The Poetry Toolkit E-Book

William Harmon

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 406

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The Poetry Toolkit: For Readers and Writers provides students with the essential intellectual and practical tools necessary to read, understand, and write poetry.

• Explains the most important elements of poetry in clear language and an easily accessible manner
• Offers readers both the expertise of an established scholar and the insights of a practicing poet
• Draws on examples from more than 1,500 years of English literature

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Key to Symbols

Chapter 1: The Arts of Story-Telling

Chapter 2: The Arts of Character

Chapter 3: The Arts of Sentiment: States of Mind and Feeling

Chapter 4: The Arts of Diction

Chapter 5: The Arts of Sound

Appendix A: Simplified Phonetic Alphabet

Appendix B: Summary of Prosody

Chapter 6: The Arts of Layout

Chapter 7: The Arts of Reaction

Glossary

Suggestions for Reading: A Biased Bibliography

A. Works on Language

B. Works on Usage

C. General Reference

D. Scholarship and Criticism

E. Versification

F. Anthologies and Collections

Acknowledgments

Index

Also available

The Literary Theory Toolkit: A Compendiumof Concepts and Methods Herman Rapaport

This edition first published 2012

© 2012 William Harmon

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harmon, William, 1938-

The poetry toolkit: for readers and writers / William Harmon

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-9578-2 (cloth) – ISBN 978-1-4051-9577-5 (pbk.)

1. Poetry–Authorship. 2. Poetry–Appreciation. 3. Poetics. I. Title.

PN1059.A9.H37 2012

808.1–dc23

2011037208

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Preface

Nobody knows nothing about poetry.

If you can read well enough to understand that sentence, then you have been meeting poetry in some form for some years, and such meetings will continue throughout your life. Everybody knows something about poetry, but nobody understands everything about it, and everybody can always learn more. The more you know, the more you can enjoy reading and writing poetry.

Eventually you may master such terms as “antimetabole,” “englyn,” and “drottkvætt,” but first you will need some rudiments. It is encouraging that, even without rudiments, you can still get genuine pleasure out of reading and writing poetry, but, if you will be honest with yourself, you may soon recognize that some frustrations, which come when reading and especially when trying to write, can be eased by learning more about the arts and techniques of poetry.

This book aims to exploit what people already know, in some sense, in order to increase their understanding and appreciation. This procedure of moving from the known to the unknown may not account for such things as whim, luck, guesswork, serendipity, and accident, but it does provide a reasonable basis for what we do.

In any process of learning, you will probably reach a point of suddenly exclaiming, “Oh! I get it!” A toolkit can hope only to furnish the materials for facilitating such leaps of intuition and illumination. Most readers begin with a vague unexplained liking for something; the liking may impel them to learn more and to try harder to explain and understand.

The first six chapters of this book follow a systematic division of the elements of poetry, considered in a certain order:

1. overall design (plot of action, story of some sort), along with rhetorical attitude;

2. character (the persons or other agents involved in an action);

3. thought, feeling, state of mind (the background and motivation of character);

4. diction – vocabulary and syntax – (the verbal expression of thought and feeling);

5. sound (the pronunciation of words);

6. graphic effects (the appearance of words on a page).

Those are not the only elements, and that is not the only order, but the approach remains sound, rational, and time-tested. The first three elements apply to almost any literary work, prose and poetry alike; the last three have been associated mostly with poetry to one degree or another. The seventh chapter takes up various ways in which one poem can interact with another, along with a measure of entertainment.

Some have begun writing by producing the sixth element first, that is, with a poem-looking object, which, as with many poems, has a more or less justified left margin and an unjustified right margin. But you will probably not know what the poem looks like until you know what it sounds like. Some, therefore, produce a poem-sounding object, with words that rhyme, for example, but they will not know what sounds to combine until they know what words they ought to use. They will not know what words to use until they know what thoughts and feelings are to be expressed, and they will not know much of that, in turn, until they know what characters are involved; and the characters in turn are a function of the overall story. Accordingly, it is best to begin with the governing elements.

Having encountered terms associated with poetry in one way or another – anapest, tragedy, poetic justice, irony, overstatement, braggart, stanza, subordinate clause, vulgarism, rhyme, metaphor – students might not have thought consciously about how certain kinds of characters belong in certain kinds of stories, or how certain levels of vocabulary or textures of syntax belong with certain kinds of character, or how any of those things relate to rhythm and meter. And much about the whole process will necessarily remain forever irrational, mysterious, and controversial. (That is part of the fun.) But at any rate the matters can be laid out in an orderly fashion that will, if nothing else, at least permit analysis and debate.

Learning the rudiments of reading often leads to a desire to write for oneself. Someone with hardly a clue may not know whether to say “autumn” or “fall” in a given situation, except that “it's just the word I wanted – to express myself spontaneously”; and, while that is not a strong argument, neither is it a wrong argument; sometimes it is all we can come up with. Every day we choose from “taxicab,” “taxi,” or “cab,” “phone” or “telephone,” “newspaper” or “paper,” for some reason or another, and we do not always know why. On the matter of “taxi,” one recent writer, the actor Peter Bull, went so far as to use “taximeter–cabriolet,” a choice that can be explained historically as the primitive ancestor of “taxicab” but maybe not vigorously defended, except as a humorous affectation. Perhaps “taxicab” preserves the ghost or tissue memory of its earliest form.

Writers all began as readers, and, unless one is an exceptionally spontaneous genius, a writer can benefit by reason and reflection as well as whimsy and a sense of fun.

Learning most things involves a progression from ignorance to improvement, perhaps to the level of mastery. Many common activities – such as preparing a meal, playing a musical instrument, driving a motor vehicle, operating a computer, engaging in a sport or game – begin with one being interested, move on to first steps, when everyone is awkward, and on to some point at which the activity becomes “second nature” and may even look easy to a casual observer. Such activities may involve boring repetitive exercises, such as playing scales or performing calisthenics, which may not seem very interesting in themselves. It is important not to give up in frustration just because the early stages of a process are difficult or tedious. Running is natural, but many runners who exercise for a track team suffer a most discouraging affliction called “shin splints” that may even persuade some to give up.

Speakers cannot take the time to analyze what they are saying as they are saying it, so that much about rhetoric, diction, and prosody remains necessarily unconscious. If, in fact, you think too much about sounds, you will interrupt an order to a butcher – “A pound of ground round” – to notice that three of the words rhyme. Efficient speech demands that much remains habitual, unconscious, intuitive, unanalyzed, and invisible. Rhyme, alliteration, and other such devices may distract.

Some have preached sermons on the text, “Write the way you talk.” That text is of very little practical value, since, paradoxically, much poetry emphasizes the very features of language that speakers and prose writers usually try to avoid. Instead of avoiding rhyme, alliteration, regular rhythm, and other kinds of repetition, the poet may court them to a peculiar degree. Such a departure from the norm seems to exempt the discourse from ordinary informal communication and moves it to an extraordinary formal realm of special things like ritual and ceremony. Even so, “Write the way you talk” may be extended to “Don't write the way you don't talk” – that is, don't write a word you would not use in speech.

The telling of a story, presentation of a character, and probing of thoughts and feelings all find their expression in language – spoken aloud, written down silently, or rehearsed mentally in the stream of consciousness – and the choices one makes in vocabulary and syntax depend on the overall situation. No diction is automatically poetic or unpoetic: poetic diction is appropriate to a situation. “Fall” is as poetic as “autumn,” say, just as “We trust in God” is as poetic as “In God we trust”: it all depends on the context. English depictions of Americans and American depictions of the English can go ridiculously astray on the basis of diction alone. John O'Hara once suggested that a good writer, as of about 1950, had better know whether an American character would say “half-dollar” or “fifty-cent piece.” In some situations, expressions normally regarded as incorrect are perfectly appropriate, as when poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins say “What I do is me” or “My taste was me.” Lord Byron could write, “Where burning Sappho loved and sung”; a few years later, Alfred Tennyson, who admired Byron, could write, “The blue fly sung in the pane” – even though both were aware that since about 1800 the standard past form of “sing” has been “sang.” T. S. Eliot commented: “The blue fly sung in the pane (the line would be ruined if you substituted sang for sung) is enough to tell us that something important has happened.” Possibly what has happened is that Tennyson, though young, was already mature and confident enough to depart from a convention.

True, some dictionaries classify items as “poetic”: “alack,” for example, qualifies as “Now arch., poet. or dial.” in the Oxford English Dictionary: “archaic, poetic, dialectal.”

As writers and readers, we will not know how to assess or present characters – that is, people – in literature or life, unless we know what is on their minds and in their hearts, since characters are motivated by thoughts and feelings – matters which, again, are subject to complete change: love can turn into hate and vice versa, or love and hate can co-exist in a volatile combination.

Although this book is in the third person and uses the first person mostly in the form of a general “we,” the first-person author – I – is always present and may as well say something here in propria persona. I first heard poetry more than seventy years ago. My first published poems were in little magazines more than fifty years ago, and my first book of poetry appeared more than forty years ago. Those statistics mean what most statistics mean: nothing. But they do testify to a long engagement, often involving frustration, disappointment, rejection, and demoralization, but just as often involving satisfaction and delight, and more than one surprise. They do not testify much to financial gain or professional advancement, but very little poetry has ever produced such returns. Unlike some people who arrive at poetry through circuitous detours of work in medicine, law, engineering, publishing, and banking, I was always an English major – even while serving in the Navy – and, after spending decades working in English and Comparative Literature, I became a “professor in the humanities.” Like the statistics, that title means what most titles mean.

I know this: what I know is a drop, what I don't know is an ocean. But a single drop is like Walt Whitman: it contains multitudes. A drop of water contains five sextillion atoms, possibly including, as Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered more than three hundred years ago, thousands of living creatures. Knowledge is so baffling that public intellectuals are forever weighing in with maxims: “When you don't know that you don't know, it's a lot different than when you do know that you don't know.” (Bill Parcells, head coach.) “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.” (Donald Rumsfeld, secretary.)

Now for some good news: however talented you may be, there is little possibility that you will be a virtuoso, champion, or master on your first day of trying something. That applies to playing chess or the cello or to baking a delicious cake or repairing a car or computer. I can think of many tempting activities that I have attempted but failed to make any progress with. (I will just say one word: dancing.) Poetry is different. Chess or the cello involves concepts and operations remote from daily life. But anybody, even the newest amateur, has been telling stories and singing songs and using language for a long time, so that there really are not any beginners. You began long ago. You know all the elements, even though you may not know you know.

Once in a blue moon, a poet can write a poem quickly and be done with it. Most of the time, however, there is slow, difficult, protracted development, with many hazards and opportunities for failure. A thousand ideas will float into your head for every one that survives to a later stage, since most ideas are just unfit in one way or another. Of every thousand that do manage to get beyond the primitive stage, most just perish of one of many afflictions, including deficient originality as well as excessive originality. So it goes, from stage to stage, by winnowing and further winnowing until the original idea finds its answerable form in a word or image or maybe just a rhythm. Again the winnowing starts, and the words or whatever have held the germ fail, victims of another myriad afflictions. Thus far the whole process could have taken a few minutes or a few weeks, but the end is the same: nothing. (Relics and fossils may endure awhile, and the resourceful writer may revisit and revive materials that had once been abandoned – but usually the things die and stay dead.)

For economy's sake, we can skip over another twenty stages of trial and error until we arrive at the point when the poem ceases to exist only in your head and finds some outer form, either as speech or writing. Some poems are spoken but never written down; others are written down without ever having been spoken. (Be careful: some poets speak words they cannot spell, others write words they cannot pronounce.) Most poems that get written are put away and never seen again. Of those submitted to magazines, most are rejected, and some that are accepted never appear for some reason. Of those that do appear – and now we are talking about some fantastic figure on the order of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% – most never reappear, and even those are subject to revision or even being repudiated by their author who has undergone a change of heart.

I can testify that poetry is fascinating and frustrating. I have never outgrown the excitement I felt when as a teenager I first read a speech from Paradise Lost, but I have never understood the springs of that excitement. The one thing I do understand is that poetry is never simple. For many people much of the time, and for some people all of the time, poetry amounts to a sort of comfort food for the soul – something offering relief and escape from the setbacks, harassments, complications, obscurities, difficulties, obliquities, worries, vexations, frets, and hassles of existence. And so it should be. Nobody should have to face unending excitement and incessant demands, and no constitution is equipped to withstand physical, mental, and emotional strain without interruption.

But nobody should have to face a life of nothing but leisure and relaxation. We all need a certain amount of physical, mental, and emotional strain for exercise, to stay in condition and prepare for challenges that are sure to come along. A diet of nothing but comfort food will soon lead to discomfort and malnutrition.

It makes sense to want things in life to be simple, easy, natural, straightforward, direct. Some teachers teach that the ideal poem is simple etc. And some pupils try to apply the lesson by approaching poems as ideally simple things with a good beat, which they like.

But, face it, nothing in life is really simple. Why should poetry be an exception? The earliest poems in anybody's memory will be enigmatic lullabies, nursery rhymes, hymns, and jokes that invade the mind with frightening images of a breaking bough, a falling cradle with a baby on board, a falling bridge, a lamb's bloodbath, a feather cryptically called “macaroni,” an old woman living in a shoe with more children than she can handle, a wicked boy kissing the girls and making them cry. And soon enough, from every sidewalk and public wall, spring the brutal images, symbols, and monosyllables that haunt every innocent soul's days until the end.

So what can you do? To begin with, you cannot solve problems by looking for ease and simplicity. They are just not there. If you value common sense – endorsed by most people as a good thing – then use enough of it to forget about the precinct of the simple, direct, straightforward, natural expressions that have the substance of fairies and the shelf life of soap bubbles.

I could never adequately thank all those who have helped me with what is in this book, but I ought to name some whose presence has been an inspiration and an education. Some friends have died: Guy Owen, Norman Maclean, Cleanth Brooks, John Frederick Nims, Hugh Staples, A. R. Ammons, George Starbuck, Robert Kirkpatrick, Martin Gardner, George Hitchcock. I rejoice that others live on to receive my thanks: Robert Morgan, Jack Wheeler, Tom Daley, Ritchie Williams, Kathryn Starbuck, X. J. Kennedy, John Hollander, George T. Wright, Kathleen Norris, Frank Wall, Doug Stalker, Marly Youmans, George Lensing, George Core, Herb Leibowitz. With the preparation of this book in particular, I owe great debts to Emma Bennett, Ben Thatcher, and Frank Kearful.

Chapter 1

The Arts of Story-Telling

Most poems belong in one of three categories: NARRATIVE, DRAMATIC, LYRIC. Narrative poems, like many prose narratives, give an account of an action or incident. Insofar as they tell stories, poems and prose texts do not much differ. Since everybody enjoys hearing stories and almost everybody tells stories sooner or later, there is not much mystery about the arts of story-telling.

There is, however, a good deal of controversy about the technical terminology of story-telling, and a number of vexatious words have emerged since 1970. “Narratology,” which first appeared in English in 1971, has caused some complaints because, among other offenses, it mixes Latin and Greek elements. But the same complaints were once prompted by “television,” “homosexual,” and even “bicycle” (some wanted “dicycle”!), but those words have long since joined the mainstream. Even so, narratology has remained an awkwardly technical-seeming term without very much technical material to justify it. Likewise, “prosaics” has been suggested as a complement to “poetics,” on a rather shallow analogy: if poetry has poetics, prose ought to have “prosaics.” And one can see titles like “The Prosaics of Ancient Romances.” But prosaic has a well-established primary meaning of “mundane,” “routine,” “commonplace,” “dull,” and it seems unlikely that “prosaics” will ever gain much ground as a critical term for anything but mild condemnation. Turbulence in terminology may suggest chaos or confusion, but it may just as well suggest a productive ferment.

It is worth mentioning here that, as one progresses through the six main elements of a literary work – PLOT, CHARACTER, MENTALSTATE, DICTION, SOUND EFFECTS, GRAPHIC EFFECTS – one goes from almost unlimited regions of ill-defined concepts that merge helter-skelter into one another. Then, with diction, one reaches matters somewhat more definite, or at least less indefinite. If there are, say, a thousand considerations in the interdependent realms of plot, character, and inner state, the considerations of diction may number only in the hundreds, and those of sound and graphic effects only in the scores. With the later elements, one can suggest a certain amount of systematic analysis that just will not work with the earlier. It is a fact that an English syllable will contain no more than eight individual sounds (seven consonants and one vowel); it is not a fact that all plots can be reduced to eight basic patterns. Accordingly, these early chapters will seem more confused and less systematic than the later ones, but that is just the way things are.

Narrative poetry is much like narrative prose, in that it relates an orderly set of events involving characters in certain states of mind performing actions. If there is a coherent account with a beginning, middle, and end, it can be called a STORY with an ACTION. If the story is EPISODIC and therefore somewhat less coherent, then it is a story with activity but not necessarily an overall action.

The word “plot” is used for any plan, outline, or scheme. There are criminal plots and assassination plots and garden plots and graveyard plots. The overall story is a plot of action; there are also plots of character, thought, feeling, diction, sound, and layout. (In the theater, there are a lighting plot, a property plot, a makeup plot, and a costume plot, detailing what the technical crew needs to do at certain points in a show, demonstrating nightfall or daybreak, aging, growing, shrinking, promotion, demotion, and so forth. A member of a technical crew may be indifferent or oblivious to a play as such, concentrating only on a change of lighting, scenery, properties, sound effects, or costumes coming midway in the second act.)

In a sense, every sentence is a little story, with some kind of character as the SUBJECT and some kind of action as the PREDICATE. We may agree that a good story ought to be intelligible, interesting, and neither too long nor too short. We do not insist that a story be new or even novel, since many people – and not just children – enjoy hearing the same story over and over. Even so, one may not quite accept the argument of Robert Graves's “To Juan at the Winter Solstice”: “There is one story and one story only/That will prove worth your telling.” That may seem reductive and simplistic. (Note, however, that that sentiment does not have to be a universal generalization; it is part of a poem, after all, and may register the state of mind of a certain undefined character in certain undefined circumstances, possibly explained by the identity of “Juan” and the importance of the winter solstice; explanations can be found on the Internet.)

Over the years, thinkers have come up with some set number of basic plots – such as courtship, homecoming, discovery, comeuppance, or revenge – but there is no foolproof repository of formulas. We tell the stories that engage and amuse us.

A basic story begins “Once upon a time.” It is in the past tense (“there was a child”) and the third person (“child” – or the pronouns “he,” “she,” “it,” “they”). Most narratives employ an identifiable point of view that governs how the story is managed. Point of view is a matter of pronoun person, verb tense, and other properties; typical points of view include past-tense third-person omniscient, past-tense third-person limited, past-tense first-person limited. (For good reasons, first-person omniscient is unlikely.)

The past-tense points of view can also be translated into present-tense points of view, and in many cases past and present are mixed. Second-person narration, again for understandable reasons, is unusual, although it is sometimes encountered, particularly in fiction since 1950.

English offers some idiomatic uses of “you” to mean people in general, but its presence gives a text an opportunity to seem to address the reader. In T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, at or near the end of sections one, four, and five, this indefinite or unexplained pronoun seems to include a reader: “You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère! . . . Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. . . . Why then Ile fit you.” The first sentence of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not seems to ask “you” a question: “You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars?” The first and last sentences of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye both include such a second-person pronoun, along with an imperative form that implies “you” without stating it: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. . . . Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

In some cases, revision may come down to nothing more than a change of point of view. You may begin a story, “Very intelligently, I bought a car that turned out to be a classic, so that I multiplied my investment tenfold in a few years.” That could, however, impress some as immodest, since the first-person speaker is claiming credit for much intelligence. In such cases having to do with great wisdom or talent, the third person may work better, since a seemingly objective witness is more convincing than a subjective participant. In stories that involve extraordinary powers or heroic exploits or supernatural phenomena, such as the familiar series of adventures of Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Indiana Jones, or Harry Potter, the narrator is either an anonymous third-person teller or a first-person witness with little claim to extraordinary powers. Very rarely do such heroic personages tell their own stories.

Many popular accounts of charismatic characters – such as Heathcliff, Ahab, Holmes, Kurtz, Gatsby, Adrian Leverkühn, Willie Stark, Seymour Glass, Mozart, Randle Patrick McMurphy – are told by limited narrators or presented on the stage through limited viewers, such as Lockwood, Ishmael, Dr Watson, Marlow, Carraway, Buddy Glass, Salieri, Serenus Zeitblom, Jack Burden, “Chief” Bromden – who offer firsthand witnesses' accounts of extraordinary persons and events.

Such presence of a limited first-person narrator is more common in prose than in poetry. It is possible that poetry automatically confers a charismatic status on characters, so that no additional devices are required. But extreme charisma is difficult to manage, and heroic characters may belong more to poetry and to tragic drama than to prose, which tends toward the prosaic. With several of the charismatic characters listed above, identity itself remains mysterious, so that some – Heathcliff, Ahab, Kurtz – have only one name.

In narrative poetry, such as classical epics and modern adaptations thereof, the narrator is usually an anonymous all-knowing third-person figure with little but a voice and a style. In both prose and poetry, however, a hero very seldom tells of exploits in the first person. Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, advised those aspiring to write best-sellers to avoid the first person. Film, a status to which many best-sellers aspire and progress, is mostly third person and achieves a semblance of a first-person viewpoint only by the use of such artificial techniques as voice-over and what is called a subjective camera. The most successful films, however, follow the formula of Star Wars: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .” The audience never knows or cares who is talking.

Most of us prefer stories that have a coherent beginning, middle, and end – although those elements need not appear in that order – and we behave as though the ideal story involves change of some sort. The change can be slight or large, but we can say that as a rule favorite stories seem to involve maximal completed changes: from wretchedly single to happily married, from alive to dead, from ignorant to knowledgeable, from being at home to being away (and vice versa). Some taxonomists have devoted pages or websites to tables and charts of the twenty or hundred most popular plots, but the list could go on forever: Quest, Adventure, Pursuit, Rescue, Escape, Revenge, Metamorphosis, Maturation, Love, Discovery, Mystery, Decline, Fall, and so forth. Some appealing plots involve a combination of types. Twin Peaks (1990–1991), for example, is a murder mystery set in the Pacific Northwest with elements of supernatural quest, romance, demonic possession, satanic ritual, transvestitism, primitive magic, and jokes on names (brothers named Ben and Jerry, a lawman named Harry S. Truman, a character named Catherine Packard Martell, played by Piper Laurie, who had played a character named Sarah Packard in The Hustler thirty years earlier.) It is not necessary for writer or reader to be aware of everything that is going on. Many decisions and maneuvers remain unconscious, and many subjective responses cannot be understood rationally. Disturbances of the conventional time sequence, such as those which have been moving more and more into popular entertainment, are considered a feature of what is called “post-modern” literature, though they are not exactly new. The popular movies Pulp Fiction (1994) and The Usual Suspects (1995) involve gnarly complications of the time sequence, and the sequence of “actual” events in the former is still debated. Memento (2000) seems to unfold in reverse order, so that confused viewers have been advised to watch a DVD with the sequence of episodes reversed.

As a listener, one can entertain critical responses while a story is going on: “Get to the point!” “So what?” “You already said that . . .” Everybody has heard a storyteller pause and say something like “Did I mention that he was wearing a red apron?” It is better for a story to be too short than too long. The teller may not feel the pressure of responsibilities, but the success of a story depends on the teller's assessment of audience, material, context, and situation. Many stories involve technical details of a profession or region, and it is a challenge to size up the audience correctly.

Consider this poem:

“Cathy!!!”

“Cindy.”

“Cindy!!”

If you reject the proposition that this is a poem at all, think about why you should think so; and hold that thought.

It is a poem; at any rate it has been published as such in a respectable magazine and read aloud as such during public readings. With what you have been given, you can speculate that the three lines, consisting of three words (or two, with one of them repeated), represent speech: the quotation marks suggest that much. You cannot be sure how many people are speaking – one, two, or three. It seems unlikely that three separately quoted speeches represent the utterance of only one person, since that kind of speech would call for only one set of quotation marks around the whole thing. So, within reason, we can move on to the assumption that two or three people are talking, presumably in the same general area. One person exclaims “Cathy!!!” and that is probably addressed to another person. The person so addressed, however, is evidently not named Cathy, and so she (presumably) responds, with some emphasis, indicated by the italics, with the correct name: Cindy. So the first speaker corrects himself or herself, but with somewhat less emphasis, indicated by the two exclamation points instead of the original three. End of poem.

But not end of story. As a matter of fact, one element has been withheld: the title, which is “On Seeing an Old Girlfriend.” Now things may become clearer. The word “old” suggests both that the girlfriend is not young and that she was someone's girlfriend long ago. With the passage of time and coming of age, the first speaker's memory has faded, and, although he or she remembers the girlfriend and is, furthermore, glad to see her, her name has slipped a bit from “Cindy” to “Cathy.”

Now, consulting your personal experience, you may reflect that such things do happen. People often say, “The face is familiar, but . . .” The poem passes the tests of possibility and, beyond that, of probability. All we really know, tentatively, is that two people have encountered each other and one of them is named Cindy. Without much labor, one could reconstruct a plausible scenario. That is what everybody does every day when meeting with a situation that seems to call for explanation. In a way, we are all detectives and we are all story-tellers. Many things in life are not fully spelled out, and there are mysteries and even miracles that defy easy explanation. From childhood on, most people like puzzles and enjoy games that somehow parallel the struggles of life.

In our Mystery of the Forgotten Name, the solver of puzzles could go on at some length. “Once upon a time, in a small town, two young people knew each other. Some speculated that as adolescents they were sweethearts. But, as time passed and they grew up and went their separate ways, they gradually lost touch with each other. Then, after decades, they happened to see each other again, possibly at a reunion, but one of them, with the inevitable erosion of memory that comes with age, had forgotten the other's name, although an approximation suggested itself. He said, energetically and enthusiastically, “Cathy!!!” (In musical language, the first line could be fortissimo, the second pianissimo, the third forte.) Now, her name was not Cathy – a nickname possibly for Catherine or Kathleen – but Cynthia, and she was nicknamed Cindy; what is more, she did not like being called by the wrong name. Who does? We all like to be addressed in the correct form and by the correct name. We say things like “You can call me Samantha” or “My friends call me Roger” or “That's Major Fleming to you.” In the case of our two people, Cynthia coolly and even sarcastically responds, with almost a hiss, “Cindy.” (The initial sounds of the name may facilitate hissing: Cindy.) With his memory refreshed, and with his ardor slightly dampened, Cindy's old boyfriend can manage only a rather feeble and detectably less enthusiastic and energetic “Cindy!!” She then turned and walked away to join some old friends who did recall her name. Boy meets girl, boy woos and wins girl, boy and girl part, decades pass, boy encounters girl again but has forgotten her name, boy and girl part again. This is painfully slow and gradual, but it is probably the way we handle clues every day, progressing step by step until the materials make enough sense for us to go on. We lack the patience to subject every reading experience to such excruciating scrutiny, but a conscientious reader and writer may want to know how these things go.

Here is another story told in a short poem:

Every morning

I say, “Never again”;

every night, “Again.”

This seems to be the utterance of a single person who generalizes about his or her own experience. The statement, punctuated as a single sentence, is indeed a generalization, and nothing specifies any of the particulars of the situation. It is easy to imagine all sorts of reasons for saying “Never again” but then backsliding soon after. A. E. Housman captured a similar sentiment in a rather austere poem:

How clear, how lovely bright,

How beautiful to sight

Those beams of morning play,

How heaven laughs out with glee

Where, like a bird set free,

Up from the eastern sea

Soars the delightful day.

To-day I shall be strong,

No more shall yield to wrong,

Shall squander life no more;

Days lost, I know not how,

I shall retrieve them now;

Now I shall keep the vow

I never kept before.

Ensanguining the skies

How heavily it dies

Into the west away;

Past touch and sight and sound,

Not further to be found,

How hopeless under ground

Falls the remorseful day.

(Incidentally, this poem furnished the punning title of “The Remorseful Day,” the last episode of Inspector Morse, in which the inspector quotes a stanza of Housman's poem and then later dies.)

Remorse appears in a poem by Housman's American contemporary, George Ade; in fact, the poem (from a musical comedy) is called “R-E-M-O-R-S-E”:

The cocktail is a pleasant drink,

It's mild and harmless, I don't think.

When you've had one, you call for two,

And then you don't care what you do.

. . . .

It is no time for mirth or laughter –

The cold, gray dawn of the morning after.

Let us return to the original poem:

Every morning

I say, “Never again”;

every night, “Again.”

In light of the familiar vernacular reference to “the morning after” and even “the morning after the night before,” we may interpret the seventeen syllables as a reference to a hangover, when, by a revered tradition, one may say, “Never again.” Without too much further experience, we may also reflect that the same people who say “Never again” in the morning feel well enough by evening to go right back to the same stupid behavior, and after one drink may say to a bartender, “Again.” But the poem is not called “Hangover” or “The Morning After” or “Katzenjammer,” so the reader must supply details. The same general pattern of “Never again” followed by “again” could apply to any sort of overindulgence – eating, drinking, spending, dancing, gambling, reading, scribbling, playing video games, staying up late – that can carry the punchline, “I'll never learn.”

The poem in fact is called “SENRYU,” the name of a Japanese comic or satiric form in seventeen syllables; the most common distribution of syllables is 5-7-5, as in haiku, but departures are freely permitted. Many of W. H. Auden's later poems are in seventeen syllables with a distribution of 5-6-6.

Both these short poems illustrate the possibilities of economy. They provide a minimum of material, so that the reader is left to work out plausible connections. That is a chore, but it is not hard work, and many readers prefer to get involved in things themselves. They resent having too much spelled out or explained, and they may feel insulted by a pedantic or preachy story that tells too much. There may be a kind of elegance in economy.

If a story is reasonably credible, it can be told in some straightforward way by first- or third-person narration in the past or present tense. Those variables account for most narrative poems. With some stories, however, a reader may feel skeptical about something not immediately plausible, and in such cases the story may need some shoring up. Sometimes an outer shell or frame sets off the inner material and gives some control. The outer poem has enough plausibility – a reasonable account of how a story is told – to confer contagious plausibility on the inner story. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner presents just such an incredible story of a fantastic voyage among supernatural effects, but the presentation is not direct, that is, the poet does not tell the story straight. There is an outer story mostly in the present tense:

It is an ancient Mariner,

And he stoppeth one of three.

“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

The bridegroom's doors are opened wide,

And I am next of kin;

The guests are met, the feast is set:

Mayst hear the merry din.”

He holds him with his skinny hand,

“There was a ship,” quoth he.

“Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”

Eftsoons his hand dropped he.

With brilliant economy of means, the poet sets off on two stories at once. The outer story is much more mundane, but still under some pressure, since the “one of three” is on an important errand, to attend the wedding of a close kinsman. Despite this pressure, the guest pauses for quite a while to hear a detailed story from the “grey-beard loon.” Some words are quoted without attribution, which requires the reader to figure out that the wedding guest addresses the mariner, providing details along the way about his beard and eye. The mariner, with no preliminaries, begins his past-tense story, “There was a ship.” (The rare word “quoth” exists only in past-tense form with first- or third-person pronoun or noun, and it typically comes before the subject noun or pronoun, as here or in Poe's “Quoth the Raven . . .”)

We then may read with two impulses: to hear the mariner's story and to find out what happens to the poor wedding guest. In a few words, we have moved from “It is” to “There was.” The fantastic story of a doomed voyage proceeds until the guest interrupts at the beginning of Part IV:

“I fear thee, ancient Mariner!

I fear thy skinny hand!

And thou art long, and lank, and brown,

As is the ribbed sea-sand.

I fear thee and thy glittering eye,

And thy skinny hand, so brown.” –

“Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!

This body dropped not down . . .

And the story continues until it concludes by resuming the present tense for a few lines:

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,

Whose beard with age is hoar,

Is gone; and now the Wedding-Guest

Turned from the bridegroom's door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,

And is of sense forlorn:

A sadder and a wiser man

He rose the morrow morn.

It may seem strange that the Mariner's “eye is bright” but he “Is gone.” Then, with the ambiguous transition of “and now” (suggesting a present past or a past present, really meaning “then” rather than “now”), the poem settles into a more normal past tense: the Guest “turned” and “went” and later “rose.”

As that suggests, FRAMING is a structural device whereby an outer story contains an inner story. It is especially useful with an outlandish or farfetched narrative, so that the outer narrator is in a way absolved of responsibility: The speaker of a Housman poem says, “I tell the tale that I heard told . . .”.

Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ozymandias” uses the relatively compact form of the sonnet:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

There are two frames: the innermost text is the two-line inscription beginning “My name”; the intermediate text begins “Two vast and trunkless legs” and ends, probably, when the poem ends (the punctuation is somewhat confusing). We start in the past (“met,” “said”), then shift to the present for the traveler's story (“stand,” “lies,” “tell,” “appear”), then, further inside, the inscription is in a sort of monumental present (“is”) along with an imperative (“Look,” “despair”). From then to the end, we are back in the traveler's virtual present.

It is unlikely that such elaborate execution would be required for a story less fantastic than “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or “Ozymandias.” For many narratives, the relative proportion of approaches, in descending order, is probably (1) third-person past-tense; (2) first-person past-tense; (3) third-person present-tense; (4) first-person present-tense.

One can experiment with various approaches. Thomas Hardy's “I Look into My Glass” is a first-person present-tense meditation, beginning

I look into my glass,

And view my wasting skin,

And say, “Would God it came to pass

My heart had shrunk as thin!”

(The poem could be an ironic response to Shakespeare's Sonnet III: “Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest/Now is the time that face should form another,” which concerns a young person.)

Hardy's stanza can be transformed into three other permutations:

I looked into my glass,

And viewed my wasting skin,

And said, “Would God it came to pass

My heart had shrunk as thin!”. . .

He looks into his glass,

And views his wasting skin,

And says, “Would God it came to pass

My heart had shrunk as thin!”. . .

He looked into his glass,

And viewed his wasting skin,

And said, “Would God it came to pass

My heart had shrunk as thin!”. . .

One can compare these versions in terms of immediacy, vividness, and drama. The poem may be more lyrical than narrative, since it presents only a moment in time, but it does have a plot, after all. In the original version, the remaining stanzas justify the first and then present a dramatic turn, signaled by “but”:

I look into my glass,

And view my wasting skin,

And say, “Would God it came to pass

My heart had shrunk as thin!”

For then, I, undistrest

By hearts grown cold to me,

Could lonely wait my endless rest

With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,

Part steals, lets part abide

And shakes this fragile frame at eve

With throbbings of noontide.

In Hardy's fiction, incidentally, the narration is almost exclusively past-tense third-person-omniscient.

During the nineteenth century, there seemed to be an explosion of excess in many things, and by about 1900 there was a hypertrophy of decoration, rhetoric, filigree, and sheer bulk. In the first decade of the twentieth century Thomas Hardy and Charles Montagu Doughty produced multi-volume poems combining epic, drama, history, legend, and speculation. Throughout the same period, however, there were also suggestions of brevity and economy. During the 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe had perfected the art of the short story in several styles: detection, science fiction, horror, and ciphers. He is also given some credit for encouraging symbolist and imagist poems that were usually short. In fact, Poe argued, “I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, ‘a long poem,’ is simply a flat contradiction in terms.”

Some American Civil War personages are celebrated for brevity of utterance. Abraham Lincoln's “Gettysburg Address,” at fewer than three hundred words, is notably short, especially in a period of bloated oratory. Ulysses S. Grant's “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender” led to his being given the nickname “Unconditional Surrender” (which matched his own first two initials). When William Tecumseh Sherman was suggested as a Republican presidential candidate in 1884, he declined as unambiguously and emphatically as possible: “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.” Those twelve words – or some permutation of the same idea – may have fitted into the cheapest class of telegram.