WORD WEAVERS

Robert K. Strong, Jr.

Last year I was mugged by a poem. That statement may sound extreme, but consider the circumstances. It was hiding in the middle of a financial newspaper—the literary equivalent of a dark alley—and caught me unprepared for a poetic experience. When I turned the page, it seized my eyes, demanded my attention, and poured its syllables into my brain.

It was a pleasant experience, the more so when I read the poem aloud. I loved poetry in my student days. I enjoyed the play and tingle of poetic speech, from Chaucer through X.J. Kennedy. But I didn’t keep up with American poetry, and in recent years I have found less pleasure in poems I read in New Yorker magazine. Many of the images and combinations of words are striking, but I do not respond to them. Instead, I have returned over the years to my old favorites: Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yeats, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and others.

Why, I wondered, does this poem, my assailant, appeal to me more than other contemporary poetry? This question prompted me to dig deeper into poetry than I have in many years. My paper tonight is the result of that exploratory project.

I begin with the poem that took me by surprise last year. It is titled “LOGO” and was written by a young English poet named Richard Osmond.[i]

LOGO

by Richard Osmond

St. Edmund’s bloodshot bell-clap, Jack

o’ the clock, Jack smite-the-clock, Southwold

Jack, tell the hours in axe-song,

garbed in rolled-iron

echo, speak with raised right arm.

Blyth Jack, tide-knight, I’ve seen the ebb,

face of saints

scratched to the grain, the anglian fleece

pitched spraywards – Dunwich and its woolgold

gone to the cod,

Suffolk turned

nuclear. In the fruit-light

of stained glass I

sing all this and silver plate

Southwold in a hammerstruck dome,

this town, my untimed first person,

smelted to ingots.

There is an appealing energy in these words, but they confront the reader with a puzzle: what do the words mean? The speaker in the poem is Southwold Jack, a 15th century mechanical bell-clap carved from oak in the figure of a soldier. He stands on a ledge in the wall of St. Edmund’s Church in Southwold, England on the coast of Suffolk. He wears armor and holds a sword in his left hand and a bronze battle-axe in his right. He was originally connected to a clock so he would “tell the hours” at regular intervals. His axe rises and falls to strike a large iron bell hanging in front of him. His bloodshot eyes are wide open and alert for danger. As he strikes the bell his head turns, and he scans the horizon.

In a few lines, Southwold Jack tells the history of Southwold’s decline from a wealthy 15th-century wool town to a poor fishing village; how the faces of saints on beautiful wood-panel paintings in St. Edmund’s Church were scratched away, literally defaced, by Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers; how the neighboring seaside town of Dunwich was washed away by the angry North Sea; and how Southwold, now a fashionable beach resort for wealthy Londoners, is threatened by the presence of two nuclear power plants visible down the coast. I interpret the poem’s last two lines, “this town…smelted to ingots,” as Southwold Jack’s vision of a nuclear catastrophe.

The historical facts are so compressed in the poem that when first read they are little more than incomplete images. Only “Suffolk turned nuclear” stands out clearly. With re-reading and internet search one can to flesh out the historical narrative. But even at first reading, even without understanding the history, the poet’s message comes through. Southwold Jack has “seen the ebb,” things are “scratched,” “pitched,” “gone,” and “smelted.” The word “nuclear” is prominent. One understands, if only vaguely, that bad things have happened in Southwold, and there is the possibility of something unimaginably worse.

The bits of history fly by the reader but provide a framework for the poem’s more prominent feature: the sounds of its words. The poem’s energetic language is buoyant full of life. The poet uses mostly percussive, single-syllable Anglo-Saxon words and takes from Anglo-Saxon poetry the practice of pressing words together to create vivid images: “axe-song,” “woolgold,” “tide-knight,” “fruit-light.” Alliteration creates different word textures, from the percussive “bloodshot bell-clap” and “pitched spraywards” to the sibilant “stained-glass,” “sing,” “silver plate.” The basic meter of the poem is trochaic, Shakespeare’s meter for incantations and fairy speech, with the accent on the first syllable. The poem’s metric pattern is set in the first line: “I, St. Edmund’s bloodshot bell-clap,” but the metric cadence varies frequently, so the pattern doesn’t descend into parody.

The emotional uplift of the poem’s wordplay is inconsistent with Southwold Jack’s apocalyptic vision. The poem’s mischievous title “LOGO” also works against the poem’s serious message. The word has two meanings. Its obscure meaning is speech or discourse, from the Greek word logos. Its common meaning today is the graphic symbol representing a commercial enterprise. Southwold Jack makes a speech in St. Edmund’s Church, but he is also the brand image of the local brewing company, and in this capacity he greets the public on untold thousands of beer bottles. This ironic twist and the poem’s verbal gymnastics suggest that the poet doesn’t want to appear too serious in his political message. The sounds of the poem’s words themselves have the most powerful impact on the reader.

My exploration of poetry continues with a look at poems by three poets I am fond of—Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings. Although they wrote in very different styles, they are all considered Modernist poets because they are members of a diverse group born in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries that broke away from 19th-century American poetic conventions. The leading poet in 19th-century America was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote epic poetry about heroes and mythical figures. He was a cultural colossus whose poetry was loved by common people and esteemed by the literati. The popularity he achieved is greater than any other American poet who has ever lived, and he remained popular well into the 20th century.[ii] Bits of his poems live on in American speech as clichés like “ships that pass in the night” and “the patter of little feet.”

During the decade before World War I, the poet Ezra Pound stated principles of the Modernist poetry revolution. Inspired by Chinese and Japanese poetry, Pound advocated clarity and precision, “with absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.”[iii] Gone from Pound’s definition of poetry were Longfellow’s overblown rhetoric and moralizing narratives. Instead of Longfellow’s rigid use of meter and rhyme, Pound advocated the patterns of everyday speech, poetry written “in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” Pound’s own poetry at this time was written in free verse without end-line rhyming, and he created images rather than telling stories. He was obsessed with the use of words as a way to “give people new eyes, not to make them see some particular new thing.”[iv] Although he later became a pariah because of his anti-Semitism and Fascist sympathies, he created a general template for poetry that has continued into the 21st-century.

While Ezra Pound was preaching the Modernist aesthetic as a celebrated public figure, Robert Frost worked out his own re-definition of poetic form and content in obscurity. In many ways, Frost’s style retains some aspects of 19th-century American poetry. He pays close attention to the natural world, although his poems are populated by humble rather than heroic figures. His poems are most often in iambic pentameter with conventional rhyme schemes, but he constantly ruffles the meter with cadences of ordinary speech. His poems are immediately accessible to casual readers and draw on our urban reservoir of good feeling about the values of rural life. His first two volumes of poetry, published in 1913 and 1914, were very well received, and within a short time he developed a large, appreciative audience.

It is easy to read Frost’s accessible country scenes without being aware of the underlying irony and spiritual bleakness. In his most celebrated poems, such as “Birches,” “Mending Wall,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening,” Frost’s preoccupation with death and loneliness is less obvious. In much of his poetry, his skeptical vision of life is more apparent. In all of his poetry there is an elusive ambiguity. Consider these qualities in his poem “Design:”[v]

Design

by Robert Frost

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches broth—

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?—

If design govern in a thing so small.

The poem is a sonnet with a strict rhyming pattern and no showy verbal effects. It describes a natural scene that might be found in a backyard garden. A spider has caught a moth and sits on a small flower. But the poem’s color imagery plays against type. Spiders are usually dark; this one is the color associated in Western cultures with purity and innocence. The heal-all is normally a blue flower with healing properties but here is also abnormally white and a participant in the scene’s small cruelty. White is now the color of “death and blight.” During the poem’s first eight lines the spider, flower, and moth are transformed into the sinister “ingredients of a witches broth.” After describing this small event, the poet asks some unsettling questions without providing direct answers.

Frost carefully chooses the words and sounds of the poem to suggest an answer to the final question. The poem creates an oppressive, frightening atmosphere with its imagery of witchcraft and repetition of the words “spider” and “white” like a chant. The moth is held up as though it is part of a ceremony. The claustrophobic rhyming scheme uses only three vowel sounds to rhyme the entire poem. By the time the final question is posed, the poet has already built an answer stroke-by-stroke in the reader’s emotional response to the poem’s language—yes, it is a design of darkness.

This is all relatively straightforward, including the obvious irony of white characters being part of a dark design. But Frost is not content to leave things there. He winks at us in the last two lines by introducing another irony in the word “appall,” which means both “to horrify” and, from its Latin root, “to make pale or white.” The word implies that the appalled narrator and reader may also be complicit in the dark design. Everything is ambiguous, nothing is certain. In an essay, Frost wrote that poetry is “at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.”[vi] One can almost hear his sardonic chuckle.

Frost considered the essence of poetry to be the use of sound in ways that evoke meaning in addition to that found in the words themselves. For him, the stated meaning of a word was less important than how sound affects its passage through what he called “the mind’s ear”[vii] directly connected to the human heart. The intonation of a word, determined by its position in the phrase and the context of the poem, creates overtones of meaning. His favorite example was the simple word “Oh.” In an interview he said,” think of what ‘oh’ is really capable: the ‘oh’ of scorn, the ‘oh’ of amusement, the ‘oh’ of surprise, the ‘oh’ of doubt – and there are many more.”[viii] He makes the same point in his poem “The Mountain:” “all the fun’s in how you say a thing.”

Unlike Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens labored without public recognition much of his life. Only a few years younger than Frost, he was a lawyer and insurance executive whose first volume of poetry was published in 1923. It was poorly received. In the first six months after its publication, Stevens’ royalties from this book earned $6.70. As he continued to write and publish, his reputation steadily grew. By the 1950s he was widely regarded as one of America’s greatest poets, although his popular audience was never large.

Stevens’ poetic style is quite different from that of Frost. He plays with sounds to a greater degree, and much of his poetry is written in free verse. He writes in a wider range of poetic voices, from comedy to rapture to quiet contemplation. The greatest difference is the obscurity of Stevens’ poetry. Frost’s images and narratives are quickly grasped, though what lies below the surface is more difficult. In Stevens’ poetry, even the surface meanings are difficult. He typically drops the reader into a metaphorical scene with only a few clues to indicate what the scene represents.[ix] But Stevens has a way with images that draws the reader in. His poem titled “Bantams in Pinewoods” is written in a comic mood and displays his poetic style.[x]

Bantams in Pinewoods

by Wallace Stevens

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan

Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal cock, as if the sun

Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.

Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!

Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,

And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

As was the case in Richard Osmond’s poem “LOGO,” the reader immediately feels the fun Stevens has playing with sounds, even if what he says is perplexing. The nonsensical alliteration of the first two lines and the high-spirited flow of insults that follows convey the sense of Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” in “Leaves of Grass.” “Chieftain Iffucan” is a “cock,” a large rooster with “henna hackles” and a “blazing tail.” A smaller rooster, one of the title’s “bantams” in pinewoods, confronts him. The “inchling” rooster insults proud, “portly” Chieftain Iffucan, and orders him to “Begone!” Between two sections of elaborately rhythmic invective, the small rooster makes three statements in short declarative sentences of ordinary speech: “I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world.” In music terms, the poem has two dynamics—the personal statements are a moderate mezzo forte in between two sections of raucous fortissimo burlesque.

The word “poet” in the fourth stanza links the metaphor of a cockfight and the quieter statements of principle. Chieftain Iffucan is a “ten-foot poet among inchlings,” and Stevens’ real subject in this poem is poetry. The “inchling” narrator in this contest is a poet of lesser stature, as Stephens was when he wrote the poem. Who or what is the “ten-foot poet” being challenged? Perhaps it is Robert Frost, who by then had achieved celebrity and publicly disparaged the unrhymed free verse used by Stevens and other Modernist poets as “playing tennis without a net.” It is much more likely that Chieftain Iffucan represents the standards of 19th-century American poetry that were still considered to be “universal” at that time and held sway with publishers and critics. What is clear is Stevens’ intent to write his poetry as he sees fit.

The poem touches on an idea that Stevens returned to frequently in his poetry, that all our lives are lived in separate worlds because what we call ‘reality’ is an internal, not an external thing. We live our lives in our imaginations as they filter and transform what our senses take from the world around us. Although we are separate, Stevens wrote that we share a profound “need for words.”[xi] Poetry communicates across the boundaries of our imaginations, Stevens says, because it “makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sounds of them” for meaning. Poetry succeeds when the poet’s imagination becomes what Stevens calls “a light in the mind of others.”

E. E. Cummings was a contemporary of Frost, Stevens, and T. S. Eliot, but unlike them his poems do not engage in philosophical questions. He was the self-styled ‘bad boy’ of the early Modernist movement, and compared to Frost, Stevens, and Eliot he is a minor poet. He was highly original—and immediately recognizable—for discarding punctuation, capital letters, and rules of syntax and scattering words and letters on the page. The literary critics were horrified. The magisterial critic Edmund Wilson called Cummings’ punctuation and word arrangements “hideous.”[xii] Cummings was intentionally provocative in his public statements, as well as in some brilliantly obscene poems. He anticipated the Beat Poets of the 1950s in his extreme individualism and desire to shock. He was the favorite whipping boy of those who were outraged by Modernist poetry.

But his poems show a gift for language. He is a poet of high spirits, a witty manipulator of words. His dismantling of language allows him to write about love and other conventionally Romantic subjects as though they are fresh and new. Chicagoan Harriet Monroe, literary critic and founder of Poetry magazine, praised his “grand gusto,”[xiii] which she welcomed in an age when most poets took themselves very seriously. He enjoyed a large popular audience during his lifetime, and his experimental verse forms are one of the many lasting Modernist innovations.

Here is his poem “in Just:”[xiv]

in Just-

by E. E. Cummings

in Just-

spring when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far and wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s

spring

and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles

far

and

wee

No puzzles here except perhaps the ancient reference to sexual appetite in the words “goat-footed.” The poem is an extended wordplay about the joy of springtime and sexual attraction. With alliteration, the obscure balloon-man image, words pushed together and pulled apart, and the striking word-pairs “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful,” Cummings creates an entertaining poetic surface. There is nothing underneath this surface. Even more than Richard Osmond’s poem, the language of this poem itself is the message. Cummings’ intention is to transmit the feelings of springtime to the reader rather than simply describing the sensation.

I began this exploration wondering why Richard Osmond’s poem “LOGO” appeals to me more than other contemporary poems. Part of the answer lies in what it shares with the older poetry I have considered. All four poets place foremost importance on the sounds of words. I agree with Stevens that a poem should make the reader “feel” and “search” the sounds of its words. All four poets play with words and use some combination of traditional poetic techniques—alliteration, rhyme, meter, metaphor, and others. I agree with Robert Frost that for the reader as well as for the poet, “all the fun’s in how you say a thing.” Finally, all the poets I have discussed write poetry in language that differs from ordinary speech. Unlike the vast majority of contemporary poems, their poetry has rhythms and textures that are distinct from well-crafted prose broken up into poetic line lengths. The poetry I respond to is lyric poetry as practiced by word-weavers like Richard Osmond, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings.

However, identifying common features in poetry I like is really no answer. I still can’t completely explain why I like one poet more than another. I’m not partial to T.S. Eliot, yet he meets all my criteria. It is a commonplace that there is no accounting for personal taste, so no list of attributes on a literary ledger will produce an answer. What I have discovered in my exploration is simply that I am a literary curmudgeon and hopelessly old-fashioned in my taste for poetry. I recognize that my inability to enter the worlds offered to me by most contemporary poets is my problem, not their problem. I’ll keep trying. But I am happy to find an occasional poet today who crosses into my imaginative world. Perhaps, as in classical music, young poets will venture back to earlier poetic traditions as young American composers today have returned to melody and harmony, albeit with a modern twist. Richard Osmond’s poem “LOGO” gives me hope. He is young and has yet to publish a volume of his poetry. I look forward to that.

Endnotes