RE:Verse

Turning Towards Poetry

Jeremy Tambling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317865391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Many people are intimidated by poetry, thinking it difficult and high-brow and not for them. But it is still considered an essential part of art and literature. RE: Verse asks; Why and How should we read poetry?

This book, aimed at people just starting with literature, takes nothing for granted but opens poetry up to all in a way that makes it both exciting and fresh. Examples are taken from a balanced combination of traditional writers such as Keats, Wordsworth, Blake and Shakespeare, and modern poets such as Seamus Heaney, Jackie Kay and Benjamin Zephaniah.

RE: Verse ranges over all periods of literature, and over the many critical theories that attempt to show why poetry matters. It places poems into their historical context, looks at poetry in translation, and discusses why much poetry is so difficult as to seem almost unreadable.

It sets the standard for talking about how to read poetry, and what to do when this seems to be impossibly difficult. Ultimately, it is the essential, easy-to-read guide to the subject.

Chapter 1
Introduction: listening to poetry

This chapter discusses four poems, and there will be, incidentally, a few technical words introduced. Let’s start with those used for the title of this book. This has two words for its subject. One is poetry, which comes from a Greek word, poeisis, which means something made. A poet is a maker: the word was used by the Scottish poet William Dunbar (c.1460–1513) to describe the poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340–1400). So we shall think of poetry as the art of making something new, making it out of words, and if words are considered to be nothing, making it out of nothing.

As for verse, it comes from the Latin versus, meaning ‘a line or row, especially a line of writing (so named from turning to begin another line), verse, from vertere to turn’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Verse means both a line of writing and the turn by which another line is reached, going from line to line. In English, the turn at the end of the line on the right hand edge of the page means a reverse back to the left. Verse and reverse: the turn turns back. Ancient Greek inscriptions went from left to right, and then from right to left and then back to left to right, as if following the primitive progress of an ox plowing a field: writing like this is called boustrophedonic. That word contains in it the word strophe, which in Greek means a turn, and which is generally used to mean a section of poetry. Japanese poetry, in its early waku form, need be only one line (which is read right to left), so that ‘verse’ in the Japanese context may mean that you may have to look for the turn inside the one line itself. A verse, then, may be one line, or two lines, or else any number of lines. Verses are often arranged in stanzas: a stanza being a group of lines of verse (usually not less than four), arranged in such a way as to form a unity, like a paragraph of prose.

But, as the Northern Irish writer Paul Muldoon (b. 1951) puts it in a poem called ‘Incantata’, thinking about the French painter André Derain (1880–1954):

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I thought again of how art may be made, as it was by André Derain,
of nothing more than a turn
in the road …

(Muldoon 2001, 335)

This book starts with the proposition that poetry is always a form of turning, and if for Paul Muldoon it is a ‘turn in the road’, then the way the poem twists and turns will suggest a very winding path.

Blake: ‘London’

Writing poetry often plays on this idea of turning. An example comes from William Blake (1757–1827), who wrote ‘London’, a poem about the city, in his Songs of Experience, which were completed in 1794. As the ‘I’ who speaks the poem describes moving from street to street, it is as if that corresponds with moving from line to line.

Here is the poem: it is the first of three poems about London with which I want to start:

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I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

(Blake 1966, 216)

As always with short, or lyric poetry, if you have not read it before, read it again before starting to discuss it. When this poem first appeared, it accompanied a picture, or a picture accompanied it: Blake integrated picture and text together by engraving them together and then colouring the complete page. If you look at any reprint of these editions, you will see the poem not as printed but in Blake’s handwriting, which includes his own idiosyncratic spelling, or orthography: it is always a matter of debate whether this should be reproduced, as it is here.

The poem is a ‘song’, and the words of songs are usually easy, because they are usually written to be set to music. (Plenty of composers have tried setting Blake’s songs.) The words seem easy here, like the structure, which starts three lines with the word ‘And’, which seems very simple and childlike. But the total poem, and any line in it, is anything but easy. How should we approach it?

Here are some hints. One is to look for the turn: the moment where the poem changes direction, or shape. (There may be more than one turn, of course.) Nearly all poetry will have such a turn: I will discuss where I see such a turn in ‘London’ later. Another hint is to look at the title. Why ‘London’? Is the poem describing London? It is certainly not addressing ‘London’ as though it was a person. How do you know it is about London at all from the verse? (Some readers will recognise the reference to the river Thames.) Is it about London, or is it about what London means, or what it does to the people in it, or what living in it is like, or how life in it has been affected? That is a question to start with, and not to answer quickly. What oppressive powers does it single out? The third verse shows it is directed against church and state, against law and war (Britain was fighting revolutionary France at the time.)

Another hint: note the repetitions of words: these are always significant in poetry (when writing prose we try to avoid repetition; repeated words in poems are a sign of something significant happening, which needs to be noticed.) There are at least five examples of repeated groups of words. There is ‘charter’d’ (twice),‘in every’ (five times),‘mark’ as a verb and then ‘marks’ as a noun,‘cry’ (three times) and ‘hear’ (twice). Look more closely at the last of these. It is especially relevant, because ‘hear’ comes as a rhyme word in two places, while the others are not rhymes. So it is integrated with other rhymes: ‘fear’/‘hear’ in the second stanza,‘hear’/‘tear’ in the fourth. Further, the word ‘hear’ is also an acrostic in the third stanza: that is, – whether intentionally or not – the word is formed by the initial letters of the lines of the verses: as you turn from one line to the next, the letters of HEAR form themselves. And this acrostic, HEAR, is framed by the last word of the second stanza, also ‘hear’, and the last word of the first line of the fourth, also ‘hear’. Blake wants the reader to listen, both to London, and its sounds – its poetry – and to the poem.

Repetition sometimes takes non-obvious forms. ‘Hear’ is also inside the poem’s last word and last rhyme, ‘hearse’. It may also be possible to think that ‘hear’ echoes in ‘harlot’ ([=] prostitute). If you mark the number of times that ‘hear’ is used, it will give more point to the emphasis on crying, and on the voice, and the significance of how the voice is referred to in the third line of the second stanza will become more apparent: the colon after ‘in every voice’ makes for a break (a caesura) in the line, and so halts the reader’s attention.

Similarly, the phrase ‘in every’ begins in the middle of a line, and then in the second stanza is used repeatedly to start the lines: this use of a repeated opening is called anaphora. In the first appearance, ‘in every’ has to do with sight: noting people’s faces, but in the following four times it introduces something to do with sound, while in the last stanza, with ‘midnight streets’, when everything is black (note the word ‘blackning’), nothing can be seen at all.

The fourth hint after the turn (not yet discussed!) is to look at the title and the repetitions: note words that seem arresting, or different. Virtually every line could be quoted here, but a list of words or phrases that I find strange include: ‘charter’d’ (which is repeated to bring out the strangeness). Or ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’. Or ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. Or ‘midnight streets’. Or ‘Marriage hearse’. And these last four examples link through the alliteration on the letter m, and that this is not coincidental could be reinforced by noting it is ‘most thro’ midnight streets’ (an example of alliteration: the repeated use of the first letter in a line, or group of lines). If this poem is asking you to hear London, not just see it, you might also hear the m in the river Thames and again in ‘Chimney-sweeper. (Young boys started to go up chimneys to sweep them in Shakespeare’s time, and this must have caused much weeping, a word which is heard in ‘Chimney-sweeper’, and which fits with the word ‘cry’.) But just about everything in stanza 3, from which I have just quoted, is strange. So is the fourth stanza, which, starting with ‘But most’ indicates a turn, a new emphasis, something different from the first three stanzas.

Yet that there is a ‘turn’ (to the subject of sexuality in the city: prostitution underlying marriage) is also disguised by the language, for example, the repetition in these last two verses of the letter b (and bl …).How that relates to the letter p in‘Palace’ and to the pl in‘plagues’ is striking. The letters b, d, g, k, p, and t are all plosives (i.e. letters that when sounded out have a popping, or explosive force: many of them begin swear words, because of the sense of energy released when they are uttered).The letters bl and pl come together in the ending: ‘And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse’. Everything that seems distinctive in the poem seems to be concentrated in that last line. To get its rhythm, tap out the bits that are italicised; you will then see the emphasis.

This poem will support much discussion as to the meaning of the difficult phrases that have been mentioned. Our analysis has hardly gone into what meaning may be abstracted; the only point to be made at this stage is that difficulties should not be hurried over – they are there as crisis-points to be discussed, they are certainly not evidence that the reader is deficient if she or he finds them simply difficult.

Let us try another poem, of the same period as Blake.

Wordsworth: ‘Westminster Bridge’

This, by William Wordsworth (1770–1850), is a sonnet – a poem of 14 lines – called ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 2 1802’:

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Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,

5

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;

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Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

(Wordsworth 1936, 136)

The sonnet began as an Italian form in the thirteenth century, and the word implies a song. The Italian, or Petrarchan sonnet, of which this is one, is divided by a pause, or a turn, into eight lines followed by six. Paul Muldoon, who like many other modern poets, has written many sonnets, speaks in an interview about the ‘thought process of the sonnet’. ‘You establish something and then there’s a slight change’, he says; and he associates this change with ‘the turn’ (Keller and Muldoon 1994, 25). This sonnet of Wordsworth has only two rhyme sounds in the first eight lines, which makes up a single unit, so that we start again in line 9 with ‘Never’ (note how this is repeated twice, first as the shortened ‘ne’er’, then, the third time, with more emphasis because not abbreviated), and with a changed rhyme scheme.

To observe the rhyme scheme of a poem, if it has one, is always a useful start. If you set out Wordsworth’s rhyme scheme on paper using an alphabetical scheme to make it clear, you will see that the form goes abba, abba, and then cdcdcd. As with the Blake (which rhymes on a pattern we can summarise as abab, cdcd, efef, dgdg), read it out to yourself, at least under your breath. Rather than stop at the end of each line, try to follow the punctuation (so that you pause at the end of the first line, but not at the end of the second).

This 14-line poem may seem less sensational and more ordinary than Blake’s 12 lines. But it invites attention just as much. Again, consider it in three ways, beginning with the title, whose oddity you should note. Westminster Bridge, which spans the river Thames, was completed in 1752. This is a view of London from the bridge, and the claim the title makes is that it was thought up while crossing the bridge on a particular date.

What gets said about London in this poem? It starts as an exclamation, up to the colon which completes the first line; the second and the third lines amplify this. The explanation begins in the fourth line: London is beautiful. The point is taken up to the end of the eighth line. We have already noted a break at that point, and when reading poetry, any such turn, change of tone, or of approach, should be noted.

So should the difference between the two sections. There are continuities; note the repetition – almost the only repetition in this poem – of ‘beauty’ (line 5) and ‘beautifully’ (l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• To the Reader
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• CHAPTER 1 Introduction: listening to poetry
• CHAPTER 2 Five ideas for reading
• CHAPTER 3 Making poetry: making meanings
• CHAPTER 4 Public and private poetry
• CHAPTER 5 Why is poetry difficult?
• CHAPTER 6 ‘Poetry is the subject of the poem’
• CHAPTER 7 Poetry and translation
• CHAPTER 8 Reading modern poetry
• Technical terms and phrases
• Further reading
• Bibliography
• Questions for further study
• Poetry examples
• Index