Studying Poetry

Stephen Matterson, Darryl Jones

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781849664363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nella poesia

Studying Poetry is a fun, concise and helpful guide to understanding poetry which is divided into three parts, form and meaning, critical approaches and interpreting poetry, all of which help to illuminate the beauty and validity of poetry using a wide variety of examples, from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan.

Part 1

Form and meaning

Chapter 1

Poem and form

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.
That’s what gets results.

Bananarama¹

The meaning of form

It is impossible to discuss poetry, or even to understand it, without some knowledge of poetic form. Form is, or should be, the starting-point of any analysis of poetry, because its form distinguishes poetry from other kinds of writing or communication. Whilst students are occasionally even now required to memorize and have a basic working knowledge of metrical forms – the iamb, dactyl or spondee – and are certainly required to recognize the basic specific forms of poetry – a sonnet, blank verse, an ode, free verse – nevertheless, the meaning of poetic form, why a poem looks the way it does, and what significance this might have for the poem, may not be subjects frequently addressed in the classroom or seminar. Poetic form is sometimes considered an abstruse subject, difficult to understand; in extreme cases it may be considered a distraction, an unnecessary complexity, a barrier between reader and text, or else as an index of a kind of old-fashioned education, drilling students in Latin grammar or the mysteries of Renaissance prosody – perhaps seen as an irrelevance to many contemporary readers or students.

The content of poetry (what is often mistakenly called its meaning), conversely, is often thought of as easy to understand, and therefore as sufficient in itself, all we need to know about a poem: poetry is its content. This is an inherently reductive view, which can lead to meaningless generalizations of what poems are ‘about’, ignoring what they are, or what they do. For example, one might say that William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’) is ‘about’ love, John Donne’s Divine Meditation ‘Death be not proud’ is ‘about’ death, William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798’, to give it its full, unwieldy title) is ‘about’ nature, and so on. Now, none of these statements is wrong, and not to recognize these thematic concerns would risk serious misreadings; nevertheless, by themselves they are inadequate as responses to the complex verbal artefacts they describe. It could fairly be argued, though, that the ‘meanings’ we have just offered of these poems are travesties (‘subjects’, perhaps, rather than ‘meanings’). Of course, there is more to them than that; but even expanded to considerable length, these kinds of content-based analyses can leave much to be desired. This is ‘Death be not proud’ in full:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,

For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poor death, nor yet cans’t thou kill me;

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more. Death, thou shalt die.²

Read purely for its content, the poem is clearly a refutation of death’s power: ‘Death’ here is personified as an individual with whom the speaker of the poem is in debate. Death is overcome, at least for the duration of the poem, initially through the force of logic, albeit the superficially plausible, playfully false logic, or sophistry, for which Donne is celebrated. Given that ‘rest and sleep’, diluted forms of death (its ‘pictures’ – ‘emblems’ or ‘types’ of death: Donne is drawing here on the Renaissance critical theory of typology, in which meanings are understood as ‘types’ of a pre-existing pattern, usually religious),³ give ‘Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow’. This is a kind of rhetorical argument known as a fortiori – ‘If X is so, then how much more must Y be so’ – an argument returned to and expanded upon in lines 11–12, where death’s power is rhetorically imaged as inferior to opiates (‘poppy’) or ‘charms’. Death, far from being all-powerful, is a ‘slave’, its strike governed by the dictates or whims of ‘fate, chance, kings and desperate men’; far, too, from being ‘mighty and dreadful’, death is degraded, even seedy, dwelling with ‘poison, war and sickness’. The closing couplet, returning at first to the death–sleep metaphor which the poem has established, clinches its argument, as we knew it would (because of the assumptions, as readers, that we tend to make about the world-view of Renaissance poetry), by recourse to the resurrection of the body in the afterlife, which, in a logical paradox transcended by religious faith, turns death’s power back upon itself: ‘Death, thou shalt die’.

This is what the poem is ‘about’ – in effect, we have paraphrased its meaning here. Nothing in the reading we have offered is ‘wrong’, but as a reading it is inadequate as it fails to account for why ‘Death be not proud’ is a poem – while accounting for what it is ‘about’, it does not account for what it is. This reading, in other words, could just as easily be an account of a rhetorical argument in prose.

On a broad thematic level, this type of reading also makes it difficult to distinguish between different kinds of poem: there are many poems about the triumph of death through the resurrection of the body – for example Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘That nature is a Heraclitean fire’, a poem about which a purely content-based analysis has very little to say beyond commonplace banalities; or Dylan Thomas’s ‘And death shall have no dominion’:

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon; …

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.⁴

On a thematic level, the level of content, ‘Death be not proud’ and ‘And death shall have no dominion’ seem very similar: both refutations of death’s permanence through recourse to the resurrection of the body. Conceivably, a reasonably effective student essay of the ‘compare and contrast’ variety could be produced by yoking them together. But such a reading would further have to account for the fact that they are, clearly, very different poems.

The logic of Donne’s rhetoric is fairly easily abstractable from its poetic context and can be paraphrased for a ‘meaning’ – this is one of the reasons why Donne, and Metaphysical poetry in general, has traditionally been a favourite target for ‘practical criticism’ exercises, where a single poem is given, often without a poet’s name appended, to a class for study (this is a technique for the study of poetry which we will look at more closely in Chapter 4). ‘And death shall have no dominion’, however, like much of Thomas’s earlier poetry, seems to resist any attempts at paraphrase – what, exactly, could ‘the man in the wind and the west moon’ mean? Is it a metaphor, or a symbol? If so, for what? Try to isolate the poem from its own linguistic frame, try to study it in any terms other than those of poetic form, as a poem about itself, or about poetry, or the production of poetic language, and the poem falls apart, leaving us only with vague statements about rebirth. Nor should this necessarily be seen as a fault in the Thomas poem – if anything, ‘And death shall have no dominion’ is the ‘purer’ poetic artefact, a poem which resists discussion except on its own terms. Certainly, as the word ‘pure’ here implies, it is a poem far more in keeping with the ideas of one poetic theory, ‘la poésie pure’ – ‘pure poetry’ – developed by the French symbolist poets in the late nineteenth century (Mallarmé, Baudelaire and others). Influenced by the poetic theories and practice of Edgar Allan Poe, these poets believed that poetry should come as close as possible to music, and should be as far as possible devoid of an extractable semantic meaning, reliant on sound alone, an idea which Ezra Pound also endorsed: ‘poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music’.⁵

Any parallel reading of these two poems would also have to take account of the great historical gap between them: Donne is a Renaissance poet, a contemporary of Shakespeare, writing on the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Dylan Thomas is a twentieth-century Modernist. In spite of Pound’s famous dictum that ‘Literature is news that stays news’,⁶ recent critical theories, as Chapter 7 will show, have cast serious doubt on the ‘transhistorical’ or ‘universal’ qualities traditionally understood as a given quality of literary value. Given that the two poems are separated by over 300 years, and given the very different attitudes to religion, death and for that matter poetry of the ages in which they were produced, do these poems really have that much in common beyond a generalized thematic concern? This kind of universalizing attitude to poetry also runs the risk of turning it into no more than a handy compendium of insights into ‘the human condition’, essentially indistinguishable from philosophy or theology, albeit more memorably phrased: like many grand soundbites on the provenance of poetry, Alexander Pope’...

Table of contents

• Studying Poetry
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Form and meaning
• Part 2: Critical approaches
• Part 3: Interpreting poetry
• Glossary
• Notes
• Further reading
• Index