waka The Japanese use w aka to refer to all serious poetry written in Japanese from the earliest literate times. It references poetry as a native possession of Japan. In contrast to popular or religious songs, waka refers to the forms of court poetry, such as the tanka. Waka is also used in modern times as a synonym for tanka, in which case it refers to a traditional verse form consisting of five phrases, each with a set number of syllables: 5–7–5–7–7. A comic waka is called a kyōka.
Japanese poetry is syllabic, and all traditional forms of Japanese poetry involve five- and seven-syllable lines. Some scholars think the model derives from Chinese poetry; others speculate that the alternating line lengths suited archaic patterns of singing. No one knows precisely why this syllabic pattern defines traditional Japanese poetry.
Kakekotoba is a “pivot-word,” a type of wordplay crucial to waka. Pivot-words use sounds that mean two things at once by different parsings. A makurakotoba (“pillow-word”) modifies the words it follows in various and sometimes ambiguous ways. There are two basic terms in Japanese poetics. Kotoba refers to the materials of poetry and includes such things as syntax and prosody, diction and imagery, quality of sound and phrasing. Kokoro refers to the spirit and feeling, the heart of poetry. Thus kokoro naki is poetry without “heart,” kokoro ari is poetry with a conviction of feeling.
Ki No Tsurayuki’s preface to the Kokinshū (ca. 905) expresses his belief in the naturalness and human feeling at the heart of Japanese poetry:
The poetry of Japan has its roots in the human heart and flourishes in the countless leaves of words. Because human beings possess interest of so many kinds, it is in poetry that they give expression to the meditations of their hearts in terms of the sights appearing before their eyes and the sounds coming to their ears. Hearing the warbler sing among the blossoms and the frog in his fresh waters—is there any living being not given to song? It is poetry which, without exertion, moves heaven and earth, stirs the feelings of gods and spirits invisible to the eye, softens the relations between men and women, calms the hearts of fierce warriors.
SEE ALSO tanka.
wedding songs, see epithalamium.
wisdom literature The ancient Near East had an elastic genre of literature and a wide corpus of works known as wisdom literature, much of it poetry. These works deal with ethical and religious topics, moral precepts, and the nature of divinity. The Book of Proverbs, which treats wisdom as something teachable in language, is the central biblical example of ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature. Some early Christian writers simply called it “Wisdom,” and it was referred to in the Roman Missal as a “Book of Wisdom.”
A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a man
of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels:
To understand a proverb and the interpretation; the words of the wise,
and their dark sayings. (Proverbs 1:5–6)
Wisdom literature includes the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs from the Hebrew Bible, as well as the books of the Apocrypha known as the Wisdom of Solomon and Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus.
Biblical scholars coined the term wisdom literature for a genre of works embodying hokmah (“wisdom”). The term was subsequently adapted to other ancient Near Eastern works, such as the Mesopotamian corpus of wisdom texts, which seek to teach the art of leading a successful life in harmony with the divine. It is generally recognized that Proverbs 22:17–24:22 (the “Words of the Wise”) borrows from the ancient Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope (ca. 1100 B.C.E.), which belongs to the primary didactic literary genre of sebayt (“instruction”) and derives from the royal court. Admonitions, a subcategory of wisdom texts, were used to warn against social and moral evils. The word for wisdom in Sumerian is nam-kù-zu, which means “pure, sacred knowledge.” This sacred knowledge, embodied in proverbs, fables, instructions, disputations, and dialogues, was passed on by master scribes to their pupils through such “rhetorical collections” or “scribal training literature” as The Instructions of Shuruppak (ca. 2500 B.C.E.), the most significant piece of Sumerian wisdom literature. It is a carefully constructed collection of poetic instructions on the proper way to live. The Akkadian word for sacred knowledge is nēmequ, which appears in the most well-known work of Babylonian wisdom literature: “Let me praise the Lord of Wisdom” (late second millennium B.C.E.). There are two main types of Babylonian wisdom literature. One contains practical advice on how to live, what to do. These are frequently addressed to “my son.” The other type reflects more generally on human experiences.
SEE ALSO didactic poetry, gnome, proverbs.
wit The ability to make quick, clever connections with verbal deftness, to perceive the likeness in unlike things, relating incongruities and thus awakening the intelligence. Wit is a term with a long critical history. In his treatise Rhetoric (ca. 335–330 B.C.E.), Aristotle treated asteia (“wit”) as the ability to make apt comparisons as well as a form of “well-bred insolence.” Classical rhetoricians used it to mean “cleverness” or “ingenuity.” The Latin writers termed it urbane dicta (“clever or witty sayings”). To the Renaissance, the word meant “intelligence” or “wisdom.” During the seventeenth century, wit was associated with the metaphysical poetry of John Donne and others, and identified with the ability to create startling, far-fetched figures of speech. “Tell me, O tell, what kind of thing is Wit, / Thou who Master art of it,” Abraham Cowley writes in his witty “Ode of Wit” (1656). Reacting against the metaphysical mode, Dr. Johnson attacked Cowley for “heterogeneous ideas . . . yoked by violence together,” a criticism that would later be considered a compliment.
Once viewed as an essential feature of poetry, wit was defined by the philosopher John Locke as “the Assemblage of Ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety.” John Dryden characterized it as “sharpness of conceit,” thereby emphasizing the shared self-consciousness between the poet and the reader. In “An Essay on Criticism” (1711), Alexander Pope famously contrasted “true wit,” guided by judgment, with mere fanciful writing: “True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”
Rebelling against the association of wit with reason and common sense, the Romantic poets employed the concept of imagination to designate the ability to invent and perceive relations. Wit was degraded to a form of levity, from which it has never entirely recovered. In rediscovering the metaphysical poets, T. S. Eliot revived the concept of wit, which he described in an essay on Andrew Marvell as a “tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace.”
SEE ALSO conceit, imagination, metaphysical poets.
work song The song to accompany work is an oral phenomenon, an ancient, rhythmic, utilitarian form of verse. The work song increases labor efficiency by setting a steady pace for a group, timing its strokes. Tomb inscriptions from Egypt (ca. 2600 B.C.E.) include work songs for shepherds, fishermen, and chairmen. There are songs of the well-diggers in Numbers (21:17–18). In ancient Greece, there were songs for making rope and drawing water (fountain songs), for stamping barley and treading grapes, for spinning wool and herding sheep. The earliest French lyrics, called chanson de toile and dating from the twelfth century, were short poems to accompany needlework and tapestry weaving. It has been plausibly theorized that the rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry was based on the slow pull and push of the oar, whereas the Irish tradition developed a rhythm based on the pounding of hammer and anvil. If so, then English verse, which has a qualitative meter, has its origins in the physical action of work. Whenever the rhythm of certain tasks has become set—sowing, reaping, threshing, washing clothes, milking cows, rowing, hauling and pulling down sail, etc.—then there are accompanying songs that preserve those rhythms.
African traditional poetry includes songs to accompany such occupations as canoe paddling, milling of rice, marching, and nursing children. The call-and-response pattern of these songs, the interplay between a leader and a chorus (dokpwe in Dahomey), carried over to the New World in the form of field hollers and other songs improvised by people forced into slavery, in the lyrics of woodcutters and fishermen, of rural and prison road gangs. In the African American work song, a leader provides a strong rhythmic cue with two or three bars, which are then answered in the ejaculatory word or words of moving workers. The rhythmic interaction makes both poetry and music a participatory activity. The West African pattern also influenced the agricultural songs of Trinidad (gayap) and Haiti (combite).
Some folklorists argue that the work song challenges the nature of work by changing the mindset of the workers. The singer supplies a beat and relieves the tedium, transposing the space, creating a different relationship to time. The rhythm of the words—the work that poetry does—actively restructures time. It induces a kind of ritualistic hypnosis, a rhythmic ecstasy.
SEE ALSO folk song, oral poetry, rhythm, sea shanties.
wrenched accent, wrenched rhyme At times the requirements of metrical stress prevail over the natural accent of a word or words. The rhythms of folk songs, for example, do not always correspond to speech rhythms. Folksingers seem to find wrenched accents quite “natural” in performing ballads, as in this stanza from “Sir Patric Spens,” which changes the emphasis on the word máster to mastér:
Late late yestreen I saw the new moone,
Wi the auld moone in hir arme,
And I feir, I feir, my deir master,
That we will cum to harme.
A rhyme that depends on a wrenched accent is called a wrenched rhyme. It rhymes a stressed with an unstressed syllable, as in the tenth stanza of the anonymous ballad “Mary Hamilton,” which wrenches together the words sae and free so that they rhyme with the word ladie:
When she cam down the Cannongate,
The Cannongate sae free,
Many a ladie lookd oer her window,
Weeping for this ladie.
SEE ALSO accent, folk song, meter, prosody, rhyme, scansion.