Carl Sandburg: Grass

A look now at Sandburg’s poem Grass, which I think should be a model example for any person wishing to explore the manner in which repetition should be used in poetry.

Consider first the repetition of the words “pile” and “shovel” and the way in which they are repeated. Normally, especially in a short poem like this one, one would want to avoid repetition in order to ensure that the poem stays interesting. Sandburg chooses to depart from that rule of thumb.

“Pile” and “Shovel” occur in lines 1 and 2 respectively, so when they recur later they’re already familiar. And the repetition of “pile” at Lines 4 and 5 is within the same phrase so that surrounding words are the same and the word occurs visually in exactly the same place in each line. I think that what Sandburg was going for with this was to convey a sense of the magnitude of death in war – not only in terms of the numbers who died in each war, but also how war reoccurs time and again. Pile also stands out more prominently than shovel. So even though we know that the cycle of piling and shovelling is going to go on, the piles seem to build up faster than we can shovel.

I think the repetition has another effect: Sandburg has written in free verse with no metrical pattern to hold the line together or give it shape. There’s also no rhyme scheme. And yet, just looking at the poem on the page, you can see that there is some of frame which keeps it all together. That frame is the repeated pile/shovel phrases and their placement in their line.

Sandburg’s theme is that grass is ultimately more powerful than battles and it is revealed in a rather astonishing way. Look at what he does: The poem is entitled “Grass” so right up front the reader thinks they are about to settle in to a poem about Grass (which they are) only to encounter the opening words “Pile the bodies high”. In the third line you find that the speaker is the grass. The grass wants to be allowed to work. Only in the closing four lines does Sandburg uncover his theme -given time no one will recognise this as a battleground anymore. The grass hides everything away, covers all the attrocities. When the grass gets the closing strophe all to itself Sandburg no longer needs the “I cover all”. The simple statement “I am the grass, Let me work” says enough. And note how each of those get their own line? A short punchy line, the first an “I am” statement almost biblical in its construction and brevity.

The statements about the grass are also worth contrasting with those repeated pile and shovel words which describe the effects of the battle. For the effects of the battle to be really apparent specific work needs to be done – piling and shovelling. The grass doesn’t need a verb to be repeated to make its point. The grass’s work is to “cover”, a verb which occurs once in the third line and which, thanks to the sentence structure, is not at all prominent in the way that shovel and pile have been made prominent. At the end the grass simply says “Let me work” – it doesn’t need to define or describe its work. Both you and the grass know what needs to be done.

Sandburg has employed diction and rhythm that contrasts the theme of this piece. The lines are long and flowing when he describes war and death and, when he gets to grass, which should be a pastoral, gentle thing, he makes the lines clippy and short. And the diction expresses society’s detachment from war, our need to separate ourselves from it by hiding it away (either bodies in graves or by well chosen euphemism). He studiously avoids mentioning death, never gets personal (keeps the dead as “bodies” and no more) and the verbs shovel and pile is the way one would describe logs, earth or compost. Something not to linger over, but simply to get out of the way and then get on with life.

Thanks to the work of the grass, the human inability and unwillingness to confront the horror of way, it only takes a short passage of time before the people have forgotten what it was like and have to ask the conductor, “What place is this?” The war is already forgotten and gone from the mind. And the grass knows that no matter how much time passes it will always have work to do. Wars come round again.

It’s amazing how much Sandburg has managed to convey with such a short poem, especially when one considers the level of repetition which actually reduces the absolute number of lines to about 6 lines.

There are other lessons to be learnt from this. By his choice of battles, Gettysberg, Ypres, Verdun etc Sandburg refers to battles that involved great carnage. Battles with a death toll or casualty rate so high that it is unthinkable that we should speak of them as dispassionately as he does. But the use of the names is far more effective in conveying this point than having to spell it out in detail.

He can get away with the dispassionate tone and make it “fit” the poem without seeming forced by adopting the unusual view point of having the grass as the observer and the first person speaker. Not only does he cloak the grass with personality but he simultaneously creates a narrator who is present throughout time and who is accordingly in a position to observe the folly of man through history.

Other than the merest hint of a rhyme across Waterloo / Verdun, this poem is devoid of rhyme. Why? Rhyme closes lines, links lines together, gives the work a sense of completion and wholeness which is precisely what Sandburg doesn’t want here. He wants the work to have a continuing, incomplete, work in progress feel. The poem is written in the present tense: “I am the grass, let me work”.

Wallace Stevens: The Emperor of Ice-cream

What’s it all about?

A poem about emperors, ice cream and death? Now I’m very glad that I’m blogging about How poems work and not “What poems mean”. Stevens’ jar in Tennessee has me confused enough, and now I’ve encountered this one. Is the reference to an emperor merely an allusion to the fable of the Emperor’s new clothes and this poem merely pretentious trash? Well, I try to start any analysis of what makes a poem work from the presumption that it is a good poem. Only if, after wrestling with it, I still cannot unearth enough elements that would allow me to appreciate its craftsmanship am I then prepared to write it off as poor writing.

The closing rhyming couplet
I think that one of the key elements to this poem is that emperor of ice-cream line which closes each stanza. For the rest of it, it makes a loose, albeit slightly absurd and Dali-esque, narrative. One can follow what he’s taking about – a woman is dead and there are all sorts of people bustling about and there is handle-less dresser with a short sheet in it. The emperor and the ice-cream are narratively unrelated, however. And yet, they are there. Closing each stanza and rhymed as a couplet so that one cannot but notice it. It must, therefore, mean something to the poem.

Diction
One of the things that struck me on reading, and which I think is a clue, is the “let” construction which Stevens adopt. It reminded me of Auden’s “Stop all the clocks” where he says “Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead…” and “Let the traffic policeman wear black cotton gloves”. The point is that they don’t. The policemen don’t wear black cotton gloves but Auden wants them to. Auden is willing the world to be a particular way, if he could he would command them to don gloves and bring out planes. Another famous “let” construction is God’s “Let there be light” commands in Genesis. And in fact the odd diction and phrasing of this piece is perhaps most reminiscent of an offstage circus ringmaster commanding the ceremonies. It is like the speaker is directing or managing the action.

This is significant if one considers the line “Let be be finale of seem”. To be is to exist, to be present. “Seem” is something that isn’t. It appears to be one thing whereas in reality it is quite another. A finale is that grand last act which ends a fantastic show and sends everybody home humming the final tune. In other words, if Be is the finale of Seem, then Seem/Illusion/Imagined reality has been a great show but now for the finale comes Reality / What Is and that is even greater.

Now consider the dead woman who makes her entrance in S2. She once embroidered fantails onto her sheet, but her dresser is cheap and is missing three drawer handles and the sheet is too short. Her feet which protrude from the sheet show how cold she is, and dumb. She is picked out in a beam of bright light. It is death in all its starkness showing things in its cold light for what they truly are: cold, dumb, horny. Death as a finale shows what is. And in the life which is going on around the corpse, we have this offstage ringmaster showily directing things – creating appearances, making things seem what they are not. Or is he? He says that the wenches (note, not girls, or women, but wenches) should wear what they normally wear.

So now we at least have some idea about what the poem is about: death and its role in exposing things for what they really are, and one’s reactions to and relationship with death. Like Frost’s Design, the subject matter is rather unpleasant and somewhat difficult and, like Frost, Stevens manages his difficult subject matter by stylizing it intensely so that it barely bears any resemblance to reality. It’s meaning has to be puzzled out by close reading and so, as we have seen, the meaning only reveals itself slowly, gradually, making the subject matter more palatable than if one were to confront it all in one go. The effect is enhanced by the poem’s obsession with mundane and commonplace detail.

Structure

Stevens also marks his poem off into two stanzas – one a room bustling with life and people, the other the death room – stark, cold, bare of activity. The structure of the piece mirrors the dichotomy of his subject matter. Just as the poem itself is a symbol for the choice of reality or appearance, so the poem contains similar symbols – the sheet which is too small to cover the body – even art cannot shroud death.

There’s something else about that division too – the first S reads almost like nonsense verse. It’s cheery, silly and frivolous. It’s only when you enter the second S that the poem takes a serious turn. And in that second S there absent things: a bureau which is missing drawer handles, a sheet which is too short, used to wear lingerie. Things are defined in the negative, by absence of things. The silliness of that first S is reinforced by the iambic pentameter which closes the last line of the S with a spondee to break the pace and jump to the next S.

Rupert Brooke: The Great Lover

I’ve been wanting to write about Rupert Brooke’s The Great Lover for some time now, primarily because of his use of images.

Brooke applies to every single one of the sense in his poem celebrating love. When he lists the things he has loved he appeals to our sight by using colours (white plate and cups ringed with blue lines, blue-massing clouds, black earthern mould, brown horse chestnuts), scenes (wet roofs beneath the lamp light, hair that is shining and free, footprints in the dew, peeled sticks) and action (dulling edge of foam that browns and dwindles as the wave goes home). He also appeals to sound (the dimpling laugh of water, singing voices, a deep-panting train). He gives us things to feel (feathery fairy dust, cool kindliness of sheets, the rough male kiss of blankets, grainy wood, cold grave iron, a hot benison of water) and smell (dead ferns, mould, old clothes, hair’s fragrance, smoke). Finally he even appeals to taste (many-tasting food, bread crust).

By employing every sense he involves the whole body which reinforces his central thesis: his enthusiasm and passion for love. He sees love as an activity which should engross the whole of life and, therefore, the whole of self.

But there are other interesting things going on in Brooke’s images too. Notice that the things he is describing are themselves in action – they are not static but are doing things: the clouds are massing, the flowers swaying, moths drink, sheets smooth away trouble. The objects of his images are in movement – they are alive. Also notice how Brooke relies on what we already know about his images to achieve much of his effect. For example, he simply says “the strong crust of friendly bread”. He doesn’t attempt to compare that crust to anything. Instead, he relies on the way most people would feel about bread crusts (thoughts of home, comfort, cooking, safety etc) and uses those associations to call the bread “friendly” and the crust “strong”. He does the same with cool kindliness of sheets, good smell of old clothes, comfortable smell of fingers etc He takes an abstract modifier that describes a human state and uses it in conjunction with our associations about the images he is describing to create a mood. How we feel about these things is how he feels about love.

William Blake: The Tyger

Enough with Frost. Time for something famous and something heavily over-analysed, William Blake’s The Tyger .

Structure

I think that one of the first things one notices about Tyger is its regular rhyme and metre. Not only is it very noticeable on first reading, but is also very un-Blake. At its simplest it is six quatrains of rhyming couplets, aabb, throughout. The metre is primarily trochaic tetrameter throughout (with some substitutions). It sounds like a nursery rhyme.

Meaning

Interpretations of Blake’s work abound and my function here is not to engage in interpretative analysis and say “This is what the poem means.” The purpose of the blog is to explore how the poem works. But, as I’ve said before, the elements of a poem “work” by contributing towards that which the poem aims to achieve and, generally, what a poem aims to achieve is related to what a poem means.

We know it is about a tiger – the title tells us that. Once we’ve read it we know it is also about the tiger’s ferociousness and beauty and contained violence and the fire of his orange coat. It’s about the process of creating a tiger. It is about the person or being who created the tiger and how they feel about their creation. It presents us with the apparent paradox of a creator who makes both a tiger and a lamb (tigers eat lambs!) and there are hints (or maybe scepticism) about whether this part of creation can truly be labelled good.

So, actually, it isn’t about a tiger. Or at least it is, but only in so far as Frost’s Two Roads is about two literal roads. The tiger is a symbol, even if we don’t know what it is a symbol of. By describing the tiger, and we’ll return to how he describes the tiger in a moment, Blake actually tells us quite a bit about the being who he thinks created the tiger. The tiger is framed by someone “immortal”. It came from the distant deeps or the skies where our immortal must presumable reside. The creator is daring and is so self-assured in his powers that he is likened to having wings. The act of creation is artistic or skilful. The poem is just as much a commentary on the character of the character as it is a description of a tiger. And what is clear from the description of the creator is that Blake is referring to a religious creation – creation by a god and not by blind evolution.

Blake poses questions with this poem. Like Frost in Design , Blake wants the reader to think about the creation of the world and God. Like Frost he questions how it is that the God who created the lamb could also be the creator of bloodshed and terror and, like Frost, he doesn’t give an answer to the question. He suggests that it’s all part of the same creation, but he also hints that there may be two creators – one of evil and one of good. Some suggest that the stars and spears line is a reference to the fall of Lucifer and that the tiger (with his fire and burning eyes and fiercesomeness) is the devil and that God, the creator of the lamb, was also the creator of the devil (evil).

I think Blake is also saying something else. Tigers don’t really burn. Stars don’t throw down spears and water heaven with tears. Blake may be suggesting that rationality alone will never account for the world. At some point wonder, lustrous and overwhelming, gains the upper hand. We can learn all we want about the pigmentation of the tiger’s coat but still we’ll see one and say “But it looks like he’s on fire!”

All of these are plausible interpretations and the poem is capable of supporting several meanings but note that, again, it doesn’t mean anything. The range of possible meanings is limited and they are all interpretations which are similar to each other.

Apostrophe and rhetorical questions

Blake wants the reader to think. He is asking questions, hard questions, and not offering answers. He wants you to ask who or what is the tiger and who created it. He poses a series of rhetorical questions which refine each other around that single central enquiry. By definition, one does not expect to get an answer to a rhetorical question and it is for this reason also that Blake has cast the poem as an apostrophe: an address to an absent third person – you, me, the tiger or the God who created the tiger. It is for this reason that he employs the repeated questioning syntax, the anaphora, the demanding ‘what’ at the start of the lines that insists on being answered.

Blake helps the poem become a catalyst for thought by keeping it deliberately abstract. It isn’t set anywhere: the only clues to location are the forests of the night and the distant deeps or skies (clearly incompatible places). Neither is the tiger really described and Blake relies on the reader already having a picture of a tiger. It’s only because you know what a tiger looks like that he can get away with his images. He doesn’t need or want a concrete description of the tiger or of the forest which the tiger is in because the tiger doesn’t matter. It is the creator of the tiger (who is described slightly more fully than the tiger, but still in abstract terms) who matters and even then it isn’t the physical attributes of the creator which is relevant, but rather the creator’s character. (The physical attributes of the creator are reduced through synecdoche to hands, feet, shoulder etc.)

Use of form

This brings us, I think, to an idea of why Blake employed the nursery rhyme style. I think it serves two functions. The rhythmic language, the repeated syntax and phrases and words, the rhymes, the phrases which get shorter and shorter as the poem progresses all give this a chant-like, almost incantation sound to the piece when read aloud and like the wonder of the tiger, the shortening of the phrases impels the reader to a faster pace or to a crescendo.

Secondly, the questions which Blake asks go to the root and heart of faith. Like Frost in Design, the implications of what Blake is asking are serious and slightly horrifying and yet the gravity and horror of the implications of his poem are hidden by the nursery rhyme style. Like the tiger he is describing, something fearful is contained within the symmetry of the poem.

Then there are the end-stopped lines which force the reader to pause. He wants the question to penetrate, to linger, to be thought about before pushing on.

Metre and imagery

The catalectic line endings (dropping the final half foot of the line to end on a stressed syllable) are also interesting. Every end syllable is stressed which, coupled with the couplet rhymes, creates a repetitive plodding beat like the pacing of a caged tiger, like the chant or hymn of a choir.

But variations break up the metre. At times the lines are iambic tetrameter instead of trochaic until you reach S4. Here Blake has fully entered the blacksmith image first hinted at in S1 and S2. The creator is pictured as a blacksmith hammering the tiger out on an anvil before a roaring furnace. Here in S4 the metre becomes strictly trochaic so that the words bang out like a hammer rhythmically striking the anvil.

The blacksmith image rewards careful study. It is a central image which permeates the poem and holds all the other imagery together. A red-hot molten tiger wrought from fire with burning eyes and fur and metal claws and pads and teeth; a blacksmith, muscular, sweating, labouring at his craft, swinging down a mallet with brutish force and violence on the beautiful thing which he will wrought from unshaped metal. It’s connotations for the questions Blake raises are numerous. And look at how it is subtly introduced until its full development in S4. At the literal level the only connection between the blacksmith’s shop and the tiger is the orange colour of fire but the image works because Blake is, after all, not writing about tigers but about the creation of the tiger and what it means for the world.

Robert Frost: Design

I’ll admit it, I’ve become somewhat preoccupied by Frost. Everyone knows Frost’s classics like Mending Wall and Two Roads and until I encountered Mowing and Birches I had really contented myself with not knowing much more about Frost.

I believe that analysing poetry ultimately helps one to write better poetry and advice which is often given in an online poetry workshop which I participate in is to “read a thousand poems before you write another one”. To read, and not absorb what it is that makes the poem work is, in my view, not sufficient. Or at least not for me. So, hopefully, eventually this blog will have one thousand analysed poems. Of course, what is not offered in the way of guidance is how to select the thousand. I began randomly and I am continuing randomly and poems which I am currently reading are not always ones which I necessarily feel like analysing. I’ve enjoyed examining Frost, though, and so I’ll do a few more and if the result is a run of a several Frosts in an analysis of one thousand, I think that should be forgivable!

So, today, Frost’s sonnet “Design”.

I don’t think I have to do any analysis at all to support the statement that this piece is about the designer who stands behind the world and about the character/personality of that designer.

When a spider is white, fat and dimpled you know that you’ve encountered something unusual. Similarly, the heal-all is no ordinary heal-all but is a white one. And the spider on the flower is holding up a white moth. It’s a somewhat ridiculous image. A white spider on a white flower holding-up a white moth. What are the odds of that happening? Almost zero. And that is precisely the point of the image. The configuration is so unusual and the odds of it happening so low, that it must designed. Frost also keeps the image deliberately artificial – the three (the flower, the spider, the moth) are described as characters, mere actors in some play and he likens them to ingredients in a witches’ broth which is again a mythical image. But at the same time, and with the same words, he ties this extraordinary assemblage to something familiar, the kitchen (mixing, broth, ingredients, cloth).

The words in the octet are chosen to reflect the idea of conscious planning or design: “stain cloth”, “assorted characters” “mixed” (which requires a mixer), “ingredients”, “paper kite”. The sestet then turns a corner. The consequence of believing the world to be consciously designed and created is to anthropomorphise it – to impart emotions and motives to that which is designed. The heal-all becomes innocent, the spider becomes kin, the moth is being steered. And yet the moth is dead and stiff and the heal-all is an aberration (it is white). So Frost sets up a logical contradiction: an arrangement of items so bizarre that they must be designed, and yet it is an arrangement which involves death and which causes the narrator some aversion. Therefore, the argument continues, it must have been designed this way. But if it was designed this way, how is the heal-all innocent (and what an inappropriate name for it)? What does it mean about us, the spider’s kin? What would be the purpose in bringing a spider so high up a flower to catch a passing moth? A designed world doesn’t make sense to Frost and, if it is designed, the designer (as he shows us in the closing couplet) is malevolent. Perhaps, he says, in a last ditch hope to clean to the philosophy of design, design doesn’t govern in things so small. But then these things occur by chance?

Importantly, Frost does not offer a resolution to the tension he has created. His couplet does not “close” the sonnet in the way that couplets usually do, offering a resolution to the poem or an explanation. In fact it unhooks the very argument the rest of the sonnet has made.

Imagery

The image which Frost employs warrants a closer look. That the moth, the spider and the flower are all white is clearly unusual by virtue of the fact that the flower is a heal-all, which is usually blue, as Frost himself says in the poem. The heal-all, at least as far as I know, was traditionally thought to have healing properties but actually does not. So we have a flower which is thought to heal but on closer examination is shown to do nothing of the sort and which is an anomaly. The unusual colour of the heal-all is exploited by the spider who can disguise itself on the white flower. Moths, being drawn toward light, are more likely to fly toward white flowers than the blue heal-alls and, by doing so, it get itself killed.

The image is carefully crafted to show apparent design – plants with healing properties, camouflage and colours which attract moths – but the design has an unhappy end (a dead moth) and is shown to be false design (the flower does not in fact heal). The image is ironic – a dead moth on a heal-all.

Tone

What strikes me about this sonnet is the tone which Frost has adopted. The idea that the designer might be a malevolent sadistic one is a horrible, deeply troubling notion. But while Frost confronts the horror head-on one is barely aware of the experience. The octet gives an image, a detailed image and then the sestet presents argument or reflections. The overall tone, reinforced by that closing couplet, is one of reflective musing, not serious thought or debate. Frost softens the horror by employing familiar figures of speech and images (satin, kites, flowers, mixed, kindred spider) and by presenting the horror in the language of opinion and argument.

Form
Why the sonnet form? Why a Petrarch sonnet with iambic pentameter and a strict rhyme scheme which allows for only three rhymes? I presume that he has employed form and a strict rhyme scheme and metre to reinforce the idea of design and of a designer imposing their rules and plans upon the world.

Robert Frost: Birches

There is so much to say about Robert Frost’s Birches that it is hard to know where to begin. One could (and several people have, I’m sure) write an essay about what this piece means but the purpose of this blog is not so much to engage in an analysis of what poems mean as much as it is to take a little time to appreciate the elements which the poet has employed to make the poem work. But, as we’ve seen with the previous entries, poems work when the elements which are employed contribute towards the piece’s meaning. So, how a poem works cannot be divorced from what a poem means. So, as usual, I will have to devote at least a part of the post to unpacking the meaning of Birches. While I do not intend to do so comprehensively, it will take somewhat more space than usual to do it justice as Frost has packed this piece rather densely.

Let’s begin with the obvious: the speaker sees bent birch trees. He likes to think that they’re bent because boys have been swinging them. In other words, boys probably haven’t been swinging them, but he likes to think that they have. In fact the “truth”, as is stated in that almost editorial aside, is that have been bent by a far more prosaic cause: an ice storm. So why, then, does he like to attribute the cause to boys? In part it is because it makes him nostalgic, reminds him of his own youth when he used to swing on the birch branches. But that’s not all – even a casual reader should be able to appreciate that the birch tree is not merely a birch tree.

Swinging on the tree teaches the boy all there is to learn about not launching out too soon. Birch swinging carries those who swing away from life’s troubles, confusions and trials. When you’re swinging up in the air on a birch branch you’re not on earth. The poet would like to go by climbing a snow white birch toward heaven. Sounds almost spiritual, doesn’t it?

In addition to the birch tree there is also the notion of swinging- literally a back and forth motion. The theme of swinging is introduced right in that first line with “bend to left and right” and then recurs throughout the piece: the boy goes “out and in” to fetch the cows, there is “summer or winter”, the poet was a swinger of birches, but is not one now, but dreams of going back to be one, he would like to get away from earth and come back to it and begin over (is he hinting at reincarnation perhaps? “May no fate willfully misunderstand me and half grant what I wish and snatch me away not to return.”) and he wants to climb until the tree dips and sets him back down again, “that would be good both going and coming back”. Cycles and swings. Back and forth.

So what does one make of all of this? The poem opens by discussing the “Truth”. Not truth, but “Truth” with a capital T, note. (Truth is peronsified as a she who barges in on conversations.) Ice storms bend birch branches down. They load the branches with such weight that the branches drag against the ground and though they do not break, they never manage to restore themselves completely but remain arched for life. Already, at this stage, while discussing truth the poet cannot hold off letting his imagination loose. The ice is not mere ice but is glass from the shattered inner dome of heaven, the trailing leaves are not mere leaves but the hair of girls thrown over their heads to dry in the sun. What a beautiful image. He is comparing the prosaic, otherwise sad image of birches being damaged by ice to rather beautiful pictures of young girls and sun and falling glass. The imagination here is a departure from reality, from the truth.

But, and this is an important “but” for the poet, he doesn’t want to talk about “Truth”. Truth is “matter-of-fact”. It describes what really is, the way things are in reality and, as the poet has already showed us with his description of the ice-laden birches, the true picture of things holds no interest for him. He wanted to talk about something else but Truth has a way of breaking-in and interrupting.. In a bracketed aside he suggests that he cannot be “poetical” when dealing with Truth. He sets up a dichotomy between truth and poetry even having just suggested through his very poetic description of ice-laden birches that the dichotomy is a false one.

So, while the poet talks of an escape from Truth, a departure from Truth, each time the birch returns him back to the ground again and, indeed, he wants to be on earth because “earth’s the right place for love.” He wants the leaving to be temporary. Swinging on the birch branch is simultaneously an act of play and a temporary departure from reality. It is imagination. It is, according to Frost, not Truth but poetry. Imagination, poetry, must push the boundaries, must reach towards those higher limbs and climb the trunk towards heaven, always pushing upward further away from imperfect burning, weeping, earth and Truth but always ready at the top of the arc to swing back down to earth again. And neither the climb nor the descent is easy. The climb is careful and painstaking, the descent an outward fling of the body, feet kicking.

A birch is an effective vehicle for all of this symbolic swinging: while it rises high above the pathless wood of life it remains rooted in the ground and attached to the earth. No matter how high one climbs you never severe your connection to the ground.

Symbolism
So, one can see that the birch and the act of swinging are both symbols for Frost. But there is an important thing to note about symbolism: the poem makes sense at a literal level. As a plain ordinary narrative there is nothing unfinished, confusing, incomplete or strange about it. One could read and appreciate the piece without ever diving below the surface. But Frost does not want you to do that and gives several signposts to the reader that there is more than just this birch and this boy swinging: there is the exuberant, almost over-the-top language of heaven’s dome, a white birch reaching to heaven, girls hair; there is that comment about Truth and poetry; there is that clever introductory line that tells you that what you are about to read about birches is imaginary; there are the recurring cyclical/swinging themes etc.

And then, at the symbolic level, while there is a richly textured layer of interpretive meanings which Frost has packed into the poem, allowing the reader to develop their own understanding of what Frost is wanting to say, this poem buries forever that common misunderstanding which is chanted like a mantra by so many beginners to poetry: namely that the poem can mean whatever the reader wants. This is not a poem about suicide for example (it’s fun, it’s play), it’s not a poem about drugs or lawlessness or colonialism or slavery or losing one’s virginity. There is (deliberately) a limited spectrum of meanings which the symbols are capable of supporting. The literal characteristics of the symbols inform the symbolic meaning and content.

Form

Consider the first three lines:

When I /see birch/es bend /to left /and right
Across/ the line/ of straight/er dark/er trees,
I like/ to think/ some boy’s/ been swing/ing them.

Each line has five iambs. Iambic pentameter. And this pattern occurs, with all sorts of variations in places, for the entire piece. While there are occasional rhymes, which I will deal with later, there really is no rhyme scheme to speak of. It is, in other words, blank verse. But it is blank verse with purpose. Just as the birch trees bend across the lines of straighter darker trees, so Frost causes the meter to spring and vary and strain against the iambic pentameter he has imposed. It is playful. It is imagination carefully climbing as high as it can away from the Truth of iambic pentameter while always bending back down again so that the form, while bending and straining, is never broken.

Look at the lines:

He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches;
And so I dream of going back to be.

The line
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish has two spondees: “flung out[ward]” and “feet first” so that the meter mimics the act of jumping.
In the line
Up to the brim and even above the brim Frost conveys the brimming over by pushing those two bisyllabic words in after two lines of monosyllabic words.
Look also at Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. Frost could just as easily and sensibly have written “kicking his way through the air to the ground” but those long words “ground” and “down” coupled with the long verb “kicking” prolongs the motion of the jump and the length of time spent suspended in the air.

And in So was I once myself a swinger of birches;
And so I dream of going back to be. Frost puts in an extra metrical foot but, by doing so, creates a jouncy swinging cadence to these lines.

Sonics, assonance and rhyme
This piece has several instances of playful assonance and sonic appeal. Just some of the pleasurable instances for me: the clicking c’s in “cracks and crazes” followed by the sibilant s sounds of the next lines in “soon the sun’s warmth …sweep away”, there is the rhyme on load/bowed followed by the assonance of “low” in the next line, and then there is the assonance in the lines “He always kept his poise …and so I dream of going back to be.”

Some of the lines also rely on vowel sounds to produce subtle internal rhymes: down/ground; woods/afterwards etc

Tone
The tone of this piece is chatty and conversational. Frost employs the first person and addresses a “you”, as if in normal conversation, with those chatty phrases “you’d think” “But I was going to say” etc. It is a monologue and with his choice of phrases Frost makes it come across as an improvised monologue. He treats the semi-hidden development and unfolding of his theme as something which is self-evident and doesn’t need explaining forcing the listener/reader to race mentally to keep up with him.

Robert Frost: Mowing

Something I was reading today took me to Robert Frost’s poem Mowing which I haven’t read before.

Lush sound
The first thing that struck me on reading it, and which would probably occur to even the most blunt-brained reader, was the prevalence of lush, sibilant whispering s-sounds throught the piece which emulate the sound of the scythe scarfing off the grass.

Form
The piece has the 14 lines which typify a sonnet and, indeed, I have now seen it described as a “pastoral sonnet” in a few places. Although it lacks the typical sonnet rhyme scheme it follows the sonnet form: An octave and a sestet linked with a colon. The volta is marked not just by the change in subject matter but also by sound – the whispery scythe sounds dissapear. And then it closes with a two lines which, although they do not rhyme as a couplet, sit together thematically and are end-stopped with periods in contradistinction to the flowing lines of what went before.

The rhyme scheme, as I say, is not the usual sonnet form but runs ABCABDECDFEGFG – the rhymes pulling further apart from each other in the centre of the poem than at the beginning and the end.

Tone

Through the use of the first person, the inverted syntax of the opening line which creates suspense and curiousity, and lines like L4&5 Frost gives this piece a conversational tone, as if one were sitting in a room with him while he tells a story.

Much of it is also cast in the negative: “knew not well”, “there was never a sound” but that of the scythe, “it was no dream of …idle hours”, “[it was no dream of] … easy gold”. These negative statements, like the opening line, defer the revelation of what the scythe whispers to the end of the poem, impelling the reader to read on to discover the scythe’s secret.

What’s the poem about? The scythe as symbol
Stripped of everything, this poem is a monologue about a scythe. A worker is mowing, but Frost doesn’t write about the worker or the field – only the sound of the scythe. And that sound is quiet. It is a whisper. How very different from the swinging arc of the scythe which cuts mercilessly: scything is in truth fearful and forceful and violent. It destroys and cuts down life. Is not death portrayed as a hooded skeleton carrying a scythe? The scythe has long been used a symbol for time which harvests us all in death.

“Anything more than the truth would have seemed to weak…” And there lies our key to unlocking this poem. Our normal way of speaking would have been to say “Anything less than the truth.” But Frost wants nothing more than the truth. To convey more than the truth would be to dream. Truth is less than dream. And now we see the import of those negatives. Truth is a cutting away, a narrowing down, a removing of what is not relevant. Like scything, really.

Frost has loving and laboriously laid the lines of poem like rows of swale and to understand them you have to lean in close to hear the whisper of the scythe. But that meaning is elusive. It isn’t handed to you. Like the hay, the product of the rows of swale, it is left by the process of scything “to make”. So the meaning of the poem is made, like hay, through labour and is always, by definition, incomplete.

Advice from Rainer Maria Rilke

A digression from the analysis of poems

I want this site to be primarily about the analysis of poems, but today I was reading a letter by Rainer Maria Rilke over at Poetry x and his words struck me as such good advice that they bore repeating.

Extracts are here. If you want to read the full letter go to Poetry x:

1.) Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

2.) Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.

And from another letter

3.) [T]he creator … must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn’t want to rob them of their candor and innocence.

Louise Gluck: Snow

I’ve read Louise Gluck’s Snow a few times now and keep having to put it away and return to it. Life is not letting me get down to commenting and analysing as I would like to.

What is it about?

Unlike some of the others I’ve considered here, I actually understand this one without too much hard work. It’s about the strange love of a father for a daughter, a father who likes to hold his daughter where he cannot see her, exposed to the bitter winter wind and she learns to see the world like him, from his vantage point.

Gluck tosses together the most fascinating contradictions: a father carrying his daughter on his shoulders – an image of paternal affection – and then an averted gaze – someone who cannot face their confronter. This father keeps his daughter out of sight and, in doing so, teaches her to do the same with those she loves. She is staring into the same world that her face is staring into.

Sound

This piece is full of assonant vowel sounds, the repeated o’s of “going to New York”, “blow over the railroad ties”. These rounded full sounds become sparse at “I was learning”, where the daughter learns to see the world as her father does – empty.

Linebreaks
Gluck breaks the lines short so that they are clippy , preventing long flowing sentences from ever getting going. She also uses the breaks to swing the meaning of the line:

He holds me / (affection)
on his shoulders in the bitter wind

to stand like this, to hold me / (affection)
so he couldn’t see me

I remember / (sets one up for a reminisence)
staring sraight ahead

Why snow?
The poem is called Snow and it seems as if the word is intended to operate as a metaphor or a symbol for something more than just snow itself. After all, the poem is not about snow but about a father and daughter going to the circus – so why call it this unless the snow is somehow important. In S1 there is no snow, scraps of white paper are blowing over the railroad ties as they stand at the station. Only at the end of S2 is snow introduced. It is heavy snow which is not falling, but whirling around them.

What is the significance of the fact that the snow is not falling? Why take the trouble to tell us what the snow is not doing? I don’t know if I have the answer but these are my thoughts: In S1 the railroad ties can be seen, they are going to take the speaker and her father somewhere. Little scraps of paper blow over the ties, note not around them, but over the ties. These scraps are probably precursors of what is to come in S2.

In S2 it is no longer paper but snow. Still white, but not scraps – heavy. And it isn’t on the ties, it is whirling around them. Were it falling things could still be seen, but this snow that has already fallen and hidden the world and left everything white and hidden. The world is empty (this snow that she sees is described as part of the emptiness), but not because there is nothing in the world, but rather because that which is in the world is hidden by the whirling snow. She is no longer looking down from her father’s shoulders to the ground, the railroad ties, but staring straight ahead into the whirling snow.

Modification
I don’t normally post the poem, but I need to do so to illustrate the present point:

Late December: my father and I
are going to New York, to the circus.
He holds me
on his shoulders in the bitter wind:
scraps of white paper
blow over the railroad ties.

My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn’t see me.
I remember
staring straight ahead
into the world my father saw;
I was learning
to absorb its emptiness,
the heavy snow
not falling, whirling around us.

Not the collection of modifiers. See how sparse they are?

The verb choices are also interesting:
S1 – “are going to”, “holds”, “blow”
S2 – “liked”, “stand”, “hold” “see” and then
S2 – “remember”, “staring”, “learning”, “absorb”, “falling” and “whirling”
Note the change in length and form of the verbs.

Charles Simic: Hotel Insomnia

Hotel Insomnia by Charles Simic

What is this poem about?

I found it difficult to understand what Larkin and O’Hara’s pieces were about and now this one. There appears to be no narrative to speak of, just a series of images. The title would suggest that the piece is about insomnia and yet insomnia or sleeplessness do not appear to be mentioned in the poem. What the hell is Simic talking about?

To try and reach an understanding of this poem I need to think through individual words. I warn you, this could be tedious. First off, a hotel. A place where one doesn’t live, but where you stay for a while, generally on holiday. You can check in and out. The room in the hotel is described as a “hole”: a dark, dirty, featureless place and yet the narrator liked it. Note “liked”, past tense. The narrator isn’t there anymore, but is thinking back to the hotel room. However, the next few lines make it seem as if we might not be describing a hotel room at all – there is a piano in the room next door and the narrator has obviously stayed there for a very long time if he knows that the piano is played by this old man a few evenings a month.

The man who plays is described as a “crippled old man”. How does the narrator know this if the only window faces a brick wall? Perhaps the man sings and the narrator can hear his crutches or walking frame scraping on the floor. Is it significant that the piece which he plays is entitled “My Blue Heaven” when (presumably) the narrator cannot see the sky from his hole of a room? Is it significant that the lyrics for My Blue Heaven are about a light leading you to a blue heaven which, in the song, is a cozy room where the singer is with a baby and Molly and is happy?

The second stanza explains that this singing/playing was unusual. The place was mostly quiet. This would suggest people living alone. Then he introduces the spiders in heavy overcoat image. I have a mental picture of what this might mean but do not know if I am right. “Each room with its spider” suggests that the rooms are not cleaned often or thoroughly. “Spider in heavy overcoat” gives me an iimage of an old person: thin to the point of fragility, their clothes much too big for them and hanging baggy from their body, the coat thick to prevent the wearer from feeling the cold. These people also seem to be alone – they are in a revery. I am at a loss at the moment as to what the fly is which they catch with their webs of smoke and revery. Revery implies sleeplessness, even though the conditions for having a good sleep (darkness and quiet) are present.

Stanza 3 tells us that our narrator is awake at 5 am in the morning and that it must be incredibly quiet indeed if he can hear bear feet in the room upstairs. This person runs a store on the corner, posing as a gypsy fortuneteller. Two interesting things here: (1) It now sounds like the narrator actually knows his neighbours if he knows this about the women upstairs, so perhaps he knows that an oldman comes round to play the piano next door because he has seen him. (2) The gypsy isn’t a gypsy. She has a storefront. She is settled. This isn’t some hotel where people come and go, in other words, this is home. Except that the narrator isn’t there anymore. Simic tells us about her feet, about her going to pee. What we don’t hear is the sounds of the lovemaking. The third stanza also tells us about the sobbing child. This was something which only happened once.

For all its tediousness, this analysis takes me a little closer to understanding what Simic is trying to say but I’m still primarily in the dark, like his narrator. So once I again I find myself considering the context.

The narrator is awake and alert and alone.  He likes this state of sleeplessness.  We know nothing about the narrator, by the end of the piece, but quite a lot about those around him.  Perhaps sleeplessness causes our narrator to have a state of heightened empathy (he almost thinks he is the sobbing child for a moment).  I think this the sense of the poem but in a lot of ways it doesn’t make much narrative sense. 

Context

This time the context is not historical context (as was the case with Larkin) or art (O’Hara) but rather the other poems in Hotel Insomnia, Simic’s anthology in which this poem is the title piece. The themes contained in this poem: spiders, mirrors, darkness, insomnia, fortunetellers are all to be found in the other poems in Simic’s collection. In Congress of the Insomniacs the reader lies in the dark in a hotel ballroom with mirrors on every side. In Obscure Beginnings Queen Insomnia lived in a house of spiders. Silence reigned in this house and Simic was a “fly on the ceiling”.  I suspect that reading this poem in the context of the larger anthology (which I have not done) might cure a lot of my ambiguity and uncertainty regarding its meaning.

What else?

This poem is seriously short of those elements which we would normally use to classify something as poetic.  There are no rhymes, no particularly noteworthy sound effects, no form, no metrics, the language is plain, simple and direct.  But it is packed with images and metaphor.  There is that divine enjambment at the close of the third stanza, the two long flowing lines of My Blue Heaven and the smoking spiders where Simic finally breaks out of the short, clippy, breathless lines and lets the sentences run unimpeded.  It evokes a mood and creates an experience for the reader of how this narrator feels about insomnia.  It may be “poetry-lite” in a technical sense, but in my book it’s poetry.