How Poems Get Made Read online

  It would be difficult to register the force of the collision of proffers flattery with hemp, rye, flax in a more exclusively Latinate language or a more exclusively Germanic language, but this does not mean that anything is lost when Moore’s poem is translated into German or French; on the contrary, it means that something is discovered. We can’t expect one language to replicate the effects to which another is particularly amenable, but the act of translation does, when the host language is engaged as a medium, create a new poem—a poem that asks us not simply to extract its meaning but to participate in the process of language becoming meaningful.

  But what distinguishes that process in a great English poem is that often we feel we’re grappling with more than one language at once, as if the act of writing in English were already an act of translation.

  Death and life were not

  Till man made up the whole,

  Made lock, stock and barrel

  Out of his bitter soul,

  Aye, sun and moon and star, all,

  And further add to that

  That, being dead, we rise,

  Dream and so create

  Translunar Paradise.

  The final line of this sentence from W. B. Yeats’s “The Tower” could not be more different from the final line of “My Apish Cousins” (“rye, flax, horses”), but each poem makes its final line feel like a revelatory event. Working in the opposite direc tion from Moore, Yeats begins by restricting himself to words derived mostly from German (dead, rise, dream). Then a different language leaps from the page: “Translunar Paradise.” To hear these two Latinate words in this sonic context is to feel the discovery of the spiritual realm Yeats is talking about, especially since the two Latinate words fill out the trimeter line (“Translunar Paradise”) as elegantly as the Germanic monosyllables (“That, being dead, we rise”).

  The meaning of those two words is crucial to the poem, but if you translate the final lines from Latinate English into Germanic English (the word paradise means an enclosed garden, or what folks from around here call a yard), its effect is changed.

  That, being dead, we swoon,

  Dream and therefore make

  A yard beyond the moon.

  Translate these lines into Latinate English, and the effect is also changed.

  That, being deceased, we levitate,

  Hallucinate and consequently create

  Translunar Paradise.

  Because this diction is blandly consistent, the lines have nothing toward which to move, no feeling of discovery in which we may participate.

  After brief acquaintance, we may remember a lyric poem’s meaning more readily than the particularity of its medium; but our relationship with the poem grows richer to the degree that we’re involved with the medium, seduced by the repeatable discovery of what we already know. The process of lyric knowledge captivates us beyond our knowledge of the poem’s information as such, and if we’re reading an English-language poem, this drama of discovery depends on our experience of one kind of diction resisting another, giving way to another. It also depends on our experience of English syntax.

  II

  SYNTAX

  Consider the anonymous lyric known as “Western Wind,” which first appeared in a songbook probably owned by a musician in the court of Henry VIII. This is one of several ways you’ll find the text printed today, its spelling and punctuation regularized.

  Western wind, when will you blow?

  The small rain down can rain.

  Christ, if my love were in my arms

  And I in my bed again.

  This quatrain is cast in ballad measure, alternating tetrameter (“Western wind, when will you blow”) and trimeter lines (“The small rain down can rain”), the two trimeters rhyming with each other (“rain” and “again”). The regularity of this form plays against the irregularity of the poem’s syntax: a one-line question (“Western wind, when will you blow?”) is followed by a one-line statement (“The small rain down can rain”) and then by a two-line exclamation (“Christ, if my love were in my arms / And I in my bed again”), the syntax of this sentence for the first time exceeding the duration of the line.

  What happens if you arrange the lines of “Western Wind” in a different order? The poem makes clear sense, but while the form is identical (alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines rhymed xaxa), the poem’s structure is different.

  Christ, if my love were in my arms

  And I in my bed again.

  Western wind, when will you blow?

  The small rain down can rain.

  Here, we turn from an experience of emotional longing to the weather, an external drama that confirms the inner turmoil; the feeling of confirmation is enforced by the two one-line sentences with which the poem now concludes, a self-contained question and a self-contained answer. Something happens in this shift from interiority to exteriority, for we feel in both arenas the power of absence, the desire for change, but something more momentous happens in the original structure, in which our expectations are not confirmed but shattered.

  “Western Wind” begins by looking out, asking in the first one-line sentence for the exterior world to change: “Western wind, when will you blow?” The second one-line sentence makes an observation about that world: “The small rain down can rain.” At this point, the poem is about nothing but weather—a wish that the weather were different, a wish registered most poignantly in the phrase “small rain”; would that we were getting a downpour, a deluge. Then the poem slaps us with new information, a revelation of erotic longing, reinforcing the slap with the unexpected blasphemy (“Christ”) and then, more potently, with a sentence that disrupts the established pattern of containment, the syntax suddenly refusing to be constrained by the line: “Christ, if my love were in my arms / And I in my bed again.”

  Different information would alter the poem, just as it would alter the sentence I examined from “The Tower.”

  That, being dead, we rise,

  Dream and so create

  Translucent paragraphs.

  But a rearrangement of the order in which we receive the information also alters the poem. Reading “Western Wind” line by line, sentence by sentence, we’re made to feel not that we’re receiving the results of an inquiry but that the inquiry is taking shape as the poem unfolds. The poem’s greatest wish is to repeat the routine of daily life (“I in my bed again”), and the poem’s structure makes the discovery of that wish feel permanently surprising. Again, as every child knows, is one of the most powerful words in the language.

  “Did you ever read one of her Poems backward,” asked Emily Dickinson of an unknown interlocutor about an unidentified poet, “because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have—A something overtakes the Mind.”

  The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

  It is deep January. The sky is hard.

  The leaves hop, scraping on the ground,

  Like seeing fallen brightly away.

  Snow sparkling like eyesight falling to earth

  Is merely the moving of a tongue.

  They have heads in which a captive cry

  Without legs or, for that, without heads,

  Has arms without hands. They have trunks

  In this bleak air, the broken stalks.

  Bad is final in this light.

  The field is frozen. The leaves are dry,

  As absent as if we were asleep.

  He is not here, the old sun.

  What you have just read is the beginning of Wallace Stevens’s “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters,” a poem about the deprivations of wartime rationing in the early 1940s, except that you have read it backwards, concluding with the poem’s first line. Though the original ordering of this passage contains the same number of sentences arranged in the same number of unrhymed couplets, I have altered the punctuation, recombining the constituent pieces of the poem’s syntax into new grammatical shapes. In doing so, I have needed to alter ju
st two words (sparkles to sparkling and have to has).

  But while the resulting syntax is coherent, the something produced by reading “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” backwards is different from the something produced by what Dickinson called the plunge from the front. To conclude the poem with the act of personifying the sun (“He is not here”) makes that figure, though it records an absence, feel like a brazened wish to find human companionship in the starkly inhuman natural world.

  The field is frozen. The leaves are dry,

  As absent as if we were asleep.

  He is not here, the old sun.

  To begin with the personification makes it feel like a passingly familiar metaphor, hardly worth noticing.

  He is not here, the old sun,

  As absent as if we were asleep.

  The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.

  Why are these sentences so amenable to rearrangement?

  The nature of English syntax is determined by many factors, but just as we may observe a great deal about a poem’s diction merely by focusing on the arrangement of different kinds of words, so may we observe a great deal simply by comparing the way in which sentences arrange their constituent phrases and clauses. Throughout “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters,” Stevens’s syntax is predominantly paratactic: his clauses, each with its own subject and verb, are arranged side by side, without any sense of hierarchy (para, from the Greek, means beside): “It is deep January. The sky is hard.” While clauses may be linked by coordinating conjunctions in paratactic syntax (It is deep January, and the sky is hard), Stevens lets his clauses stand alone, making the poem sound ceremoniously hieratic.

  The sentence Because it is deep January, the sky is hard is in contrast hypotactic: because the two clauses are linked by a subordinating conjunction, one clause depends on the other (hypo, from the Greek, means under). We tend to employ hypotactic syntax when describing the hierarchical relationship between causes and effects in a narrative or between facts and conclusions in an argument, and throughout “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters,” Stevens isn’t doing either of those things; his mostly paratactic syntax builds a structure through association and juxtaposition. Charged information is accumulating, but because we don’t yet know why, the poem sounds not only hieratic but ominous.

  Given this reliance on parataxis, “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” is much more amenable to rearrangement than a poem featuring hypotactic syntax.

  In the darkest evening of the year,

  Between the woods and frozen lake,

  To stop without a farmhouse near—

  My little horse must think it queer

  To watch his woods fill up with snow.

  He will not see me stopping here;

  His house is in the village though.

  Whose woods these are I think I know.

  Robert Frost is telling a story; Stevens is not. The syntax of “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” avoids causal relationships between its clauses, allowing the poem to make plausible sense both backwards and forwards: “The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice” or “The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. The sky is hard. It is deep January. The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.” It matters in Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” in contrast, whether it is a horse or a person who watches his woods fill up with snow.

  But less obviously, it also matters whether we move from the behavior of leaves to a more general sense of the month of January, or whether we move from a sense of January to the behavior of leaves; it matters in “Western Wind” whether we move from weather to erotic longing or from erotic longing to weather. The fact that a predominantly paratactic syntax enables a lyric’s rearrangement does not undermine the lyric’s plunge from the front; it alerts us to the inevitability of the plunge, one thing following another for a purpose that reveals itself in the time it takes to read the poem.

  Consider the first stanza, which is also the first sentence, of John Donne’s “The Canonization.”

  For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,

  Or chide my palsy, or my gout,

  My five grey hairs, or ruined fortune flout,

  With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,

  Take you a course, get you a place,

  Observe his honour, or his grace,

  Or the King’s real, or his stamped face

  Contemplate, what you will, approve,

  So you will let me love.

  This sentence contains eleven independent clauses, and until the stanza’s final line, they are arranged without any subordination: hold your tongue, let me love, chide my palsy, flout my fortune, improve your state, take a course, get a place, observe his grace, contemplate his face, approve what you will. Formally, the stanza’s meter and rhyme scheme put pressure on this paratactic accumulation of imperatives: beginning with a quatrain rhymed abba, the stanza moves to a more tightly rhymed tetrameter couplet (“Take you a course, get you a place, / Observe his honor, or his grace”) that quickens the act of listing and makes the entire sentence feel as if it were tumbling forward, bearing down on its final line with an inexhaustible reserve of syntactical repetition.

  Then, in the stanza’s final line, the syntax changes. We encounter the poem’s first subordinate clause (so that you will let me love), and this shift to hypotaxis enacts the poem’s argument: after being told many times over what to do, we’re told why. Were the stanza to begin with hypotaxis, moving backwards, the accumulation of parallel clauses would feel like a static confirmation of what we know, rather than a strategically pressurized suspension through which the poem’s purpose is revealed.

  Once having been found, however, the purpose needs to get lost. The second stanza of “The Canonization” shifts its syntactical energies, moving from the first stanza’s single imperative to a sequence of one-line interrogatives.

  Alas, alas, who’s injur’d by my love?

  What merchant’s ships have my sighs drowned?

  Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?

  When did my colds a forward spring remove?

  Throughout the poem, these shifts between sentences that alternately confirm or conflict with the lineation, between sentences turning abruptly from one mode or tense to another, make us feel that the poem progresses by a succession of spontaneous choices, as if the poem’s structure were not premeditated but were happening in real time. As a result, when the second stanza shifts from these one-liners to a longer hypotactic sentence, reasserting the poem’s argument—

  Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still

  Litigious men, which quarrels move,

  Though she and I do love

  —the reassertion feels again a discovery, a source of pleasure even after the poem’s argument is grasped.

  Given Donne’s sporadic embrace of parataxis, certain of his stanzas will read as elegantly backwards as they do forwards, the form (driven by the stanza’s meter and rhyme) unchanged but the structure (driven by the syntax coursing through the stanza) different. Revealing as such rearrangements may be, however, they sacrifice Donne’s crucially delayed shifts from parataxis to hypotaxis, shifts that make Donne’s conclusions seem simultaneously inevitable and unprecedented. Just as the drama of Yeats’s “The Tower” depends on a movement from one kind of diction to another, the forward plunge of “The Canonization” depends not simply on what kinds of sentences the poem contains but on the order in which those sentences appear, one kind of syntax giving way to another. As Coleridge famously proposed, poetry is “the best words” (diction) in “the best order” (syntax).

  A poet writes sentences; the sentences appear in the order in which he writes them. How might a poem’s most inevitable plunge be found? Paradoxically, John Koethe actually wrote his 207-line poem “The Constructor” backwards, moving from its final sentence—

  Why do I feel so happy?

  —to its penultimate sent
ence—

  How could this quiet feeling

  Actually exist?

  —and so on, until he wrote finally what became the first sentence of the poem: “They strike me less as actual persons than as abstract / Ghosts of an idea.” The poem might have been perpetuated in the order in which Koethe actually wrote its sentences, but one can sense immediately the attraction of moving backwards: what was originally a governing thesis, a question to be explored (“Why do I feel so happy?”), becomes in the reordering not a stolid given but an unforeseen gift. The simple flatness of the question feels in the final position uncanny, driven into existence by unforeseen forces, just as on a much smaller scale the final two-line sentence of “Western Wind” does.

  One might say that my strategic rewriting of Frost (“My little horse must think it queer / To watch his woods fill up with snow”) is similarly transformative; it sounds a little like John Ashbery, whose elegantly hypotactic sentences provide a syntax of cause and effect while at the same time refusing to provide us with a plausible narrative of cause and effect. But my point is not that syntactical procedures need to be manhandled in order to be interesting. My point is that lyric poems enact infinitely repeatable dramas of surprise through their syntax and that, even more fundamentally, English syntax and diction are themselves surprising. Poetry happens, as Shakespeare puts it, in the “telling” of what is already “told.”

  III

  VOICE

  Let’s say you want to write a poem that by its fourth or fifth syllable sounds urgently spoken, a poem that makes its readers feel almost instantly engaged with an interlocutor, perhaps even making them feel late to the party—that the conversation is well underway. You might begin with an imperative that fills out a single pentameter line, the majority of its syllables ringing changes on a single vowel (God, hold, tongue, love) so that the line feels trippingly spontaneous and yet so tersely epigrammatic that it forestalls argument.

  For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love.

  Or you might offer a charged exclamation, an even punchier string of monosyllables overriding the iambic rhythm, the majority of those syllables sharing no consonant with another (he, stark, mad) so that the mouth is forced to reshape itself with every syllable, the resulting utterance feeling deliberately considered.