What Crane called his poem’s “logic of metaphor” is by no means haphazard, however.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells . . .
The ship sinks without ceremony, no bells, producing a whirlpool that sucks its sailors and cargo down to death. But once the ship disappears, the whirlpool becomes a cornucopia that delivers a bounty of wreckage to the surface.
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph . . .
This bounty (the broken and reconfigured pieces of the ship) is now legible only as an incomplete story, a scattered chapter, or as a collection of inexplicable signs, hieroglyphs. The scattered chapter is like a hieroglyph, which is like
The portent wound in corridors of shells.
“About as much definite knowledge might come from all this as anyone might gain from the roar of his own veins, which is easily heard (haven’t you ever done it?) by holding a shell close to one’s ear,” Crane told Monroe, explicating the final leap from the figure of the hieroglyph to the inexplicable portent one hears within the calyx of a shell. Crane was eager to suggest that each of his figures is grounded in ordinary experience, but what makes the figuration nonetheless difficult to process is the variety of unprecedented realms of experience (shipwreck, harvest, story-telling, crustaceans) toward which the syntax pushes us. The effect of the poem is due not so much to the extravagance of its metaphors as to their order—to the way in which the poem’s syntax moves forward in an act of discovery, not an act of confirmation.
“At Melville’s Tomb” is a highly idiosyncratic poem, but the serial organization of its figures is in fact central to English-language poetry in a way that Blake’s sequence of parallel figures is not. “Generally they are ill constructed,” said the influential New Critic John Crowe Ransom of Shakespeare’s sonnets: like Harriet Monroe reading Crane, he was perplexed by the rapid and surprising way in which Shakespeare’s metaphors supersede one another, phrase by phrase, line by line. But Ransom was not responding to an intriguing poem by an unknown poet; he was objecting to an aspect of Shakespeare’s verse that had long provoked admiration and wonder. Writing about the sonnets more than a century earlier, John Keats found their figuration thrilling.
I never found so many beauties in the sonnets—they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally—in the intensity of working out conceits—Is this to be borne?
The illusion of spontaneity (“things said unintentionally”) generated by the quixotic unfolding of figurative language (“the working out of conceits”) was what Keats admired most about the sonnets, and he went on to quote the second quatrain of the twelfth sonnet as an example of an achievement so astonishing it could hardly be borne.
Here is the entire poem.
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night,
When I behold the violet past prime
And sable curls all silvered o’er with white,
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard;
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow,
And nothing ’gainst time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence.
The formal expectations aroused by the typically Shakespearean rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg) suggest that this sonnet breaks into three four-line units followed by a two-line unit. But the structural expectations aroused by the sonnet’s hypotactic syntax suggest that its single sentence breaks into an eight-line unit (three parallel adverbial clauses of irregular length—“When I do count”—“When I behold”—“When lofty trees I see”), followed by a four-line unit inaugurated by the sentence’s independent clause (“Then of thy beauty do I question make”), followed by a two-line unit inaugurated by a second independent clause (“And nothing . . . can make defence”). The sonnet’s formal arrangement stands at odds with its structure, and the figuration reinforces the dynamic work of the syntax, not the static paradigm of the rhyme scheme.
The first of the sonnet’s three adverbial clauses offers conventional metaphors, the kind we use in most any sentence we utter: the clock tells the time, day is sunk in night. In the second adverbial clause, the metaphors become more extravagant; the violet is past prime, the sable curls are silvered. And while it’s not difficult to link these metaphors of physical decay to the earlier metaphors for temporal change, the metaphors in the third and longest adverbial clause—the lines that provoked Keats’s wonder—become increasingly difficult to track.
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard . . .
While the barren trees function, like the violets and sable curls, as figures for change, the additional figure treating the once-green trees as solicitous shepherds (“did canopy the herd”) throws us into more unpredictable arenas of significance, as does the figure personifying the now faded sheaves as the dead body (“Borne on the bier”) of an elderly man (“white and bristly beard”). What’s more, the figures seem to generate one another as much by vagaries of sound as by the logic of sense, the syllable bier extending into beard. “Is this to be borne?” asked Keats at this point, echoing the poem itself: three dependent clauses are bearing down with increasingly extravagant figuration on the emergent independent clause, whose language seems suddenly transparent: “Then of thy beauty do I question make.”
The remainder of the sonnet’s sentence is less densely figured but increasingly wayward. For while many of the earlier metaphors emphasize natural change (violets, curls, trees), beauty now seems in charge of his own destiny, able to choose between saving himself and forsaking himself to death: “beauties do themselves forsake, / And die as fast as they see others grow.” But how could a violet choose not to fade? How could a man with bristly beard not end up borne on a bier? Then, in the couplet, an egregiously conventional metaphor (“time’s scythe”) suggests that beauty’s life is not naturally but violently terminated. But even if old men’s beards will never turn sable again, deciduous trees do regain their leaves; perennial violets do return with spring. The final couplet offers the sound of epigrammatic closure, as final couplets almost inevitably do, but the order of the sonnet’s metaphors remains provocatively linear, each one suggested by but not necessarily at peace with the figures preceding it.
Shakespeare’s sonnets may be the most influential body of lyric poems in the language—which has little to do with the fact that they happen to be sonnets; it has to do with their intricate collusions of figuration and syntax. Keats’s judgment sharpens our sense of the particular nature of their influence; Ransom’s judgment makes it more difficult for us to take the particular nature of their influence for granted: the sonnets will seem ill-constructed only if we imagine structure to be a grid-like pattern imposed on language, rather than a dynamic event that happens in the incremental act of reading sentences. A metaphor is not a static vessel for meaning.
Consider the first three lines of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: the poet’s heart aches, we don’t yet know why, but his senses are numb, reminding us that the ache is not physical; he feels as if he had dosed himself with opiates, as did other romantic writers such as Coleridge and De Quincey.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains.
“More than a figure of speech,” says Keats’s most recent biographer, “Keats’s ‘dull opiate em
ptied to the drains’ frankly admits his own laudanum habit.” But how can we know that the lines are more than figurative? Why employ a mathematical figure (“more than”) implying that figuration itself is inadequate or incomplete?
“We need to cure ourselves of the wish for biography,” says the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, suggesting that the stories we tell about our lives, inasmuch as they fix our lives, cannot be driven other than by anxiety and fear. And if biographies of poets were written in the manner of lyric poems, we’d find them wayward and inefficient, possibly maddening—which might be, from the psychoanalytic perspective, a good thing. Treated as a vessel for meaning, Keats’s figure (“dull opiates”) becomes the proof for the speculation it also provokes, the wish for biographical knowledge transforming the repeatable pleasure of lyric knowledge into a condition that needs to be cured. But in any case, as the “Ode to a Nightingale” continues, Keats rejects both opiates and alcohol, declaring that he will leave the world where “youth grows pale, and spectre-thin” on the “viewless wings of Poesy.” Like Shakespeare’s and Crane’s, Keats’s figuration is constantly shifting, generating new meanings so quickly that its author seems barely able to keep up with his own invention.
Yet the force of Keats’s metaphors is, however equivocal, not inconsequential: when he wrote this sonnet (inscribed on a blank page in his copy of Shakespeare’s poems), he knew he was dying.
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
Although this sonnet begins by declaring a wish for metaphorical equivalence (“would I were steadfast as thou art”), it spends its first two quatrains objecting to the implications of the metaphor, producing new figures in the process: Keats would be as steadfast as the star but not inasmuch as the star is in turn like a sleepless hermit watching the movement of tidal waters, waters that in turn are like priests for the ablution they offer the earth, earth that is in turn like a human being for needing daily to be absolved. While the sonnet thrives on the unpredictable exfoliation of its figures, the sonnet’s maker wants to be steadfast. And yet, when he begins in the third quatrain to describe his unchanging state, he nonetheless deploys metaphors of temporal change: “Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast.”
Of course the power, the poignancy, of Keats’s poem inheres in this tension. The or in the poem’s final line offers a choice between life and death that the figure of the “ripening breast” has already blurred, and logically Keats should admit that his only choice is “to hear her tender-taken breath” and “swoon to death.” This is the opposite of frustrating, however, for if we feel the ghostly presence of this poem’s maker, who continues to speak to us even in death, it is not because we’ve extracted from the poem dependable conclusions. It is because, for a moment, we continue to live in the linguistic act of becoming, participating in the ongoing project of knowledge, rather than simply receiving its results.
“Pilot,—tempest, too”: Crane coupled these two figures in a sonnet addressed to Shakespeare, describing his predecessor as a poet who by (as it were) steering the boat conjured the storm—as a poet whose exquisitely made poems paradoxically produced unmanageable energies. The same set of figures might be used to characterize Crane himself, but if Crane’s metaphors sometimes seem more challenging even than Shakespeare’s or Keats’s, it is not because they are necessarily more quixotic but because the sonnets of Shakespeare and Keats distract us from the explosive energy of their figuration with their suavity of formal coherence: the poems sound whole. To understand why, we need to pay attention not only to syntax, diction, and figuration but to the way syllables may sound like one another—stresses making rhythms, phonemes making rhymes.
V
RHYTHM
The syllables of Old English poems are organized in lines, lines that have four stresses that alliterate with one another in one of several patterns.
Bitre brēostcaere gebiden hæbbe
This line (which might be rendered as “I have abided bitter breast-cares”) ends where it ends not because of how it looks but because of how it sounds; the pattern made by the alliterating stressed syllables is complete. This sonic patterning is so strong that when Old English poems were first written down, their lines did not need to be registered visually on the page: the poems were transcribed as if they were prose. Greek and Latin poems were also written down as if they were prose; nobody ever saw the shape of a Sapphic stanza until an editor arranged Sappho’s lines on the page, offering obvious visual cues for the sonic patterning of her lines.
In contrast, Shakespeare’s way of organizing the sound of Modern English into iambic pentameter lines (lines that contain five stressed syllables that do not necessarily alliterate but have a particular relationship to the unstressed syllables surrounding them) was always registered visually on the page.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
We nevertheless recognize the first ten syllables of this sentence as a variation of the iambic pentameter line not because of how they look; we recognize the line because of how the syllables sound in relationship to one another, just as Shakespeare made the line by listening to how they sound.
Yet our now established habit of looking at poems, fostered by the rise of print culture, has altered the way poets think about the sound of poetry. Beginning in the later seventeenth century, poets we call Augustan or neoclassical grew to prefer a smoother pentameter line, free of the adventurous rhythmic variations of Shakespeare and Donne, as if the line’s neatness of finish were a reflection of its appearance on the printed page; John Crowe Ransom was harkening back to these neoclassical tastes when he called Shakespeare’s sonnets ill-constructed. More recently, the habit of looking at poems has encouraged the production of a flaccid free-verse line whose length is determined merely by its visual relationship to other lines on the page. Just as it seems logical that films will change if we expect to watch them on an iPad rather than in a movie theater, poems have changed because of the changing technologies through which the English language has been experienced, print being the most obvious. What electronic media will do to poetry remains largely to be seen.
But what is more remarkable is the fact that, over hundreds of years, poetry in English has changed so little. The pentameter line, which eclipsed the alliterative four-beat line deployed by Old English poets, was developed in response to the prosody of French poems that entered the ears of Middle English writers along with the French language itself. It would be difficult to wedge Latinate words like impediments or pilgrimage into the Old English line even if those words had been available to Old English poets, and as Middle English settled into Modern English, the pentameter became essential not only to Shakespeare but to Pope, Keats, and Stevens. The line remains essential to innumerable poets writing in English today, but this continuity of formal procedure is a symptom of a deeper continuity, one that also underlies the disruptive formal procedures of innumerable poets writing today.
Consider Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” one of the foundational free-verse poems in English.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Each of these lines is made from a combination of Latinate and Germanic dic
tion; the Latinate nouns tend to be multisyllabic (apparition, petal), while the Germanic nouns tend to be monosyllables (crowd, bough), as do the function words that English syntax requires (of, these, in, on). Syntactically, the poem consists of a sequence of prepositional phrases (of these faces, in a crowd, on a wet); there is no predication, no verb, but by suggesting a metaphorical equivalence, the semicolon asks to be understood as a copulative verb (these faces are petals) or as a copulative verb plus a preposition (these faces are like petals).
How do this diction and syntax generate the poem’s rhythm? In the first line, the multisyllabic word apparition is necessarily pronounced apparition—two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable and an unstressed syllable. The subsequent function words aren’t generally stressed in English unless something directs us to do so. Tension between syntax and line may produce that direction—
The apparition of these faces in
The crowd
—thereby throwing emphasis on an otherwise unstressed preposition; but Pound’s poem offers no such direction, leaving us to stress the more semantically charged nouns, as the function words fall away.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Since the nine unstressed syllables in this line are broken into three groups of three, each group followed by a stressed syllable, it seems the poem may possibly be establishing a regular rhythmic pattern, one that might be repeated—ti ti ti tum ti ti ti tum ti ti ti tum. We won’t know if that’s true, however, until we listen to the second line. Pound is famous for being one of the inventors of free verse in English, but he also wrote artfully metrical verse throughout his entire career.
How Poems Get Made Page 4
