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