Poems that answer a question (12.12.21)

At our last Wednesdays@One salon, I suggested a new project: write a poem that answers a question.

Specifically, what I'm thinking is the following:

• make your title a question
• write the poem as an answer or series of replies to the question
• the interesting challenge will be to answer the question using as many of the tools of poetry as you can: image, metaphor or simile, descriptive figure (like an image or a brief narration), rhythm and/or meter, page real estate, and so on.

You're familiar with some well-known examples already, in English at least.  "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" asked Shakespeare at the start of his famous sonnet.  He did two things that you might consider when writing your own.  One, the first line is the question--the poem was, as most sonnets were at the time, without a title--and thus integrated into the structure of the poem.  Two, his approach was, as that first line announces, comparative.  "Thou art more lovely, and more temperate," came the first line in reply to the question.  And the rest of the poem proceeds along this line of answer: how the object of the poet's ardor compares to things in nature (the weather, sunlight, mortality, the passage of time), that is, to changeableness, because his poem is answer to impermanence.  

Here is another famous "reply" poem:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning did the same thing with this poem as Shakespeare had before her, left it title-less, incorporating the crucial question into the opening line and making the entire poem an answer to that question.  Her approach is definition rather than comparison: it's a kind of "how-to" poem, or, specifically, "how-I."  She builds momentum, and force, through the repetition of "I love thee," as her means of "counting" through the answer to the most powerful expression of the poem: love even in death.

And notice this about these two poems, and keep it in mind as you write, everything about the question is high gain.  No yes/no or rhetorical questions here!  These questions demand some deeper thinking.  It's the need for a deep response that drives each poem.

Now imagine this.  Suppose either poet decided to answer the question more or less obliquely or metaphorically, that is, not so directly and point-by-point, that is, rhetorically, as Shakespeare and Barrett Browning do.  But what if you wanted to stick solely with the poetic, what might that look like?  

Shakespeare might have simply described a summer's day, without the comparative language.  Or he might have moved his answer still one more step away from rhetoric and described someone having a picnic on some grassy knoll or taking a walk alongside a stream, noting the faults of summer--hot and buggy and sweaty; storm-tossed; blinding; unpredictable weather--only implying through the question that the someone of the poem "compares" far better.  

Barrett Browning might have only described a man actually "turning from praise," or "doing right"; or a child demonstrating blind faith in some childish activity; as an oblique means of implying, "the way he resists praise (that is, with integrity), I love you." 

Granted, to respond this obliquely is a challenge!  But we moderns are Modern partly because we do things--like talk, think, imagine--in the oblique.  I wonder if you can do this in your poem?  If not, don't worry about it.  Do it the old-fashioned way, if you like.

But write a poem whose purpose is to address a question that is either its title or its first line.

And have fun!