Summer
1 of 2008
English
140 at 1 pm
Prof.
Introduction
to Poetry
ASSIGNMENT
I
Write
an essay of around 1000 words in which you discuss the emotional impact of
meter and rhythm in a poem of your choice.
Theoretically, you can select any poem in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, but, unless you feel you have a genuine
gift for picking out poems, I would recommend your consideration of the
following six:
William
Shakespeare: Sonnet 60 (handout)
William
Blake: "The
Gerard
Manley Hopkins: "God's Grandeur"
Robert
Frost: "Acquainted with the Night" (handout)
William
Carlos Williams: "The Dance" (handout)
Stephen
Spender: "Express" (handout)
You
may not use any of the poems which we analyzed for meter and rhythm in
class or which are discussed in your textbooks.
My suggestions are all relatively short poems in which meter plays a
relatively strongly marked part.
This
assignment handout will later include a scansion of
George Herbert's "The Collar" and a sample essay on that poem. Please note the following features of that
essay: (1) It has a title. (2) It has an introductory paragraph which
explains what the main body of the essay is going to be all about. (3) It does not, repeat, not, immediately
start off discussing prosody. Instead it
tries to explain, first in general and then in more specific terms, just what
Herbert was trying to do in "The Collar." In fact, more of the essay is devoted to
explicating the poem than to analyzing the prosody. (4) Then the essay tries to
relate the shifting moods of "The Collar" to the metrical patterns
found in the poem. There is an attempt
to explain how the rhythms reinforce the sense of the poem. (5) There is a concluding paragraph that sums
up what has been done.
Now
go thou and do likewise.
Papers
may be turned in by email (doc or rtf file, please). The scansion upon which your reasoning is
based should be included, though the paper should if possible be free-standing:
you should quote the poem as necessary within the paper. Use the handout for a model of how to go
about this. Research is not necessary,
but if you use the library or your own reference books, use footnotes as you
have already learned to do to document your borrowings. Again, use the handout as a model for
footnote form. Papers are tentatively due
on Monday, June 9, 2008 [assuming that we make sufficient progress in class].
George Herbert: The Collar
_ / _ / _ / / /
I struck the board and cried: No more!
/ _ _ /
I will abroad!
/ _ _ / _ / _ /
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
\ / _ / _ / / _ _ /
My lines and life are free, free as the road,
/ _ _ / _ / _ /
Loose as the wind, as large as store. [5]
/ _ _ / _ /
Shall I be still in suit?
/ _ _ / _ \ _ /
Have I no harvest but a thorn
_ / _ / _ / _ /
To let me blood, and not restore
_ _ _ / _ / _ /
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
/ _ _ /
Sure there was wine[10]
_ / _ / _ / _ _ _ /
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
_ / _ / _ / _
Before my tears did drown it.
_ _ / \ _ / _ _
Is the year only lost to me?
/ _ _ / _ / _
Have I no bays to crown it?
\ / _ \ / _ / / / _
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
/ / _
All wasted?
\ / _ / / _ / /
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
_ / \ /
And thou hast hands.
_ / _ / _ / _ /
Recover all thy sighblown age
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage,
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
/ / _ _ _ / _ /
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
_ / _ /
And be thy law, [25]
_ / _ / _ / \ /
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
_ / \ /
Away! take heed;
/ _ _ /
I will abroad;
/ _ _ / / _ / _ _ /
Call in thy death's head there; tie up thy fears
/ _ _ /
He that forbears [30]
_ / _ / _ /
To suit and serve his need,
_ / _ /
Deserves his load.
_ \ _ / _ / / / _ /
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
_ / _ _ /
At every word,
_ / _ / \ / _ /
Methought I heard one calling, Child! [35]
_ / _ / \ /
And I replied, My Lord.
[Key: _=slack; /=full stress \=semi-stress ]
RHYTHM AND METER IN "THE COLLAR"
In his "Essay on Criticism," the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope suggests that mere sweetness is not the rhymer's job, that the task of the rhythms of poetry is to reinforce the poet's meaning: "'Tis not enough no harshness give offense,/ The sound must seem an echo to the sense." An excellent example of sound echoing sense can be seen in George Herbert's dramatic poem, "The Collar," where large-scale shifts in poetic rhythms are used
to "echo" the speaker's rebellion and reconciliation.
"The Collar" is not an easy poem, partly because the dramatic situation that gives it shape is not explained to us at the outset, and we are forced to deduce it from the speaker's angry outburst. Not until the sixth line, "Shall I be still in suit?" is it clear that the table on which the speaker slams his fist is not his own but that of a greater man, a noble lord, perhaps, with whom the speaker is living as a guest, and to whom he is looking for favors, promotion, independence and its means. From here on it is apparent that the speaker has somehow grown impatient about his dependent situation; he feels that he may be wasting his time hanging about the great man's table. In "the year" he has spent there he has felt only frustration: no "bays" [laurel wreaths symbolic of literary or military triumph] have come his way, no "garlands gay" either, emblems of a pleasurable and profitable marriage. So what is the speaker hanging around for? Where are the rewards of his dutiful, self-denying behavior?
It is from this frustration that the outburst derives its force. The speaker resolves to free himself of his unrewarded service, and for the while we provisionally sympathize with him. But around line 17 the tone shifts, as the
speaker resolves to throw off not only his dependence, but all morality as well. There are good things about, he says, and he has hands to pick them up with. Pleasure can be his if he will only jettison the knowledge of right and wrong ["thy cold dispute/ Of what is fit, and not"]. Moral restraint he characterizes as an illusionary "rope of sands" created by "petty thoughts" which he could accept only by willfully obscuring from himself the real truth about the world ["While thou didst wink and wouldst not see"]. From line 27 he whips himself into a further frenzy, bidding himself "tie up" his fears about the life to come, and to "suit and serve" nothing higher than his own needs and desires. To do otherwise is to be a base pack animal who "deserves his load."
The final turn in the poem comes in the last quatrain, which shifts out of the present into the past tense. From outside that point of view that had produced the enraged rejection of service and morality, the speaker tells us that as he "raved and grew more fierce and wild/ At every word," he hears his master's voice calling "'Child'"--to which he responds--as humbly and dutifully as if the outburst had never occurred--"'My Lord.'"
It is probably not until the last two italicized words that we realize that Herbert has not been portraying the temporary rebellion of an impoverished and dependent scholar against the nobleman at whose table he has eaten, but rather a far more universal situation. The scholar/nobleman relation is only a metaphor for that of man with God, at whose "board" all men sit, and whose rewards come slowly, perhaps not in this life at all. It is God's fatherly voice that brings the rebel back to his obedience, not by force but by consciousness of His love. This metaphor, embedded in the dramatic situation, is one that would come naturally to Herbert, whose brother Edward was Baron Herbert of Cherbury, whose brother Henry was a court official to three British monarchs--but who was himself the relatively humble rector of Bremerton parish, near Salisbury, at the time he wrote this poem.1
The meter of "The Collar" is established in the first line as iambic, but the line lengths vary unpredictably among two, three, four, and five feet, and the meter is no sooner established in the first six words than Herbert begins to throw in rhythmic variants, spondees and trochees primarily, so that the iambic meter is only intermittently heard. The result is a rhetorical performance that gathers momentum at the outset, speeds up through the enjambed lines in the passage between lines 7 and 12, then slows again for the impassioned first climax at "All wasted?"
Within that first sequence, Herbert establishes a signature tune, one might call it, for the speaker's rebellion. This is a trochee-iamb pair [/- -/], first heard in "I will abroad," and repeated again and again, in the first two feet on line three, the last two of line four, the first two of lines five, six, seven and nine. The rollicking beat of DUM-dee-dee-DUM, heard most strongly in "free as the road/ Loose as the wind," fades out for a while after line ten, as an acceleration begins, marked by the enjambed lines and the insertion of pyrrhic feet and dactyls, whose extra unstressed syllables force the reader to pick up the pace. Then, at line 15, a new "signature tune" is played, emblematic of the agony of frustration: //-, which we hear in "no flowers," "no garlands," "all blasted," "all wasted."
With the turn in line 17, the meter shifts back to iambic, varied primarily by ominous spondees, as the speaker coldly considers his new amoral philosophy of life. Then, at "Away! take heed," as the speaker prepares to put his philosophy into practice, we hear again the trochee-iamb DUM-dee-dee-DUM of rebellion in line 28, twice in line 29, and again in line 30. And the final sentence in this section, the speaker's contemptuous rejection of his former servile self, forces us to read the three lines as one, riding over the comma apparently end-stopping line 31 even as the speaker prepares to ride over all ethical restraint.
In the last quatrain, quiet returns with a solid iambic rhythm, just as the speaker returns to his master. And while the irregularity of the line lengths apparently continues as before, the quatrain's two clauses in 5 + 2 iambs, then 4 + 3, can be seen to form in the reading a regular heptameter couplet, a pattern that is associated primarily with the ballad, but also with the settings in English of the book of Psalms. So as the speaker returns to his lord--his God--he returns in the familiar metrical pattern of the Anglican hymnbook.
These are perhaps only a few of the techniques Herbert uses to give his dramatic poem genuine drama in the voice of its readers. By using rhythmic motifs, by accelerating and slowing the pace as the speaker's feelings shift, Herbert is able to dramatize, rather than merely describe, the way in which the speaker's collar chafes him to rebellion, then settles more comfortably around his neck.
1Albert Baugh, et al., A Literary History of
William Shakespeare:
SONNET 60
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallel in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
Stephen Spender:
EXPRESS
After the first powerful plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.
Without bowing and with restrained unconcern
She passes the houses which humbly crown outside,
The gasworks, and at last the heavy page
Of death, printed by gravestones in the cemetery.
Beyond the town, there lies the open country
Where, gathering speed, she acquires mystery,
The luminous self-possession of ships on ocean.
It is now she begins to sing--at first quite low
Then loud, and at last with a jazzy madness--
The song of her whistle screaming at curves,
Of deafening tunnels, brakes, innumerable bolts.
And always light, aerial, underneath,
Retreats the elate meter of her wheels.
Steaming through metal landscapes on her lines,
She plunges new eras of white happiness,
Where speed throws up strange shapes, broad curves
And parallels clean like trajectories from guns.
At last, further than
Beyond the crest of the world, she reaches night
Where only a low stream-line brightness
Of phosphorus on the tossing hills is light.
Ah, like a comet through flame, she moves entranced,
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.
Robert Frost:
ACQUAINTED WITH THE
NIGHT
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain--and back in rain.
I have out-walked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.