Lesson in Form: Monorhyme

Okay, this is an easy one. To borrow a joke from the Simpsons, monorhyme is made up of two Greek roots, mono meaning one, and rhyme meaning rhyme. This pattern is (in my experience) best used for light verse, in which it becomes a fun exercise to see just how far the poet can take it. Here's my favorite example, a poem by Dick Davis:

"Monorhyme for the Shower"

Lifting her arms to soap her hair
Her pretty breasts respond--and there
The movement of that buoyant pair
Is like a spell to make me swear
Twenty odd years have turned to air;
Now she's the girl I didn't dare
Approach, ask our, much less declare
My love to, mired in young despair.

Childbearing, rows, domestic care--
All the prosaic wear and tear
That constitute the life we share--
Slip from her beautiful and bare
Bright body as, made half aware
Of my quick surreptitious stare,
She wrings the water from her hair
And turning smiles to see me there.

A Forgotten Romantic

John Clare is one of those neglected nineteenth-century writers, like Melville and Hopkins, whose work was revived in the early twentieth century and became a sort of proto-modernist. Or, at least his later work was. During his lifetime, he achieved brief but intense stardom as a peasant-poet, a new Robert Burns, but after his fifteen minutes were over he went mad and spent the rest of his life is what was probably the most humane mental asylum in Victorian Britain. Rather than being beaten and locked in a windowless cell, he was allowed to walk in the gardens and was encouraged to continue writing poetry. This later poetry was not published until 1920, to the acclaim of many modernist writers. The following poem resonates particularly strongly with Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

"Song"

I peeled bits o' straws and I got switches too
From the grey peeling willow as idlers do,
And I switched at the flies as I sat all alone
Till my flesh, blood, and marrow wasted to dry bone.
My illness was love, though I knew not the smart,
But the beauty o' love was the blood o' my heart.

Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude
And flew to the silence of sweet solitude,
Where the flower in green darkness buds, blossoms, and fades,
Unseen of a' shepherds and flower-loving maids.
The hermit bees find them but once and away;
There I'll bury alive and in silence decay.

I looked on the eyes o' fair woman too long,
Till silence and shame stole the use o' my tongue;
When I tried to speak to her I'd nothing to say,
So I turned myself round, and she wandered away.
When she got too far off--why, I'd something to tell,
So I sent sighs behind her and talked to mysel'.

Willow switches I broke, and I peeled bits o' straws,
Ever lonely in crowds, in nature's own laws--
My ballroom the pasture, my music the bees,
My drink was the fountain, my church the tall trees.
Who ever would love or be tied to a wife
When it makes a man mad a' the days o' his life?

1842-64

More Heidegger, More Scots

The professor teaching the critical theory seminar I'm in this semester also specializes in Scottish literature, and so we've read a few Scottish poems as part of our class discussions of Heidegger and related philosophy. This poem, by John Burnside, came up early in the semester in our lectures on Heidegger's Being and Time and "What is Metaphysics?" The central concept here is that of "worlding," the way that the human, or in Heidegger's terminology, Dasein, being-there, creates the "world" through interaction with "earth," and the possibility of a post-humanist understanding of existence. At least, that's what I think it comes down to.

"Agoraphobia"

My whole world is all you refuse:
a black light, angelic and cold,
on the path to the orchard,
fox-runs and clouded lanes and the glitter of webbing,
little owls snagged in the fruit nets
ourt by the wire

and the sense of another life, that persists
when I go our into the yard
and the cattle surround me, obstinate and dumb.
All afternoon, I've worked at the edge of your vision,
mending fences, marking out our bounds.
Now it is dusk, I turn back to the house

and catch you, like the pale Eurydice
of children's classics, venturing a glance
at nothing, at this washed infinity
of birchwoods and sky, and the wet streets leading away
to all you forget: the otherworld, lucid and cold
with floodlights and passing trains and the noise of traffic,
and nothing like the map you sometimes
study, for its empty bridlepaths,
its hill-tracks and lanes, and the roads winding down to a coast
of narrow harbours, lit against the sea.

[~1980?]

Irish Poetry, a Couple Days Late

Towards the end of his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce includes a poem by his protagonist/alter-ego Stephen Dedalus. At this point, young Stephen is preparing to leave Ireland behind, symbolically rejecting any identity his homeland could provide him. Though not particularly known for his poetry, I have to say that Joyce really could have done more in that genre had he wished to.

An untitled villanelle

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim,
Tell no more of enchanted days.

And still you hold our longing gaze
With languorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

1914

Where there's a Will . . . (Sorry)

My friend Lexy is currently at work on a thesis involving linguistic rape in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus which takes some inspiration from her reading of the Bard's sonnet 135. I don't know all the details, but she will present a version of the paper this Saturday at the BYU Literature conference. In the meantime, here's the poem:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus.
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine to make thy large Will more.
Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill;
Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

1609

P.S., I will also be presenting at that conference on Wordsworth's poem "Michael," which is far to long for me to type into a blog post.

Heidegger, de Man, Singer

This semester, I'm taking a course in critical theory centering on the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the responses to his work, roughly since 1980. Heidegger writes extensively on language, interpretation, presence, and above all, Being. Paul de Man, one of the most influential theorists generally considered part of "post-structuralism," deals with many of these same topics, but in a much different way. My midterm in the class involved reading the following poem by the Scottish writer Burns Singer with these two philosophers in mind. But you don't have to go in to all that to appreciate it.

"A Sort of Language"

Who, when night nears, would answer for the patterns
Words will take on? emerging huge, far, shiny,
What unfrequented systems? Or like clouds
Unseen and hiding brightness, bringing rain,
Progressions that the wind drives on, drives after,
Who will say? I who have seen, seen many,
Imagining I scattered them abroad,
Starlight for Calvary and the immense equations
That drew to unity two who knew not either,
As to a hill at midnight, I have seen words,
Seen them with thanks too, shivering, become
Fragile and useless, pale as the steel sparks
Tramcars make waifs of when they round a corner.

[~1950?]

Quick update

Not much time to comment tonight, so I'll let this poem speak for itself. Enjoy.

Wallace Stevens - "Emperor of Ice Cream"

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

1923

Lesson in Form: the Pantoum

The pantoum, a little-used poetic form, is a sort of hybrid of terza rima and a villanelle. The poem is made up of a series of quatrains in which the second and fourth line of one stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next. The final stanza elaborates on this, taking the first and third lines of the first stanza as its fourth and second lines. The effect can be a distinctly circular feel, with slight changes in meaning taking place within overwhelming continuity and repetition. Seasonal change and the passage of time are therefore particularly common subjects for pantoums, as in this poem by Greg Williamson.

"New Year's: A Short Pantoum"

The sunlight was falling. A part
Played out in the deep snow.
We were all there. At the start
We knew how the year would go,

Played out in the deep snow.
The sunlight was falling apart.
We knew how the year would go.
We were all there at the start.

2001

Forgiving William Carlos Williams

Until my freshman year at Willamette University, the only poem I'd read by William Carlos Williams was "The Red Wheelbarrow." Now it may just be the way it had been forced upon me in high school, but I hate the poem, and for a long time I hated the man who'd created it. It simply struck me as overly pretentious in its poetics. "Look at how I dispense with rhyme, meter, and any aspirations of Romantic transcendence" the poem gloats. "Isn't that just thoroughly modern?"

As a student, my job was to notice how modern the poem was.

Then I read the following poem and all was forgiven. It's a wonderful dismantling of poems praising female beauty, going back to the Petrarchan sonneteers (there's your dash of literary history for the day). I hope you enjoy it, and that you, too, can learn to see others with fresh eyes (or something like that).

"Portrait of a Lady"

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze--or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
--as if that answered
anything. Ah, yes--below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore--
Which shore?--
the sand clings to my lips--
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.

1920