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The Origin of a Poem [i]
Diverse impulses motivate poets to write. When Emily Dickinson said about her art, "My business is circumference," she was talking about her desire to explore experience by drawing it into a circle of her own, a world. Similarly, Wallace Stevens wanted each poem to give "a sense of the world." D. H. Lawrence thought the essence of good poetry was "stark directness." Telling or uncovering truth is the prime motive of poets like Muriel Rukeyser, who once asked, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open." William Wordsworth valued "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." When William Carlos Williams called a poem "a machine made of words," he simply meant to say that the best-formed poems function smoothly, with oiled and well-fitted parts. This is not fa r from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ideal, "The best words in the best order."
Many poets aspire to reach "the condition of music"-some aim for the heavenly music of the spheres, while others want the words to “boogie.” William Butler Yeats thought, “We make out the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but the quarrels with ourselves, poetry.” His writing emerged from the internal faultline between conflicting thoughts. Yeats's desire to understand his human condition echoes Walt Whitman, who wanted the reader to "stand by my side and look in the mirror with me." For Matthew Arnold the impulse was external, not internal. His poetry came from "actions, human actions; possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the poet."
Sometimes poets write to recreate an experience, as in this poem about a childhood moment of exhilaration and terror:
CHILD ON TOP OF A GREENHOUSE
The wind billowing out the seat of my britches,
My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty,
The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers
Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,
A few white clouds all rushing eastward, --------------------------5
A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,
And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!Theodore Roethke, 1908-1963
In seven brief lines, Roethke isolates an unforgettable moment. He keeps the precarious child on the roof present to the reader by his use of billowing, rushing, flashing, and other -ing verbs. This participle form maintains an ongoing feeling of action and excitement.
"Child on Top of a Greenhouse" reports an experience in vivid language. "A Blessing" proceeds in the same manner until the last three lines:
A BLESSING
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows ----------------------------5
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come. ------------------------------------------------10
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, -------------------15
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear ----------------20
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.James Wright, 1927-1980
What happens at the end? After a simple, sensuous description of stepping over barbed wire into the field with the Indian ponies, the poem abruptly changes. The speaker (the "I" in the poem) stops describing external action. He shifts to the inner experience of his happiness. The last two lines surprise us with their bold originality. Rapport with the natural world is a common experience, but the speaker here reacts intensely. He expresses an imaginative level of that experience, allowing us to recognize our own feelings in a new way. If he'd ended the poem at "wrist," we could not possibly have imagined the powerful idea of the spirit transforming into blossom.
A poet may write primarily out of a delight with the sounds of language:
COUNTING-OUT RHYME
Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple, ------------------5
Bark of popple.Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.Silver bark of beech, and hollow --------------10
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow.Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892-1950
Millay plays with words, rhymes, and repeating patterns of vowels and consonants. There is nothing to understand, only something to hear and imagine. Even though it has no message, the poem evokes reactions. It sounds like a chant. You probably remember the one-potato, two-potato counting-out rhymes from childhood, and how repetition can cast a spell. Perhaps Millay's words call up images of trees in different sea- sons or memories of playing in a forest. You might recall such child- hood nonsense as:
Tinky toesy timbo nosey
Hooey booey booskie
Pin pin rickey
Pom pom mickey
No me oh non phooey hoo.
Who knows where such rhymes come from, except from the basic fun of making noises with words?
The sources of poems, like their subjects, approaches, and meanings, are endless. Whatever the motivation might be, the making of all art is a fundamental and instinctive impulse. More than twenty thousand years ago, at Pech Merle in France, the earliest artists painted a group of spotted horses on the damp walls of caves. Around the realistic forms are several handprints. No one who has seen them could forget these strange reminders, like signatures, of the cave painters. These are star- tling images of the human desire to create. Did the drawings give magic control over hunting that animal? Was the horse a religious image? Were the paintings done for entertainment on long, cold nights in the cave? Were the horses so beautiful that the painter searched for just the right spot, placing the chest of the animal over a swelling in the cave wall to get the right sense of the animal's form? Perhaps none–or all–of these possible sources were in the artist's mind. As we look at the pictures, the artist mixing paints from blood and soot and ashes seems very close. We have to resist matching our hands to the black ones outlined on the wall. The natural desire to make art easily spans the epochs.
(The spotted horses of Pech Merle, France.)
Art is the real "news" source of any culture. The cave paintings are the liveliest news items from prehistory. Today, as ever, movements in art reveal more about a moment of human consciousness than newspaper headlines can. Art reveals a culture's values, pressures, breakdowns, new directions. Contemporary poems are comments on our time; poems from other times and places give us glimpses into other lives.
The Art of Reading
When an interviewer asked how old William Stafford was when he started writing poems, Stafford replied, "How old were you when you stopped?" Writing poetry, he meant, is a normal function. So is reading. This is especially important to realize because many of u~ are over- trained to read for factual information. Overly pragmatic, we look for a result, a conclusion. In addition, Americans are particularlytime-conscious. Stories in the old Saturday Evening Post used to have notations to let you know how long it would take to read each one. Presumably, you could zip through the first few paragraphs and decide whether the story was worth the allotted twelve minutes, two seconds.
Although poems may include useful information, results, and conclusions, these aren't prime reasons for reading. Poems take concentration and time. Because many people assume they cannot understand poetry, they bring to it an overly serious mindset. They fear that complex meanings must be wrung from the poem like water out of a dishrag. Actually, many poems are clear on first reading. The most importa'ilt a~pect of appreciating any poem is extensive reading-the more the bet- ter-of poems of all kinds. The best reader is the one most open to the poem on the page; this reader is likely to be an experienced one. Novelist Henry James said, "Be one on whom nothing is lost." Here are eight guidelines toward that ideal:
1. Poems are written in lines. The length of the line and where it breaks help establish the poem’s rhythm. We'll discuss this in detail later. For now, let the punctuation mark at the end of the line guide you. A comma indicates a distinct pause; a period indicates a full stop. If there is no punctuation mark where the line breaks, regard that break as a very slight pause, like a half-comma, that emphasizes the last word on the line. Lines are not necessarily units of sense. Often the sense flows on from line to line in a continuous sentence. If there's no period; keep reading; don't interrupt yout reading of the sentence just because the line stops:
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert-Percy Bysshe Shelley
New lines often start with capital letters, but this does not necessarily indicate that a new sentence is starting. Understand the lines above as: "I met a traveler from an antique land who said, 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert.' " Capitals along the left margin of a poem add a formality to the poem and give a slight emphasis to the opening words of the lines. Practice pausing for the line break but continuing the thought. Note, for example, the importance of the realize, break, and blossom at the line breaks in this excerpt from James Wright's " A Blessing":
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.Emphasis on realize signals a change in the speaker's thinking. The emphasis on break is tricky: for a suspenseful instant, we don't know what will come next. Blossom is the most important word in the poem. Coming last in the shortest line, it gets strong emphasis both visually and orally.
2. Read the poem once silently, then once aloud, listening to the sounds. With long poems, read at least a few sections aloud. Notice the action of the verbs.
3. Characterize the poem. Old wisdom claims that all poems come from courting, praying, or fighting. The traditional classification of poetry is into lyric, narrative, I dramatic. A lyric is a song-like poem (originally played on the lyre), usually told in first person; a narrative is a story poem; and a dramatic poem demonstrates a conflict, often using the third-person voice. These categories tend to blur, however: a narrative may have lyric passages, a lyric may be dramatic, a dramatic poem may tell a story. More useful for sharpfocusing a poem will be to pinpoint two or more basic qualities of its subject: Is it a poem of personal experience? A description? A revelation of a single moment? A poem of political or social com- ment? A poem of word play? A retelling of a myth? A memory? A meditation on a spiritual or religious question? A song? A sermon? An argument?
4. Is the poem effective? You gradually will build a critical vocabulary for why and how rhythm, image, and word choice help you determine effectiveness. At the outset, notice your general responses to the poem. What is your first impression? Is the poem interesting? Does each line propel your attention down the page? What personal associations does the poem evoke? A poem usually has plural meanings; some of them are entirely personal to an individual reader.
5. Who is speaking? "I"? "We"? A character, historical or invented? To whom is the poem addressed? "You"? The reader? A character, named or unnamed? A nation or group? What is the overall tone of voice of the speaker? Sincere? Ironic? Intimate? Matter of fact? Mocking? Distant? Contemplative? Frenzied? Questioning? Tone of voice shows the speaker's emotion and sense of the situation. Reading aloud will help you hear the speaker's tone.
6. Note difficult sections. Sometimes typing or copying these parts will clarify them. Look up unfamiliar words. If you miss a word in line 1 that is referred to in lines 2 and 3, you'll lose the opening. Look up allusions, those references to people, objects, or events outside the poem. A poem might mention Norse gods, brand names, or English spies; it might refer to a biblical story, a battle, an ancient tool–or another work of literature. Not every allusion is important to understand, and many are self-explanatory in the context of the poem. Arm yourself with a good dictionary (a paperback desk dictionary won't do) and a book of myths. When you see a poem titled "Leda and the Swan," you'll need to track down exactly who Leda was.
7. Don't overinterpret. Meanings don't hide behind every bush. If you paraphrase (put what the poem says into your own words), that will be a useful prose replica of the poem, a flat rendition of what the poem says without the qualities of craft that make it a poem. Poems usually suggest much more than they actually say; some are complex, with layers of meanings that repay weeks of study. However, when one student wrote that .the black and white ponies in "A Blessing" symbolized good and evil, he'd gone too far. Nothing in the poem suggests this interpretation. The ponies are themselves. They suggest also the beauty of the natural world and something of its mystery–but not good and evil.
8. Comment and ask questions in class. You're a student; if you already understand everything, then the teacher has no job to do. Sometimes everyone in class, even the teacher, must probe a line or a section of a poem. If all of you discuss your impressions and insights, the meanings often get pieced together. Writing papers and discussing them with others offer further chances to explore the poem. Some people fear that analysis takes away from enjoyment. Protracted discussions can wear everybody out, but good critical consideration is creative and rewarding. As you hear other opinions, some very different from your own, you sharpen and widen your perceptions.
[i] Frances Mayes, The Discovery of Poetry, HBJ: San Diego and New York, 1987. pp. 1-7