Line by Line

You may recall that Sandburg’s Grass was short and yet he, like Whitman here, employed repetition.  While Sandburg wrote Grass in free verse, I commented there that, merely looking at the poem, one could see a structure or frame to the piece.  The same is true of Whitman’s astronomer: The first four lines all start on the word “When” and the lines increase in length until, in some type-settings of the poem, that fourth line is so long it wraps onto another line. The last four lines, by contrast, are more-or-less the same length with a short last line. 

The first line is held together with assonance – internal vowel rhymes.  Listen for the “er” sound in “When I heardd the learn’d astronomer”.  “Learned” is contracted to “learn’d” in order to produce that aural effect, I think. To reduce the word from two syllables to one. The line carries three accented feet “heard”, “learn’d” and “tron” in “astronomer” and ends with a semicolon which creates a noticeable pause before the commencement of the following line.

Because line 1 opens on a “When”, one is waiting to find out what happened – he heard an astronomer and then?  But line 2 keeps us waiting and also opens on a “when”.  Proofs, figures, are ranged in columns before the poet.  The astronomer is offering proofs or corroboration for the things which he is saying and this proof comes in the form of figures ranged in columns.  This line has five stresses on “proofs”, “figures”, “ranged”, “columns” and “before” and again closes on a pause-inducing semi-colon.  The poet is hearing an astronomer and he is seeing columns of figures.  Note that there is not just one proof, but there are “proofs”, plural.  There is not just one column, but “columns”, plural.  Finally he doesn’t use the more common word “arranged” but instead chooses “ranged”, a word which has a secondary meaning, namely to move about aimlessly or without direction, typically in search of something, often food.

Line 3 again makes us wait for the action or the consequence which follows the when.  The poet is shown, presumably by the astronomer, charts and diagrams (again, more than one in each category) and is given these charts and diagrams in order to “add, divide and measure them” so that the poet can check for himself that the proofs are indeed proofs as the astronomer claims.  Initially the poet was presented with columns of figures but now is shown charts and diagrams. In addition to hearing the astronomer and seeing the figures the poet is now given the opportunity to interact with the data himself by adding, dividing and measuring it.  He can satisfy himself that what he is being told is in fact correct.  The line is even longer than the preceding two lines and carries seven stresses.  Again it closes on a semi-colon.

.Line 4 is in many ways a strange line. It is so long it reaches out well beyond the length of the preceding lines.  It is repetitious. It begins again on “when I” and follows again with “heard the astronomer”, a third repetition of this phrase from the title and the opening line but this time with the parenthetical aside “sitting” occurring in the phrase.  He uses the word “lecture” twice. The second half of the line also shifts its focus.  Up to this point it has been about the poet – he heard the astronomer, the proofs and figures were ranged before him, he was shown charts and could manipulate them; he, sitting, heard the astronomer. And then suddenly in the second half of this fourth line the camera lens shifts to the astronomer himself. The astronomer lectured to much applause.  The poet hears the astronomer and hears the applause.  The line ends on a comma and not a semi-colon because, at long last, the poet is going to resolve the “what happens next” element.

Line 5 is a surprising anti-climax. The tension and the expectation has been mounting – the line lengths increasing, the proofs mounting, the applause for the learn’d astronomer and the poet’s reaction is to feel tired and sick. 

Line 6 doesn’t require much commentary save to notice two features: firstly the contraction of wandered to wander’d. This time, unlike “learn’d”, it makes no discernible difference to the sound.  Until is reduced to ‘Till”.  Secondly, notice the sudden tense shift from past to present continuous with the use of “gliding” and “rising”.

Line 7 has the lovely alliteration and assonance of mystical moist night air and the usage of “mystical” which is somewhat out-of-place after words like charts, diagrams, figures and proofs.

Finally there is the closing line 8, written in iambic pentameter –the first metrical line in the poem and also with the strange contraction of “looked” to “look’d” which again contributes no difference in sound.

We can see that Whitman wants to contrast the approach which the astronomer took to the stars, with his personal reaction to the same object.  This is a poem about stars, right?  About astronomy?  Strange then that the word “night” only occurs in the second last line and “stars” is the last word of all.  This is not a poem about astronomy.  Or, at least, it’s not only about astronomy.

Structure

Why the repetition? Why does Whitman open repeatedly on “When” or When I’ in those first four lines?  Why the increasing line lengths through the first 4 lines?

I think he is doing at least four things. 

The first is what I have already alluded to above: the building of a tension or a crescendo.  It is not only the increased line lengths and stresses per line which contribute to this effect, there is also the activity contained within the line. In L1 there is one activity: hearing.  In L2 proofs and figures (two items) are ranged in columns. In L3 he is shown charts and diagrams and must do three things with them – add, multiply and divide. And in L4 the words are becoming long and the sentence itself heavy and unwieldy.

The second thing I think he wants to do is show that this astronomer is wordy and repetitive. He doesn’t use one proof or figure when several will do. He doesn’t use one simple word if many harder ones can be used instead.  Sounds like lectures you’ve sat in, doesn’t it.

The third is to say something about the activity of lecturing, teaching or speaking. The speaker wants to persuade the listener of something. He wants to exhort and provoke a reaction and response. The repeated When I’s are like Martin Luther King’s repeated “I have a dream”.  It’s what we call anaphora.   – the repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of successive clauses.  But this brings us to the fourth thing –which is that this speech doesn’t have that impact.  The poet doesn’t actually add, divide or measure the things which are offered to him.  Instead, sitting, he hears the astronomer. That “sitting” introduces a pause in the line as you read it. It detracts from, pulls away from, the action sequence of the piece. The poet is not engaging with this material. He is sitting. It is not causing him to get excited or to sit on the edge of his chair. He doesn’t want to leap up, he sits.

The speech is well received though. There is much applause.  But Whitman emphasizes that the applause is in the lecture room, not outside under the stars.  Whitman doesn’t sit through much of this before he becomes unaccountably tired and sick.  If the account of the lecture which I have set out above, namely that it is repetitive and long-winded and boring, then the fact that there is much applause must mean that the audience are clapping not so much for what is being said, but rather they are praising the fact that the lecturer is supposed to be knowledgeable.  I think that this is the reason for the shift in L4 to place the spotlight on the lecturer rather than the content.  They’re clapping because they want to convey to those around them that they understand these figures and charts and diagrams and are impressed by them.

Clearly Whitman could not literally rise and glide out of the lecture room and so this is meant in some metaphorical sense. I can’t tell whether he literally leaves the room or whether he remains for the lecture and imagines himself leaving his body and gliding out of the room.  I think it is most likely to be the former given what comes later.

The lecture was engaging his sight and hearing and was supposed to engage his mind, but did not.  When he goes outside the first sensation is feeling – he feels the moist air and thinks it is mystical. Why? There’s nothing mystical about water vapour and given the lecture he has been attending one can assume he know this. But this comes after “rising“ and “gliding out” which is hardly a normal manner of exiting a room.  Why look up at the stars in “perfect silence”?  Surely silence is silence?  I think the perfect is meant to convey a state of mind, rather than be intended to modify the word “silence”. To look at the stars makes Whitman feel wonderment and awe. His emotions and mind are engaged in a way that speech in a lecture room and empirical proofs could not achieve.

I think it is safe to conclude that the poet is not impressed by the lecture.  In fact by the second usage of astronomer in L4 the poet has dropped the word “learn’d” when he describes the astronomer.  But learning cannot mean nothing to this person or why did he attend the lecture to begin with?  He came in the hope of receiving or experiencing something which was not delivered to him in that lecture-room but which was achieved outside of it.  Contrast his behavior to that of the audience.  He wanders, directionless and without purpose, by himself and from time-to-time looks up in perfect silence at the stars.  He just looks at them. He doesn’t offer explanations or proofs, he just marvels at them.  I think the use of the iambic pentameter in this closing line is to emulate in sound the harmony which he feels or has attained through being outside and staring up at the stars.  But it also harkens back to the first line which was equally short, pregnant with assonance and after the opening words is also in iambic pentameter.

I don’t think, and now I’m going out on a limb here and getting into what I think the poem’s message is rather than focusing on how it works, that the piece is a rejection of learning as so many claim. The poet attended the lecture after all. And note that the audience is clapping for the fact that the astronomer is learned, rather than because they comprehend what he is saying.  They don’t’ get what the astronomer is saying just like the poet didn’t get it. To get it he would need to interact with the data himself.  And the poet admits that his enjoyment and wonderment is aimless and directionless.  I think the message may be that experience and wonderment is the gateway to learning, but that’s just me.

The structure of the poem emulates the simpler message – the contrast of the experience of the lecture to the experience of looking at stars: less words (no words) are needed for Whitman’s form of comprehension. Whitman’s approach is simple, like those closing lines of the poem, while the astronomer’s increases in complexity.  While the astronomer explores and explains his world through interacting with it (adding, dividing and measuring), Whitman detaches from the world in order to experience its wonder.

Word choices

I pointed out the choice of the word “ranged” in L2 and gave its secondary meaning as wandering aimlessly, often in search of food.  Now that we’ve looked at the close of the poem and the wonder which Whitman’s wandering produced in him, one realizes that the choice of the word “ranged” might not be coincidental. It may be intended to foreshadow what is to come.

“Ranged” is also a shorter word than “arranged”, which brings me to those contractions. Learn’d is understandable, it contributes to a change in sound and produces the aural effect which is so noticeable in that first line.  “Till” is contracted without an apostrophe and look’d and wander’d really don’t’ seem to add anything by having been shortened. And lectured and ranged are not shortened. What are we to make of this?  I think Whitman is wanting to convey a casual, conversational tone. By doing so he distances his character from the astronomer.  This is a person who uses ordinary every-day words, not lofty ones.  So when the astronomer does things, like ranging figures and lecturing, the words are written out in full.  When they are the speaker’s words and actions, they are not.

Notice also the change in word choices Whitman makes for the second half of the piece. He signals the change with the shift to the present continuous tense.  The “I” which has been so prevalent in the first four lines falls away. We also have the assonance and alliteration of mystical moist-night air to which I have already referred plus the alliteration of time-to-time and the “t” sounds of “Look’d” and “perfect” and the sibilant s’s of “silence at the stars”.  The whole approach is more poetic and less clinical.

We also get the use of adjectives for the first time. Other than to describe the astronomer as learn’d in L1, the only other adjectives are “mystical”, “moist” and “perfect”, all coming in the last two lines.

Yet another good example of form enhancing content.  So much to extract from such a short piece.

Let’s start with the obvious: The dictionary tells me that a Tarantella is a whirling Italian dance. That comes as no surprise to anyone who has read this poem. That it is Italian is surprising, perhaps, in that the reference to Aragon and the Pyrenees locate the inn in Northern Spain.

The poem is addressed to Miranda. The poet asks whether she remembers “An Inn” as if, at some time past, both poet and Miranda shared an experience of some kind there. Having called on Miranda to remember the inn, the poet then begins creating the mental picture he wants Miranda to conjure up.

We leap straight in to alliteration (spreading / straw), internal rhymes (tedding, spreading, bedding; tedding, spreading, bedding) and iambic metrication. The hard sounding d’s and t’s and b’s falling on the accented iambs emulate feet beating out the dance steps. We see immediately that in order to emulate a dance the poet is using aural effects – the rhythmic metrication, rhymes and alliterative effects. The dance effect is enhanced through the employment of onomatopoeia (hip, hop, hap, clap, ting, tong, tang) and by the repetiton of words and phrases also reinforces the energy and the action.

The way in which Belloc handles the pacing is worthy of closer attention. Those opening repeated lines, “Do you remember ann inn, Miranda, do you remember an inn” read much more slowly than the quick-stepping “and the tedding and the sperading of the straw for a bedding and the wine that tasted of tar” which follows it. Why is this? The secret lies in the employment of short vowels for the quick lines and long vowels “oo” and “em” in the opening lines. But, like a dance, he doesn’t carry us at pell-mell pace through the short vowelled lines either but breaks off and introduces a pause with the question mark that follows tar and reintroduces long vowel sounds in the interjecting line “Under the vine of the dark verandah” before returning to the refrain “Do you remember an inn Miranda” which picks up the rhyme of verandah.

Then there is the break. The noticeable change from the rhythyms of the dance that dominated S1 to the quieter, sombre, more prepossessing close of S2. S2 echoes S1 in that traces of the dance remain in lines like “In the walls of the halls where falls” and “of the feet of the dead to the ground”.

What are to make of this change? What is Belloc saying? I don’t think we can do better than to say that the poet is looking back on a long-lost memory, an event which meant much to him and which he is trying to recapture. That the events happened some time ago seems to be captured in the fact that the inn is now abandoned and silent, the feet are dead, and the peaks hoary (old, grizzled and grey if the word is unfamiliar to you).

The attachment to the memory and its emotional value is conveyed, I think, through the poet’s repeated exhortations to Miranda that she remember it too. It is not enough for the poet that he can remember it – he hopes that she can too, that it meant as much to her as it did to him and that she also thinks of it with fondness. The memory is captured by the appeal the senses of sound and sight and taste. By capturing the dance. And there’s a feeling, perhaps, of loss. The only things which have remained are the peaks and the river and the far waterfall which sounds like “doom”. That which is gone cannot be regained.

I was captivated by this piece at first reading. It sounds lush and dense and beautiful. I love the sound of the repetition of the “I make you” themes. Vowelled beeches and crabbing suns sound gorgeous but, on more distanced reflection, I realized that I didn’t have a clue what Thomas was talking about. Even after fairly close study of the words I wasn’t that much closer to understanding what he was talking about. Again I find myself pleased that this blog is How Poems Work and not What poems mean.

Geographical context

Geography was one of the barriers I faced. It is important to know that Thomas is from Wales and that, therefore, for him, October is Autumn – not the sweltering Spring I endure. For us in the South, our trees don’t catch flame in the autumn like the trees up north do. Once I realized that the trees in Wales turned orange I understood that the “fire” the narrator is walking on was probably a carpet of leaves. Similarly “signal grass” is a type of grass, I discovered, and not a noun-adjective pairing as I first thought.

It is also important to note that this is syllabic, not metric verse. In other words, there is no discernible metre as we have noticed in some of the other poems which we have considered. Instead, Thomas has kept to a fixed pattern of 10 syllables per line. I can’t say I spotted this on reading the poem and certainly the effect is not an audible one (to me). But the regularity of the syllables suggests that Thomas did this deliberately and that it must therefore serve some purpose. We’ll get to what that purpose is.

Imagery
It is worth taking some time to note the kinds of images which Thomas employs in this poem. The opening image of the wind punishing his hair draws on a visual image (his hair appearing windswept), personification (the wind is given fingers), and sensation/feeling (the wind is frosty and cold). The second image of the sun is again a sensation/feeling (the sun feels hot -he walks on fire) alternatively (and more likely) it is a visual image -the colours of the fallen autumn leaves being likened to fire in a simile. The next image is also visual – you can see the shadow cast upon the land. The next image is an aural one – he hears the birds in the winter sticks. Then at the close of S1 we reach the description of his heart. Again personification is employed and here we again have an aural image -we hear the shudder and the talk of the heart

S2 opens on visual images: walking like trees, the shapes of women, star-gestures etc but then shifts to aural images: the speeches of the water, voices and notes.

Thomas is employing all of the senses to convey to the reader his experience of this autumn day. Now let’s look at the language of the similes and metaphors which he employes: “vowelled beeches”, “syllabic blood”, “my busy heart … drains her words”, “tower of words”, “wordy shapes”, “dark-vowelled birds” etc. He is using words which are the terminology of poetry to describe the Autumn day.

There is another remarkable element to the imagery which Thomas employs. We have said that he employs all of the senses. For the visual one can see the rows of children forming star shapes as they play, we see the wordy shapes of the women, the fire-carpet of leaves. With the aural images he does not merely describe the sounds, but also enables us to hear them: there is the sibsilant sound of the sea in the alliterative “by the sea’s side”; there is the use of assonance.

Structure

Having now understood what he is doing, we can get back to the structure of the piece. First of, notice that it is written as four stanzas of eight lines each. Then we know that there is an almost consistent number of syllables per line. Added to this is the repeated phrases “Some let me make you…” and the scheme in the final stanza of abbacddc created by the assonance in the end words of the line.

Structure is also present in the pairs of words which Thomas uses: when / wind; frosty fingers; clock/cock; mark/park; beeches / speeches etc. Some of these are properly rhyming pairs while in other cases the words are similar due to shared consonants. Numerous of the lines are end-stopped and linked to other lines within the stanza by the consonance of the end–words. The first and the last stanzas have identical openings lines and share the identical line-end words wind, land and birds.

The poem is accordingly four stanzas which are almost cyclical in the way in which the end stanza harkens back to the first. Each stanza resembles the others in length, structure and syllables. The lines of each stanza are closely knit by the assonance, consonance and word pairings.

In other words, the structure of the piece emulates the seasons and the structure is conveyed through the employment of sound (its audible to the ear) and, to tie up with the metaphor of writing and poetry, through the employment of writing techniques like syllabic verse and syntactical repetition.

The man is a genius!

A first read reveals that Hodge is a youngster from Wessex who had only been in this foreign land (the South African karoo) for a short time before he died. He was a drummer. His body is found and is buried in this foreign land where he died. Although not apparent from the poem itself, the historical context tells us that Hardy is writing about the Boer War which took place in South Africa between at about the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries. The Boers were the Dutch farmers who would been in occupation since the mid 1600′s and who were rebelling against English rule in South Africa.

Line 1 word 2: “throw” – a verb that sets the tone of the entire piece and sums up the attitude which the poet wishes to convey. The body is thrown, carelessly, unceremoniously, into a hole. There is no coffin. This is a hasty burial and its unremarkable, unexceptional. We don’t know from the poem who the “they” are who find the body in the field. Given the nature of and haste of teh burial, it is likely that he is found by strangers who happen upon the body, and not by comrades who were out looking specifically for him. If that is so, why is he called Hodge? The dictionary shows that hodge means a farm labourer or rustic. The word has lost the meaning it had in Hardy’s day but then it meant any average worker. This isn’t a particular fallen soldier – it is an average, general soldier. Anyone.

Stanzas 1 and 2 are devoted to conveying the foreigness of the place to Hodge, assisted by the employment of the South African vernacular in places. Hodge was there for such a short time that he did not get to become familiar with his surroundings. S3 takes a sudden turn, however. It starts with the word “Yet” and tells us that though the place is unfamiliar and unknown to Hodge, now that he is buried there a part of the plain will forever be Hodge. He will nourish an African tree and the southern constellations will west over him forever. Hodge becomes a part of the Karoo in which he died. The Karoo is forever marked by its past. While I’m not sure that one should make too much of the point – in death he becomes integrated with the landscape in a way that he did not in life.

History also tells us that the drummers of that time were frequently very young boys who often had never travelled far from home before. Their role was an extremely important one. The drum was used as the battlefield communication device, setting the cadence for the march and telling troops when to advance, retreat and regroup. Notwithstanding the importance of the role which the drummer held in the battle, this particular drummer is buried without ceremony and without anything to mark the spot or commemorate him. All that marks that he was there is the landscape itself.

Hardy is saying a few things, I think: Firstly, the travel associated with travelling to war is hardly romantic or exciting. In this instance the drummer doesn’t even get an opportunity to understand or appreciate the land that he is in. Hardy conveys this by telling us little to nothing about the landscape. Only a reader who has been to South Africa before or who knows something about the Karoo can develop a mental picture of the landscape he describes – for all other readers it is as unknown as it was for the drummer. The second thing I think Hardy is saying is that war is not a way to acheive immortality or to carve one’s name into history. This drummer is not remembered or commemorated. His grave is not marked. A third thing I think Hardy is commenting on is the irrelevance of war. He tells us nothing about what the war is being fought for, who won or who lost and what changed. After the war, the land looks as it did before and goes on as it did before. The fourth thing is that events become integrated with and part of the landscape. A part of the Karoo will forever have an English heart in it. So even if Hodge is forgotten and the war is forgotten, the landscape is marked by the event, even if it is only discernable by those who know what and where to look.

So if that is what Hardy was wanting to convey, how does he employ the structure of the poem to assist in conveying this? Firstly, notice the metre. It is an alternating scheme of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. These lines are short – like Drummer Hodge’s life. It is rhythmic and metricated like the cadence of a drum, or of boots marching. Note also how the end-stopped rhymes are masculine – the stressed syllables of the words rhyme with each other. This adds to the metric effect and creates a resonating accent as one reads and a pause of each rhyme. It also integrates the lines very closely with other. Note also how in S1 and S3 there is the use of the possessive personal pronoun “his”. Mounds, landmarks and stars are all said to be his.

A last thing I would like to comment on is how Hardy goes about conveying information. In such a brief poem he manages to convey an awful lot of information. Granted one must turn to independent sources for the historical context – but let’s look at quite how much he maanges to tell us with such an economy of words:

By the use of words like Kopje and Karoo and Southern he places the scene geographically.
By the use of the words young, drummer, hodge and Northern breast he tells us a fair amount about the main character of the poem.

The strangeness or otherness of the place in which Hodge finds himself is conveyed using words like “fresh”, “foreign”, “strange” etc and the feelings towards the place conveyed by using the word “home” twice, once as a noun and once as an adjective. In such a short piece note the number of times words conveying otherness or foreigness or strangeness are used. They far overwhelm the number of words describing England, South Africa, the war or the drummer. Now that’s economy of writing.

To appreciate this one needs to unpack the structure of the poem. It consists of nine lines and the rhyme scheme is a b a a b c b c b . The first four lines operate as a unit on their own. The fifth line serves as a pivot and that it does so is marked by three things: the end of the a rhyme, the period which closes line 4 and the “But” which opens line 5. The first four lines contain two short clippy sentences while the last five lines are one long sentence. What the poem is pivoting into is covered below.

Note that the rhymes are all masculine, echoing the last syllable of the word with which it rhymes. In fact it is a sound-heavy poem with alliteration and assonance in several places. The masculine rhyme ensures that the ear cannot miss the repeated rhymes and this effect is enhanced by the use of iambs so that the last syllable of each rhyme (and line) is additionally stressed.

Then the last thing to note about the structure are the deviations from the iambic tetrameter on lines 2, 8 and 9 which are written in iambic dimeter. If you read aloud you will see the effect which this has. The dimeter in line 2 is not as noticeable because the lines read in a way which is relaxed and slower due both to the punctuation at the end of the lines, which slows the reader down, and due to the o’s and s’s in those opening lines. But when one gets into the last five lines the pace picks up markedly. There is no punctuation to slow the reader and there are the short i sounds and the meter to speed one along at a clippy pace. The dimeter lines, because of their departure from the iambic tetrameter that precedes it, markedly retards the pace, especially with that long o sound again in the closing line.

The sound and meter of the poem emulates the two contrasting states of fire and ice which the poet is describing. The fire moves along briskly and swiftly while the ice has the effect of slowing things down almost to a standstill.

The poem is anchored by these two contrasting images, namely fire and ice. Each of them features in its own clangingly apparent metaphor – fire is a metaphor for desire and ice a metaphor for hate. What are the characteristics of fire and how is it like desire? It is hot, it starts small and can expand rapidly, it conumes everything and everyone around it and it destroys that which it consumes and the thing which once fed it until, its fuel destroyed and carbonised, the desire vanishes. Ice, like hate, is cold, hard, paralysing and life-sapping.

But one musn’t stop at the level of the metaphor. The poem starts with two statements about possible physical destructions of our earth. One where the sun burns out and the earth freezes, and another where the sun consumes us all. But the poet then says that from what he has tasted of desire, he thinks the world will end in fire. In other words, he is saying desire will kill the world. Our insatiable desire for things which spreads like fire and destroys the things we want will leave the earth barren and carbonised. Then the author says that if the world had to perish twice, he knows enough of ice to say that that would do the trick. A thing can’t die twice and so we are alerted to the fact that the poem’s literal version doesn’t make sense. We have a symbol. And now you see what the fifth line does – it pivots the reader from the literal into the symbolic.

The symbolism relates both to what is being destroyed and how that destruction is coming about – destruction by desire in the first instance and destruction by hate in the second. The poet says he has tasted desire and has felt hate. He experienced both in a way that was destructive and world destroying. He says that for destruction, ice would “suffice” – it would be sufficient to destroy the world. It’s suggesting that the destruction of the world doesn’t take much – no nuclear bomb or imploding sun, hate is enough to do the trick. The poet is sufficiently familiar with hate to understand its destructive power.

Hate and desire are emotions which one feels for people and we can assume that the world which is destroyed twice is a relationship, killed first by desire and then killed by hate. The one state, fire, transformed into the other, ice. And that’s again why he employs the masculine rhyme, the sound-heavy short lines and the rapid pace – to emulate how quickly one emotion can transform itself into another.

Structure serving form – a well crafted poem.

Form

It is a villanelle: a French import dating back to the 19th century which is oh-so-hard to do well. I shan’t go into the details of the form as it can easily be found on the net. Suffice it to say that one is restricted to to 19 lines (five tercets and a concluding quatrain) and two rhymes (the first and third lines) which rotate around each other. The repeated lines which alternate with each other through the tercets and meet in the quatrain generally slowly acquire new meanings through the progression of the poem by changes in emphasis.

It is a form which is restrictive and, if you’ve ever tried to write a villanelle, you’ll know that it is a difficult form to master.

Progression of the poem

The progression of lost objects is significant. First are objects that seem to want to get lost, like keys and time. They are easily and carelessly misplaced. The next category are memories: names, places, plans and intentions. The next category are items with a sentimental or emotional attachment: a mother’s watch, homes. From here we enter the realm of the symbolic: the objects being lost are realms, rivers, continents – objects that clearly cannot ever have belonged to the speaker in any physical sense. Finally we reach the “you”, the loss of a person.

The progression obliquely takes us from a physical space into an emotional one. There is no emotional attachment to keys, time or the forgetting of a name. But to say goodbye to a loved home, a continent, a loved one is an emotionally charged thing.

One can only lose a thing which one once had or possessed or owned. You can’t lose that which was never yours. Understanding this reveals two things about this poem. The first relates to that watch. Bishop describes it as “my mother’s watch”, but for Bishop to have lost it it must in fact have been Bishop’s in the first place. Describing it as her mother’s watch reveals what the watch means to her. It isn’t just a watch, it is her mother’s watch. Although this isn’t obvious from the poem, it may be that the speaker’s mother has passed away and this watch is the last reminder of her. The second aspect arises from the fact that a person cannot own or possess or have continents, rivers or realms in the way that you can a watch, house or a key. It is something else that must be lost as far as these items are concerned. One idea you will encounter often in internet postings is that she is speaking about a loss of memory. I can see how one reaches this conclusion given the opening tercets which seem to deal with forgetfulness or absent-mindedness. But I don’t think that this is correct. The closing quatrain (the all important one in a villanelle) makes clear that the loss of this person means the loss of the sound of their voice and the absence of their familiar gestures. Now unless one is losing vision and hearing (perhaps advancing into old age) these things would still be present even though the memory fades. The person is, I think, physically gone. I think that the progression from the commonplace loss to the emotional loss is a deliberate progression of physical loss to achieve a quite clever thing. What Bishop is ultimately discussing the loss of, with this piece, is not a physical thing, but an abstract thing. She has lost someone whom she loves and all of what that means in terms of support, companionship, comfort, friendship and the other positive qualities love brings to our lives. She takes us to the abstract by first dealing with things that are quite concrete and walks us slowly to items of greater abstractness: greater emotional content and greater symbolic content.

The choice of form

So having unpacked the progression in the poem, let’s consider why Bishop chose to use the vilanelle – a form that is notoriously difficult. Why use a form with a repetitive motif if you want to achieve is a progression – a movement in a particular direction?

The key, I think, lies in the title. Bishop describes losing as an “art”. Practice, in other words, makes perfect. And uniting all the various kinds of losses she describes is the same single art. The title of teh poem is “One” art. The same skill which one can develop to avoid being perturbed by the loss of a key can be applied to the loss of a home, a continent and a loved one.

So then the question becomes – is she serious? Can one master the art of losing? The clue is in the form. You can master the vilanelle – Bishop did – but is very very hard to do. Losing, she says, isn’t hard to master. In other words her form that she has chosen for the poem belies her message.

There is another clue. She’s practiced losing (practiced everyday as she commands in the poem) and has progressed from small items to large, emotional and significant ones. She’s well practiced. And yet the loss of the loved one, whatever she might pretend, seems to her like a disaster. The little bracketed note to herself there indicates that she needs to force herself to admit that the loss seems like disaster.

A third clue is in the repetends themselves. The first occurence says that the art of losing isn’t hard to master. On its last appearance she says the art of losing “isn’t too hard” to master. The confidence that was present in the first statement is gone. Now she’s saying it is hard, but not too hard. The art of losing is hard to master, just like the form employed for the poem. She is pretending that the loss isn’t so bad as a coping mechanism. And that’s the function of the bracketed aside. First to be self-referential and show you that the poet is writing a poem and wants you to know that (alerting you to the unity between form and function) and secondly to show that the writing of the fact that it seems like disaster indicates a method of coping with the problem, that she needs a coping mechanism and hasn’t mastered losing, and finally it betrays how much she has to force herself to admit the truth of what she is feeling.

This is brilliant. The poem reads the way we behave towards others in the face of loss. We try and be stoic and put on a brave face and pretend that we are immune to loss whereas in truth loss hurts. But the point is, like the villanelle, the art can be mastered. Though it seems like disaster and the feeling of loss can never be purged or avoided, life goes on (another reason for those repetends perhaps?).

Should we take life advice from a poem?

I think that the progression in the poem speaks to this issue too. The speaker has been around. She has outlived and lost her mother, lived in three homes, two cities and moved continents. This is a person with an experience of displacement and loss. She knows what she’s talking about.

Why this is poetry well-done

She’s pulled off an enviably difficult form in a way that looks so seamlessly easy that the poem is easy to understand and easy to read. Even if you don’t do all the unpacking I have here, you read it and feel the sense of loss that pervades the message. The form which she chose for the work matches the theme beautifully and completes and contributes to the meaning of the piece.

I’m less concerned in this blog with what poems mean as much I am with how they work. So, thankfully, I don’t need to enter into the complex debate of why Larkin chose water from amongst all the many other things which could be used to construct religions and this post won’t be much use to the students who couldn’t be asked to try and unpack poems for themselves.

Let’s start with S1. One can’t help but notice the absurdity of the opening. Who would ever call someone in to construct a religion? And even if they were to do so, why would they call Larkin? Are religions made on contract? Are they made (“constructed”) at all? He portrays religion as a construct. In other words it isn’t a delusion, or a crutch, or a blind following of tradition. Someone, somewhere, actively decides to make up a religion and calls someone else in to go about the task. The idea is preposterous (at least to the devout). Other than perhaps in the lunatic cult fringe, history tells us that religions don’t come about in this way. No-one gets called in to construct religions.

Notice also that S1 is very much about “I”. You can’t miss it, dominating as it does the opening of two lines in a three line strophe. This is about what the poet would do. He’s not interested in hearing about your ideas or debating the matter with you – he is talking and you are listening. But not quite. The preposterousness of the situation has almost slapped you in the face and it is clear to the reader that we’re in a fantasy world. The clue I think is in the last line. He could easily say “I would use water” in that line but he doesn’t. He switches from “would” to “should”.

Two reasons, I think. Firstly an “I should use” construction implies a “but you might do something else” and, in fact, when I first read this I found myself wondering what I would do if I were constructing a religion. So I don’t think this is solely an “I” poem. Secondly, listen to the sounds in S1. Lines one and two have the clicky hard “c” sounds of “construct” and “called”. There is no discernible metre to the lines and, then, in line three he drops into sibilant soft s’s and a lovely iambic trimeter
I should make use of /water

Verb forms
Look also at the verb forms which Larkin employs. There are really two sets of verbs. The one set are the verbs which the speaker uses when imagining the possibility of constructing a religion and the second set is the set of verbs which occur within the context of the imagined religion.

The first set are all subjunctive: “If I were called in…”, “I wouldmake use…”, “going to church would entail…”, “my liturgy would employ…” etc. Compare this to the second set of verbs: fording, sousing, drench (although used as a noun) and congregate. There is nothing equivocal or contingent about what would be required, if Larkin was called in to construct the religion, that is.

Note also how the verbs in the second set, though describing what should be ordinary or common-place action, are cloaked with religious meaning. The drench is doubly modified to become furious and devout. The fording is not just to a dry bank, but to dry and different clothes. The congregation is an endless one.

Note also how the second set of verbs are set apart from the first set and made strong and powerful and noticeable by the use of onomatopoeia. Souse and “furious devout drench” sound like the things they are. In fact this effect is so powerful that it is these few verbs that dominate the poem, rather than the few sparse nouns.

In fact, I think the absence of things from this poem is significant. The speaker is absent. There is no description of God and no description of the kind of water. The only nouns which are used (clothes, religion, church, litany) are all non-descript and generic. He wants the focus to be on the action of the poem, as is the case in many religions where the emphasis is on the sacramental and the ritual.

Outward looking symbolism

The use of water must be intended to draw on all the religious connotations which water has acquired through its role in baptism and as a nourishing and cleansing liquid. Larkin employs a symbol which, unlike the symbols we considered in Frost and Yeats, contains no identifying clues within the text as to the meaning of the symbol. Instead Larkin relies on the reader looking outwards from the text in order to discover the meaning of the symbol. Sounds like religion again, doesn’t it?

Structure

Larkin does another subtle and devious thing with his structure which you may not have noticed at first. The structure is three tercets followed by a quatrain to close. I think the additional line does two things. Firstly, by lengthening the verse it emphasises the endlessness suggested in the closing quatrain (an effect which is more noticeable if you read the poem aloud, especially because of the sibilant s’s which accumulate in that closing and the metrication). Secondly, I think it is intended to suggest the transformative change which is brought about after the sousing, drenching, fording and raising. Even the poem comes out changed at the end.

So Larkin has created a poem which is similar to a religious experience. It is focused on the “I” and what “I” would do, it has to look outward for meaning, notwithstanding that it was self-created, the emphasis is on the ritual and sacramental and, as you read it, you experience the effect of transformation. He has, in fact, constructed a religious experience for you.

clever little poem that.

There are many aspects to the poem, but I want to deal only with the symbolism for the moment. The poem’s narrative level is obvious: It’s autumn and the author observes 59 swans on a lake. We understand that the writer has watched these swans for 19 years. We read about how he first heard and counted them, and how they flew up in great honking circles on his first count. He is concerned that one day he will wake and the birds may be gone.

It’s a lovely poem and one can enjoy it without taking it any further than the literal – but then you’d be missing out.

Let’s approach the symbol in the same way we did in Frost, by looking for the writer’s clues that tell us we are looking for a meaning which is not just literal. Firstly, we learn that at some point after first counting these swans the speaker’s heart has become sore. That’s not something which should happen were the speaker only looking at swans. Then we learn that when he first heard and saw the swans something changed in his life and he walked with a “lighter tread” but that now “all’s changed”. Something in his life has happened apart from a literal sighting and counting of swans. He describes the swans as being “unwearied”, they paddle “lover by lover” in the water. He says that their hears have not grown cold, they can still feel passion and conquest. He anthropomorphically projects onto the swans human characteristics and feelings. We learn that one day the swans will leave.

The author is mourning that the passion and conquest and companionship of love is gone from his life. But why are these things gone? If you return to the beginning of the poem you will note that it is autumn and twilight. The season and the day is nearing an end. The paths are dry. What the water reflects is stillness. The lake, on the other hand, is brimming and about to overflow.

He has been through nineteen autumns in this place and autumn is something he describes as beautiful. The swans first came at twilight. And I think therein lies Yeats’s point. He is getting old and things are coming to an end for him but, even in twilight, the magnificent birds come into his life and lighten his tread. Joy can come to the old but he knows it is transient – one day it will be gone. And that is the curse of age. His heart is weary and struggles to feel passion and conquest as it once did. Even when something new and exciting enters his life, perhaps love, it “drifts on the still water”. It is mysterious and beautiful but without the passion and conquest of young vigour. Such delights are for other men, sitting alongside other lakes.

Two symbols: the swans – youthful passion and vigour; autumn – the beauty, mystery and stillness of advancing age. What a lovely poem.

Almost everyone, I think, understands symbolism to mean that the thing they’re reading about is a  symbol for something else.  And that’s true – but only partially so.  Firstly, symbols make literal sense.  They work in the context of the narrative in which they are used even without standing for anything else.  In other words, because a symbol makes literal sense – you might read a piece which employs symbolism and not even appreciate that any symbols were there.

Symbols do not operate on the basis of finding meaning through similarity – which is the way in which similes or metaphors work.  Similes and metaphors rely for their success on comparing one thing to another and allowing the reader to understand or picture more by seeing similarities between different things.  And if a symbol doesn’t rely on similarity, it means that the meaning behind the symbol might not (and probably won’t) be as readily apparent as a metaphor or simile.  This also helps one to miss the presence of symbols in the text.  Metaphors and similes, by virtue of being non-literal, grab your attention and encourage the reader to seek out the meaning of the device by considering similarities.  You won’t spot the symbol until and unless you understand what figurative or “other” meaning, the literal might have.

I’m sounding confusing – aren’t I?  Well let’s take a simple well-known symbol and work from there.  Picture a white dove with a green twig clasped in its beak.  Literally, this is a white dove with a green twig clasped in its beak – nothing particularly strange or unusual.  But this concrete, specific thing (the white dove with twig) also represents an abstract notion: namely peace.  Peace means many different things to many different people and that’s one of the virtues of symbols.  My single literal device can be used to conjure up a class or category of qualities.  It is a way for a writer to concisely and compactly communicate large ideas or concepts with an economy of words.

Now this is where some people sort of get lost – they think that a poem, because it contains a symbol, can mean anything and the symbol can represent anything.  Not so.  Because a poem may mean many different things to many different people does not mean that it can mean everything, or absolutely anything at all.  Let’s go back to our peace dove.  Peace means different things to different people.  For some it is an absence of war, or a life without the threat or fear of physical harm or violence, for some it is a religious or psychological way of being, for others it is being in nature or wiht one’s family.  The list can go on.  What is important to appreciate is that peace has a specific meaning to the person seeing the symbol.  What it means to them, specific though their personal meaning is, may differ from what it means for someone else.  But, the symbol does not represent only one of those meanings – it represents the whole class of meanings simultaneously.

So let’s take a look at a symbol in action in Frost’s famous poem The Road not Taken. I think almost everyone recognises that this is a symbolic poem and it is so taken for granted that it is symbolic that I doubt many casual readers have taken the trouble to unpack why this is so and how the symbol is identified.

The poem makes sense literally and one can read it as a story of sadness at having been forced to take one forest path rather than another while out on a walk. Were one to stop there, however, one would be missing Frost’s point.

Frost’s poem consists of four stanzas of five lines each. In line 1 he reaches two roads. In lines 2 and 3 he is sorry he can’t cut himself in two so as to walk both. In lines 4 and 5 he looks down the one path and in 6 & 7 takes the other path. Lines 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 are all spent on talking about what the path was like. Lines 13 to 15 are a lamentation for the path not taken. The last five lines are an expression of how the author will feel in the future for having chosen the path he did.

If space in a short poem is a measure of importance (and it is), then there must be something significant about how Frost feels about the choice and also about what the paths were like. That what the path’s looked like could be important is perhaps surprising at first if you haven’t appreciated the presence of a symbol or what the symbol is – especially given that the descriptions of the paths are rather unremarkable. But that’s just Frost’s point – the roads are both unremarkable. There’s nothing particularly special about either one. They’re pretty much equal to each other with no distinguishing feature to help in choosing which of them to take and, worse, the speaker clearly likes both paths and wishes he could take both of them.

That sounds like a situation one encounters occasionally in life and so one begins to see the symbol – but does that make it symbolic? How can one be sure that a comparison to real life choices is not just accidental, that one is not reading into the poem more meaning than the writer intended (a poetry student’s common complaint)? We know it means something more because Frost alerts us to look for more. If this were a literal wood with a literal fork why be so regretful about having to make an election? You simply return and walk the other path. But Frost doubts that he can come back to do so. And the last stanza suggests that the choice made is going to have a lasting impact extending late into his life. How could that be true of a literal footpath? Frost wants you to appreciate that this isn’t a literal wood. In fact it can’t be a literal wood given the irreversibility of the choice. And once you’ve seen that and read the poem again you’ll see how he flags the irreversibility of what’s coming right up front in the poem.

So that’s how we know that we are not plastering onto “The Road not Taken” some layer of meaning that was never intended. Frost wanted the fork in the road to be a symbol and gave the reader subtle but unambiguous cues to indicate what he was up to.

And what’s also clear is that the poem is not a symbol representing every choice we have in life. It’s a subset of choices. It’s a symbol of those mutually exclusive choices where one choice is much the same as another, but only one course of action can be adopted, not both. Different readers will have had different types of such choices in their lives that they will relate to thus creating different meanings for different readers – but it remains that the poem means something specific and defined.

My reason for turning to it now was prompted by a discussion I saw on Yahoo Answers where someone had asked what the meaning of sonnet 18 was. The best answer was apparently: “though her beauty may fade … her beauty will be seen and remembered”.

Umm, no. Do people have such a short attention span these days that they can’t make it to the last two lines of a 14 line poem? It is in fact about the immortality of Sonnet 18 so, unless you’re in love with Shakespeare, could people please stop reading this at weddings now.

Sonnet form

Form is the easiest element of this poem to analyse because almost everyone these days (as Yahoo Answers does prove) at least understands the Shakespearean sonnet form.

Fourteen lines divided into three four-line stanzas (called quatrains) and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is usually abab cdcd efef gg. Every sonnet has a volta (or turning point) which in the Shakespearean form occurs usually at the beginning of the third quatrain. Sonnet 18 has all of these characteristics but what the Yahoo Answers readers appear to have forgotten is that fourteen lines does not a sonnet make. The point of the sonnet is the epiphany, the revelation, the VOLTA.

To understand this, and the effect of the volta in sonnet 18 (and, consequently, what the poem is really about) let’s go quatrain by quatrain. Quatrain 1 asks the question everyone remembers – Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day. The poet’s answer is, simply, no. “Thee”, whoever thee may be, is nicer than a summer’s day. Quatrain 2 then describes what a summer’s day is like and why it isn’t such a great thing to be compared to one. And now the all important quatrain 3. Shakespeare so much doesn’t want you to miss this volta that he starts the line with a “but”: It describes “thee” and says that the thing being described (1) has an eternal summer (2) which is always fair and which (3) never needs fear death and in fact (4) increases and grows over time. The closing couplet tells you what is being described – Shakespeare’s very own sonnet that you are reading. As long as there is mankind on the earth and we have eyes to read with we will be able to read the sonnet and so it is the sonnet that will live eternally and the sonnet that gives life to the person described in it (who may be a man, by the way).

But is there any more to this narcissistic romp than perfect deployment of form? Of course. It is written, as if most of Shakespeare’s poems and plays, in iambic pentameter – five feet consisting of alternating unstressed and stressed elements (bold indicates stresses and the “/” divides the feet):

Shall I/ compare/ thee to /a sum/mer’s day?
Thou art /more love/ly and /more temp/erate:
Rough winds/ do shake/ the dar/ling buds/ of May,
And sum/mer’s lease/ hath all/ too short/ a date:

Unstressed followed by stressed. Except in line three where we have two stresses lying next to each other in “rough winds”. This is known as a spondee and serves to functions, firstly it breaks the clip-cloppy rhythm that constant and uninterrupted iambic pentameter would produce but, secondly, and more importantly for our purposes, it adds to meaning. See if you can spot where other spondees occur. There is one on “too hot” and a third and final one on “Death brag.” When describing summer’s drawbacks Shakespeare will say that it is too short, its complexion dims or it declines. He only uses three nouns which are negative – winds, heat and Death and all occur in spondees. It is the spondee which is emphasised and sticks out when you read the piece aloud and so what he is emphasising is not summer’s good qualities – but the bad ones, the rough wind, too hot and Death bragging.

Shakespeare also does some clever things with language. He describes summer as having taken out a lease, and a short-term lease at that. Think of all which a lease means – you can never get too settled or comfortable, you can’t paint the walls and put in a picture window, and at the end you pack up all your things and leave without a trace. Sounds like the human condition, doesn’t it? Shakespeare extends the personfiication of the seasons and the world in the next line when he describes the sun as the “eye of heaven”. This is something which is fixed and permanent, always looking down across all the seasons and all of time. Sometimes the sun dims summer’s gold complexion with its heat. That which is permanent and eternal, in other words, sears with its heat and dims the temporary things of the world around it. Then Shakespeare says how he is going to make this person immortal and the reader is wondering how, after the effort he has expended in setting up the transience of things. The “reveal” in the final couplet is made all the greater when you realise that the “eye” here refers back to the sun. His sonnet will live for as long as the sun will shine/see.

Let’s look at something else – the choice of form. Shakespeare chose sonnets in part because they were fashionable then and in part because he was good at them (as he shows off here). But the readers on Yahoo Answers immediately jumped to the conclusion that this was a love poem because we typically associate sonnets with love poetry. That is what the form was traditionallu used for. So Shakespeare is in a way being subversive here. He starts off his sonnet in a way that makes it look like it’s going to be a love sonnet and yet it isn’t. He is using the form to praise both his talent and the form itself. The poem is about love, then, but not about love of a beloved. It is the sonnet form that causes the person described in the sonnet to be immortal and to be remembered. It’s no coincidence that rhyme is used in song-writing – rhyme makes things easier to remember, as does metre and Shakespeare in choosing this form also deliberately opts for a style that is more likely to live on in the memory after reading.

The opening line plays into this conceit too. The central theme of poetry is comparing one thing to another to reveal surprising, pleasing or previously unseen commonalities. Shakespeare steps back from his poem like an editor and asks his reader if he should make this comparison in a rhetorical opening question. He is telling us he can do it (as he goes on to do), but is asking whether he should (his answer is no). It almost smacks of showing-off, as if he wants us to put up some absurd impossible comparison challenge for him to try and meet: compare your lover to a used tea-bag or some such. And so, even though one doesn’t appreciate it until the end, he makes the very act of writing poetry an issue right in the first line.
With this new lens, if you re-read the poem you will see that he can make his poem more lovely, or more temperate, or he can use it to shake. You can see the eternal lines to time, the growth as the poem is caught up in popular imagination, reproduced in books and passed from generation on to generation.

But let me muddy things up a little now. I said that summer was being personified. Why personify the summer, and death for that matter, if it is a person to whom Shakespeare seeks to give immortality in this sonnet? Well, isn’t summer eternal in its own way? Doesn’t it return season after season? Won’t it be there for as long as the sun remains in the sky? Is Shakespeare not writing about the summer too in making his comparison? And writing about death? And if the poem achieves immortality do they not too?

Shakespeare can employ such things as seasons and weather in his poems and give to them what attributes he will and make of them what he will. He can “lease” them for his purposes as summer leases the weather. He can make summer both simultaneously too hot and too cold, he can possess fairness like one would own property. He is saying that poetry creates a world, creates eternity. The man is a genius.