36.Poetry. A Matter.

Poetry lets a man speak in his own voice, but it stresses feeling as much as thought in its attempt to recreate the whole complex of events and reaction and this response to living. This recreation of immediate experience is what Archibald Mcleash meant when he wrote that a poem should not mean but be. He stresses the immediacy of the poet’s experiences. Prose deals with ideas & poetry may deal with the concrete observation. We speak about poetry as transformation of concrete observation into emotional experience.

Poetry enables the reader to react to the poet’s personal attitude to life. It enables the poet to deal with concrete facts, he doesn’t have to invent, coz his obsrvations supply facts, which create associations that are caused by the poet’s personal experience.

Poetry is more ancient than literary prose. Poetry was said & sang at religious festivals. The full impact of the poem can be appreciated only when it’s read with the ear as well as with the eye. it places special demands on the reader’s attention & perception.

Poetry is highly compressed. Every mark of punctuation, you can’t skip a word, links in thought, transitions, even elements in the grammatical structure may be entirely omitted from the poem. Prose depends upon the syntax, poetry distorts it. A poet chooses most rigid forms to achieve the highest degree of compression. They rely upon sound patterns, line length, meter or rhythm, rhyme & other effects.

Poets take liberties with the syntax, inversions, they omit words & phrases ( in contrast to prose-writers). To compensate for these distortions they use punctuation & pauses. Analyzing poetry you should be guided by the pauses, not syntax. Punctuation is an invaluable guide to syntax in poetry. The inversion gives the poet’s verse a kind of solemnity, elevation & dignity. It’s a new incarnation of meaning. Grammatical omissions, suspended constructions & inversions all can pose problems. Untangling them is the first step in the understanding of poetry.

Imagery. It’s the poet’s business to transform abstract ideas, as well as observations & events, into concrete experience, which can be apprehended as concrete experience through all our senses. Symbolism makes poetry poetry. An image evokes a picture or the response of 1 of the other senses. It’s a most straightforward description. It can be purely visual, or a mixture btw some sound perception & visual perception.

Sometimes we don’t think of imagery, but of devices like similie, metaphor, allusion. 1st of all think of the image, understand its structure & mechanisms that underlie the construction of the image. Similies & metaphors are based upon comparisson. Personification (often used) gives personality & concreteness to such abstract notions as justice, wisdom…

In poetry images often come in compact groups. The author wants to enable the reader to discover the meaning of this/that image. And sometimes images come so close one to another that they almost merge shading meaning on each other.

Poetry yet makes another demand, coz an important part of its total quality lies in its rhythm, sound. Poetic organization of content: syllabic, syllabo-tonic, free verse, rhyme, blank verse. The patterns are always recurrent, repetative. In the syllabic verse we rely on ‘foot’. There are 6 patterns: Dissylables (iambus- e.g.return; trochee- e.g.respite; spondee- e.g.sunbeam) & Trisyllables (dactyl- e.g.merrily; amphibrach- e.g. receiving; anapest- e.g.colonnade).

As to free verse, rhythm does not follow a set pattern from phrase to phrase, from line to line.

Inspite of the implications in the regular metrical patterns a good reader makes a compromise btw the strict pattern of the metre & the natural phrasing & natural stress of the lines: ‘To Be or Not to Be. that Is the Question’.

Some poems contain a more or less regular pause in the middle of the line. Some lines are of different length. This is determined by the number of feet & units of the metrical pattern.

The metre of the line is usually described as iambic pentameter or iambic tetramater( usually in ballads), etc.: dimetre(2 feet), trimetre(3), tetrameter(4), pentameter(5),.. Translator should know the metres, it’s necessary to see the variation of metres, that the poet uses to make the line sound not monotonous. When you translate from E. into R. it’s difficult to observe the pattern, coz R. words are much longer.

Besides metre another prime quality of poetic form & sound and the most frequent device of sound is rhyme. R.- is a patterned reappearance of like sounds at the end of lines & sometimes in the middle of lines- inner rhymes. The number of rhyming patterns is almost infinite:

1.Rhymed couplet: pairs of rhymes running aa, bb, cc, etc.

2.Quatrain: 4-line rhyme pattern running abba

3.Quatrain: rhymes run abab

4.Ballad form: 4-line stanza running xaya

5.Tenza: a tercet (3-line stanza) running aba, cb, cdc, etc.

6.Canzone: aabcbcded

In addition to rhyme poetry uses all the devices of language to add melodious characteristics& sometimes to reinforce the meaning. The most important effective one is onomatopoeia:’the buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard’, ‘Ramped and roared the lions, with horrid laughing jaws’

Alliteration: ‘If I were what the words are, And love were like the tune’

Some allit. have onomatopoeic qualities:

‘Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad,

In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies,

Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemes’

Similarly related to allit. is assonance, the repetition of vowel within 1 or several lines:

‘John Adams lies here, of the parish of Southwell,

A Carrier who carried his can to his mouth well’

the rich interplay of vowel and consonant sounds is the most beautiful:

‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun…’ ( sounds s,m,n,l)