What is "ornament," or ornamentation, in poetry? The use of figurative language? Is it a rhythmical element, such as the use of a strict meter? Or maybe ornament is found in repetitions, rhymes, exotic diction? Or how about complexity, as in sentences compounded with modifying clauses, ellipses, appositives and the like?
Does the topic even warrant much discussion in 21st Century America?
I've been thinking about it lately partly in response to some of my own poems' use of all of the tools referenced above, partly because I've paid a little more attention than usual to the different styles and voices I encounter among the poems shared each week in our Wednesdays@One salon.
Maybe we can get at ornament and ornamentation negatively--what its opposite is. So . . . that would be plainness, right? Or a more or less uncomplicated sentence structure (like a "straightforward" subject-verb-object structure), or blank verse, free verse, unaccentuated verse . . .
One poet (Dickinson) advises us to "write it slant." Does that mean with ornamentation? Another (let's say, Dr. Williams) counsels to write it plain. But what is "plainness" in poetry?
William Wordsworth famously declared that "modern" poetry should be written in common speech--a practice that he ignored in his own poetry. Whitman did much the same thing, claiming a common voice using common American speech in poems that rang even in his own day with the music of a symphony.
Speaking of music, perhaps we can find some analogous notions there. Ornamentation is a technical term in music. It's something added or improvised, like vocal trills and sustains in an aria or in some sacred music. Ornamentation is a flourish, an emotive element, or a "heightening." We tend to think of it as an embellishment.
In music, ornamentation has been codified historically into "vocabularies," styles, rhythmic modifications, and "accepted language(s)" and phrasings that performers can access to "fill out" the "skeleton of the melody." Coloratura! Remember all those trilling contestants on American Idol?
The Homeric tales--Iliad, Odyssey--are records of this kind of codified vocabulary in poetry. Rhapsodes (tellers)--the rap poets of the ancients--delivered from a memorized storehouse of epithets, catch-phrases, memes, standard tropes ("the wine-dark sea" is maybe the most quoted of these today) that they strung together in inventive ways to repeat a well-known story of heroes and gods and glorious battle. The phrases were like ornaments hung on the limbs of the tale, in different configurations and clusters, depending on the teller and the contest.
How do you reconcile Whitman's or Wordsworth's advice with their practice? Well, what Whitman set out to do was not to write poems in plain speech or plain style. Rather, he tapped a whole new vocabulary--plain American speech--for his poetic material. The result remains poetry, ornamented and highly musical. Think of the Divine Comedy in this respect as well. Dante wrote in the vernacular of the day instead of the Latin of the Church, thereby freeing poetry from centuries of assumption and expectation about what a poem is and what it should be made of. He Italianized it. Allen Ginsberg and his literary cohort did the same thing for us in post-WWII American poetry.
Ornament is an element of poetry, poetry is ornamental, no matter how plain the speech deployed in a poem. For poetry is, in its most technical sense, language put to artistic use. Edmund Spenser did something interesting with ornament in The Fairie Queen (looking at you, Bennett!). He rescued certain outdated words, words that in the 16th Century had already fallen out of use not just in spoken English but in poetic English, too. These were words of dialect, local expression, colloquialism, regional flavor and meaning. His project was partly to preserve the words and the traditions from which they sprang, even while creating a new kind of epic poem for the England of his day. But it was also to refresh poetry and peoples' sense of poetry. Read Spenser and you can't feel that you're not feeling the weight of ornamentation.
You can deploy ornament in a heavy- or ham-handed way (here's looking at you, Joyce Kilmer), or you can use it more deftly to enrich the poem and a reader's experience of the poem. Here's another example of a poet--and another Irishman, like Spenser--who salvages language for making poems that are highly ornamented, individual and fresh.
Encheiresin Naturae
Not for the first time would we rest the heavy door
of the barn from its jambs.
The door had been painted the red of iron ore,
the posts daubed with the blood of a lamb
to protect us from the Angel of Death.
It all had to do with two interpenetrating cones.
One of the pillars of the sons of Seth
was built of brick, the other of dressed stone.
No wonder almost everything did pass over us--
passed us over or by--
wealth, fame, true love. For now we would astound
ourselves with a pig hanging from a roof truss
as if it might be making a half-hearted attempt to fly
before falling hard to the ground.
This sonnet is the first in a sequence Paul Muldoon wrote as part of a collaboration with the artist Barry Moser. The sequence is a grouping of sonnets called a sonnet redouble, or "crown of sonnets." (If you have $5,700 lying around, you can see the full effect of engravings and sonnets in the art-book edition published by Nawakum Press between 2014 and 2017. Or you can get a taste of it here .) From the allusive, enigmatic title (from Faust, meaning "manipulating nature") to the variable line lengths to the rich rhymes (jambs/lamb, Death/Seth), the alliteration, and indeed the sonnet form extended to a " crown," what could be more ornamental than this poem? Ornamental as in heightened and closely controlled language and the richest of reading experiences.
Regardless what figures and tools a poem contains, one thing is sure about its ornaments: they are language calling attention to itself. And so, they are elements specific to poetry.
Does the topic even warrant much discussion in 21st Century America?
I've been thinking about it lately partly in response to some of my own poems' use of all of the tools referenced above, partly because I've paid a little more attention than usual to the different styles and voices I encounter among the poems shared each week in our Wednesdays@One salon.
Maybe we can get at ornament and ornamentation negatively--what its opposite is. So . . . that would be plainness, right? Or a more or less uncomplicated sentence structure (like a "straightforward" subject-verb-object structure), or blank verse, free verse, unaccentuated verse . . .
One poet (Dickinson) advises us to "write it slant." Does that mean with ornamentation? Another (let's say, Dr. Williams) counsels to write it plain. But what is "plainness" in poetry?
William Wordsworth famously declared that "modern" poetry should be written in common speech--a practice that he ignored in his own poetry. Whitman did much the same thing, claiming a common voice using common American speech in poems that rang even in his own day with the music of a symphony.
Speaking of music, perhaps we can find some analogous notions there. Ornamentation is a technical term in music. It's something added or improvised, like vocal trills and sustains in an aria or in some sacred music. Ornamentation is a flourish, an emotive element, or a "heightening." We tend to think of it as an embellishment.
In music, ornamentation has been codified historically into "vocabularies," styles, rhythmic modifications, and "accepted language(s)" and phrasings that performers can access to "fill out" the "skeleton of the melody." Coloratura! Remember all those trilling contestants on American Idol?
The Homeric tales--Iliad, Odyssey--are records of this kind of codified vocabulary in poetry. Rhapsodes (tellers)--the rap poets of the ancients--delivered from a memorized storehouse of epithets, catch-phrases, memes, standard tropes ("the wine-dark sea" is maybe the most quoted of these today) that they strung together in inventive ways to repeat a well-known story of heroes and gods and glorious battle. The phrases were like ornaments hung on the limbs of the tale, in different configurations and clusters, depending on the teller and the contest.
How do you reconcile Whitman's or Wordsworth's advice with their practice? Well, what Whitman set out to do was not to write poems in plain speech or plain style. Rather, he tapped a whole new vocabulary--plain American speech--for his poetic material. The result remains poetry, ornamented and highly musical. Think of the Divine Comedy in this respect as well. Dante wrote in the vernacular of the day instead of the Latin of the Church, thereby freeing poetry from centuries of assumption and expectation about what a poem is and what it should be made of. He Italianized it. Allen Ginsberg and his literary cohort did the same thing for us in post-WWII American poetry.
Ornament is an element of poetry, poetry is ornamental, no matter how plain the speech deployed in a poem. For poetry is, in its most technical sense, language put to artistic use. Edmund Spenser did something interesting with ornament in The Fairie Queen (looking at you, Bennett!). He rescued certain outdated words, words that in the 16th Century had already fallen out of use not just in spoken English but in poetic English, too. These were words of dialect, local expression, colloquialism, regional flavor and meaning. His project was partly to preserve the words and the traditions from which they sprang, even while creating a new kind of epic poem for the England of his day. But it was also to refresh poetry and peoples' sense of poetry. Read Spenser and you can't feel that you're not feeling the weight of ornamentation.
You can deploy ornament in a heavy- or ham-handed way (here's looking at you, Joyce Kilmer), or you can use it more deftly to enrich the poem and a reader's experience of the poem. Here's another example of a poet--and another Irishman, like Spenser--who salvages language for making poems that are highly ornamented, individual and fresh.
Encheiresin Naturae
Not for the first time would we rest the heavy door
of the barn from its jambs.
The door had been painted the red of iron ore,
the posts daubed with the blood of a lamb
to protect us from the Angel of Death.
It all had to do with two interpenetrating cones.
One of the pillars of the sons of Seth
was built of brick, the other of dressed stone.
No wonder almost everything did pass over us--
passed us over or by--
wealth, fame, true love. For now we would astound
ourselves with a pig hanging from a roof truss
as if it might be making a half-hearted attempt to fly
before falling hard to the ground.
This sonnet is the first in a sequence Paul Muldoon wrote as part of a collaboration with the artist Barry Moser. The sequence is a grouping of sonnets called a sonnet redouble, or "crown of sonnets." (If you have $5,700 lying around, you can see the full effect of engravings and sonnets in the art-book edition published by Nawakum Press between 2014 and 2017. Or you can get a taste of it here .) From the allusive, enigmatic title (from Faust, meaning "manipulating nature") to the variable line lengths to the rich rhymes (jambs/lamb, Death/Seth), the alliteration, and indeed the sonnet form extended to a " crown," what could be more ornamental than this poem? Ornamental as in heightened and closely controlled language and the richest of reading experiences.
Regardless what figures and tools a poem contains, one thing is sure about its ornaments: they are language calling attention to itself. And so, they are elements specific to poetry.
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