Marcus P
04-29-2004, 04:33 AM
Please excuse this post - I know nothing about poetry.
I try to write it; I spend hours rearranging words, repeating a line over and over until it either sounds just right or loses all meaning, borrowing phrases and squeezing them until they become my own. But I actually know nothing. And that becomes most obvious when I sit down and flick through a collection of really excellent writing.
Take Tennyson for example. I'd never read a single word of his till last night, but as I looked through his poems it seemed as if half the language started with him. Phrases and lines just seemed so right. My anthology doesn't contain much of his work, just a few representative samples I guess, but enough to know that this is real poetry.
Of course most of it is just plain hard to understand. After all, it was written a hundred and fifty odd years ago. When I started reading last night I had Portishead on the stereo; can you imagine someone in 2150 listening to 'Dummy' for the first time and being able to really appreciate it? Well, it's the same with me and Tennyson. But some things are immediately good, enough so that I can really enjoy the read.
I spent some time reading In Memoriam A.H.H and was struck by Tennyson's force of feeling. His friend Arthur Henry Hallam had died and this poem is Tennyson's response; personal, philosophical, but rooted in strong images and beautiful language. Take section eleven for example (I didn't have that many sections to choose from!); we see Tennyson stood somewhere in the countryside, in some wide open land early in the morning with dew highlighting the spiders' threads over the gorse bushes and the occasional chestnut rustling the leaves of a tree as it falls to the ground. A scene of total peace and calm.
But what is he doing there at that time? Clearly not everything is calm, he's grieving his friend. So the calm, "if any calm", is "a calm despair". The real calm, the "dead calm" is to be found on the ship bringing Hallam's body back to England.
And the idea of calm is in the structure of the poem too. The regular abba rhyme and the eight syllable lines give us a calm regularity, like a resting heartbeat or the sway of a boat on a gently heaving sea. But, and remember I know nothing about poetry, it seems to me that although each line has four stresses (tetrameter?) the first lines of stanzas two, three and four have five. This interrupts my calm! There's an unease as I read these lines out loud. It's as if Tennyson finds himself in the countryside in the first stanza, forgetting his grief for a moment, but then the calm is less than perfect in the following stanzas until things settle down again in the final stanza when we are brought to the "dead calm" in the "noble breast" of his lost friend.
This will still be beautiful and touching in another hundred and fifty years.
In Memoriam A.H.H
XI.
Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only thro' the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground:
Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:
Calm and still light on yon great plain
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main:
Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair:
Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
And waves that sway themselves in rest,
And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.
Links:
Tennyson's Poetry (http://tennysonpoetry.home.att.net/index.htm)
Alfred Lord Tennyson (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/tennyov.html)
(Edited to fix the links!)
I try to write it; I spend hours rearranging words, repeating a line over and over until it either sounds just right or loses all meaning, borrowing phrases and squeezing them until they become my own. But I actually know nothing. And that becomes most obvious when I sit down and flick through a collection of really excellent writing.
Take Tennyson for example. I'd never read a single word of his till last night, but as I looked through his poems it seemed as if half the language started with him. Phrases and lines just seemed so right. My anthology doesn't contain much of his work, just a few representative samples I guess, but enough to know that this is real poetry.
Of course most of it is just plain hard to understand. After all, it was written a hundred and fifty odd years ago. When I started reading last night I had Portishead on the stereo; can you imagine someone in 2150 listening to 'Dummy' for the first time and being able to really appreciate it? Well, it's the same with me and Tennyson. But some things are immediately good, enough so that I can really enjoy the read.
I spent some time reading In Memoriam A.H.H and was struck by Tennyson's force of feeling. His friend Arthur Henry Hallam had died and this poem is Tennyson's response; personal, philosophical, but rooted in strong images and beautiful language. Take section eleven for example (I didn't have that many sections to choose from!); we see Tennyson stood somewhere in the countryside, in some wide open land early in the morning with dew highlighting the spiders' threads over the gorse bushes and the occasional chestnut rustling the leaves of a tree as it falls to the ground. A scene of total peace and calm.
But what is he doing there at that time? Clearly not everything is calm, he's grieving his friend. So the calm, "if any calm", is "a calm despair". The real calm, the "dead calm" is to be found on the ship bringing Hallam's body back to England.
And the idea of calm is in the structure of the poem too. The regular abba rhyme and the eight syllable lines give us a calm regularity, like a resting heartbeat or the sway of a boat on a gently heaving sea. But, and remember I know nothing about poetry, it seems to me that although each line has four stresses (tetrameter?) the first lines of stanzas two, three and four have five. This interrupts my calm! There's an unease as I read these lines out loud. It's as if Tennyson finds himself in the countryside in the first stanza, forgetting his grief for a moment, but then the calm is less than perfect in the following stanzas until things settle down again in the final stanza when we are brought to the "dead calm" in the "noble breast" of his lost friend.
This will still be beautiful and touching in another hundred and fifty years.
In Memoriam A.H.H
XI.
Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only thro' the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground:
Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:
Calm and still light on yon great plain
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main:
Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair:
Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
And waves that sway themselves in rest,
And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.
Links:
Tennyson's Poetry (http://tennysonpoetry.home.att.net/index.htm)
Alfred Lord Tennyson (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/tennyov.html)
(Edited to fix the links!)