Poembuster

Analyses of the masters and their works

Desert Where Frost Is

Saturday, February 28, 2009

During my short stint with Poembusters, we tackled "Desert Places" by Robert Frost. It's one of his better poems, yet I did not even know about it until this Poembusters session.

Indeed, this poem was a big inspiration when I wrote The Many Goodbyes.

Last night the sky dumped a good amount of snow on the ground, and so staying home from work because school is out can have its advantages. I decided to re-read "Desert Places", perhaps subconsciously, because snow is a character in the poem (I had forgotten this).

For anyone who knows Frost, some basic characteristics of his poetry in general is they are nature poems written in Iambic Pentameter, often blank verse. This small poem Iambic (short LONG) Pentameter, though it is hard to tell at first. The poem throws a lot of surprise punches. Let's start with the first verse.

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The is little mystery in this stanza. The beauty in this stanza is the language. There is alliteration(falling fast field), and repetition (falling falling) (fast fast) that combine for a double punch. Frost is gently pounding away his imagery just like snow falls in a big storm. Of course, the rhyming meter helps to control the poem, the feeling he will experience in the following stanzas. The stanza uses a lot of metrical substitutions, but what you need to decide when scanning a poem for meter is what the majority of feet are within the poem as a whole; this helps to identify the substitutions.

"but a FEW WEEDS in STUBble GROWing FAST" does not show the true meter in the line. Neither does "SNOW FALling and NIGHT FALling FAST oh FAST". But both lines end in an Iambic foot.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

What do the woods around the field have? This is the first punch we don't see coming. Whatever "it" is, appears to affect the animals too -- why else would they be smothered in their lairs? Snow can smother, but snow doesn't fall in lairs. But Frost as narrator admits his absent-mindedness at what he is looking at and doesn't see that he isn't an observer. He isn't in the movie theater -- he is in the movie. And with this understanding, we now can understand what the "it" is -- loneliness. The field feels it, the wood feels it, the animals feel it, Frost feels it.

We wait until the last line of the second verse before we get a complete line using Iambic Pentameter: "the LONEliNESS inCLUDES me UNaWARES". This line needs a special punch, and we get it with a perfect Iambic Pentameter line.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

This stanza reveals the agent of the loneliness is the snow itself. The more snow that falls, the more lonely the place will be. And just like a blank expression does not allow anything to pass like a brick wall, the snow is one big blank expression. It reminds me of a famous argument between Van Gogh and Gaughin. They were painting a landscape together, and Van Gogh saw the sky with all its lines and curves and interesting pockets of color shades. Gaughin saw the sky as flat and uninteresting, like a plank or a sheet. And so the snow is more like what Gaughin saw, an expressionless suffocating agent.

But suddenly the poem shifts, and the wide surroundings of field and woods and sky is only a microlevel of the vast world that loneliness envelopes, especially when he acknowledges that loneliness is a frightening thing, and since it exists everywhere, nowhere is safe from it. And yet, Frost would rather be scared where he lives and knows, then be out there in the unfamiliar ground of the universe along with the other lonely objects and scared still.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Labels: Desert Places, Frost

So Much Depends Upon

Thursday, February 12, 2009

I used to hate poetry. I never understood it when I read it, and so I never read it. And if I can't understand it when I read it, especially by the supposed masters, why write it?

Then I took a Modernism class in college, when one homework assignment, and the class session that followed, changed my life. It was here that I was introduced to the pure beauty of poetry, with a poem consisting of a single sentence. I have read many poems consisting of one sentence; the beauty of "The Red Wheelbarrow" written by William Carlos Williams, a minimalist poet, is in the first stanza.

So much depends
upon

The rest of the poem consists of pure imagery. Each stanza has two short lines consisting of one big image, but each line consists of a smaller image. The restof the poem follows.

...the red/wheelbarrow//glazed in rain/water//beside the white/chickens.

The professor who taught my class has a pretty unique style. At the beginning of class he would spend five or ten minutes at the board and "lecture" about the class the day before, then sit down and was silent for the entire rest of the class; indeed, the class ran the class.

To break the awkward silence that always seemed to occur after the professor sat down, I mentioned this poem. What made this a poem? And what is up with that first stanza?

I really do not have a lot to say about this poem, other than it took up an entire class time of conversation for such a small ditty. But the class in its entirety seemed to agree on two items of critique:

The first stanza makes the poem.
The other stanzas completes the poem.

Except for the first stanza, the poem is all imagery. Simple imagery. Nothing fancy. But words are still selected with care, such as "glazed". The first stanza makes the poem bigger than itself. "So much depends/upon..." Williams says everything about his subject, without revealing anything. The poem isn't about the red wheelbarrow, it is about everything it stands for.

Labels: Red Wheelbarrow, Williams

The Grave Nettle

Sunday, February 08, 2009

I do not know much about A.E. Housman's poetry, but in terms of style it appears poems like the one in this blog is typical. I read this little poem in a book by Randall Jarrell. I only remember bits and pieces of what Jarrell had to say about this little ditty, but the poem has a big punch for its size.

It consists of two simple verses. I will break them down individually.

It nods and curtseys and recovers
When the wind blows above
The nettle on the graves of lovers
That hanged themselves for love.

Okay, so this is a nature poem. The first line provides the action, but the subject is not known. But it seems we must be talking about an object ("it"), so the imagery is fabulous. What else other than people nods and curtseys?

Of course, the second line gives us an idea. A plant of some kind, most likely. But it isn't just any plant. It isn't just any flower. It is a nettle. And the nettle is on graves. Another striking image, but it doesn't even stop there. The graves are of lovers. A dancing flower on lover's graves. It sounds at once cliche and original at the same time, due to the way it was all written down and presented.

The nettle nods, the wind blows over
The man he does not move
The lover of the grave, the lover
That hanged himself for love.

Wait...what?

Okay, so the poet now presents his mastery. The poem is not a nature poem after all. The poem is not about the flower, it is about the people lying under the graves, calling special attention to one of them.

It is a love poem. But the man is not just a lover, he is a lover of the graves. He is a romantic, yes, but of the atypical kind. As Jarrell pointed out, he didn't hang himself because he loved someone in the grave and wanted to be with them, he hanged himself because he loved the grave itself. It gives a kind of Harold and Maude romanticism to it. This poem isn't cliche at all, and it is incredibly rewarding to discover this.

I also want to bring attention to the rhyme for a second.

In the first stanza, when everything seems so neat and tidy, we have a neat and tidy rhyme: above, love, lovers, love. It is all in the "of" variety. But then in the second verse, when the poem comes into being and we are taken by surprise, the rhyme to the ear is off, though to the page is the same: over, move, lover, love.

Finally, the poem is thick with consonance. The Ns, Ms, Cs, and Ls all came together for a party. Nettle nods, man not move, Curtseys recovers, lover love. And don't forget about internal rhymes such as graves/hanged.

The poem makes you want to read more A.E. Housman, doesn't it?

Labels: grave, Housman, love, nettle

Reconciliation for Whitman

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Here we are as a country, about to swear in the first black President of the United States. The first non-white President too, but of course the fact that he is black brings a huge significance in the history of the country. Just watch Jesse Jackson on election night, or listen to the black man who while being interviewed said "The dream has come, the dream is real."

That Obama is also non-white is significant in the present time as well. (My wife, who is half White and half Asian Indian, affectionately calls Obama a half-breed, and talks about him as one of "us"! But I digress...) We are in an intangible and yet very real war with Islamic extremists, and that is why his being non-white is so important right now; Whitman lived in a war as well, and although slavery was not officially a reason to fight against our own countrymen, no one can deny the importance of the issue during that time.

Obama was elected as a uniter of our own country, and within this context, a forgiver as well.

Thus, I can think of no better tribute to the country, the new President, and the poets, than to analyze Whitman's "Reconciliation".

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its acts of carnage must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin -- I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was God. God also begins this poem, and lives in the beautiful, vast sky. God is beautiful, and is also a reflection of what lies beneath, even if it is war. But lines two and three is telling us that war and everything evil that comes with it must be forgotten ("utterly lost") and forgiven ("softly washed again, and ever again"), including the cold slow lonely nights. The world is not just physically soiled of dead bodies, it is emotionally soiled. People are mad, angry, tired, beaten, exhausted.

But then the poem turns, and narrows the war to two men, the killer and the killed. The killer looks at the dead man's face and remembers that this is war, only war; remove war and you have two normal loving countrymen. This enemy is only an ideological enemy, not a personal one (and if he were, would it matter?). He forgives the man he fought -- and loves him too.

This poem is a poem of love and hope, not hate and despair; it is written by the father of American poetry, who loved humanity in all its faults. I have a feeling this love for humanity is not lost on the 44th President of the United States.

Labels: Reconciliation, Whitman

Pound Po City of Choan

Sunday, January 11, 2009

I am not a fan of Ezra Pound, at least not yet. His elusiveness is something I haven't "gotten". However, his translations are something else entirely. "City of Choan" is such a poem. But to understand his genius here, you have to compare him to other translators of the same original poem. I have also read "On Climbing in Nan-King to the Terrace of Pheonixes" by W.H. Bynner and "Climbing Pheonix Terrace at Chin-Ling", both are perfectly good further translations of the original poem by Li Po.

Briefly, Li Po (Li Bai) was a poet of the highest degree in ancient China. He served under the emperor before resigning his post and becoming a wanderer. This poem was written after a kind of homecoming of sorts. One night while drunk, he saw the moon's reflection in a pond, bent down to embrace it, and drowned.

I do not know a lot about Ezra Pound, but I can say he understood poetry is a language of showing. He starts the poem out with a dramatic display of opposites, from the first line to the second.

"The phoenix are at play on their terrace./The phoenix are gone,..."

Pheonix are at first plentiful and playful, and the next thing we know, what happened?

Compare these lines with Bynner's:

"Pheonixes that played here once, so that the place was named for them,/have abandoned it now..."

It reads like prose, and it's because of the title that we know where "here" is. (This is a perfectly fine and legal poetric technique, but again, I am reading prose, aren't I?)

Again, compare the second half of the second line:

"...the river flows on alone" versus "to this desolate river". A desolate river is likeable and very poetic, but I can "see" a river flowing on alone. And why is it "alone"? Because the pheonix are gone. Why is the river desolate? Good question.

Pounds third, fourth, and fifth lines are very interesting to read and take in:

"Flowers and grass/Cover over the dark path/where lay the dynastic house of the Go." (The fifth line is indented.)

"Flowers and grass" is on one short line by itself so that we can see them and not get distracted by whatever comes next. The longer fifth line provides the feeling of climbing along a path. Lee writes, all on one line, "Flourishing flowers of Wu Palace are buried beneath dark trails." There are several things I can say about this line, but critiquing the comparison poems is beyond the scope of my efforts here; I will mention that I like the flourishing flowers imagery, but I don't believe it fits within this poem.

However, the next two lines close the stanza and echo the the last three:

The brights cloths and bright caps of Shin Are now the base of old hills.

In the first line of the next stanza we see the cloths and caps by themselves without any distractions, and in the second he puts them into context for us -- they blanket the bottom of the hills, almost like litter or trash -- remains of a populated place.

And the second stanza starts off with mountains, but what about the mountains?

"Like this green horizon halving Three Peaks" (Bynner)
"The three-peaked mountain half visible under the blue sky," (Lee)

Both these lines provide a snapshot, that is out of focus at best. How does a horizon halve three peaks? What part of the mountains are visible (I mean after all, the sky is blue)? You still don't know what to make of it after reading the lines. Oh wait, maybe Pound can give us some answers.

"The three mountains fall through the far heaven"

Ah, yes. Action (mountains falling) and we now have video in perfect focus.

And what about the island?

"The Isle of White Herron/splits the two streams apart." (Pound)
This is a lot cleaner and easier to see than:
"The two-forked stream separated by White-egret Isle" (Lee).

"A cloud has arisen between the Light Heaven and me" (Bynner) -- too fancy
"It's always the clouds that block the sun" (Lee) -- okay, but a little boring
"Now the high clouds cover the sun" (Pound) -- the clouds are "high" and they "cover" the sun, plain like Lee, but with more imagery so we can see it.

But first, let's read how the other poets end their works. Why would I want a cloud "to hide his city from my melancholy heart" (Bynner) or know that "I do not see Ch'ang -an and I grieve"? I know intellectually about these things (grieving, melancholy), but I want it to be immediate, and tangible.

"And I can not see Chan afar/and I am sad."

Labels: Chinese Poet, City of Choan, Li Po, Pound

Shell for Adair

Sunday, January 04, 2009

Virginia Hamilton Adair wrote poetry all her life, and published in a few journals early in her career, but did not publish again until her first book of poetry at the age of eighty-three, called Ants on the Melon.

"The Shell" epitomizes Adair's writing style like few of her poems do. Adair enjoyed rhyme schemes, but refused to stick to them for the sole purpose of the rhyme's formality; however, she also refused to drift too far off from the scheme in question.

The end words in "The Shell" are as follows:

stanza one: land, sea, sand, moss
stanza two: toss, swell, gloss, shell
stanza three: fault, dispair, salt, sea
stanza four: air, hand, sand, rare

As you can see, and if you take each stanza separately, the rhyme schemes are:

stanza one: abax
stanza two: abab
stanza three: abax
stanza four: abba

One can see where Adair employed a general rhyme, but there is no pattern. The first and third stanzas are alike, but the second and fourth are not. One expects the same rhyme pattern in each quatrain of a poem, or alternating patterns at best. Neither is true here, but she refuses to give up on the rhyme; it helps control the poem.

If you look at the rhyme scheme in the poem as a whole however, it becomes far more textured and interesting, unpatterned and yet very connected:

abaccdcdefebfggf

One reads the poem with such familiarity of sounds the broken scheme is completely lost; indeed, the pattern as a whole is so rich and powerful the poem both demands its attention and never calls attention to it.

However, Adair isn't done. She uses internal rhymes, word repitition, and other techniques within the lines themselves, it makes the reader think Adair was drunk with sounds. I count twenty words in the poem that drip with an "l" sound, not all alliteration.

But the alliteration in the first stanza alone must be brought to attention -- living, land, land, lying, littered, [c]lotted.

Stanza One:
On the desolate border between the living land
and the land entombed under the sea
the littered and soaking sand
strewn with wrecked wood and clotted moss

She alliterates throughout her poem (eg. "strangely spiraled" in stanza two) but there are other nuggets, such as her word repetition of toss/toss that begins stanza two:

which the waves continually toss,
toss, and then regather into the foam and swell

Notice we have gone a full stanza and a half without knowing fully what she is referring to. One sentence spans two stanzas, and the subject and verb of the sentence does not come until line three of the third stanza, the direct object comes at the end of the stanza:

I saw, shapely and thin, with delicate gloss
and strangely spiraled, a wan shell.

It reminds me of some languages where the sentence structure is something other than subject-->verb-->direct object, such as Hindi, and yet, the poem is not awkward to the English-speaking ear, it is suspenseful.

And so now that we know what the poet is speaking about, it is time to zero in on the subject with vivid description in stanza three:

A shell delicate and turned without fault

(notice the shell//a shell word repetition!)

pale, icy, thin as dispair
washed in the dead bitterness of salt

and here comes an internal rhyme, just like the second "toss" adds another internal rhyme to "gloss" in the previous stanza, and ties the stanza with stanza four:

It was born in the sea//torn from the sea into the air

The wan shell is not a dull subject, either. It is not only "strangely spiraled", not only "delicate and turned without fault/pale, icy, thin as dispair", but the final three lines of the poem ends with the epiphany that it is a superior object:

Some other may lift it from the sand;
I do not dare. Never have these hot hands
held a substance so desolate and so rare.

So, with all this going on, you may want to watch -- or listen -- to me recite this poem. The audio is off by a second or so, so you may prefer to close your eyes and listen. I don't do anything dramatic with my facial expressions anyway. There is a reason why I don't read my poetry at poetry readings!

Labels: Adair, The Shell

Words of Dickinson

Sunday, December 28, 2008

I found the words to every thought
I ever had -- but One --
And that -- defies me --
As a Hand did try to chalk the Sun

To Races -- nurtured in the Dark --
How would your own -- begin?
Can Blaze be shown in Cochineal --
Or Noon -- in Mazarin?

While there is a lot going on in this very short poem that requires a line-by-line analysis to understand it, I can't say I have succeeded in completely getting it; still, I will offer my best pass at it.

It seems to me this poem is about the art of writing poetry. It is an ars poetica piece. But there is corruption in this poem as well, corruption by editors trying to make sense of it. Some editors attempt to create this poem:

I found the phrase to every thought
I ever had, but one;
And that defies me,--as a hand
Did try to chalk the sun

To races nurtured in the dark;--
How would your own begin?
Can blaze be done in cochineal,
Or noon in mazarin?

Dickinson used hyphens as a standard for punctuation, and regularly capitalized nouns. These preferences have divided editors between those who see the value in the original and those who feel the poems are great but can use an editor's hand in the final for better understanding.

Unfortunately, the latter group has failed in this particular piece completely.

Let's start with the first line - "words" alliterates with "one" in the second line, but editors have chosen to use "phrase" because several words = phrase and "phrase" alliterates more closely with "found"; however, "words" does not necessarily equal a group of words that make up one phrase. It could be several words independent of each other. Furthermore, there is the negative singular -- "but one" -- one word or one phrase? Singular "word" is first of all capitalized. This could be the result of capitalizing nouns, and so changing it to lower-case makes sense. After all, what "word" is capitalized? I'll tell you: "In the beginning was the Word..." Is what she didn't find God? So now we have a dilemma: is this "word" supposed to be capitalized or not? Is God defying her, or her art?

The hand that chalks keeps the meaning ambiguous. "To chalk" is "to sketch". This hand could be God's hand as S/He creates the universe in seven days, but it could also be the artist's hand, trying to sketch the sun. And if it is the artist, is the artist sketching the sun on paper? Maybe; I don't think so. Perhaps it is the artist's hand trying to color in a star billions of miles away using nothing but chalk and an appendage only a couple feet long. It won't work. The attempt is defied by the impossibility. Chalking here may mean trying to physically shade in the brightness of light coming from the closest star.

And why would she try to do this? The first line of the second stanza provides the answer: "races" could be "games where people run", but I think it is a race of humankind. What race is nurtured in the dark -- artists are. Writers and visual artists stereotypically work at night, an stereotypes exist because there is an element of truth to them.

But back to the first stanza for a moment. Traditional ballads worked in iambic feet: four feet in the first and third line and three in the second and fourth line of each stanza. Dickinson knew this -- she was a master of the ballad -- and yet she chose to ignore this rule. This stanza goes four-three-three-four not four-three-four-three. Why? Because she wanted to put the "defies" in a line all on its own for extra emphasis, and she didn't want to break up the next thought, so she put the hand on the same line as the chalk for a fluid complete idea on one line. Yet editors in keeping with the traditional have changed this, and I think it a poor choice.

Back to the second stanza. She is asking for some answers from fellow poets and artist to help her in her own art. How do you begin...what? To be successful? Probably not. How do you begin when all you have is a blank page? Maybe. But she is also asking visual artists too. Blaze equals fire. What color is fire? Yellow and red. Cochineal is a red dye originally made from crushing female Cochineal insects -- which are bright red in color. Now she is asking rhetorical questions. It is the last question which baffles me most. Mazarin is nowhere to be found in any dictionary I have seen. Nothing on the Internet either. Is the “M” supposed to be capitalized or more of Dickinson’s eccentricity? As it turns out, the only Mazarin I can find is a famous French Cardinal who lived in Rome and acted as an ambassador. Jules Mazarin was a politician and died pretty wealthy. Noon not only means midday but "highest point", or "zenith". Noon was also the hour of midday prayers (originally three o'clock and only became twelve o'clock later). So noon could be a play on the zenith of the day, and the zenith of Mazarin's long career; she may be inserting another religious reference here.

So is this a poem about religion or a poem about poetry? Both. For Dickinson, her poetry was her religion.

Postscript

I have since learned that Mazarin may be a kind of indigo. A Mazarine Blue (with an "e"), is a butterfly of an indigo color. And instructions for making Indigo from about 100 years before Dickinson, the directions state: "beat briskly until liquor is of a Mazarin color".

This revelation works well with the "artist" and the "cochineal" imagery, and makes more sense within the context of the stanza. Admittedly, it weakens the religious aspect of the poem, however slightly. The way I see it, the second stanza is made a bit stronger, and the religious context is still alive in the first stanza. Looking at Mazarin as a color simply means the poet didn't close the poem with the same imagery she began it with. Two distinct sets of imageries broken up by a clean stanza break.

Labels: Dickinson, I found the words to every thought