideas but in things,which I take to mean that to speak about ideas, emotions, and abstractions, we must ground them firmly in the things of the world.   (CM Teicher)

 

Williams has professed his aversion to rhymes and the capital letter. We shall consider ‘rhyme’ later in our discourse, but what does he gain by not using capital letters, as he says – “The decision lasted all the rest of my life”.

 

Let’s look at the non-use of capital letters in poetry. An initial capital letter in every line of a poem serves primarily as a line boundary marker. We don’t have this problem in non-roman script languages like Hindi or Bangla or Urdu. The purpose is served by line-breaks only. But in English poetry if this device of a line-break marker is not used, it will instantly become like prose with continuous lineation, and will necessitate punctuation more urgently - to keep the meaning well-organized; and without the use of sentence markers (capital and full stop), any punctuation will look quite illogical. The modernist’s argument is – they will use or not use it as they need to and quite rarely; like the half bracket in Cummings. Because modernist poetry pleads for total syntactical freedom for poetry.

 

Personally, not writing poetry under the influence of any particular school, I, too, find punctuation a hindrance, except in rare positions, and feel that the flow of the verse itself should indicate the line-breaks (i.e. line lengths). However, I like to use capital letters only as line-starters as it saves me from the compulsion of using all the other punctuation markers. In fact, in my poems, initial capital letters are used only as fence staves to create a boundary for the ‘garden of words’ on their poem side – separating it from the blank margin. Williams would have none of it.

 

Freedom is of essence in poetry, as Lawrence said in P-2: “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!” You may have your window frames to allow the wind to blow in, but you cannot hold it in your fists.

 

In much of post-modernist poetry, these prose-markers have been jettisoned to varying extent. Indian languages do not have the ‘capital problem’. But punctuation marks are also being used now less and less in poems in Indian languages as not being germane to the nature of poetry.

 

If you find poetry close to song or music – something of an anti-thesis of prose in spirit and form –  the argument against use of punctuation as a rule, holds water pretty well!

 

We shall consider Williams’ repugnance of rhyme (alternatively spelt ‘rime’) in our next episode.

 

  © Dr BSM Murty

Images

: Courtsey Google

Visit my 2 other blogs for more of my writings in Hindi & English : vibhutimurty.blogspot.com & vagishwari.blogspot.com

Contact : bsmmurty@gmail.com   Mob No 7752922938

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