Case study in Poetry

Poetrylaureates puts here in application some of the concepts and principles we have seen in crafting great poetry compositions.

Introduction

In poetry, as in creative writing, the ways of writing poetry defy enumeration, but here are just a few, with common faults and strategies to overcome them.

We start with a pastiche. This might be a typical offering in a small magazine. 

In a Country Churchyard

Effaced by the wind
Stones stand waiting
For the human touch.

My caring fingers
Trace the names of those
Who walked here once,
Long ago.

What can we say? The poem is quiet and unpretentious, expressing what everyone feels in such surroundings. Poetrylaureates suggests that you start with quiet and unpretentious poetry compositions.

Certainly, and that's the trouble. Everyone has felt this, and everyone has said so. There's nothing very distinctive in this contribution, and put as prose ¡ª try it ¡ª the piece would not merit inclusion in a local newspaper.

What's to be done? Umpteen things:

• Visualize the scene in its sensory fullness ¡ª the season, weather, surroundings, the hum of insect life, the smell of earth, etc.

Under the skylarks, the hard sunlight, and the frequent bluster
Of the wind in its shimmy through the laid out rows,
I kneel down, clear the litter, slit the cellophane wrapper,
Prop up the flowers, and discard them, one by one...

• Develop the theme through the sensory details, making them the actors:

I was glad of the frank ordinariness of the earth beneath,
Though the grass was unruly, and in the laid path
I noticed it pushing itself, lush and insistent;
As much as expectantly on those summer evenings...

• Recast the form. See what conventional metre and rhyme will do:

Again you have found me at a year's decease,
With the blue air singing and the green grass spreading;
Stooping to read, under the familiar heading,
Words which are final yet give no peace.

• Start with some striking phrase and develop its connotations. Tone down the rhythm so it that supports the meditation rather than sweeps the reader heedlessly on .

Epiphanies of the evening, and a slight
Thinning in the wind, which empties its hand
Over the headstones, mowed plots, the flowers
Dead as the rest are, and heaped about...

• Construct a Postmodernist collage of two-dimensional snapshots.

So much for that, I said. A single life, just
As it was. On the way home I bought a sandwich,
Watched my fellow passengers settle the kids,
Shopping and thoughts into the local bus.

• Introduce a personal element; tell a story.

I can't remember. We didn't come much ¡ª
Just kids then, you know, hanging about.
Even when Dad died and I did my bit
Again at the gravestone she was still a blank...

Are these improvements? Not yet. We shall develop these beginnings in following sections, but remember that the point of these exercises is to:

• Introduce material that cannot be accommodated by the merely safe and conventional.

• Recast the poem in forms where more demanding technical requirements apply. To work at all, the new poem will have to be very much better.  

Traditional

In the previous section we redrafted a poem along traditional lines:

Again I have come at the year's decease,
With the blue air singing and the green grass spreading,
Bending to read under the familiar heading
Words, which are final, yet give no peace.

A lot is wrong with this. Decease suggests winter, only we have the blue air singing and the green grass spreading . Headstone or inscription is probably what is meant by heading . The rhyme scheme of abba will create self-enclosed stanzas, suitable for lyrics perhaps but not a prolonged meditation. The rhythm, augmented by the feminine rhymes, is much too 'loud' and insistent. The core meaning ¡ª how can nature be so indifferent to human feelings? ¡ª is not sufficiently brought out. We try again:

Lie deep and be peaceful in this shadowed spot
All you who were militant under barracked stones,
Who spoke much, did much, who reached out and got
A small box, of cardboard, for your sheared bones.

There is nothing but a fragrance, as though warm air breathed
Of summers incandescent over heavy loads
Piled up in junkyards, as though factories seethed
Vast and arterial by wind-smoothed roads.

We've got the poem into the twentieth century, just about, but not beyond the nineteen-thirties if the Audenesque imagery of the second stanza is left portentously undeveloped. Where's the connection (if the country churchyard has now become a military cemetery) between burial and the industrial world to which the conscripts would otherwise have returned? Soldiers are not brought back in boxes of cardboard, however neat the b alliteration of that line. And why fragrance? Military cemeteries are places of immense sadness, but fragrance is not what springs to mind at the wastage of young lives.

Before rewriting, consider shadowed . If simple description is intended, the better word is shaded . But shadowed ¡ª with its connotations of impending events, of depth and the afterlife ¡ª contrasts vividly with militancy and the barracked stones. Dwell a moment on this last conceit. It's the nature of traditional verse to turn up intriguing possibilities, and barracked stones suggests that it is the stones themselves that are barracking, i.e. shouting and jeering. But more importantly, it also suggests that death came because living men were turned to automatons, were drilled, confined and regimented as we see them now in their mass graves. Should we develop this? And if so, recall that soldiers are returned from the battlefield in body-bags, and such bags contain dead bodies rather than bones. What can we do to avoid the associations of the immemorial rhyme bones/stones ? If we change the third and fourth lines to something like Who laughed much, lived much, reached out and got / A zipped bag, and sealed, for their scored limbs , we're left with rhyming possibilities of hymns/trims/rims/brims/ swims/whims/bedims ¡ª none of which will take barracked . For the present, we make the rhythm more trochaic, correct some errors, and continue:

Lie deep and be peaceful in this shadowed spot
You the once militant under barracked stones,
Who spoke much, did much, who reached out and got
Cut words in marble for unmade bones.

Nothing you can speak of has a clamour now.
The great wars are done with. Our occasional lives
Drift and resettle. We do not question how
Legacy can be the passing of what survives.

There is nothing but a fragrance, though the warm air breathes
Of summers incandescent over heavy loads;
Piled up as junkyards, the long factory seethes
Vacantly by arterial, wind-scudded roads.


Where now? First make some corrections. Cut words in marble for unmade bones is too neat, too pat, suggesting to the reader that the alliteration is leading the sense. And what exactly is meant by: We do not question how / Legacy can be the passing of what survives ? 

Let's work on the first stanza by removing some of the glibness, and then muting the rhythm.

Lie deep in the shadow of this sure place,
You that were militant, and under barracked stone
Speak now in silence and unshamed grace
With short words chiselled into the marmoreal bone.

Note first how the stanza is built. The first line is end-stopped, but the sense carries on to the end of the fourth line. The rhythm is varied accordingly, and an iambic meter only vaguely sensed. Lie deep in the shadow of this sure place is a pentameter if the last three words are stressed. With short words chiselled into the marmoreal bone is practically a hexameter, with a pauses after words , chiselled and marmoreal . Alliteration in m, b and sh ties the lines together.

In poetry, as in creative writing, the imagery is an elaborate conceit. Bones and marbles crosses are fused in a vision of whiteness attacked by conventional phrases. Marmoreal means marble-like, but evokes immemorial, which adds a darker connotation. Convention is further questioned by the paradox of silence speaking, and the unsubtle irony of sure and unshamed. Very sure is their resting place, and nothing they can do will detract from the social statement. Death was perhaps even preordained. Shadow is linked by alliteration and stress to sure , and implies more than the old commonplace of death and taxes being the only certainties. Barracked implies confinement and parade-ground discipline. Casualties are what soldiers are trained to inflict and to suffer. The tone is dignified, not questioning, but still angry. The paths of glory lead but to the grave , as a better poem put it.

Before moving on, is anything worth improving? One howler is unashamed grace . It's effeminate, and unnecessary with averted face such an obvious alternative. Then there's the statement of the fourth line, which goes nowhere, ending literally with the words being chiselled into the bone. Unless we want to develop a bone-carving theme ¡ª which is macabre or has Icelandic connections ¡ª we should return to the earlier theme of shadows and vain things. The rewritten stanza

Lie deep in the shadow of this sure place,
You that were militant, and under barracked stone
Retreat into silence and averted face
In the short words that fade into marmoreal bone.

now has two layers variously represented - surface and depth, present and past, loud parade grounds and silence, expectations and the horrors of war, dreams of youth and the enfolding experience of man ¡ª which provides a theme to justify and develop in the next stanza:

Nothing you can tell us has a clamour now.
The great wars are done with. Our occasional lives
Withdraw and resettle. The mute question 'how?'
Is at peace with such bodies, and yet survives

A Modernist poem would probably have left the third stanza as it was, with its striking imagery unintroduced and unexplained. A traditional poem needs surface clarity, however:

In the absences, fragrances, in the things that breathe
Beyond summers that flame around the airless roads,
In the wrecks, new barriers, the tire-marks that leave
The routes we scud past with our pressing loads .

That allows us to expand the ideas of the previous third stanza into a separate fourth stanza:

The factories you'd have worked at rust into air;
Women have their albums but have made other ties.
The past is but a season of some held otherwhere ¡ª
Crying, still crying, out of these bare lies.

A few points. Poetry is a means to thought, not of clothing preexisting thoughts in appropriate language. Notice how the imagery is shifted through the lines, simplified and dispensed with once the point is made. And how readily the polysyllabic metre will drift into the jog-trot of a ballad measure unless restrained by sense and syntax. And then there is the declamation in the last line. Where does that go?

Poems need to viewed periodically with fresh eyes. Returning to our piece after a decent interval we rewrite the phrases that don't immediately work:

Lie deep in the shadow of this still place,
You that were militant, and under barracked stone
Retreat into silence and averted face
In the short words that fade into marmoreal bone.

Nothing you can tell us has its clamour now.
Great wars are done with. Our occasional lives
Drift and resettle. The mute question 'how?'
Is at peace with the bodies, and yet survives

In absences, fragrances: things that breathe
Beyond summers that flame on airless roads,
In the wrecks, new barriers, the tire-marks that leave
The routes we scud past with our pressing loads.

The factories you'd have worked at rust into air;
Women keep their albums but have made new wives.
The past is but a season of some vast otherwhere:
Crying, still crying, from these crushed lives.

Then we ask about the overwhelming insubstantiality. The poem is continually retreating into silence, absence, the air itself. We don't have to believe all that Poststructuralists tell us to know that texts can write themselves, and in the course of its creation our own poem has moved far from evoking the emotions usual in a military cemetery: the destruction of youth and its hopes, the futility of war. As it stands we seem to be making some comment on the unreality of life, that the greater part is unseen (an oriental poets might put it). We can round the poem off on this note by simply changing the word crushed to closed:

Crying, still crying, from these closed lives.

Nothing very ambitious has been attempted, but the meanings and their overtones reverberate to create an autonomy that is neither hermetic nor vacuous. Some balance has been achieved, and the reflections are not trite.

But suppose we feel more than a desolating sadness. We are angry, and reject any philosophical musing. One way of opening out the poem is to change crushed to culled , and develop its bitter implications:

Crying, still crying, from these culled lives.

The world must move dreamily. In the selfsame sun
We rose to manhood, and our heart's thonged knots
Held to your purpose; we have nothing done,
To be levelled and scattered into these small plots.

Far more than you, famed patriots, who'd make
Of a party's preferment a sovereign pride ¡ª
Feckless appeasements in the shift and fake
We shall go elsewhere whom the weltering tide

Set down in waves of impregnable force.
We ask how you worked it since you would not go,
But laid out for others a protracted course
That drowns us like lemmings in this undertow...

And so on. No one supposes that the addition is acceptable ¡ª it's much too safe still, muddled and oratorical ¡ª but the approach should be clear. Traditional poems, written properly, draw their protean natures from words imperfectly found. That is one difference between verse and poetry. No line or phrase in poetry really achieves what we hope for, but in pushing words to the brink of the unsayable, we create things that had not quite existed before. And the things are not mere words. Modernist poems, and the fruit of New Criticism approaches generally, accept truth as something not necessarily existing outside a particular arrangement of words. Traditional poems insist on a wider reference: we have to say, as cogently as we can, what we indeed mean.

Now the rhythm. Though the poem we've written seems to be in iambic pentameters, it certainly doesn't sound that way ¡ª a singing more than a speaking voice, as a little scansion shows. Syntax is not supported by the rhythm, and meaning is almost overwhelmed. What started as a lyric has shifted to social protest, and old rhythm is inappropriate. One answer would be to cut ornament and polysyllables:

Lie deep in shadow. In this still place
I hope you are militant. Under barracked stone
You retreat to silence, averted face:
To short words that fade in marmoreal bone

Now the emotional charge is stronger. Try something more drastic:

No one wants to know. Although we grew
Up like you, breathed the same air, kept
To the same promises, all we got
For our sacrifice were these marble crosses.

No intrusive rhythm here, but no poetry either. A Postmodernist might make something of these shapeless lumps, but here we are writing traditional verse, and to the traditional masters we look for guidance. Donne showed early Modernists how poetry can be made from closely textured thought, but we shall study his notorious "wrenching of accent". Donne aimed at a striking freshness with such lines as:

For I am every dead thing
In whom love wrought new Alchemy. 

I taught my silks their rustling to forbear,
Even my opprest shoes dumb and silent were.

No verse is entirely regular, but this juxtaposition of silence and sound creates a new (and very pleasing) urgency. An almost physical representation of the thought is thrust into the opening pauses. This is not speech ¡ª the underlying iambic metre is clearly sensed ¡ª but a facsimile of speech created by great metrical skill. If we 1. slow the lines into a falling rhythm, and 2. break the flow with change of accent and pauses, we get:

I wish you militant in this still plot,
Past any comfort, where barracked stone
Is vaulted on nothing, and you are not
Wistful for words on marmoreal bone.

What is the solace in such preachments now?
The great wars are done with. Our vague lives
Drift and resettle. The fraught question 'how?'
Is not for these bodies; it survives

In absences elsewhere, things that breathe
On the far side of summer, on unfenced roads,
In the wrecks, barriers, tire-marks that leave
The routes we drive past with heavy loads.

The long fields and factories return to air;
Memories to old maids or busy wives.
The world is but passing: we do not share
What is retrieved out of unformed lives.

"Spare us this moment: we were much like you,
Grew fast in the sunlight. The wealth of day
Returned us our friends, and to high hopes too,
Until all in a gunshot was thrown away

"For reasons we had noted: the vested stake
In setting us plumb on old Europe 's side:
Continued appeasements, the shift and fake.
Yet we who shipped out on a downward tide 

"To spill, half at night, on shell-strewn coasts,
Battalions at risk where you did not go,
Heard on the wavelengths 'the inviolable hosts',
But only rough lemmings, in this undertow...

The rhythm will still need work, but that lies in the future, when the poem develops a more biting tone. Here we conclude with three commonplaces. 1. Rhythm is an inherent part of the content ¡ª on what is said, how the originating impulse is even generated. It helps to start off with something appropriate. 2. In any redrafting there are gains and losses. The poem is now tighter, but also less evocative, and therefore less pregnant with future developments. 3. Though redrafting never ends ¡ª poems are abandoned more than completed ¡ª the requirements of verse foreshorten the process. Poetrylaureates believes that this contributes to craft most of the poem and of poetry and creative writing as an art form.

Early Modernism

Back in the introduction we suggested recasting the traditional pastiche into something like: 
  
Epiphanies of the evening, and a slight
Thinning in the wind, which empties its hand
Over the headstones, mowed plots, the flowers
Dead as the rest are, and heaped about...

We started with a striking phrase, and aimed to develop its connotations, keep the rhythm unflurried, the emotion generalised, the language elevated in tone and diction ¡ª in short, write a piece in the High Modernist manner.

If epiphany is the manifestation of Christ to the Magi, or the manifestation of some overwhelmingly significant event, what is meant by the evening's epiphanies? A phrase to clear the scene, move thoughts to the end of life? The tempo and setting portend the impersonal and habitual ¡ª epiphanies, not an epiphany ¡ª but we cannot say more at present. We need a larger setting, and therefore conjure up the universal rites of passage:

In obdurate splendour the sun sinks over the hill:
A last brilliance glitters on the laid out rows
That are tented and bridal; as the clouds mass thickly,  
There is coronal and permanence in the sumptuous dark.

Triumphal in passing? As though in the earth
They were residual, were friendly with it, going
Home as from a holiday, elated and regal,
Large in inheritance, their birthright but not a home?

Where do these words come from? No one knows. Writers find and develop their own attitudes and obsessions ¡ª surveying the sheer variety of work produced is one of the pleasures of attending or running a workshop ¡ª but two points are worth stressing. Future stanzas are created through the lines already written. The mood suggested by the imagery, tone and rhythm act as it were as godparents to the nascent thought, eliciting and guiding whatever has been accumulated by experience or outside reading. And for most poets, secondly, the process is indirect. Approaches vary with writer and genre, but most poets talk about "something in the back of the mind", pregnant but rather vaguely apprehended, which only finds expression, if it does, when the poem is finished. Poets are not exempt from the need to check facts and sources, but stringing together such facts will not create poetry. Facts feed some larger conception, and this conception creates the poetry.

We must now pause. The lines are rather muddled. The sentiment is not Modernist, which is generally critical of convention. Ambiguities abound, but they are not very helpful: does empties its hand mean endows, expires, or throws the card in? The imagery is arbitrary, and the rhythm irregular, indeed practically a hexameter in places. Should we start correcting now?

There are no hard and fast rules. Lines too loose will not spark new thoughts, nor create something manageable when polishing is undertaken. Corrections undertaken too early, however, may close off opportunities and stifle development. For the moment we will continue with lines unchanged, and ask if the sentiments expressed will generate interesting work. The present life, the poem is suggesting, is not the focus of existence, but only an interlude. To a consumerist society that is doubtless an odd notion, but it is a Christian one, and one still to be found in country communities with long traditions. Let us say yes, therefore, and develop further the themes of rootedness and journey.

That always they had known this? The long rides to school,
The ink-stains, the torpor, even the double detentions,
Were something they returned from, their school-friends playing
As mothers were calling through the pent-up dusk.

However you may view it, it is the poppied land
Before Flanders , new highways, the Education Acts,
Beautiful at a distance and only at seasons
Which came, as the wind does, as unknown guests.

Again we have allusions to darkness, the wind and the past: none of them explicable yet.

Let's tidy a little. We remove some of the ambiguities, introduce an unobtrusive abba pararhyme, make the imagery more relevant, and smooth out the rhythm:

Epiphanies of the evening, and a slight
Thinning in the wind, which eddies and gathers
The wrappings and dead leaves on the banks of flowers
That lie as the dead do, heaped about.

In a ragged ebullience the sun batters the far hill,
And the long fields float into the level haze:
The trees come to shadow, and the laid out rows
In the churchyard lean over in the earth's dark pull.

The warm rays sink deeper. The shadows stream
Into something familiar, almost residual:
Life was a holiday, and now frugal or regal,
Rejoicing, they troop from their one-time home.

Which had always retained that. The bare schoolroom desk,
The detentions, the ink stains, the overseeing
Were something they passed from, their schoolmates playing
As mothers were calling through the pent-up dusk.

A far land, red poppied, before the Education Acts
Brought striving and profit and wide-shining horizons.
One that was close, and enchanting, if only at seasons
Which burst on them laughing as infrequent guests.

Is this Modernist verse? Not in the slightest. Modernism was a complex movement, with very different features in its odd century of development in European and American writers. Broadly and retrospectively, four features were common ¡ª experimentation, anti-realism, intellectualism and individualism ¡ª although excellent Modernist poets can be found that only partly fulfill these requirements. Nonetheless, the stanzas above are nothing like those of the first wave of English Modernists ¡ª Yeats, Eliot and Pound ¡ª and not particularly close to those of the second wave ¡ª Tate, Crane, Lawrence , Empson, etc.

Why is that? Look at a line adroitly put together with alliteration and long vowels:

The long fields float into the level haze:

Not bad for its type, but behind the accomplishment lies the incomparably better:

The white kine glimmered, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field. (Tennyson)

This is not merely descriptive, but says something, and that something is moving.

Authors are surely allowed to borrow ¡ª indeed have to, since language is clearly inherited. But they're also expected to finish with something closer to contemporary requirements. For that reason, the site's section on poetry movements doesn't dismember verse into techniques that can be lifted down and used at will: it attempts to see the techniques in the context of answers to particular needs. Could we not analyse those needs now, and produce work more recognisably of this century?

Not very easily. The difficulties are:

1. Modernism is simply too varied. It includes the strident iconoclasm of Rimbaud and Majakovskij, the virtuoso verse performances of Val¨¦ry and Dar¨ªo, and the homely craft of Hardy and Carlos Williams.

2. We shall produce academic work, or even pastiche. What is wholly missing is the commitment to beliefs, the deep struggle with ideas, demands and perplexities that every artist makes personal. Art students are not sent out to paint the world with learnt techniques, but to find their techniques through the integration of craft skills with visual questioning. Poetry grows out of a similar interaction between observing and understanding. Each style is the product of a particular quest, and needs therefore to be modified or abandoned as that quest alters.

3. We have discarded what was most interesting in the previous draft. Baffling they may have been, but such phrases as epiphanies of the evening , the pent up dusk and tented and bridal were powerfully evocative. To leave the first two undeveloped, and cut out tented and bridal altogether, is to turn aside from what Modernism believed essential, the preeminence of the word. Whatever its later developments, Modernism was an attempt to recover words from their everyday use. That invigorating, primal quality we need to consider when we redraft our work in the light of that varied movement called Symbolism.

Let's start entirely afresh, using only the epiphanies phrase, which we change to epiphanies of the late afternoon to capture the lassitude usual with Symbolist verse. Let us also set the scene indoors, and imagine a coffin, decked with lilies and laid out in an adjoining room. In epiphanies we have one way of creating symbols (see the section on Symbolism in poetry movements). For the other we shall project the poet's inner mood, using slow, wavering rhythms and thick consonants to evoke an atmosphere closed and oppressive.

Epiphanies of the late afternoon. Under the long leaves
The white-clothed trumpets shake out their flagrant pollen.
A cloud of incense patters onto the small, closed room
The grey bones grin evilly in the churchyard plots.

Nothing is very remarkable (or good) about these lines. The imagery is overwrought, the rhythm defective, and patters and bones are saying nothing useful. But with Epiphanies serving as our rare word, we concentrate on syntactical intricacies, removing the sense links in the first two lines:

Epiphanies of the late afternoon. The quiet leaves clothe.
Refulgent, the trumpets shake out their flagrant pollen.

The third line we shall leave for the present, but recast the fourth as something like:

Beyond, in the churchyard, the small teeth pick
Into decencies of the embroidered stone.

What has happened? The lilies have taken over. More exactly, certain aspects of lilies have floated into consciousness ¡ª their lambent purity, their martial bearing, their associations with pageantry and death. Indeed, rather too much. Since our poem is not about botany, let us put more detail into the setting:

Rain and rain on the window glass, and a cold
Sky settles on the eyelids. A maid fusses in
The late silence of doily and needlepoint, which
At length unravels in the costumed bodies.
She is one with the epiphanies of the quiet day:
The unbuttoned trumpets shake out their flagrant pollen.

She hears or does not hear. The powdered head
Looks upward and beyond the unchanging day
Tented and bridal in the candlelit chamber, they
Come to her, bow to her, these embarkations
Bright with the summer through tea-strewn lawns.
Tightlipped, her smile oozes from the velvet skin:
The gloves, long worn, are shaped on the empty fingers.

Now concentrate on the first line. We have rain, the cold sky outside, and the vacant eyes of the corpse. Try a few variations:

The rain is undone into the window glass and a cold
Sky settles on the eyelids.

Rain and rain on the window glass, and a cold
August settles on the eyelids.

The second is the more interesting, but we can do better. If we condense rain, sky and corpse, we get:

A cold August rains into the eyelids.

That is very much in the high Symbolist manner: enigmatic but striking. Note the method: explanation, amplification of detail, removal of everything but a few points of telling detail. The scene has first to be clearly visualised in evocative phrases, and then those phrases reduced to the barest hints.

Now what can we say about A cold August rains into the eyelids ? Clearly it is not a first line in any conceivable stanza, nor yet the last. We need beginnings and ends. Let us merge dress and lilies to give the poem a new direction:

Beyond the laid silence of doily and needlepoint,
A cold August rains into the eyelids.
She is at one with the epiphanies of the quiet day
As the impudent dresses shake out their flagrant pollen.

What is wrong with these? They read like translation, not very good translation, of Symbolist poetry at its most cerebral. The images may be striking, and the content intriguing, but the lines lack emotion. We are presenting womanhood stifled by proprietary and unspoken disappointments, and Symbolist techniques allow us to suggest what cannot be fully voiced. But by whatever process, rational or irrational, the images have to move us, and that calls on a good deal of the poet's craft.

What's to be done? Try:

• Reading poetry by the celebrated masters of Symbolism, in their original French, German and Spanish originals and in translation.

• Reading aloud and continually rephrase the lines until something pleasing and arresting emerged.

• Searching our own poetry for some phrase or line to get us going again.

We took our line When put down / They were but cyphers of themselves , to create:

She was a cypher of herself, and seemed so still
when the following came fairly quickly:

Alive, a cipher of herself, she seemed
So still as worked within the patterned silence.
The clock ticked busily, the doilies grew
Slatternly with importance. The gaslight flared
Into effacement of the silk-hung room.

The days that prick upon the conscience, the fought
Lasciviousness of linen, the tinctured nights
Are sewn within the eyelids. A cold light clothes
The litanies of temperance, forbearance: she
Is at one with the epiphanies of her laying out.

Is she? Tented and bridal in the unlit chamber,
The satined body waits. All that it had hoped
For in the sunlight and on croquet lawns
Is flushed with lilies and their brandished anthers.
Unworked, the legs shake out their flagrant pollen.

Some improvement is apparent. The poem now:

1. Make sense. We are clearly dealing with an emptied room, a woman's foibles, and her frustrations.

2. Follows the rules of rhetoric. Lines 1-2 announce the theme. Lines 3-5 draw in the reader by setting the scene. Lines 6-10 are appeals to our good natures: understanding and tolerance. Lines 11-15 start developing the theme: was the life so commendable?

3. Preserves some the better nodal points: eyelids, epiphanies, flagrant pollen.

4. Adds pregnant phrases of its own: slatternly with importance, days that prick upon the conscience, fought licentiousness, brandished anthers.

5. Replaces the merely enigmatic by something meaningful. A laid silence of needlepoint becomes a patterned silence, not simply of the room but the woman's life. The days do not prick the conscience ¡ª which is banal ¡ª but upon the conscience, which suggests that the conscience is somehow insulated from life.

6. Develops the sense of a life held and cosseted with images from dressmaking: patterned, silk-hung, (needle) prick, linen, sewn, clothes, satined (in coffin).

7. Uses metaphor to provide depth.

8. Has a varied but consistent metre.

On the debit side, however, we have to admit the poem:

1. Is squandering the resources of Symbolism by not saying anything very new or important.

2. Employs a metre that is restrictive, perhaps over-fussy. Very much more fluid and open was the rhythm of the lines which began this poem three issues back: The epiphanies of the evening and a slight / Thinning of the wind, which empties its hand¡­

We start by loosening the rhythm:

Perhaps, then, all her very hopes had been a portioning
Of self to what was wanted. The hemline and the corseting,
The flare of silk, and the body's crimped recalcitrance
In lobes and gender and appurtenances ¡ª all
The tirades of the days gone out were entered on this small, pinched face.

Then we go to the end of the poem and sketch something like:

Always there was visiting, and sunlight, though on autumn days
When the wind tore at the last few leaves, and the lifted heart
Yearned and turned over the fecklessness of things
Not done in time, aright, attempted not at all, there came
A cry from the world labouring, piteous and not to be suppressed.

As they stand, these lines are hopelessly banal and rambling. But if we now introduce a long, dropping rhythm, and redraft the last stanza we get:

And afterwards, what is there but the surge
Of wind through trees, of dust in melancholy rooms,
Old autumns that feed upon regret, the numberless
And unassailable infractions of the spirit? All
That is gone, is past, irretrievably dispersed¡­

These are Old Testament rhythms of lament, a little too strident in their raw state, but perhaps serving as a bass melody onto which to rewrite the opening stanzas of the last issue.

The days that prick upon the conscience, the very
Patterning of withholding, pained gossip and
The visiting, the Sievre and the treasured silk
Embroidering the cold breasts ¡ª matters as these
Are settled, and far away from the quiet face.

What of remonstrance, the web of influence,
Lasciviousness of linen, tinctured nights?
All sewn within the eyelids. A cold rain clothes
The litanies of temperance, forbearance: she
Is at one with the appurtenances of the quiet house.

Why house ? Because we have now personified the woman through her surroundings, one way of building up the persona, as we certainly need to do. Poems are no different from novels: we have to shape and care for the characters we create. Appurtenances replaces the grandiose epiphanies for a similar reason, and to suggest that material possessions have crowded out people. Now we can loosen this rhythm with more detail:

The clock ticks greedily. The maid has banked the fire up,
Smoothed the coverlet and by the bedside placed
A nightcap and the latest offerings by Thorndyke Vane.
She who was to read them is not far away,
Surely, though sleeping, boxed in the next room¡­

And so on. But what of Symbolist approaches? Most of the foregoing is simple narrative, and evokes very little of extra consciousness. We must return to the instructions above: visualise and condense. The first two stanzas, moreover, cover the same ground, and for them we can use the writer's most useful weapon: the blue pencil. For the rest, with the rhythm finally in our head, we gather up the previous phrases and set out something more kindly and understanding:

The days that prick upon the conscience, smoothed
Patterns of withholding, the tinctured nights -
All sewn within the eyelids. A cold rain clothes
The litanies of temperance, forbearance: she
Is at one with the appurtenances of the quiet house.

The maid has banked the fire up. Still it flares
On walls and further, to long days beyond,
To lawns and meets and ballrooms, events as white
In recollection as these arum lilies.
Untouched, the anthers shed their golden pollen.

To her, though, sleeping, beyond the surge of wind,
High trees, the drift through melancholy rooms,
Of voices tangled in regret, there comes
A sound of expectation, going home at hols
To teas and outings, and all her sisters' chatter.

Expressionism

Before starting afresh, we might draw some lessons from the Symbolist poem we completed in the previous section. That approach might be called 'by way of discrete phrases'. We used free association to conjure up images relevant to our theme, and these images were then whittled down to a few telling details. Everyday links were further removed until we were left with condensed but compelling phrases. The more interesting or beautiful of these phrases were finally picked out and set in lines of some common rhythm and/or syllable count.

That is a very common way of writing poetry in the twentieth-century. It avoids the trivial, and causes us to continually question what is said or could be said. Very beautiful work can be turned out, which must appeal to readers in the same way as it does to its author ¡ª if only because we

are not getting some feeling off our chests or riding a particular hobbyhorse. The objectivity guarantees some quality.

But the emotional distancing can be overdone. Poems are deeply-pondered things, which we write and rewrite until they become meaningful to us. Unless we have wrestled with all our powers and experiences, the lines will not be memorable to us. And what we as authors cannot remember will not haunt the imaginations of readers. No doubt a poem can be worked on until it starts to take fire, but poems that spring from the heart may carry with them their own potency and shaping power. Content is crucial, and the content has to be overwhelming important to the writer. Fail here, and what eventuates is hack work, journalism, the hired pen.

What else could we do? Start quietly, putting the whole draft on paper in a style not so different from thoughtful prose. Back in the introduction we began a poem with:

I was glad of the frank ordinariness of the earth beneath,
Though the grass was unruly, and in the laid path
I noticed it pushing itself, lush and insistent;
As much as expectantly on those summer evenings...

Let's use these loose rhythms and suggested details to sketch developments in an ex-colonial country, to comment on the old inequalities and the still unequal opportunities:

Perhaps it was the unwholesomeness of the soil beneath
The fat grass, or the rancorous trees, or ache
Of hard-turned earth, the spade-marks still uncouth, that made this
The dead-lands, the many-lands, the pungencies without voice.

The cicada is cancerous in the dry bones, and sometimes
What seems detritus is but a seed-pod that in the late sun
Is luminous, almost cavernous with white, as they were,
Squatting, smiling at evening, tottering into as it went on

From wasteland to farmland, to the continual lifting
Of the land by the great contraptions, the belts rattling
And the air pinched with the smell of diesel and sweat
Of small people running as the oil through the small furrows.

But now there is no succulence here but a dry twister
Of grief that trundles across the scandalous greens that
Are virtuously watered. Each day the chauffeured race
Come with their polished knuckles and laughter, and under

The bright parasols the day is cut into a thousand colours
Of banter, and the sleek limb lifts through the snakeskin and
Instep away from the hemp fields, the unfulsome ones, and I don't
Know if the trees in their darkness could hold such grief.

This is not strictly prose, but not poetry either. The line endings are arbitrary, though the lines do seem to have their own shape and purpose. Join the lines up, moreover, and their power remains much the same: we are not dealing with chopped-up prose.

The sense is a little obscure, but the metre seems useful. How does it scan?

Perh¨¢ps it w¨¢s the unwh¨®lesomeness ¨®f the s¨®il ben¨¦ath
The f¨¢t gr¨¢ss, ¨®r the r¨¢ncorous tr¨¦es, or ¨¢che
Of h¨¢rd-turned ¨¦arth, the sp¨¢de-marks st¨ªll unc¨®uth, that m¨¢de this
The d¨¦ad-l¨¢nds, the m¨¢ny-l¨¢nds, the p¨²ngencies without v¨®ice.

Accentual verse with approximately 6 stresses to the line. We say 'approximately' because there are marked differences in the quality of the stresses:
The f¨¤t gr¨¢ss, ¨°r the r¨¢ncorous tr¨¨es, or ¨¢che

And doubt as to whether lines 2 and 4 are not closer to 5 stress lines:
The fat gr¨¢ss, ¨®r the r¨¢ncorous tr¨¦es, or ¨¢che
The d¨¦ad-lands, the m¨¢ny-l¨¢nds, the p¨²ngencies without v¨®ice.

But main trouble is that the analysis does not correspond to our experience in reading the lines, which comes over in rhythmical waves:

Perhaps it was the unwholesomeness of the soil beneath
The fat grass | or the rancorous trees | or ache
Of hard-turned earth | ¡ª the spade-marks still uncouth ¡ª | that made this
The dead-lands | the many lands | the pungencies without voice||

The elements of classical rhetoric are very prominent, and the stanza could indeed be seen as three-phrase line | ¡ª aside ¡ª | three-phrase line. The terminology is not important, but what really has to be asked is:

1. Is this not rather too grand an opening? It is certainly verging on oratory.

2. Should an opening anyway be so symmetric in rhythmic phrasing? The classical authors would not have thought so, and even to our ears the movement does not lead into the next stanza. It is a roll of drums: an announcement and not an introduction.

There are no absolute rules. Studies of rhythmical phrasing by Cureton and others show how pervasive and complex is the feature in English poetry of all types, so that main complaint may be the crude nature of the oratory. The structure of the first three lines may well be acceptable ¡ª note how the swell is damped down with the repeated s and th sounds, which seems also to emphasize the unpleasantness of the setting ¡ª but the last line needs changing.

What is it saying, exactly? That the dead have no voice ¡ª which they manifestly should have, given the enormity of their suffering. Since we have already personified the surroundings, let us go one step further and suggest that the country itself is pregnant with the tragedy. The stanza then runs:

Perhaps it was the unwholesomeness of the soil beneath
The fat grass, or the rancorous trees, or ache
Of hard-turned earth ¡ª the spade-marks still uncouth ¡ª that made these
The lands as though pockmarked with the unspoken dead.

Which is grander than ever. What can we do to bring it closer to a speaking tone? Introduce a second voice that argues itself inadequate to the task:

What shall I say to you in these unsettled places,
Who have no licence to preach, nor yet by words
Undo what was done by my forebears that lean
Even now, over, working their spare, hard plots.

Now we can introduce the next verse with some modifications:

The cicada is murderous in the dry bones, and sometimes
What seems detritus is but a seed-pod that in the late sun
Is luminous, almost refulgent with white, as they were,
Squatting, smiling at evening, tottering into as it went on

Notice what is being done. From the staid, somewhat portentous opening, the stanzas pick up urgency, the rhythm pushing forward and the syntax rather disjointedly falling into place. Notice also that both landlord and tenant farmers are part of the same exploitative process: we are trying to understand, not to retrospectively assign blame.

But we haven't yet produced anything of merit. Consider the first stanza. It builds up impressively enough, but then collapses with unspoken. That the unrepresented should have a voice is all that the stanza is saying: no more indeed than the uncelebrated leader writer has to turn out every day, a reworking of commonplace opinions. But if poetry is going to be read, and not retreat further into a coterie activity, it must say things that are eminently worth saying, and things that can only be effectively said in poetry. Yet how do we say something memorable and penetrating about world slavery, social disadvantage and economic exploitation? Write honestly. We cannot carry the burdens of the world on our shoulders, but we are required to understand ¡ª if exploitation is the subject of our poem ¡ª how those burdens are rooted in human nature, which is part of us and so open to introspection.

We rearrange the line as though the very ground shared a common disease. Both exploiter and exploited were party to a criminal system, but lacked the courage to act on their consciences or reasoning. With that in mind, we acknowledge that the second stanza is hopelessly flaccid, and begin the rewriting as:

Perhaps it was the unwholesomeness of the soil beneath
The fat grass, or the rancorous trees, or ache
Of hard-turned earth ¡ª the spade-marks still uncouth ¡ª that made this
The lands as though septic with the unmourned dead.

What can I say to you of such stillborn places,
Where the blood only hardens into a reptilian skin?
Of a land as we are, without memory, unregenerate,
Binding for a season till the injustices break

Into flatulence, miasmas, a searing haze
More acrid than the burning or the thin spoor of huts
Catching the sunlight with a faded but not forlorn air,
Acquiescing, yes, but not troubling that much.

Is the cicada associated with the dry bones? Sometimes
What seems as detritus is but a seed-pod that in the sun
Is luminous, deliquescent with white, as they were,
Squatting, lining the roads as the Benz drove through.

Their croplands are farmlands, as though they were lifted
To a rushed abundance by the big contraptions, belts
Rattling, air swimming, the smell of diesel and sweat, and ever
The small people running like oil through the long-greased furrows.

But now there is no succulence here but a dry twister
Of grief that trundles across the scandalous greens that
Are sedulously watered. Each day the chauffeured race
Come with their polished knuckles and laughter, and under

The bright parasols the day is cut into a thousand colours
Of banter, and the sleek limb lifts through the snakeskin and
Instep away from the hemp fields, the unfulsome ones, and I don't
Know if the trees in their darkness could hold such grief.

So what has happened? We jotted down phrases, worked them into a third stanza, and then threw that stanza away. Why? Because the poem was going off in a new direction. But it hasn't entirely been a waste of time. Much attenuated, the phrases reappear in later stanzas. In short, the phrases have acted as catalysts, effecting change if not much changed themselves.

All very well, but the piece is over-literary, and so not very acceptable now. Let's try a more idiomatic language.

Expressionism was a search for inner truths that employed overt literary devices to transmit emotions and emotionally charged messages. We start with the first line of the poem so far:

Perhaps it was the unwholesomeness of the soil beneath

This would normally be followed by: that made me think or do something¡­ It is an explanation for what we are about to learn, only that explanation is never forthcoming. The next four stanzas buttonhole the reader, and the sixth starts with But now , as though explanations were done with. These journalistic devices may hook a reader's interest, but they are not Expressionist. The powerful description of the poem is not directed into emotionally charged inner truths. So once again we we must start over by brooding on what is being implied, the physicality of the earth. 

This is my father's land. His and the unhusked generations
in what I work with here. The greased furrows¡­

Now if we knock out the second land , we have something much more interesting ¡ª not the inheritance, but the responsibilities that are handed down the generations. Rewrite continuing the theme:

This is my father's and all the long-creased
Generations that I work in with these
Hands much calloused, as though the earth
Erupted in suppurations of the skin.

Notice two things. We have worked in attitudes and words from the previous draft, which act as catalysts again. We have brought the landscape physically into the farmer's body, which will provide Expressionist opportunities. Let's continue with:


Continuance is in the wireworm and the fat grub,
Deep here in the ground though they push up fences.
Sometimes the trees reach spindly into the sunlight,
To parades and arrases but I take them back,


Now the Expressionist devices. We draft various possibilities for lines 3 and 4 concentrating on the rhythm and the overt (unpleasant) sensuousness. Only the main stresses are shown:

1. S¨®metimes the tr¨¦es r¨¦ach sp¨ªndly into the s¨²nlight,
To par¨¢des and ¨¢rrases b¨²t I h¨¢ck them d¨®wn

2. S¨®metimes the tr¨¦es r¨¦ach into tr¨¢ceries of s¨²nlight,
Cr¨¦vices or ¨¢rrases, t¨ªll I h¨¢ck them d¨®wn.

3. In mi¨¢smas, p¨¢rades, ¨¢rrases, the tr¨¦es
R¨¦ach sp¨ªndly into s¨²nlight t¨ªll I h¨¢ck them d¨®wn.

Many such variations can be written, but if we read back carefully just these three, we find:

a. Version 3 does not sit well with the two lines preceding. It is an opener, with a strident, lifting rhythm.
b. but is better than till because the b and the t pick up the d, ck sounds in the line, and suggests energy and determination.
c. The traceries of version 2 is defective in sound and association. Traceries is too delicate a word for the tough indifference of trees.
d. Trees may form parades but can't reach into them (version 1). We therefore substitute miasmas for parades to get:

S¨®metimes the tr¨¦es r¨¦ach sp¨ªndly into the s¨²nlight,
To miasmas, ¨¢rrases b¨²t I h¨¢ck them b¨¢ck.

We have not personalized nature, nor made it strange and inspiring, which would be Romanticism, but emphasized the unpleasant physicality of things. Moreover, because this is Expressionism, we have conjured a world that is pitiless and perhaps diseased. The lines employ suppurate, spindly, fat grub , and there is heavy assonance: miasmas , arrases, hack, back, etc. The rhythm, moreover, is harsh and broken, though not uncontrolled. Each line has five strong accents and a varying number of unstressed syllables.

How can we carry these amendments further? Emphasize f, th and I sounds in the opening lines:

Continuance is in the wireworm and the fat grub.
Which are thick in the ground and push up fences.

And if we now replace sunlight by air, we suggest that the effort is something of a delusion:

Continuance is in the wireworm and the fat grub.
Which are thick in the ground and flood the air.
Sometimes the trees reach spindly into the sunlight,
To miasmas, arrases, but I hack them back.

Now the poem is turning into something quite different, but we have still to check the sense. We therefore redraft and extend as:

I really think the prettiness was inside me
and not something put out by the tabloids then.
What of the heart's chromatograph? That too dried,
though the afterbirth hung there in the sky,

watery and horrible. Never went. The fetid blood
Stained through the underwear I went in for then.
Yet nobody noticed. I changed my partners
Regularly. The cuttings room was shut. . .

4. Make a Postmodernist collage of thoughts, observations, trains of association:

The body is smoking and the bad teeth go everywhere.
Whatever you want, but you pay. And that's now, please.
I have been sent to bed with a rub-a-dub man.
Shaking their heads the nursemaids run all over the house.

Radiant then vicious: it's all the same.
Daddy wins you, Daddy loves you. Where is that man now?
He is digging up my garden, he is climbing up my tree.
Historically, the incidence of incest has been under-reported.

Are these any good? Hardly, but we have made forays into everyday reportage that will make us think, which is the beginning of proper writing.