When we classify poems by their speech acts, we draw attention to their manner of expression more than to their content. I can apologize for any number of things — my tardiness, or my mistakes, or my clothing — but in each of these cases my speech act (whatever its content) is an apology. Similarly, I can protest about time, or death, or love — but in every case, my speech act is a protest. Since the language of most poems can be thought of as a series of utterances by a speaker, the poet expects you to track the person’s successive speech acts, just as you might do in life when you might say, “First, she criticized me, then she apologized, then she explained why she was upset, and finally she asked if we could still be friends.” A poem’s speech acts need to be followed and identified in just this way: “The speaker declares his love, and then vows that he will always be faithful, while protesting the indifference of his beloved and reproaching her for it.” Here are a few speech acts that often organize poems (a longer list is provided in the appendix “On Speech Acts”):
Apology
Apostrophe (a direct second-person address to another, usually of higher rank)
Declaration
Boast
Command
Interrogation
Exclamation
Description
Hypothesis
Rebuttal
Narration
Prayer
Debate or dialogue
Reproach
We have seen a narration of autobiography in Rich’s poem “Necessities of Life” and a narration of prayer in Dickinson’s “The Heart asks Pleasure – first –.” A poem whose speech act was prayer would be, unlike the Dickinson poem, addressed directly to God, like George Herbert’s “Discipline,” which begins,
Throw away thy rod,
Throw away thy wrath,
O my God,
Take the gentle path.
Or the speech act of a poem can be a command. Commands are normally given by people; one way of being original in a command-poem would be to have the commands given by something that normally doesn’t talk. This is what Carl Sandburg does in his poem “Grass,” where the grass speaks. This poem surveys the sites of famous battles during the Napoleonic Wars, the Civil War, and the First World War:
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
This poem contains other speech acts besides its repeated commands (“pile,” “shovel them under,” “let me work”). It also contains a repeated self-definition (“I am the grass”) and a piece of narration “Two years . . . and passengers ask . . . what place is this?” If we were mapping this poem by the grass’s speech acts, numbering the commands in sequence (1, 2, and so on), it would read:
Command 1a (“pile”)
Commands 2a and 3a (“shovel them under,” “let me work”)
Self-definition 1a (“I am the grass”)
Command 1b (“and pile”)
Command 1c (“and pile”)
Commands 2b and 3b (“shovel them under” and “let me work”)
Narration (“passengers ask”)
(Inserted question by passengers: “What . . . ?”)
(Inserted question by passengers: “Where . . . ?”)
Self-definition 1b (“I am the grass”)
Command 3c (“let me work”)
When we “map” a poem by its speech acts, we are often enabled to see its skeletal structure and to describe it precisely, saying, “This is a poem of repeated commands by the grass. The grass defines itself by its work of covering-over the dead of all battles, important in their day but soon forgotten, as the questions asked by later passersby, narrated by the grass, reveal.” This is a far more exact way of describing a poem than to mention only its theme, saying, “This poem is about the way in which past battles are soon forgotten.” In noting the way the poet has made this thematic cliché memorable — by having the grass be the speaker, and by giving it relatively few and repeated speech acts to use — one sees the poem not merely as a statement about war but also as a constructed piece of art. Since the language of most poems can be thought of as a series of utterances by a speaker, the poet expects the reader to track and identify the speech acts, just as we do in life. Here, the repetitiveness of form is used to emphasize the sameness of all wars, as burial follows burial repeatedly.