The eagle cam (Decorah, Iowa) is showing lots of sleeping time (the chicks) and patient sheltering (adults); the parent birds fly in or off by turns and feed their chicks with gobbets torn from fresh or rotting carcasses of rabbits, fish, small woodchucks, birds. For warmth (or comfort), the big chicks can’t get much more than their big noggins underneath a parent’s breast. The site has fifty million hits. (See raptorresource.org, then click on “bird cams”)

I wonder if there is a prosody of bird sounds—regarding calls, it doesn’t seem at all possible, but perhaps for songs (only “songbirds” have these) there is something.  Whether there are universals of prosody in human language is a question, too, with strong opinions on both sides.  Some of the oldest traces of poetry in the huge family of Indo-European languages suggest that in the mother-language itself, Indo-European, there was already an established poetic line of about 11 syllables.  It can’t be a coincidence that the longstanding lines of similar length in European languages, for example, are about the same length; that’s simply the history.

What’s interesting to the poet and the reader now is what the rhythms of lines are.  There’s no question that spoken English roughly alternates syllables with some speech stress and syllables with little or none.  The whole description of the eagle cam, above, is entirely in iambic feet, with only a couple of substituted feet (pyrrhic followed by spondee, as some call it; “that other thing,” as I have been, perhaps too flippantly, calling it in this series of posts), and it isn’t very hard to create perfectly iambic rhythms in English that sound like everyday speech, since the pattern arises from the language and is not forced onto it.

But once you hear what I’ve done in the paragraph about eagles, above, it will certainly sound monotonous—because I have forced the language a little by making every single pair of syllables fit the pattern of iambic rhythm that verse makes use of for structure, tone, and the subtle play of surprise against expectation (which is the way English poets have described the effects of meter).  The living language that we speak is not verse, so the rhythms of it are never that finely, that deliberately, managed, even though it is roughly iambic all the time.

Yesterday I attended a group discussion led by Derek Attridge, who is visiting Northwestern University this quarter, on prosody, and he proposed that a four-line, four-beat form known in Russian and called the dol’nik might be analogous to something that exists in English without as yet having a name (so it goes unrecognized as a verse form).  He showed us ways of hearing the rhythms in W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” and Thomas Hardy’s “Neutral Tones,” and suggested that these rhythms are dolnikish (my word, not his).  He listens to (and counts) beats and offbeats of a line as a whole, rather than scanning feet.  And our discussion quickly showed that many of us are skeptical of everyone’s else’s way of analyzing the rhythm of a poetic line.  All of which made for a very absorbing discussion that arrived at no conclusions, of course, for the pleasure of it was in entertaining alternative views.

Today the eagle cam has added annoying video ads, as if TV itself had to barge in and conquer the quiet, slow, continuous passage of time at the eagle nest—where only a few things happen, all day long, and yet where the show of incremental change in life, as the chicks perceptibly grow and the adults imperceptibly age, is (evidently for lots of people) very absorbing.  (I know—it’s not some abstract creature called “TV” that does this; it’s the eternally corrosive pressure of profit.)  I find the “raw” (like the fish, etc., the eagles eat) video of the nest more absorbing than the continuous fast sequence of “technical events” of edited video or film, whether in ads or programs, which artificially create a sense of movement far faster than that of ordinary time.  I’m sure many people have theorized all this in many ways.

Like the slow rhythm of the nest (arrival and departure of parents; feeding and sleep) and also like the fast-flying and completely continuous speed of the parental hunt for prey or carrion, rhythms of language are a very old pattern indeed.  In terms of the human life span, the patterns are far older than we are capable of imagining.  (For poetry, 250 generations? 500 generations? 1000 generations?  For human language itself, 5000 generations?  Eagles have no imagination, but we might call their knowing how to do eagle things a kind of memory, and if so, then it goes back millions of generations.)

So the rhythmic argument for free verse is that there are more expressive possibilities in using that only roughly iambic rhythm of English.  And all poetry, metrical or free, can push expressively against the iambic rhythm of English as well as using it, along a continuum that includes taking words out of syntax entirely, as in some of Robert Duncan’s “Passages”; or creating intense “free” rhythms that are very deliberately not iambic (rather than falling without realizing it into iambic rhythms, which I think is an awful thing to do); or by using a different kind of linguistic rhythm, like that of Auden’s poem or Hardy’s, which can’t be scanned in the usual metrical way, and which nevertheless offers (in Auden’s poem) a very satisfying, sensuously pleasurable rhythm (familiar from the ballad tradition), or (in Hardy’s poem) a perplexing rhythm that underlines the agitation of feeling expressed in the poem.  All poets feed on past poetry as prey or carrion.  I suppose it’s their poems that receive the gobbets of flesh and grow big on them.

I send my thanks to Derek Attridge and to the unwitting eagles…  (and to those eagles Auden and Hardy, too…)

*

Two useful books:

John Thompson, The Founding of English Meter

Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction

In the midst of my description of my installments on how poetry uses the rhythms of English to create meter and also free-verse rhythmic emphasis, I can’t resist offering this sidelight.  I encountered it thanks to the poet Maureen McLane, who was visiting Northwestern last week, and who included this quotation among the others in the handout that accompanied her lecture.  It is from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958, 1998, pp. 169-70).  Below the quotation, I will offer a few responses to Arendt’s ideas.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.  The durability of a poem is produced through condensation, so that it is as though language spoken in utmost density and concentration were poetic in itself.  Here, remembrance, Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses, is directly transformed into memory, and the poet’s means to achieve the transformation is rhythm, through which the poem becomes fixed in the recollection almost by itself….  Of all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art; yet even a poem, no matter how long it existed as a living spoken word in the recollection of the bard and those who listened to him, will eventually be “made,” that is, written down and transformed into a tangible thing among things, because remembrance and the gift of recollection, from which all desire for imperishability springs, need tangible things to remind them, lest they perish themselves.

1. “Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.”  I do very much agree with Arendt’s assessment of poetry as “the least worldly of the arts,” simply because unlike visual art and reproductions of such art, sculptures (and copies or photos of them), installations, graphic designs, musical compositions, recordings, buildings with architectural dimensions of originality and beauty and thought like those of art works, dramatic scripts and productions, with all their attendant design of different kinds, choreography and dance performance, etc.—unlike all this, poetry actually needs no materiality at all.  Something that can be recalled in its full presence in one’s mind or heard when someone recites it from memory can’t be sold or bought, can’t be “worldly,” belonging to the world both materially and transactionally.  So poetry does not become a commodity in the same way that the other arts do, but instead is sold in small editions (with few exceptions), and is presented in readings and preserved in memory.  One of the trends of activist visual art, too, has been to produce work that can’t be sold—murals, some kinds of installations, art made of quickly perishable materials.  (Yet someone is always thinking of ways to sell these kinds of things, too; and artists need to buy shelter and food and materials and clothing….

I think Arendt is at least partially mistaken, though, in thinking that there is on the one hand poetry, and on the other, “the thought that inspired it.”  “Inspired” is the tricky word, here.  And maybe I can come back to it, at some point, in one of these little essays.  For now, I will simply say that the process by which a poet composes a poem (whether in one’s mind or on on a wax writing tablet 2,500 years ago or on paper) is a process of  interweaving some initial thought (or phrase or single word or even rhythm—as Paul Valéry said of his own way of working—for these are the “materials” of poetry) with the discoveries one makes along the way (discoveries of a word or phrase, rhythm or rhyme, or discoveries of whole stages of feeling or the shape of the whole poem).  And the initial thought, if there was one, is not necessarily the opening of a poem, but can easily become the ending.  We can’t say that there is a thought, or even “thought” as an abstraction, here, that inspires a poem, over there.

2. “The durability of a poem is produced through condensation, so that it is as though language spoken in utmost density and concentration were poetic in itself.”  Attempts to settle the question of what “poetic language” might be have accompanied poems perhaps continually since the ancient Greeks, and maybe before, and probably since the beginnings of poetic traditions in cultures outside the west, too.  I would guess that such attempts are a part of all poetic traditions, at least from time to time.  And I think that “density and concentration” have probably been a consideration in the history of  most poetic traditions, from prehistoric times till now, everywhere.  Not that the concept of “density and concentration” itself isn’t a point of disagreement; but even when it is, it remains as an idea about poetry that perhaps always guides some poets, however they may define it.

3. “Here, remembrance, Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses, is directly transformed into memory, and the poet’s means to achieve the transformation is rhythm, through which the poem becomes fixed in the recollection almost by itself.”  But rhythm is not only an aid to memorization; it is an expressive resource, a meaning-making element of poetry—when particular poets choose not to use it they can take nothing away from its value as a resource; they are simply making their own aesthetic choice to avoid it, whether their motive is personal or ideological.  (As poets know, any element of poetry can be, and has been, condemned, or praised, for reasons that are supposedly philosophical or political—whether that gesture makes any sense or not.)  And meter of various kinds, on various principles, which my “art and practice” essays are looking at, is the first, and most sustained, and perhaps universally utilized, version of poetic rhythm.  What Arendt leaves out is that whatever it is about poems that does make it possible for us to remember them, it isn’t rhythm alone.  Sound and structure, paradox and metaphor—all sorts of things contribute to memorability.

4. “Of all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art; yet even a poem, no matter how long it existed as a living spoken word in the recollection of the bard and those who listened to him, will eventually be ‘made,’ that is, written down and transformed into a tangible thing among things, because remembrance and the gift of recollection, from which all desire for imperishability springs, need tangible things to remind them, lest they perish themselves.”  Here is the oldest motive or (if the oldest motive was prayer or propitiation of the supernatural) then the second-oldest motive for poetry, and is well documented: the memorability of poetic lines preserves the fame of a king, warrior, chieftain, sometimes a woman.  For this the best poets of the earliest times of poetry were rewarded.  And my final qualifier: the best poetry is thought, is a mode of thought, a way of thinking (and of feeling).  And as Arendt implies both here and at the beginning of the quotation, the pleasures of poetry don’t consist primarily in owning a material object but in the experience, I would even say the sensation, of thinking along with a poem as it moves from beginning to end.  We reread a poem in order to think and feel with it, and to have again a particular sensation of thought and feeling, with the aid of the particular sequence of the “material” or at least sensuous properties of language itself: the forms and histories of words, the rhythms, sounds, images, figures, of the poem.

Back to rhythm and meter.

There is a deservedly admired short poem by Gwendolyn Brooks that is worth listening to, “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till” (from The Bean Eaters, 1960, and included in Blacks, 1987).  I’m sure there are many readings available of this poem, but looking at it mostly rhythmically and phonetically, I will add another brief one.

Announcing in the title that the poem is the last stanza of a ballad, Brooks signals that we should imagine a narrative of which this is the final moment.  And she does not follow traditional ballad meter; instead she writes in response to it.  The traditional meter can be seen in many old poems, especially the beautiful Scottish ballads, such as “Sir Patrick Spens” (on line at a number of web sites), which compresses a tragic narrative into a few stanzas, making use of vivid metonyms, such as the cork-heeled shoes that stand for the warriors themselves not wanting to sail, and later, vindicating their apprehension, and signifying their having placed loyalty over safety (pointlessly, in this case), the hats that float on the sea after the ship and the men have gone down.  In this poem a vindictive, cowardly king is chastised forever afterward for the loss of strong young men.

In her one stanza, Brooks has plenty of narrative power, too–implying a narrative she does not need to provide, but to supplement.  Her images are oblique.  She asks us to imagine what we do not see—unlike Emmett Till’s mother, who required that people see what no one would want to see.

“After the Murder, After the Burial,” Brooks writes, as a kind of narrative epigraph.  And she moves us from the imagined ballad of what happened to Emmett Till to a scene in which he is absent, in which his mother is present as the last figure in Till’s own narrative.  The poem begins, “Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing; / the tint of pulled taffy.”  If we listen to the speech stresses, we hear not the balladic four plus three but five plus three (although we could scan the line as four loose metrical feet; but if Brooks had wanted the meter to be close to ballad meter, she could easily have written it that way, given her virtuosity): “Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing; / the tint of pulled taffy.”  The intensity of feeling is concentrated at the end of the utterance: six speech stresses in nine syllables.  The double speech stresses at the end of the first line and at the end of the second are that Ezra-Poundian device I have mentioned in earlier posts in this series: a twentieth-century choice, for roughly metrical or roughly free verse, whichever way one wishes to read it, of a rhythmic figure formerly used in metrical verse.

“She sits in a red room, / drinking black coffee.”  And there it is again, used in the same way.

And again: “She kisses her killed boy. / And she is sorry.”  Now this is “after the burial,” so her son is not in the red room with her.  Brooks runs two moments in time together, perhaps to represent the time-wrenching experience of grief.  By rhythmic stress and by the phonetic figure on the sound of the repeated ki-, Brooks forcefully links the opposites of “kiss” and “kill.”  That is, the love and the horror are brought into the same space by the repeated sounds of those two juxtaposed words, but this is stated and danced, so to speak, simply, and with restraint.  Meanwhile “taffy” and “coffee” rhyme—both are something one ingests, edibles that are not nourishment but rather a self-soothing: candy and caffeine.  (And of course, Emmett’s mother too has been “pulled” into a distorting pain by grief, the absence of retributive justice, and the extinguishing of a life for mere reason of race.)  And then with “taffy” and “coffee” Brooks rhymes “sorry.”  We can sense the phantom utterance of these three rhyme words together; they almost say it, but do not, because they are separated from each other syntactically, and the poem leaves it to us to formulate that utterance by associating the three words with each other.

“Chaos in windy grays / through a red prairie.”  The last rhyme shows us the whole pattern of a repeated sound, a phonetic figure used over and over—two syllables, the first one stressed, the second one a long “e” sound.  So we hear not only “prairie,” which goes with “taffy,” “coffee,” and “sorry,” but also “windy” and, in line one, “pretty.”  (I can’t help hearing, also, inside “prairie” another word that is not given: “prayer.”  Not given.  That is, significant by its absence.)

Meanwhile the rhythm has been speeding up.  (Every line except the first two can be scanned as metrical, but the feel of the poem is of rhythmical free verse.)  Four speech stresses in the first line, then three, three, three, three, two, three, two.   If we read what the poem would be if it were restricted to something like four-line (unrhymed) ballad meter—that is, without reading the even-numbered lines of what appear to be eight but which are in fact half-lines completing the four lines that begin at the left margin—then we have: “Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing… She sits in a red room… She kisses her killed boy… Chaos in windy grays…” (in this case, 4 speech stresses, then 3 and 3 and 3.)  That’s an even more compressed version of the whole story, with a final image as commentary.

Interpreting the poem means not only imagining one’s way into what is only implied, but also listening to how the rhythms and repeated sounds emphasize what is stated.  “Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing”—but those who know the history know that the boy himself was not pretty-faced, after what had been done to him, and his mother insisted that his coffin remain open at his funeral so that people could see what had happened to him.  She did not allow them to think that the brutality of what had happened to a young boy might perhaps be less horrifying than in fact it was.

The loneliness of Till’s mother; the emptiness of an abstract landscape of “windy grays” moving “through a red prairie”—these are the absence of a humane presence anywhere or everywhere.  The “red room” and the “red prairie” are equated by color: blood, a social and political chaos, an absence of right, a chaotic presence of inhumanity.   “Red prairie”: Brooks was a great satirist, a great social observer; here she ends with an emphatically rhythmic image that is not human, not social, not even literally real.  What can one say?