No Poetic Makeweights, Thank You, Pastry Cooks Excepted . . . . . . . or Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2).

When is a metrical makeweight ever acceptable to a poet?

Padding? Never!

Tennyson’s Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white, for example, is not by the merest jot weighted with such dud ballast.

Tennyson does not stumble at his envoi by interpolating a school-marmish stage direction:

            So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
            Into my bosom (Write it!) lost in me. 

I ask this question because for some time now I have striven to reconcile my admiration for Elizabeth Bishop’s much-lauded villanelle, One Art, with certain misgivings, which I expressed in an earlier post: ‘Do other readers share my doubts when considering the concluding lines of the final quatrain?’

           the art of losing’s not too hard to master
           though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Even the charm of Cameron Diaz when stumblingly reciting the piece in the movie, In Her Shoes (2005), cannot redeem the parenthetical padding of that clumsy antepenultimate metrical foot, which to me always seems as though it’s been desperately shoe-horned into a fit unsuited to it. Metrically, it seems like – as we English say in the demotic – like a cop out. 

Pastry wrappers. ‘It’s all poetry is good for.’

I can think of only one poet whose makeweights have been indulged by his followers. I am thinking of ‘the pastry-cook of poets,’ Ragueneau in Cyrano de Bergerac, whose brioche pastries were shaped as lyres since they additionally gained worth by the burden of his verses. You may remember that those who consumed his confections (bardic cavaliers who numbered Cyrano in their company), whose poems were regarded as currency, saw their screeds cut up for paper bags by Ragueneau’s wife in her perpetual war to defeat Orpheus by punishing the Bacchantes. 

As Mme Ragueneau says, ‘It’s all poetry is good for.’

Yes. It’s one of the very few cases of utilitarianism in the history of poetry, apart from that other witty confection, Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis (Fence/Gate/Stile), created by Britain’s supreme exponent of la poésie concrète, the poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, for his garden of contemplation in South Lanarkshire. 

The Incredibly Obvious Manoeuvre.

But, you know, it is my belief that the stumbling closing line that so vexes the reader of Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art could have been fixed so very easily because the secret mechanism for perfecting the verse was hidden from her all along in her antepenultimate line:

I shan't have lied. It’s evident

Since the structure of a villanelle is surely to reconfigure the poem’s principle elements to extract new and surprising nuances (from such words as ‘evident’ and ‘intent’, say, which provide the secondary rhyme), then it should follow that, when the poetic metre is implacably trochee and suggestive of a revaluation of evidential experience viewed in maturity, the perfect trochaic component – far from being a superfluous padding out (Write it!) – should noticeably possess for the final inevitable clincher the inherent potential to practically write itself. 

In short, it is possible that a poet can be blind to the compelling dynamics of her own invention even while those dynamics are seen to operate with an irresistible momentum within the closed system that is a poem’s argument.  

As a gifted cryptologist declares in my recent post of November 16: ‘The correct solution can often be found hidden in plain sight . . . in this kind of business, we learn to recognise the Incredibly Obvious Manoeuvre.’  

In other words, even the most proficient magician can miss a trick.

So, in my view, the answer to the One Art problem has been embedded in the verses all the time, intrinsic to the text. And, therefore, the poem’s conclusion – defined by its own special impetus –  should/could more directly read:

            Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 
            I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
            the art of losing’s not too hard to master
            though it may look like evident disaster.

Well. Free of independent thought, driven only by the propulsive energy of the unique devices the poet had set in motion in her masterly verses, that’s what I would have done . . . had I been in her shoes.

Cameron Diaz
In Her Shoes

Dare the critic enter the bear pit? See 

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/09/all-that-apart.html 

 

See also 

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1) 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/catechisms-and-cliche-fatuous-minds.html

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 3) 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/finishing-school-for-versifiers-part-3.html
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 4) 
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/03/did-someone-call-for-recitation.html

Mr and Mrs Anon.

To return to the theme of the 'mute inglorious' Mr and Mrs Miltons so despised by Kingsley Amis (see my September posting, Commoners' Rights to the Heroic Quatrain).
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/09/commoners-rights-to-heroic-quatrain.html
The defence of Anon must be for me a recurrent fixation because I'm reminded I touched upon it in my Elegy from a Locked Drawer in Sister Morphine (2008), where my youthful protagonist's flirtation with Toby Freemartin takes this turn ...

It was clear we were hitting it off.
    'What is your favourite colour?' he asked.
    'Iridescence,' I answered quickly (paying homage to Marianne Moore).
    'And your favourite poet?'
    'Anon.'
    His smile was wary. I suspected he was more than a little stuck on me but puzzled by the immature elusiveness I often contrived to make myself more fetching.

-

So, evidently, my views haven't changed since my teens.  And certainly my notebooks record any number of memorable sayings, saws and proverbs whose authors are Anon, yet whose utterances, like folk tunes, cling fast to the mind with a grip fiercer than that of any named poet.

Look. Here. I've just this minute taken eight random folk sayings and arranged them in two 'found stanzas' ...

Thought lies in Bed and is beshatten.
Mope-eyed for living so long as a Maiden,
She cannot leap an Inch from a Slut
Yet can correct the Magnificat.

They say Old Maids lead Apes in Hell.
The Body is the Socket of the Soul
Put together with a hot Needle and burnt Thread. 

Then ask: Would you know her Secrets? Who’s to know who’s a Good Maid?

Remember, Sir Kingsley, the ballad, the proverb, the inventive oath, the cautionary tale, owe their origin to Mr and Mrs Anon.

A solitary truck ... euphonious assonance.

Talking of poetasters. I should note frankly that memories of my youthful experiences when working on an academic publisher’s poetry list were refashioned as Elegy from a Locked Drawer in my Sister Morphine (Salt 2008). This is how I recall the first day at the publisher's office and meeting the intimidating editorial team ...

    I took to him instantly. His name was Toby Freemartin, the editor's copy assistant and general progress chaser. Opposite him, seated across the aisle, was our office section leader, Desmond, a small, fussy, mild-featured copywriter who could, nonetheless, unsheathe kittenish claws to rake his victims with a lacerating wit.
    Toby made a long arm and boldly withdrew from my grasp the cloth-covered writing-case I had brought with me which bore my name. He untied the tapes and riffled through the thin sheaf of poems I had not dared to show the editor.
    'Audenian,' he sniffed, passing each sheet ponderously to Desmond.
    'Macspaunday without the audacity,' Desmond purringly demurred.
    They were both absolutely right, of course.
    Soon a spirited argument developed which centred on my indictment of a number of curious imprecisions which, in my own view, annoyingly marred Auden's phrasing; I was soon citing '... a solitary truck, the last of shunting in the Autumn ...' as a particularly glaring example of such infelicities. Their protests were silenced when I mentioned my great-uncle had been a locomotive engineman hauling French Sleeping Cars on the Continental Express for more than twenty years. He had shown me his railway company's pre-war Signals Manual, I said, which proved conclusively that shunting in sidings was not exclusively seasonal work.
    ' "During darkness, fog or falling snow," ' I quoted, ' "the trackloading in either direction must not exceed ten goods-wagons and a tail lamp must be placed on the last truck by a handsignalman." '
    My great-uncle and his Marxist footplateman agreed that Auden's phrase was ultimately meaningless, I assured them airily, and simply a case of seductive euphonious assonance.
    Toby and Desmond exchanged thoughtful glances.
    I think I must have succeeded in impressing them.

Commoners' Rights to the Heroic Quatrain

I wonder who remembers now Kingsley Amis's reactionism* in citing Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard as 'a great Rightie poem; no work of literature ever argued more persuasively that the poor and ignorant are better off as they are.'

So that's all right, then, 'some mute inglorious' Mr Milton or Mrs Milton are better off laid to rest with our dismissive thought that no lyrical utterance ever passed those illiterate villagers' lips in their lifetime, or profound or original observation ever struck their minds! Absurd!

I was reminded of Amis's idiotic snidery when I came across this poem by David Sweetman the other day. This is the truest, purest, refutation I have yet encountered of Amis's fascistic authoritarian contempt for the People, literate or otherwise, and of his 'kingsley' assumption that metaphor and simile do not figure in the spiritual lives of ALL subjects of the realm.


Cold Beds

Thirty years she had waited for disaster
and when they told her he had drowned
she nodded. Like things seen in Holy prints

there had been signs: the greengrocer
piling bound asparagus as if to burn a saint
made her cross herself quickly.

And when she took flowers for Bob
a dead gull lay on the boy's grave,
plump and grey as the shell that killed him.

So now the father’s gone, after thirty years
on a bed too big for one, she sees it all:
the sails becalmed at the window,

her Madonna for a prow, the moonlight
that gives their walnut cupboard the pattern
of waves closing over his head.

David Sweetman
From ‘Looking into the Deep End’ (Faber, 1981)

* For Amis’s shamefully reactionary remarks, see page 320, ‘The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse’ (1988)