Reading poetry

Peter Barry

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526111760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

Witty, direct and articulate, Peter Barry illustrates the key elements of poetry at work, covering many different kinds of verse, from traditional forms to innovative versions of the art, such as 'concrete' poetry, minimalism and word-free poems. The emphasis is on meanings rather than words, looking beyond technical devices like alliteration and assonance so that poems are understood as dynamic structures creating specific ends and effects. The three sections cover progressively expanding areas – 'Reading the lines' deals with such basics as imagery, diction and metre; 'Reading between the lines' concerns broader matters, such as poetry and context, and the reading of sequences of poems, while 'Reading beyond the lines' looks at 'theorised' readings and the 'textual genesis' of poems from manuscript to print. Reading poetry is for students, lecturers and teachers looking for new ways of discussing poetry, and all those seriously interested in poetry, whether as readers or writers.

Part I. Reading the lines

1. Meaning

Ironing

I used to iron everything:

my iron flying over sheets and towels

like a sledge chased by wolves over snow,

the flex twisting and crinking

until the sheath frayed, exposing

wires like nerves. I stood like a horse

with a smoking hoof,

inviting anyone who dared

to lie on my silver padded board,

to be pressed to the thinness

of dolls cut from paper.

I’d have commandeered a crane

if I could, got the welders at Jarrow

to heat me an iron the size of a tug

to flatten the house.

Then for years I ironed nothing.

I put the iron in a high cupboard.

I converted to crumpledness.

And now I iron again: shaking

dark spots of water onto wrinkled

silk, nosing into sleeves, round

buttons, breathing the sweet heated smell

hot metal draws from newly-washed

cloth, until my blouse dries

to a shining, creaseless blue,

an airy shape with room to push

my arms, breasts, lungs, heart into.

Vicki Feaver

As we read this poem, we probably sense immediately that it can’t just be about ironing. Without the feeling that poems often mean more than they seem at first to say, there would not be very much in poetry to ponder and enjoy. But what is it that creates in the reader’s mind the feeling that a poem is also, and often even primarily, about something other than its stated or foregrounded subject? Sometimes it will be a conviction that develops only gradually as the poem goes on, but in the case of this one, we already seem to be beyond ironing by the end of the first stanza. The two opening lines are a literal comment on doing the ironing – they could be dropped into casual conversation without sounding too odd – but the third line would sound strange in a chat with a friend about domestic routines. For the line ‘like a sledge chased by wolves over snow’ is fundamentally different in vividness and intensity from any formulation which might be used in casual conversation – yes, we can still see in that phrase the ironing board with a white sheet on it, and the iron sliding up and down along it, but it has been metaphorically transformed, the sliding iron into a sledge, and the white sheet into a snowy landscape. In many poems, the transformative use of metaphor marks the transition point, the moment when the act or object being described gathers new associations or connotations and starts to mean something else, or, more often, something else as well.

For instance, there are added elements, such as the chasing wolves, which don’t seem to be the metaphorical equivalent of anything we can immediately see in the simple domestic scene of the iron and the ironing board. But with the mention of wolves, the hint of an alien, feral world has broken into the domestic calm, and the ironing begins to seem linked into some kind of compulsive obsession. The implication is that the familiar domestic activity is driven by fear of some imagined (perhaps even imaginary) external force. So now it is impossible to iron fast enough to stay ahead of the baying wolf-pack, no matter how desperately the sledge-pulling huskies are whipped in an effort to make them go faster. We are so frantic now that the harnesses are twisted and frayed, like the flex of the iron, and the nerves exposed and jangling. Then the ironing seems to become even more fraught, and the iron becomes the iron-shod hoof of a snorting horse which will trample anyone who gets in its way – now everything is going to be flattened, the whole house, even, if there is an iron as big as a tug boat to do it. So this seems now a ‘macho’ form of ironing, ironing on an industrial scale, which amounts to a kind of frenzied climax in which the whole world is to be steam-ironed into submission. And then the grip of the addictive compulsion is suddenly broken, and now the only way to stay sane is to do no ironing at all – to iron nothing, to put the very implement beyond use in a high cupboard, and to convert ‘to crumpledness’, as the only cure for the opposing addiction to flattenedness. But the obsessive ironer, who now irons nothing, rather than just ironing a few selected things, fearful that the mere taste of ironing will be enough to bring back the addiction, must still be an obsessive ironer at heart. So evidence that the addiction is cured arrives only at the final stage, when the speaker comes back to ironing, but now in a different mood – relaxed, sensuous, appreciative – with the external, alien, pressurising force gone. Rather than being driven and frantic, the activity is now enjoyed for what it is, and the result is fulfilling, giving a sense of air, space and self-realisation.

So have we ‘paraphrased’ the poem here? In a way, yes, of course, for the frequently encountered view that poems are by nature unparaphrasable is a poetry-reading shibboleth which needs to be broken. But it’s not exactly paraphrasing, of course, for what we have been doing is more like a process of talking to oneself about the poem, talking oneself through the poem, or alongside it, and putting it into ‘our own’ words as we go. I don’t know of any substitute for this, and I often start doing it before I’m sure I understand the poem. Then I find that, as I do, I am drifting into understanding as the ‘talk back’ process goes on. It is valuable, and recommended, because it makes the reader active rather than passive in the reading process, as poetry readers need to be. Here, we have certainly ‘re-said’ the poem or ‘re-played’ it, into a kind of blend of our own and the poet’s words. It is a way of groping towards what we think the poem might mean, and perhaps, more than anything, a way of slowing the poem down in order to make its meanings and effects observable. And yet, we haven’t said what the other activity is (or other activities are) that the poet is speaking about – could it be sex, or writing, or home-making, or teaching, or thinking? That list pretty well comprises the usual broad-scale interpretive suspects in poetry – but more of that later. At first, this implied, but unnamed activity, whatever it is, does us, because we are so eager to do it right, or do it best, or do it as much as possible. Then we rebel against the forces that are pushing us, and, eventually, we find ourselves in the activity which had previously consumed us, and then we start doing it. So in the end we are speaking the language which hitherto was speaking us. Likewise, we too, as readers, must find room for ourselves in the poem, room ‘to push / [our] arms, breasts, lungs, heart into’, so that the poem makes its meanings by a combination of saying and not saying. The ‘concreteness’ of the poetic material, we realise, must also have a certain openness attached to it: nothing could be more mundane and familiar than ironing – but we might wonder whether a poet ever could iron without irony. So the much-proclaimed ‘rightness’, ‘inevitability’ and ‘precision’ of the poet’s words – that merciless flattening of the unruly medium of language – have to allow a degree of elasticity and vagueness too, and we have to be able to stretch the words of the poem to cover more meaning than is at first apparent. It is essentially in that elasticity – that vagueness, even – that a poem expresses its meaning.

In the case of this Vicki Feaver poem, the interpretive strategy of the reader, if it can be so grandly named, involves standing back from the particular, so that something specific – the mundane business of ironing – comes to be seen in a generalised way, as representing (or connecting with) our inevitably changing attitudes to life in general as life goes on. But the poem, of course, doesn’t overtly declare that ironing is to be seen as ‘representative’ in some way, though it might be argued that it does do so implicitly when it opens with the bold statement ‘I used to iron everything’. Since this statement cannot literally be true, we are prompted to think of ways in which it might be metaphorically so, so that the act of obsessively ironing clothes into neatly pressed stacks suggests an urge and a determination to control every aspect of life, till eventually there is not enough room to push ‘arms, breasts, lungs, heart into’, and life is forced into a kind of straitjacket of predictability. Being a poem, however, it cannot just tell us things directly, but must show things which seem to have implications of the kind I have tried to tease out in ‘Ironing’.

Note that we are leaving this poem now without seeking to wrap it up conclusively and exit with a feeling of ‘closure’, having pinned down exactly all the implied overtones of the ironing activity described in the poem. The roomy, ‘airy shape’ mentioned at the end suggests the attainment of a more easy-going lifestyle, one which is less hidebound by routine, but the poem does not give any literal detail about it, and confines itself to presenting this concluding image of the unrestricting ‘creaseless blue’ garment.

In general, then, poets value mimesis (the ‘enactment’ or ‘embodiment’ or ‘showing’ of an idea or situation) above diegesis (the ‘mere’ description or telling of it). Thus, a large body of criticism has long insisted that the poem must ‘enact’ its sense, not simply assert it. But the dichotomy between showing and telling is not absolute, and it makes sense to recognise that in poetry we always need both the saying and the showing, just as in grasping an argument most of us require both a proposition (which is usually abstract and generalised) and an example (which is usually concrete and specific) before we can truly comprehend what is being said.

We can develop this idea of the complementarity of showing and telling by looking at another poem, a sonnet by Charlotte Smith, a writer now best remembered for her long poem ‘Beachy Head’. The poem considered here is about Middleton Church, close to the Sussex coast, where cliff erosion had toppled much of the graveyard into the sea, so that bones were seen on the shore at low tide:

Sonnet 44

Press’d by the moon, mute arbitress of tides,

While the loud equinox its power combines,

The sea no more its swelling surge confines,

But o’er the shrinking land sublimely rides.

The wild blast, rising from the western cave,

Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed,

Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead,

And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave!

With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore,

Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave;

But vain to them the winds and waters rave;

They hear the warring elements no more:

While I am doom’d – by life’s long storm opprest,

To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest.

By convention, the first word of each line in metrical poetry begins with a capital letter, but that initial capital does not have the same function as the capital letter at the start of a prose sentence, and the danger is that the initial capital at the start of each line may give the misleading impression that every line of poetry is self-contained, like a prose sentence, and will therefore make sense on its own. But no matter how long the opening line of this poem is pondered in isolation, it will never make sense, and reading poems line by line is not the way to understand what they mean. An important secret of reading poetry and making sense of it is to pay more attention to the full stops than the capital letters. We must read sentence by sentence, not line by line, and I have nothing to say in this book which is more important than that. Thus, ‘Press’d by the moon, mute arbitress of tides’ has no meaning on its own – it makes sense only as part of the sentence that begins with that line and ends with the full stop that concludes the fourth line. The whole block of four lines is the ‘unit of sense’, and the full stops, not the ends of lines, are the places to pause and make sure that we have grasped the sense of what is being said. If, as you read a poem, you realise at some point that you have lost the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface. About this book
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘One small step’
• Part I. Reading the lines
• Part II. Reading between the lines
• Part III. Reading beyond the lines
• End-note
• List of poems discussed
• Glossary
• Further reading
• Index