POETICA - 5
13 Dec 20 Sun
Poem of
the Week
May
By Jonathan Galassi*
The backyard apple tree gets sad so
soon,
takes on a used-up, feather-duster
look
within a week.
The ivy’s spring reconnaissance
campaign
sends red feelers out and up and
down
to find the sun.
Ivy from last summer clogs the
pool,
brewing a loamy, wormy, tea-leaf
mulch
soft to the touch
and rank with interface of rut and
rot.
The month after the month they say
is cruel
is and is not.
Theme
Rhyme or reason
Rhyme (from Old French ‘rime’) is as old as poetry,
because of its quality of memorability. This holds true for all poetry, in any
language, anywhere. In simple terms, similar sounding words generally coming at
the end of verse lines are called ‘rhymes’. Such ‘end rhymes’ can recur in the
very next line, or in a designed pattern among the lines in a poem, thus
creating a ‘ringing’ effect by a designed pattern of repetition. The idea of
repetition of similar sounds – at the end of particular lines or even within
the lines - is capable of creating a variety of sound effects. All poets worth
their name are familiar with this basic sound feature of poetry, as they are of
many other similar features – like rhyme scheme, stanza forms, etc explained in
any good primer of prosody.
As we have seen, there is a symbiotic relationship
between music and poetry – a feature that clearly distinguishes poetry from prose.
All poetry, like all music, must have marked features of a palpable and regular
rhythm as well as recurring variations of musical notes. This poetic feature is
often known as ‘word music’ because, basically, all language is uttered sound,
potentially capable of ‘word music’. Musicality woven into the semantic
properties of language is the fundamental medium of poetry. Like embroidery or
architectural patterning, the poet plays with the music of words, deepening it
with a high level of symbolical signification, to achieve a kind of
communication, unattainable through any other art medium.
For centuries, even till date, ‘word music’ has
remained an inseparable part of poetry, with its innumerable variations, as
codified in prosody. And rhyme has been its most dominant feature all along –
till the French symbolist poets found it to be a fetter. They innovated verse
libre for the higher reaches of poetry, and in modern English poetry it
became ‘free verse’ – free from the shackles of rhyme and codified metricality.
An anthology of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge – The
Lyrical Ballads - had been published in 1798, which had heralded the
Romantic movement in English poetry, a movement basically bringing poetry
nearer to the language and events
of common life – a kind of democratization of poetry that could sing of the
common people’s lives in their own language, not in the highly stylized,
metrically shackled verse.
What we notice in William’s poem ‘Between Walls’ is
a linear extension of the same principle. It’s strikingly free from all the
trappings of traditional poetry, and nearer to everyday langauge. It’ a casual statement, half mumbled – a flash of thought at a particular moment in
the mind, apparently hard, concrete and sharp – reflecting its piercing
potentiality in the image of the ‘broken green bottle’. The total lack of
punctuation, in spite of its straight flowing syntax – no inversion, no elision
– with not a word to spare, is the hallmark of the poem. A familiar,
unimportant sight (at the back of a hospital) to have caught the poet’s eye,
with zero emotion, and no attempt to explicate. A fine example of modernist,
Imagist poetry. Sort of a camera snap for the reader to view and find his own
meaning in it. It’s poetry that wants to imprint an image as an ‘objective
correlative’ (T S Eliot) on the reader’s mind to look into it for a meaning.
And the question is – as a metaphor for the mind’s
perception – does the poem (the statement) need any rhyme-jingle, or capital
letter or any punctuation? The meaning is directly transmitted to the reader,
not as a syntaxed sentence, but as a thought, as it hit the poet’s mind. But
with maximum effect achieved through
avoidance of traditional poetic devices.
Rhymeless verse is the norm in modernist – and even
more in post-modernist poetry, poetry of today; poetry that we are reading and
writing today. Experimentation is synonymous with creativity. The idea is
direct transmission of creative thought in the most effective manner – without
the trammels of poetic devices. And for me, the only caveat is that such
experimentation should not be too intellectually abstruse. Though Eliot’s
poetry is still enjoyable even while partially understood. Modernist poetry is
like a river: you can bathe on the shore, but navigate distances on a boat, too.
And it’s all the magic of imagery and symbolism. The central principle is: Poetry
should show more, though say less.
Look at these lines of Eliot’s The Hollow Men (1925)
–
We
are the hollow men
We
are the stuffed men
Leaning
together
Headpiece
filled with straw. Alas!
The form is almost traditional, but the imagery is
strikingly modern. The meaning is almost transparent in the imagery, yet closer
to modern sensibility. Almost 20 years later, in Burnt Norton, the first
of the Four Quartets, his lines looked much less traditional in form:
Footfalls
echo in the memory
Down the passage which
we did not take
Towards the door we
never opened
Into the rose garden
Rhymes are almost non-existent; punctuation nominal.
And the imagery - only deceptively familiar, with symbolism over-riding. Here
we see what Eliot means by ‘tradition’ and ‘individual talent’. That shows in
the long progression towards symbolism. There it differs from Romantic poetry.
Eliot is still modernist in 1945. But Williams has gone further towards
post-modernism. The traditional form of the language of poetry has been
completely transformed. Rhyme and punctuation have been completely, or largely,
discarded. Syntax has become more flexible and orthography is almost totally
changed.
I am writing these episodes about poetry today, not
for students or academics. I am writing them for fellow-poets like me. I want
to understand how poetry is seen and being written today in the Western world.
In today’s poetry the emphasis is on the image and
its symbolism. It’s poetry now without rhyme, but with reason.
Symbolism is a bit more complicated; we shall look
at image-making in today’s poetry in our next episode, with some side lights on
rhyme.
I’d love to have your comments;
particularly about Galassi’s poem, and its ‘word-music’.
© Dr BSM Murty
*Jonathan Galassi (b.1949) is a modern American poet
and publisher.
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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