We often find the sounds of words and subtle connotations used to
weave together something, in the best of poems, wonderous and magical.
Consider the following passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream, a
snatch of lyric poetry:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine
(A Midsummer Night's Dream, 2.1)
The eglantine is selected here as much for the melopoeia of the word
than the scent of the flower itself. Compare a substitution, say the
tuberose (tu-ber-ose, not tube-rose!), which is used as a mid-tone in
perfumes:
Quite over-canopied with sweet musk-rose,
With testy luscious woodbine and pungent tuberose
This does not provide a good substitution, and yet it ought to if the
poetry were just in what the words describe.
In many forms of poetry it is inescapable that what we like about it
should be tied up in the choice of words, the metre, and the lesser
things that each words should remind us of, their punning counterparts
and nimble associations. To dispraise this would be like dispraising a
carpenter for making the most out of his wood, working with the grain
and polishing the finish with beeswax.
Yet I've often wondered if there are poetic things which are still
poetic no matter how you tell them. I think there are likely to be
many such things. Just the other day I was walking over a lawn which
unexpectedly had many mushrooms sprouting up in it, it being quite
early in the season for mushrooms. Amongst these mushrooms I saw one
very small mushroom, and as I walked along the most unexpected thing
happened: the mushroom grew from something tiny to a full sized
mushroom just like the others around it, within the ten seconds or so
that I walked by it!
Of course this was an illusion, but even the illusion was interesting.
The mushroom, which was far off, upon closer inspection turned out not
to be a mushroom though all the others by it were. Actually it was a
feather, and the gentle wind had been turning it round so that instead
of it being seen end on, it was now full to the side, and from a
distance was the same size and almost the same hue, a kind of brownish
dun, as the other mushrooms.
No matter how you tell that story, whether the mushrooms be called
toadstools or fungi, and whether the feather is blown by the breeze or
the wind or the septentrional zephyrs (actually I think the wind came
from the south east), the story is as good as it can be by its own
nature.
Because the story is independent of the words, this bit of poetry and
others like it share the common attribute of making me wonder a little
more at what is being described and not at the words used to describe
them. It is nice to wonder at words, just as it is nice to wonder at a
well prepared bit of wood, but to stick too much to the magic of words
for poetry seems to be avoiding a fuller potential.
Now I don't say that in normal poems with their metre and connotations
it is only the words which do the art. Of course the words simply
facilitate the telling of something, just like in a thrilling movie
you have fast paced beating music and in a comedy you have whoops and
comic noises instead. The music of the words helps to set the tone for
the meaning of the words as taken. But when there is no such
assistance, sometimes this is a fresh relief, like the difference
between a lush set painted to make up for poor acting versus great
actors on a bare stage.
What is tricky about this kind of poetry, a poetry that depends less
on words, is that it makes one feel the urge even more to lean on
words again. Even when I talked about the mushroom, I said "the gentle
wind" where I could have said "a slight breeze". I managed to avoid
using zephyr, but there was still a little lyric pretention creeping
in there. To extirpate it all would be very difficult.
So this is what my piece last night with the shepherd was about:
"Poets are apt to formalise their ideas in twisted syntax and clanging
words, but I would rather chat my ideas to some wandering mythical
shepherd and have them turn up again carved into some rude block on a
sheer mountain top."
http://groups.google.com/group/whits/t/88a690d94ba7feb1
The idea was that to get rid of the lyric pretention, the story should
be given to a "shepherd" (a metaphor, you understand, because there
aren't any shepherds these days, they all went out with the civil war
and turned to different forms of shearing than were heard of here),
and retold in essence rather than in rhetoric. The rude stone figures
the opposite of rhetoric, it's the hard and tough medium that is a
labour to carve into, so that words must be used sparingly and
directly.
But as I was writing it, I started to reconsider a little:
"But when the twisting is topological enough and the clanging bright
enough, then there may be a medium that the shepherd can't carry, as
though some mathematical expression from one age shown to a former. So
some ideas might depend on the teaching of that expressivity."
Though this being said explains in brief what I have explained in more
words here, the worry behind it was something more like the idea that
the shepherd could in fact drop some of the meaning if she (or he)
also dropped some of the words. Sometimes a thought is so complex that
it needs a complex word. What if one made a poem about mathematics?
Isn't Euler's equation beautiful? But how could that be explained
rudely? So the idea was not to discriminate against pretentious or
academic poetry, at least if there be no other means of conveying it.
Anyway, I don't so much care how a thing is put. Sometimes I like to
write as pretentious as I can, or shove in dregs of it where it's
unwanted (such as here), in order to laugh at it. If you're afraid of
writing in a particular way, write a whole paragraph that way to begin
with, and then continue as you like, because when you mar something to
begin with then you free yourself from the fear or marring.
And if a poem can be a story or other thing, independent of the words
used to tell it, then why does a poem have to be in words at all? I
could set up a scene with mushrooms and have a fan turn a feather and
create a movie of it, which would have no words but indeed capture the
idea of the thing far better than words could. But some things are
more apt to words, like the expression of certain feelings and complex
ideas.
I would like, though, to have things which are poetic but don't
necessarily subsist in words to at least be thought of on the same
plane as metre and assonance and connotation, since the things that we
write about are what move us to the words, not the other way around.