Conceits and extended metaphors (6.20.18)

I’ve titled this note somewhat redundantly; a conceit is technically an extended metaphor.  But a conceit is a special kind of extended metaphor: it is a torture of language, a figure placed on the rack and stretched, twisted, compressed, bent and bowed to the point of breaking, but never permitted to break. At least not in a successful conceit, anyway.  There are many unsuccessful ones which do break, and there are names to describe them:

Gongorism

Marinism

Euphemism

The unsuccessful conceit usually is clever to a fault, precocious, showy, facile, obvious and lacking depth or insight beyond the trite or the clichéd.  Here’s a famous example:

I think that I shall never see 

A poem lovely as a tree. 

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest 

Against the earth's sweet flowing breast; 

A tree that looks at God all day, 

And lifts her leafy arms to pray; 

A tree that may in Summer wear 

A nest of robins in her hair; 

Upon whose bosom snow has lain; 

Who intimately lives with rain. 

Poems are made by fools like me, 

But only God can make a tree. 

We generally associate the conceit with the metaphysical poets of the 17^th Century—John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell.  In their poetry, metaphors and images are often far-fetched, verging on the surreal (French Symbolists picked up on this aspect of conceits in the 19^th Century), striking and surprising.  But then, Chinese, Japanese and Korean poetry traffic in the striking and surprising as well.  The difference? The conceit in Western poetic tradition is an extended treatment of a metaphor or image in which the writer pushes the comparison or the figure as far as the language permits and for as long as the poem can be made to maintain structure and meaning.  That is, without devolving into drivel or mere word-play. In this sense, so-called stream of consciousness writing does not qualify as metaphysical conceit.

The idea behind the making of a conceit isn’t just that it’s inventive or clever. It’s also supposed to be difficult to do and difficult to puzzle out, and delivers insight or revelation, usually in the form of argument.  Which is to say, a good conceit expects more of its reader than other kinds of writing.  An example:

Redemption

                         ─ George Herbert, 1633

Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,

              Not thriving, I resolvéd to be bold,

And make a suit unto Him, to afford

              A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.

In heaven at His manor I Him sought:

              They told me there that He was lately gone

About some land which He had dearly bought

              Long since on earth, to take possession.

I straight returned, and knowing His great birth,

              Sought Him accordingly in great resorts—

              In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts:

At length I heard a raggéd noise and mirth

              Of thieves and murderers; there I Him espied,

              Who straight, “Your suit is granted,” said, and died.

To get this poem, you have to know the language of leases and legal contracts . . . and THEN you have to be able to interpret the spiritual message in those terms.  Conceits in 17^th Century English poetry (read: Metaphysical Poetry) ran the gamut from bawdy and erotic to love, Platonic, spiritual and religious themes.  What they shared was highly wrought language, metaphors sustained throughout the poem, intellect yoked to passion, and the spiritual together with or expressed via the material. The best of them were ingenious . . .

The Flea

                        ─ John Donne, 1633

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deniest me is;

Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead,

              Yet this enjoys before it woo,

              And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

              And this, alas, is more than we would do.

This is the first stanza of Donne’s famous love poem.  You should read the remaining two to see how he sustains the metaphor of the flea, flesh, blood, love, and of course exhorting someone to have sex, throughout the entire poem.  But you get the idea in just this first stanza.

Conceits aren’t restricted to 17^th Century English poets, however.  They are common in modern poetry, especially in America; I suspect because they are a challenge to write and, when done properly, a satisfying experience for both writer and reader.  Here’s an example from the 1960’s . . .

Love Song: I and Thou

                                              ─ Alan Dugan, 1961

Nothing is plumb, level or square:

the studs are bowed, the joists

are shaky by nature, no piece fits

              any other piece without a gap

or pinch, and bent nails

dance all over the surfacing

like maggots.  By Christ

              I am no carpenter.  I built

the roof for myself, the walls

              for myself, the floors

for myself, and got

              hung up in it myself.  I

danced with a purple thumb

              at this house-warming, drunk

with my prime whiskey:  rage.

              Oh I spat rage’s nails

into the frame-up of my work:

              it held.  It settled plumb,

level, solid, square and true

              for that great moment.  Then

it screamed and went on through,

              skewing as wrong the other way.

God damned it.  This is hell,

              but I planned it, I sawed it,

I nailed it, and I

              will live in it until it kills me.

I can nail my left palm 

              to the left-hand cross-piece but

I can’t do everything myself.

              I need a hand to nail the right,

a help, a love, a you, a wife.

As I said above, writing a good conceit is not easy as the form can quickly descend into the trivial—in terms of structure, tone, and meaning—or the unintelligible. E.E. Cummings’ poetry has often been accused of the latter fault, but you can decide whether this poem is a deft conceit or merely typographical fun and games . . .

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

                                         ─ E. E. Cummings, 1932, 1935

                                  

                                  r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

                       who

a)s w(e loo)k

upnowgath

                   PPEGORHRASS

                                             eringint (o-

aThe) :l

             eA

                   !p:

S                                                          a

                         (r

rIvInG                          .gRrEaPsPhOs)

                                                              to

rea (be) rran (com)gi(e)ngly

,grasshopper;

I typed this one in a font with serifs so you can get the full effect of the poem.[1]

And finally, here’s a conceit that I wrote a long time ago, to celebrate my mother’s 84^th birthday (she lived another 14 years!). There is a precedent for it: George Herbert’s poem “The Blossom,” though I wasn’t conscious of this connection at the time I wrote the poem . . .

The November Rose

November is a long time into the year

for a rose to bloom, even here,

in a Carolina cul-de-sac 

that once sprouted soybean, now HVAC.

But there, as if just for proof,

another bud unfolds, aloof 

to the arguments of season and physics,

governed by some other metaphysics.

Outside this morning, cold rain, sleet

pelt the ground.  I turn the heat

up another degree or two.

(It’s Sunday, I haven’t much to do.)

Over every surface a general glaze

forms the carapace of colder days.

Appealing to see, in such raw dawn,

pink heads hanging on,

and blooms spread under the metal sky

like their antecedents of July.

Appealing, too, to think of a power

that suspends the nature of a flower

to bud, bloom, fail, die,

to live briefly.  But then, why?

To what end will natural stuff

not be perishable?  Nature’s rough

nature is all anyone knows

of the biology of person or rose,

whose rhythm makes a sacred rhyme

to help us mark passing time.

To note, then: November arrived,

another year to be archived.

So.  It's conceits and extended metaphors, then.  See you on Wednesday.

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[1] Note for future project: concrete poetry?

Poems written in reply (6.13.18)

This week we’ll investigate “poems in reply,” which is my shorthand for poems written in response to our readings of other poems.  You can’t rightly call this practice a sub-genre, and it’s not technically a form of ekphrasis, but the poem written in reply to another poem is an “art-to-art” exchange and common enough in literary history.  Here’s a famous example:

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer rule as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with easly eyes

He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with wild surmise—

Silent upon a peak in Darien.

John Keats wrote this poem, reportedly, after spending an entire night reading the George Chapman translation of Homer (likely The Illiad) with his former teacher, Charles Cowden Clarke. He walked home at dawn and by 10:00 o’clock that same morning posted the finished poem back to Clarke.[1]  The story is important for our purposes because it touches on the passion or excitement or reverence or pure engagement underlying poems in conversation with each other.  Keats’s poem is about how or what he felt upon reading Homer.  Put slightly differently, it’s about one poet’s understanding and admiration for the translation that Chapman had made available to readers of English.

There are as many reasons for writing poems in reply as there are readers and readings of poems. Poems in reply have been written in praise of an original model, like the Keats poem above, or to take issue with it, or simply to use the model as a launching point for expressing a reader’s thoughts and feelings. That makes sense especially when you approach poems as expressive art: as a reader, you’re engaging with feeling, emotion, psychological tension. The poem in reply is an artistic record of that engagement.

Often, poems are written in reply to only a few lines or phrases or just an image in a model poem.  Here’s an example:

Nuances of a Theme by Williams

It’s a strange courage

you give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise

toward which you lend no part!

I

Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,

that reflects neither my face nor any inner part

of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

II

Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses

you in its own light.

Be not chimera of morning,

Half-man, half-star.

Be not an intelligence,

Like a widow’s bird

Or an old horse.

This poem, by Wallace Stevens, incorporates an entire poem by his contemporary, William Carlos Williams, as the opening stanza. Stevens italicizes but does not number it, to set it off from his own nuanced reading of Williams’ theme.  In the Williams poem, the speaker takes courage from the star shining alone in the heavens against the superior force of the rising sun. But in the Stevens poem, the speaker wants no courage from the start, in fact disassociates everything human from the star.

Poems in reply to William Carlos Williams are something of a cottage industry, perhaps because of the fame of both Stevens and Williams; thus, to make a little tradition out of replying to themes by Williams is to step up to the podium, as it were, of American poetry and add your voice to the general conversation.  This is what Kenneth Koch did in this poem:

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

1.

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.

I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do

and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2.

We laughed at the hollyhocks together

and then I sprayed them with lye.

Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3.

I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.

The man who asked for it was shabby

and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4.

Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.

Forgive me. I was clumsy, and

I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

Some poems in reply are not so obvious. They merely nod at famous antecedents, like this one by Frank O’Hara:

Autobiographia Literaria

When I was a child

I played by myself in a

corner of the schoolyard

all alone.

I hated dolls and I

hated games, animals were

not friendly and birds

flew away.

If anyone was looking

for me I hid behind a

tree and cried out “I am

an orphan.”

And here I am, the

center of all beauty!

writing these poems!

Imagine!

The reference is in the title of the poem. The poem was written as a spontaneous, tongue-in-cheek and thoroughly modern American reply to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous critical work, Biographia Literaria.

But my absolute fav poem in reply is a poem that uses a famous couple of lines as departure for developing a completely separate theme:

Milton by Firelight

Piute Creek, August 1955

“O hell, what do mine eyes

with grief behold?”

Working with an old

Singlejack miner, who can sense

The vein and cleavage

In the very guts of rock, can

Blast granite, build

Switchbacks that last for years

Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves.

What use, Milton, a silly story

Of our lost general parents,

eaters of fruit?

The Indian, the chainsaw boy,

A string of six mules

Came riding down to camp

Hungry for tomatoes and green apples.

Sleeping in saddle-blankets

Under a bright night-sky

Han River slantwise by morning.

Jays squall

Coffee boils

In ten thousand years the Sierras

Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion.

Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees.

No paradise, no fall,

Only the weathering land

The wheeling sky,

Man, with his Satan

Scouring the chaos of the mind.

Oh Hell!

Fire down

Too dark to read, miles from a road

The bell-mare clangs in the meadow

That packed dirt for a fill-in

Scrambling through loose rocks

On an old trail

All of a summer’s day.

There are other famous “riffs” on famous antecedents, such as Anthony Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life,” which is of course a reply to the much more famous “Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold.  Hecht’s poem is a satirical reply.  The love object of Arnold’s poem is not so lovely as Hecht’s, nor is the speaker of Hecht’s poem so melancholic as the speaker of Arnold’s.  In fact, the emotional ground of Arnold’s poem, a cri de cœur for love in a warring world, becomes a sardonic take on Empire well past its prime.  Hecht’s poem isn’t so much a criticism of life as of the late Victorian view of life.

And on that theme, here is my own take on the Arnold-Hecht exchange, written many years ago:

The Dover Bandit

I was thinking of writing this poem in Spanish

but it has come out in Romanian instead,

in a remote mountain dialect of Romanian,

which is very strange, not because

I know so very little Spanish and even less Romanian

but because I was thinking about this in Latin,

in Church Latin, to be exact.  That is, “in an Italian way.”

Yes, what a strange thing to be thinking this way

in the Mother Tongue that connects me to you

and you and therefore me to the rest of the world,

the crazy misspelled unpronounceable world we go

talking through each day, like Sophocles with the sea

coming in and going back out and coming in again,

only, I guess, he wouldn’t have thought of it in Latin?

Well, it is a strange thing that I was thinking at all—

about the pissy world, you, writing this poem.

C

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[1] By the way, he’d have been around 22 or 23 years old when he had this experience and wrote the poem. Imagine that! Darien is in Panama and the explorer was Balboa, not Cortez. But what does that matter?

How poems end (6.6.18)

Closure, in Western poetry, wants to be more or less evident formally and/or thematically.  A poem ends on a rhyme of some sort, or it ends by arriving at some conclusion or insight.  Closure satisfies because it completes a thought or a series of sounds and beats, that is, it completes a structure.  To put this into the obverse: a structure makes closure recognizable.  I almost said a structure makes closure necessary, in the Aristotelian sense:

POSSIBILITY → PROBABILITY → NECESSITY

And while some of this logic—the teleological—underlies some kinds of poetry written out of some traditions or literary histories, it does not apply across the board or to all literary cultures, for the possibility to probability to necessity relations that make up a well-structured poem are merely tools for creating the recognizable, which in turn is a factor of what satisfies, or gives pleasure, which is made possible through expectation.

This is to say, form creates expectation.  Expectation, in good poetry, is then fulfilled in some way: we recognize something when we expect it and are satisfied only when we do.  A poem resolves like music.  Fulfillment can come as a confirmation of our expectations or it can undermine our expectations (in a satisfactorily surprising way) or it can cause us to reassess our expectations.

Barbara Hernnstein Smith, in her famous book, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, argues that poems can fail to close properly in various ways.  Their endings can “feel” wrong or incomplete or premature/late or irrelevant or unnecessary.  Failure to close stems from two main causes, she says: 1. A poorly structured poem, or 2. An innovation in style or structure for which proper closure has not yet been invented.  She cites John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with its famously controversial ending, as an example of a new kind of poetic structure with a formally traditional ending.  Keats may or may not have been aware of his predicament.

·     ·     ·

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

·     ·     ·

‘Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail ─

Assent ─ and you are sane ─

Demur ─ you’re straightway dangerous ─

And handled with a Chain ─

·     ·     ·

I am pretty sure you will recognize the two passages above.  The first is the last part of Section 52, the last section of Whitman’s Song of Myself.  The second is unmistakably by Emily Dickinson.  Since it’s short, I’ll reprint the entire Dickinson poem, so you get the context for the ending:

Much Madness is divinest Sense ─

To a discerning Eye ─

Much Sense ─ the starkest Madness ─

‘Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail ─

Assent ─ and you are sane ─

Demur ─ you’re straightway dangerous ─

And handled with a Chain ─

And yes, the poem concludes (or simply ends?) with the familiar dash.

I’ve been thinking about how poems end since last week, when we started talking about the subject.  Inevitably, the famous conclusion to Whitman’s great poem comes to mind—one of the best poem endings that I know of.  I searched through my copy of Final Harvest, the Little, Brown edition of her complete poetry to find another kind of ending, one marked by that dash.  The search led me to a question: What’s the difference, if any, between lines that conclude a poem and those that bring the poem to an end?  Well, for one thing, conclusions are teleological, that is, “planned for” by the logical progression of the poem (either thematically, formally, or in some other way).  “Mere” endings are just that: a poem stops.  A list poem, which we’ve tried before, often makes for a good example of a poem that just stops. There is no progressive structure to a list poem that leads necessarily to some conclusion.  It just stops listing things.

Interestingly, both Whitman and Dickinson wrote poems with concluding lines/passages and poems that just get to a point and end.  I assert above that the passage quoted from Song of Myself concludes rather than ends the poem.  If that long poem seeks to equate the speaker-poet Walt Whitman and America in a kind of national-cultural-artistic autobiography (the song of myself is the song of America), then this section is strongly conclusive thematically. [1]  It emerges from the argument of the poem.  Similarly, the argument of Emily Dickinson’s poems goes something like this: majority opinion determines whether you are sane or not.  The first three lines set up the argument thematically (sanity and madness are in the eye of the beholder, often enough) and the last five conclude it (if the beholder holds the majority position, then you are sane or dangerous, and must live with the consequences).

Think of all the sections of Song of Myself, which work like poems in themselves, that are hardly more than laundry lists of one thought or another, or an extended repetition of rhythms.  Think of all the brief lyrics of Dickinson that function something like Eastern bright image poetry, that is, series of images without further comment or “lesson.”  In these cases, both poets wrote poems that could have gone on almost endlessly, but simply stopped.

Thematic structure and closure.  One kind of thematic closure is based on rhetorical devices like “if . . . then,” “either . . . or,” “then . . . now” where the theme or themes of a poem are constructed like an argument that leads to a logical conclusion and possibly even a comment on the conclusion.  This kind of closure dominates Renaissance poetry.  It’s very evident throughout Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, where the first two quatrains develop an argument, the third quatrain complicates or “turns” toward a resolution, and a closing couplet sums up, comments on, or delivers some kind of final judgment.

Formal structure and closure.  Another kind of closure is “formal,” that is, is based on more or less strict rules of rhyme, meter, line length, all of which contribute to the formal structure of a poem.  This kind of structure and its logical (or in other words, inevitable or “right”) closure is pretty evident in Emily Dickinson’s poems, many of which are constructed in the form of hymns: exact or near rhyme, strict metrics, fairly exact rhythmical repetition.  In these cases, since hymns are nearly always constructed in quatrains of iambic meter of two or three feet per line and extend somewhere between two and six quatrains, as a reader you start to look for one of Dickinson’s poems to get to a conclusion fairly soon.

Whitman’s poetry, on the other hand, is rhythmically “tidal.”  Its lines ebb and flow without recourse to strict rhyme or meter.  The lines are long and the stanzas are more like paragraphs that can be of any length.  The rhythms approach song, but more in the sense of a chant than a hymn.  It’s much harder to sense a conclusion approaching in a poem by Whitman, though some poems of his do point more or less clearly to conclusions.  “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim” is a famous example of a poem with a formal conclusion.

Epigrammatic structure and closure.  Epigrammatic closure is again based on rhetoric: final lines conclude a thought, usually both thematically and formally, and do so in the most strict ways, and often in short bursts of language.  Augustan poetry (think Alexander Pope) provides the best examples of this, and so do almost all of Emily Dickinson’s poems.

Nature, like liberty, is but restrained

By the same laws which first herself ordained.

·     ·     ·

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

·     ·     ·

How vain are all these glories, all our pains,

Unless good sense preserve what beauty gains.

You can see by these couplets that rhyme provides closure through sound and sense.  Closure also works through the metrics of the lines: note that in each case, the second half of each first and second line ends with strong iambic meter.

Open structure and closure.  Finally, there is the so-called “anti-closure” poetry that is mostly associated with modern writing.[2]  It is poetry that refuses to sum things up, to comment conclusively, to create logical bookends to a set of ideas or images or word associations.  But I don’t necessarily mean poems that are nothing more than experiments in word-splatter or that are mere or pure sound experiments.  I also mean the so-called “open forms” of modern and contemporary poetry, poems that grow organically from a writer’s own sense of rhythm, breath, and way of looking at whatever world he or she observes.

“For modern poets—for everyone after Yeats—rhyme and meter amount to little more than mechanical aids for writing . . . In rhyme and meter one has to be concerned with how to say something,[3] perhaps anything, which fulfills the formal requirements.  It is hard to move into the open that way.  If you were walking through the woods in winter, rhyming would be like following those footprints continually appearing ahead of you in the snow.  Fixed form tends to bring you to a place where someone has been before.  Naturally, in a poem, you wish to reach a new place.[4]  That requires pure wandering—that rare condition, when you have no external guides at all, only your impulse to go, or to turn, or to stand still, when each line does not, by the sound of the word on which it ends, force the direction of the next line, when the voice does not subjugate speech, but tries only to conform to the irregular curves of reality, to the rough terrain itself.”[5]

The question of open forms with respect to closure is How do you know you’ve come to the end of the poem?  (Many formalists still might say, in so-called open forms, How do you even know you are writing poetry?)  The answer is, You don’t.  In fact, open forms resist closure in the traditional sense.  In open forms, closure is artificial and does not “conform to the irregular curves of reality, to the rough terrain itself.”  This resistance is often called “anti-closure,” but the characterization is filtered through a formally traditional mindset. Closure provides a certainty.  Put slightly differently, closure satisfies our need for certainty.  But as Yeats once wrote in an essay, modern poets “sing amid our uncertainty.”

I am wandering, like Kinnell’s natural poet.  So let me finish by quoting Barbara Herrnstein Smith once more: “Whereas the weak closure of much modern poetry can be understood partly as the result of the prevalence of formal and thematic structures that offer minimal resources for closure, the reverse is also likely: the prevalence of free verse, for example, probably reflects, in part, the impulse to anti-closure, the reaction against poems that ‘click like a box.’” (242).

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[1] Barbara Hernnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1968. Here are the other types of poetic closure she identifies: formal closure and epigrammatic closure.  Hernnstein Smith also studies what she calls “anti-closure” in modern poetry.  Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1968.

[2] Hernnstein Smith argues that anti-closure exists throughout literary history and across cultures, usually when one literary generation is trying to escape the gravity of earlier literary generations, and in much Eastern or Oriental poetry, which is not epigrammatic so much as imagistic.  She also argues that serious modern Western poetry assumes all forms of closure—thematic, structural, anti-closural—except the epigrammatic, which is usually considered “light” or “cheap” and not sufficiently poetic.  Limerick is one example.  W.H. Auden might have had an argument with this last point.

[3] My italics here. For writers working in the open, so-called organic, forms, process (the how of craft) is of less value than the what, which is the becoming of a poem, its natural growth into itself. Writing in rhyme and meter, moreover, encourages us to develop ready-made themes as well.

[4] I might argue with this assertion. Not every writer of poems “naturally” wishes to reach a new place. But every serious writer of poems, every artist, that is, does wish to create something as new as he or she can make it, for that is what an artist does.

[5] Galway Kinnell, “The Poetics of the Physical World,” excerpted in The New Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms, eds. Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976. Pp. 133-34.