On Modern Poetry by Smith Robert Rowland;

Author:Smith, Robert Rowland;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-05-22T05:21:41.500000+00:00

wormy winter

winter sticks

fists of turnips

frosty fingers

punishes the land

punishes my hair

heartless words

my busy heart

my heart is drained

drains her words

chemic blood

syllabic blood

dark-vowelled birds

vowelled beeches

Some of the repetitions are exact, some half-exact, and some closer to association than repetition; but the overall effect cannot be denied. What is that effect? Not quite that of incantation or fugue, though it stimulates in the reader’s mind a comparable inebriety: it is a sense of magic and mirrors, of a twisted but unavoidable logic, of an equation that, despite the colourful algebra of its terms, balances out. How does it differ from the use of repetition in classic rhetoric – (the famous example being the speech by Martin Luther King in which he uses the phrase ‘I have a dream’ eight times in succession)? Again, there is a point about message. The inescapable anaphora in the King speech is designed to cascade relentlessly into every ear until it is full, until the vision it portrays has been painted on the inner screen of all who listen; that is repetition as evangelism. Poetry must be wary of it on those grounds. Where possible, poets should, like Thomas, insinuate into the repetitions some subtle variation, unless the function of those repetitions is solely to mark out a formal pattern, like gridlines for a new building. The reason being not only the avoidance of message in the narrowly political sense, but the properly poetic opportunity to photograph the delicacies of shade that exist where repetitions are not quite exact.

But there is a more important value that repetition bears for the poet, to do with the establishing of a lexicon. Again, poetic differs from political rhetoric in this respect. The latter has to be careful to keep to an idiom that is broadly demotic, to ensure popularity. Poetic rhetoric, by contrast, embraces repetition and variation within repetition in order to limit, rather than expand, the list of words on which it might draw, in the name of constructing an image-world answerable only to its own logic. It aims to create a ‘pull’ towards it, rather than the ‘push’ given by political rhetoric. So when Thomas writes ‘With fists of turnips punishes the land’, it obviously chimes with ‘With frosty fingers punishes my hair’, and in such a way that we accept the second line as consistent with the poem’s molecular structure, so to speak, even if the idiom in both cases is strange to the point of being repellent. The first phrase breaks open a path for the second, helping to construct the poet’s own territory, a territory that we, the reader, now tend to accept on its own terms. Contrast it with these lines, say, from ‘Chomei at Toyama’ by Basil Bunting:3

Hankering, vexation and apathy,

that’s the run of the world.

Hankering, vexation and apathy,

keeping a carriage wont cure it.

Keeping a man in livery

wont cure it. Keeping a private fortress

wont cure it. These things satisfy no craving.

Hankering, vexation and apathy …

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