By Walter Donway
I'm afraid I have chosen a reckless title. I do have a definite idea, an argument. I don't intend to “cut and run,” as we say about our commitments, these days. On the other hand, I hope that I don't have to man the Alamo. I will be content if you end by considering that poetry might have a claim to the epithet “the universal art.”
Anyway, how would you rate one art form above another? Let's begin with this definition of art that Ayn Rand offers in The Romantic Manifesto: “Art is the selective recreation of reality according to the artist's metaphysical value judgements”? The goal would be to give reality to the world as one sees it:: what is important, what counts, what is ideal--or beautiful or fundamentally true. The image lives in ones soul as a certain deep and enduring emotion, an emotion that murmurs, or shouts, or cries, “Yes!” when an artist, or a person, seems to reveal that world to you. The emotion can be very different for different artists; the point is, in the first instance, not to choose among different such emotions—what Ayn Rand calls “sense of life” emotions--but to create and experience art that succeeds in speaking to those emotions, stirring them, letting you enjoy them—as though you had been transported to the homeland of your soul.
So perhaps art forms could be compared in terms of their resources, at the very most exalted level, for recreating reality in a way that involves, compels, and ultimately satisfies a particular sense of life. Of course, every legitimate art form recreates reality, but the arts do so in different forms—amazingly different forms, forms so different that we sense the universal power and appeal of the arts just by seeing the scope of innovation and invention humans have shown in discovering ways to move the emotions at the level of sense of life.
Dance apparently appeals to a part of the brain that stores memories of a repertoire of movements, and how you felt when you made those movements: leaping, flinging out the arms, twirling, falling to your knees, or backing away. An intriguing analysis of dance and the brain appeared in Cerebrum, the journal on brain science I used to edit. It is available online.
Music's appeal seems most direct of all, perhaps because it bypasses vision, which most of us experience as the chief portal of our mind; it may be the sense most closely related to concept-formation. However that is, music seems to stir up the neurons that hold our memories of certain emotions, crushing our neurons a little so they release emotion the way crushed spice releases odor. Without knowing how sounds or strings of sounds stir different centers of emotion, composers have learned to correlate specific sound stimuli will the emotions those stimuli typically evoke.
Drawing, painting, and other visual arts can to some extent bypass the conceptual faculty, making their appeal directly through the senses to the brain, without the intervening step of language. The vocabulary of the visual arts is a vocabulary of visual images, which, in the case of representational art, shows us things or combinations of things that we have seen and to which we now attach emotion.
The medium of the dramatic arts mixes the spoken word, human actions, and sometimes certain visual props. Drama is our transition into the conceptual arts, the arts that seem less direct in their effect because first we hear or see words, then we have a thought, an image, a memory, and those evoke emotions. With novels, the medium is the printed word, or at least essentially so.
The medium of the art of poetry is the speaking or singing human voice. Poetry is not at its core an art of the printed word; where it is printed, the words must be spoken aloud or heard in the theater of the mind. If they are not, then the defining characteristics of the art of poetry are not being employed. That is in contrast to the novel, where a silent reading conveys most of the power of the art form. I don't know, some of you may have read Atlas Shrugged aloud, declaiming the scenes, gesturing, but my experience was solitary and silent, and it had quite an effect.
What I would like to suggest today is that poetry makes its appeal in its own distinctive ways, but also in the ways that almost all the other arts make their appeal. What is distinctive about poetry, its unique and defining characteristic, is meter—the regular arrangement of numbers of syllables with stressed and unstressed sounds against which the poet works infinite subtle variations in rhythm. The special vocabulary of poetry is the rhythm of the spoken human voice, the alterations in the volume, pitch, and duration of sounds that create differences in stress, which can convey enormous emotion.
Again, poetry uses many other devices of language—indeed, all devices of language of every conceivable sort—and the devices of the others arts—as I will argue presently—but in essence poetry is about meter. I could say “rhythm,” here, but prose has rhythm, as does music, and the concept of meter implies rhythm: poetry is all about creating rhythm against the backdrop of meter. I will spend much of my time here talking about meter because the spoken human voice is the medium of poetry; meter is the defining characteristic. A sixteenth-century English poet, Bishop Henry King, wrote these lines after the death of his young wife. He said to his wife that he was coming to her; but it was his meter that told her so:
But hark, my pulse, like a soft drum,
Beats my approach, tells Thee I come;
And slow however my marches be,
I shall at last sit down by thee.
King wrote poems all his life, and published a book of poems, but he is remembered exclusively for the first two lines. It is not unusual for poets, hailed in their lifetimes, to be represented to posterity by one poem. It is even less unusual, though, to be represented by none.
Here is very different meter, this from a poem by Robert Browning, “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”:
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I gallop’d, Dirck gallop’d, we gallop’d all three;
“Good speed !” cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;
“Speed!” echoed the wall to us galloping through;
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we gallop’d abreast.
We will return to meter, but I want to expand on the idea that poetry commands all the resources of fiction: narrative, dialogue, character, and scene. Why that does not ring very true, today, is also part of my presentation, for later.
But now, consider that perhaps the most influential full-length narratives of all time are the "Iliad" and the "Odessey." Those would have appeared about 3,000 years ago, at a time on the Greek peninsula when, according to historians, it is not even certain that written language was used. If Homer did write down the “Iliad” about 720 B.C., and the “Odyssey” about 680 B.C., then he was giving form to poetry that had only been sung for hundreds of years. Homer defined the epic form itself, sustained for hundreds of years to come. Greek meter, by the way, sets its measure by long and short syllables, two shorts equivalent to one long; there is no use of rhyme. The great Roman epic was Virgil's "Aeneid," written in the first century B.C. in Latin Hexameters.
It has been said that today we don't read much Roman imaginative literature. The Romans exercised the most successful imperial rule in history, for 1,000 years or so. Their obsession was public service and the virtues and characteristics that subserved it; Latin is said to have been the best administrative language ever developed.
The Romans admired the Greeks, and felt inferior to them when it came to culture and the arts; they sent their children to study in Athens. But they stuck to their destiny, ruling the world, mostly at peace, and did so for a whole millenium. Above all, they wanted to defend and advance the Roman way of life, and the "Aeneid" was their great expression of that. Its hero, like the hero of the "Odessey," goes to the underworld in his travels. But there, Aeneas meets the shade of his father, and is given a lecture to take home on how Rome should be organized and administered.
The Aeneid exercised enormous influence on European literature, but still, not as sweeping as the other great Roman epic poem, The Metamorphosis, by Ovid, written toward the end of the classical age of Roman poetry. Of all the Roman epics, it is least concerned with celebrating the Roman public ideal. Ovid set out to tell great stories, and, since The Metamorphosis took all of history as its subject—the gods, the gods and man, Greek and Roman history—the poem is a storehouse of classical myths, stories, characters, and allusions. This epic has been said to have shaped French, English, and Italian literature, starting in the later Middle Ages. Consider just one of Ovid's hundreds of stories, Pyramus and Thisbe. Shakepeare retold it in Romeo and Juliette, perpetrating on Ovid a West-Side Story. He plundered Ovid for speeches in The Tempest and in Macbeth. For that matter, T.S. Eliot's greatest poem, “The Waste Land,” is full of Ovid. The influence rolls on.
The tradition of the epic shaped the greatest narrative poem of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, some say the greatest narrative of all time, The Divine Comedy, written by Dante Alighieri in the first part of the fourteenth century. He was Florentine, of course, and his poetry influenced the imagination and life's work of another Florentine, Michelangelo, who is reported to have had a great deal of The Divine Comedy by heart.
If you want to take gigantic, flying leaps over the highest high points in the history of Western literature, you might start with Homer, bound ahead to the Greek tragedies—also written in verse—and then to Virgil, and then Dante, and then to Shakespeare, who, of course, wrote all his plays in blank verse and also wrote the greatest sequence of poems of all time, his sonnets. Catch your breath, there; you've been taking some pretty stupendous leaps, and I'm not sure where you jump next. But as you rest, contemplate that all of these highest of the high stepping stones have been poets.
Well, I have dealt, just in passing, with how poetry was the source of virtually all the resources of the novel and short story and synonymous with the great traditions of drama. And poetry still represents the greatest tradition of storytelling in literature. Now, it is not surprising perhaps that poetry can command all the resources of fiction and drama; they are after all both art forms of language.
I would suggest to you, though, that in some ways poetry can and does appeal to the sense of movement as well as—if in different ways than—dance. Movement, most particularly movement of the body, is in the very sinew and fiber of poetry.
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How shall we know the dancer from the dance.
That's William Butler Yeats, of course, in “Among Schoolchildren.”
And this from Yeats, too:
When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Moharabuiee.
When we come at the end of time,
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;
For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance:
And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.
That is not one of Yeats's greatest poems; and Yeats is not one of the notables of the poetry of movement; but movement is part of any great poem, and Yeats wrote the greatest of our time. Many of you will know “The Congo,” by the nineteenth-century American poet, Vachael Lindsay:
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
Then along that riverbank
A thousand miles
Tattooed cannibals danced in files;
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song
[A rapidly piling climax of speed and racket.]
And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong.
And "BLOOD" screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors,
"BLOOD" screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors,
"Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle,
Harry the uplands,
Steal all the cattle,
Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle,
Bing.
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM..."
I should not leave the impression that poetry's command of movement is best exemplified by these rather obvious examples. All of good poetry is poetry of movement, and I mean physical movement—implied physical movement. If you have drafted a poem, you might stand up, loosen your muslces, and read it, letting yourself act out what you are saying, and feeling. If you feel no urge to movement, you might have a problem with your poem. The next lines are from Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach,” where he took his new bride and later wrote about standing with her, at night, on the Dover clifts. It is sometimes called the first truly modern poem. Not modern, enough, the Lord be praised, to dispense with meter and exquisite movement:
Listen! You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Moving closer to the present, or as close as I get, when it comes to poetry I like, here is the American poet John Crowe Ransom with a poem that swings with movement, of one kind or another, from first to last:
Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.
Tie the white fillets then about your hair
And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass
And chattering on the air.
Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our power shall never establish,
It is so frail.
For I could tell you a story which is true;
I know a woman with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfections tarnished--yet it is not long
Since she was lovelier than any of you.
We have to move on, but the case for poetry as an art form of movement need not rest. Every poem we consider will be, in its way, a poem of movement.
Well, music and poetry, alike, are art forms of sound. I would reckon that there well may be more music that is poetry—that is, that employs song, putting poetry to music—than music that does not include song. Opera, of course, is an entire genre of poetry put to music. But this isn't the aspect of the relationship between music and poetry that I want to discuss today. I want to suggest to you that poetry unaccompanied by instrumental music—and that includes song, for the singing voice is a musical instrument—has resources of sound as extensive as those of music and incorporating many, many of the devices of music.
Now, certainly I don't intend to argue for the superfluity of music or any art form. I don't mean to suggest that with poetry, music has nothing to add. Darwin, I think, first use the terms “lumpers” and “splitters,” and I think Objectivists are lumpers, sometimes to a fault, but I scarcely would try to lump all arts and their distinctive characteritics into poetry. For one thing, you can enjoy music, by yourself, with your eyes closed. Well, you can do that with poetry, but first you must memorize the poem. With music, you can lay back, close your eyes, dim the lights, and let the sounds invade your very consciousness, past your weary conceptual faculty, and tickle your sense of life. Poetry, I think, whatever its qualities, reaches your brain circuits, the ones with the stored ensemble of sense-of-life neurons--in a less direct manner than music. You do have to hear the words. Still, you only just have to hear them; the music of the words has its own profound power. Let's go back to Yeats and a later poem, “A Last Confession.”
What lively lad most pleasured me
Of all that with me lay?
I answer that I gave my soul
And loved in misery,
But had great pleasure with a lad
That I loved bodily.
Flinging from his arms I laughed
To think his passion such
He fancied that I gave a soul
Did but our bodies touch,
And laughed upon his breast to think
Beast gave beast as much.
I gave what other women gave
That stepped out of their clothes
.But when this soul, its body off,
Naked to naked goes,
He it has found shall find therein
What none other knows,
And give his own and take his own
And rule in his own right;
And though it loved in misery
Close and cling so tight,
There's not a bird of day that dare
Extinguish that delight.
What I hear is that the music changes after the line “And laughed upon his breast to think.” Until then, the tone is carefree, but really almost despairingly frivolous, a throw away. The music then becomes sober, as she realizes the nature of the pleasure, the huge joke on her men and herself: “Beast gave beast as much.”
The music then changes again, into a constrained, rather uptight, perhaps resentful statement, with the line: “I gave what other women gave...” Then, I hear another shift in music when she talks about the transition from bodily existence and pleasures to pleasures beyond and apart from the body: real nakedness, the nakedness of the soul, with the line “Naked to naked goes.”
Here, the music assumes a tone of the most intense dedication, the vow of the noviatiate to her god: “He it has found shall found therein...” It has an almost desperate sincerity: “Close and cling so tight...” and only lightens at the end, as the new pleasure, this time ecstasy, awakens: “There's not a bird of day that dare/Extinguish that delight.” The woman who has been the pleasure toy of beasts now gazes upon herself in the embrace of God.
The enchantment of the sound comes in part from the varying rhythm, as we shall see with other poems. But any poem, as it rises in intensity, increases the number of syllables that are stressed.
Scanning, of course, is the identification of the stressed and unstressed syllabes in a line, and dividing them into the standard measures, or “feet” of English poetry.
FLING ing from his ARMS, I LAUGHED...
I hear three stressed syllables, here, and four unstressed. But “laughed” is one of those long single-syllables words that almost becomes two syllables. After that, the stresses pile up, as her voice gains intensity, especially the vision of submission to God:
And RULE in HIS OWN RIGHT...
We have the music of the balanced “l” sounds in the line “Flinging from his arms, I laughed...” And we have the same balance of the “r” sounds in the line “And rule in his own right...” We have the emphatic bringing down of the fist in the “d” sounds in “Not a bird of day that dare...” that is echoed by the final word, “delight.”
The music of the rhyme scheme here is intense, because groups of three rhyming words are used. English is a relatively rhyme-poor language. It is doubtful any poet in English could have written the thousands and thousands of rhyming lines of The Divine Comedia, for which Dante had available the thousands of words endings with “ia” and other vowel sounds in Italian. By contrast, the English poet wonders how he can possibly use “life” in a line within a poem not about marriage or stabbing and not slightly achaic in tone, so he can rhyme with “wife,” “knife,” or “strife.” At any rate, Yeats uses rhymes so naturally and beautifully that you may not have realized that he was using triple rhymes. And in the final stanza, the rhymes are three of the most significant terms in the stanza and the poem: “right,” “tight,” and “delight.”
I could mention much, much more about the music of the sounds in this poem. For example, Yeats must have sensed it was very desirable to end the poem with a word that included an “l” sound in order to echo the many important words in the poem that share that sound: “lady,” “lad,” lively,” “pleasured,” “lay,” “soul,” “loved,” “flinging,” “laughed,” “rule,” “close,” and “cling”—among others. Note that in the first half of the poem the many, many more “l” sounds are in words that lilt—lively, like the lady. In the second half, the few “l” words are either not especially significant, like “shall” or definitely not lilting—for example, “rule.” Only at the end is the lost joy once again regained, this time by the soul, with the lilting word “delight.”
Now, I would not try to take anything away from painting, which, like music, has a direct and immediate effect on the emotions that the art forms of language do not—at least, insofar as they are concerned with concepts, not sound and rhythm, which do have a quite direct effect. But painting and drawing appeal to our dominant sense, vision, and when poetry conjures up images in words, the effect of the words depends upon our having stored the original image in our memory. So give the visual arts their due. Except, of course, that the images they can use are quite severely limited as compared with poetry.
For those of you who caught my talk on the brain, on Tuesday, I used “image” to mean any directly experienced quality in our stream of consciousness. In that usage, all the senses contribute to our imagery. We have direct awareness of visual images, but also of sound images. You are forming images of my voice; you can hear in your mind the particular qualities of the sound I use for “Yeats.” Likewise, you can have an olfactory image or a tactile image. Well, the visual arts do not convey any but visual images. Yes, you can associate images from other senses with what you see in a painting: a cherry almost real and ripe and red enough to taste. But poetry can evoke, deliberately and with considerable definition, images from any of the five senses, and also from proprioception and interoception—the experience of the position of your limbs, your body in space, and other perceptions from within you. Further, poetry can evoke a mixture of the senses; it can evoke a sequence of sensations; and, above all, it can evoke images that might be termed abstract images.
Don't even think about a painting that might capture this striking and disturbing image from Yeats's “Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop.”
A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent
But Love has pitched his mansion
In the place of excrement
And nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
This is from Ezra Pound's “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” about Christ and the apostles. Simon speaks it after the crucifixion:
He cried no cry when they drave the nails
And the blood gushed hot and free
The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue
But never a cry cried he.
We have the immediate visual image of the blood, but the image is of its movement—spurting—and its temperature—hot. The next image is partly visual, partly acoustic, and partly even abstract: “The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue...” I see long, dark clouds of red and purple on the horizon behind the hill at Calvary, and they are low and stretched, like running hounds, their tongues lolling, and their howl is not in sky but in the mind of Simon, to whom the whole scene is so unbearable that he knows not whether he or the heavens will howl first. Note the music in the three long “o's” of “hounds,” “crimson,” and “tongue,” which roll and moan like far-off thunder. Then we switch to the high-pitched vowels of “cry cried he”--ending in the “e” that is almost itself a cry. That's a lot for one or two lines of imagery.
How could you capture visually the image that begins “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient, etherized upon a table...
Eliot was inviting you upon a tour of a world in which the romanticism of evening skies, and the strolls of lovers through charming cities at dusk, no longer could be taken seriously. A patient in the operating room under ether has cheeks flushed pink like the evening sky. Eliot's sky is at best sedated, but more probably gravely afflicted, life hanging in the balance; the age itself is the patient, Eliot will make the diagnosis. The patient on the guerney and the evening sky, presumably over Boston, are brought together in one image, united by their pink hue, the impending night, and the now-admitted and accepted lack of romance.
Well, I want to spend a little time specifically on meter, the defining characteristic of poetry, and a little on the state of modern poetry. But “At my back I hear time's winged chariot hurrying near...”
“Meter” means “measure” and poets writing in English take the measure of the rhythm of their lines by reference to units called feet. English meter, and metrical feet, are units defined both by the number of syllables and the placement of stressed and unstressed syllables. A list of metrical feet may be longer or shorter, but the shortest, reduced to essentials, is as follows:
iamb (unstressed and STRESSED: e LOPE
trochee (STRESSED and unstressed): LOV er
spondee (STRESSED, STRESSED): CUCK OLD
anapest (unstressed, unstressed, STRESSED): to the WOODS
dactyl (STRESSED, unstressed, unstressed): PAS sion ate
pyrrhic (unstressed, unstressed): [TURN ing and TURN] in the [WID en ing] GYRE
To use single, out-of-context words as examples of the feet is misleading. The syllables around the word might affect how it is stressed; and meaning might affect how it is stressed. For example, I might use as an example “worn out” and call it an iamb: worn OUT.
But that would change if I wrote: “I didn't say I was BORN out of wedlock. I said I was WORN out with wedlock.” It a skill and an art, even a high art, to scan poetry. There have been masters of it such as the poet Yvor Winters; a classic on the subject was written by Paul Fussell. After all, do any two syllables have exactly the same stress? Above, I used as an example of a dactyl the word PAS sion ate. One stressed syllable followed by two unstressed. But relatively, to my ear, the final syllable is stressed a bit more than the middle syllable.
How you divide a line into metrical feet can be debated like the abilities and sex appeal of two actresses. The pyrrhic, two unstressed syllables, is impossible to use except as a variation because it always can be divided up between the preceding and following feet. And some mavens of scanning like to use additional feet, with four syllables. But these, too, can always be divided into two feet or redistribted.
The far more pressing decision for the poet is to choose a meter (and more than 90 percent of the time it will be iambic, the overwhelmingly dominant meter in serious English poetry) and a line length. If the line length is five feet, then the poet is using iambic pentameter, the runaway favorite in all English poetry, the line of Shakespeare's sonnets, the line of all the great poems in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), and often said to the natural beat of spoken English. The skillful poet will keep this underlying beat, like a metronome, and vary it to achieve his effects and create his rhythm. The variations in effects achievable by varying iambic pentameter have not been exhausted by millions of lines of English poetry written over more than 500 years. When variations in rhythm are combined with the resources of meaning, tone, mood, rhyme, vowel and consonant repetitions (assonance and consonance) and all the other resources of poetry, there is no end in sight.
The poet will establish his meter and keep returning to it throughout the poem. If he lets the variations go on too long, the underlying beat may be lost, and so the variations cease to be variations. If he lets the meter go on too long, he risks a metronome regularity, and rhythm is made by the piano, not the metronome. He will keep tightening and loosening; but, a cardinal feature of poetry is that as the intensity of the statement increases, the stresses will come closer together, building emphasis and tension:
STAND, STAND at the WIN dow
As the TEARS SCALD and START
You must LOVE your CROOKED NEIGH bor
With your CROOKED HEART.
LOOK, LOOK in the MIR ror
LOOK, in your disTRESS
LIFE re MAINS a BLESS ing
Al THOUGH YOU CANNOT BLESS.
W. H. Auden's wonderful poem “As I Walked Out One Evening,” has an iambic meter, so the underlying beat is unstressed, STRESSED, unstressed, STRESSED, unstressed STRESSED. And for much of the poem that meter is sustained:
Oh LET not TIME de CEIVE you,
You CAN not CON quer TIME.
In fact, for much of the poem, the unstressed syllables predominate; there are many anapests, a frequent variation in iambic lines:
And a CRACK in the TEA cup O pens,
A LANE to the LAND of the DEAD,
Where the BEG ars RAF fle the BANK notes,
And the GIANT is en CHANT ing to JACK...
I would say the meter is imbic, made less formal and more conversational by the use of the extra unaccented syllables in anapests.
But look again at that climax:
STAND, STAND at the WIN dow
As the TEARS SCALD and START
YOU must LOVE your CROOKED NEIGH bor
With your CROOKED HEART.
LOOK, LOOK in the MIR ror
Oh, LOOK, in YOUR disTRESS
LIFE re MAINS a BLESS ing
Al THOUGH YOU CANNOT BLESS.
The iambic beat, established earlier in this long poem, is left behind in the clustering of stresses in the poet's climactic exhortation to hold onto compassion, to love, and struggle against renunciation. Virtually all moments of high intensity and drama in poetry are expressed in this build-up of stresses. Yes, I could have scanned differently, marking “you” and “not” in the last line as unstressed. It depends upon how you speak the lines. I read the meaning as “Although YOU cannot bless.” In other contexts, “cannot” would receive the stress only on the “can.” In fact, if you do stress “you,” I think that “not” probably should be unstressed. Notice, though, that these decisions change not at all the clear character of the passages, as the poet piles on emphasis, urgently pleading for self-examination in the teeth of despair.
One more example of meter, this from a famous sonnet by Shakespeare. The scanning of the passage has been much debated:
That time of year though mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
There is no debate whatsoever about the first three lines. They are perfect iambic pentameter. No other scanning is even plausible. Shakespeare is setting up a powerful underlying beat. For a textbook example of iambic pentameter it is impossible to improve on the second line: :When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang...” Note this shivery imagery, and how the unfolding of the image gives it poignancy. By adding “or few,” the poet in two words has reminded us how as we age we watch our inevitable losses—the last few strands of hair, the few remaining old friends. But onward to the meter and rhythm of this poem:
That TIME of YEAR though MAYST in ME be HOLD,
When YEL low LEAVES, or NONE, or FEW, do HANG
U PON those BOUGHS which SHAKE a GAINST the COLD,
BARE RUIN'D CHOIRS, where LATE the SWEET BIRDS SANG.
Here is a kind of climax, too, although a quieter one. Notice that the first three words of the last line are single-syllables words, but with long vowels. “Ruin'd” has almost the length of two syllables. The “r” sound in each word also stretches out the sound. We have seven stressed syllables out of nine, here—a powerful variation from perfect imabic feet in the first three lines. But notice that in contrast to the low, long, mournful first three words, the last three are quicker and crisper: “sweet birds sang.” Unlike the “r” sounds that drew out the first three syllables, the words “sweet” and “sang” end in letters that snip sound short. Arguments have been made that this line should be given a more nearly iambic scan: “Bare RU in'd CHOIRS, where LATE the SWEET birds SANG.” Also, the nature of the image has been debated. Is “bare ruin'd choirs supposed to refer back to “boughs,” creating a metaphor: are the boughs the ruined choirs of the summer birds? Or are we looking at the tumbled down walls of a church in the forest, the last autumn leaves falling on the exposed and crumbling choir loft? Well, the tension and uncertainty, both in rhythm and imagery, add to the tension in this line, making it come brilliantly alive.
Briefly, now, what about poetry today? My presentation, and several others, could have been devoted to the postmodernism dismantling of poetry as an art form. This has exactly paralleled the dismantling of the visual arts and music. As you know, the postmodernists always go for the jugular, for the lifeline of the art, and slash that. In painting, the attack was on representation, in music the attack was on melody. In poetry, the attack has been on meter—the defining essence of the art form. Free verse is the abandonment of meter. Free verse has rhythm, certainly, but so does prose. Yet, what I want to say, now, is not about the postmodernist attack, per se.
The question I posed much earlier was why it seems odd today to say that poetry commands all the narrative power and resources of fiction. It seems odd because the practice of poetry today has, to a fair approximation, been reduced to one minor sub-form of the art. The lyric was a brief, intense expression of emotion in a poem intended to be accompanied by the lyre. It is a beautiful form, the lyric; but I suggest to you that most of what the public knows, and thinks, about the art of poetry is only about the lyric. Today, a poem is a unit of writing short enough to fit into the filler space between articles in a magazine. It gets all emotional and imagistic and perhaps reaches some wise point or observation, then ends. Its seems selective in its language, but the selectively appears to make the meaning cryptic.
Where are the epics, today—the heroic accounts of the things that have mattered to our civilization? Where are the plays in verse, the great poetic dramas? Where are the satires? Pope, Dryden, and Swift penned some of most cautic and telling political, cultural, and social criticism of their day--in verse. Do we have no political figures today, no celebrities, appropriate for satire that pricks pretention, catches sheer political frivolity in the act, or punctures the idols of the current theater or arts? In short, where the major poetic forms and traditions of some 3,000 years that created the most memorable literature in our entire civilization? Where for that matter are the philosophical works in verse like De Rerum Natura, On the Nature of Things, written in the first century B.C. by the Roman Epicurean philosopher and scientist, Lucretius? His goal was to free men from religious superstition and so from the fear of death. Where are even the kind of dramatic monologues written by Robert Browning?
I acknowledge a few exceptions, or partial exceptions, in fairly recent times. But, today, the whole art of poetry, certainly in the public mind, is minor. If poets produce only brief cries from the heart—even on the generous assumption these are not unrhymed, unmetrical, and obscure—then poetry will have a small place in our lives. Certainly poetry will have no public role of any kind. How many of you in the past five years have purchased a book of poetry by a new, contemporary poet? I'm not sure that I can raise my hand.
Today, it has become difficult even to imagine what we are missing in many walks of life: what it would be like to live in a free society, what it would be like to have principled statesmen, what it would be like to have unbounded enterprise, what it would be like to have universities founded on a rational philosphy, what it would be like to have a culture of romantic art. Gazing upon that field of devastation, the collapse of poetry may seem a less than life-threatening blow. But that may be because in this field, least of all, can we envision what we are missing: what it would be like to have a great poet to tell us who we have been, who we are, and who we could be.
Ayn Rand remarked wistfully that for those born in the second half of the twentieth century, it was impossible to imagine the sense of life of European and American culture prior to World War I--the optimism and benevolence and confidence in civilized standards. I am talking about such a loss in the realm of poetry. In his poem, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” Yeats wrote:
Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.
Today, one of them is the great tradition of poetry—the supreme art.
* This talk was given in July 2007 at the annual Summer Seminar of the Atlas Society. An DVD of the talk may be ordered at http://www.objectivismstore.com/. Many ideas and examples in this article are drawn from the writing of the late Judson Jerome. To my mind, he was the best writer of our time on the practical techniques of poetry, on the course of contemporary poetry, and on the making of the poet's soul. His books, such as The Poet and the Poem, reward endless rereading. His book of poetry, Light in the West, has many poems I like.
