The Ordering of Language

Because poetry is a temporal art, it has to unfold sequentially, one piece after another. First, I say x, then y, then z. But the logical relations among x, y, and z may not be additive or sequential ones. X, y, and z may instead be radii of the same circle, as in George Herbert’s sonnet “Prayer,” where the successive definitions all relate radially to the one subject:

A circle with the word “Prayer” is shown at the center. Lines are drawn from outside the circle like spokes on a wheel. Between each pair of lines, a word or a phrase is written. The words/phrases are as follows: The church’s banquet; angels’ age; God’s breath in man returning to his birth; The soul in paraphrase; heart in pilgrimage; The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth; Engine against th’Almighty; sinner’s tower; Reversèd thunder; Christ-side-piercing spear; The six-days’ world transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness; and peace; and joy; and love; and bliss; Exalted manna; gladness of the best; Heaven in ordinary; man well dressed; The Milky Way; the bird of Paradise; Church bells beyond the stars heard; the soul’s blood; the land of spices; something understood.

GEORGE HERBERT (1593–1633)

Prayer (I)

Prayer, the church’s banquet, angels’ age,

God’s breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth;

Engine against th’Almighty, sinner’s tower,

Reversèd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six-days’ world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear:

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,

The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise,

Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,

The land of spices; something understood.

This list of all the things that prayer is might best be represented as radii of a circle: Herbert’s order is one of radial amplification of one concept, prayer. But does the poem, in addition to its radial order, have a temporal order? That is, does something “happen” to the concept of prayer as the poem progresses? Most readers will be aware that thinking of prayer as “reversèd thunder” is not the same in feeling-tone as thinking of it as “softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss.” You may want to track the changes in mind of the speaker as the poem progresses, as the speaker exchanges one metaphor for another — only to give up entirely on metaphor at the end. In short, a poem can have more than one “shape” — here, it has both a static radial shape and a dynamic temporal unfolding.

Frequently, the ordering of a poem’s language offers a gradual clarification of meaning. At first, in Sonnet 66, Shakespeare’s speaker sees only a procession of terrible miscarriages of justice in the world:

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616)

Sonnet 66

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry:

As to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,

And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,

And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, . . .

At this point, most readers (especially those who have been imaginatively “filling in” the implications of Shakespeare’s categories with their own current examples of the same vices) will begin to see that these actions have no agents. Who reduced the deserving (“desert”) to beggary? Who misplaced honor, bestowing it on the unworthy instead of the worthy? Who has seduced the maiden? As the procession of wrongs continues in the poem, the speaker’s vision becomes clarified: he can see now not only the victims but also their victimizers accompanying them:

And strength by limping sway disablèd,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill, . . .

The procession is now advancing two-by-two, instead of one-by-one; for instance, “strength” is hampered by “limping sway” (incompetent authority). Then, the two-by-two procession is interrupted by an anomalous solo figure:

And simple truth miscalled simplicity.

Who can this be but the poem itself (in the person of its author)? Its “simple truth” is called, wrongly, “simplicity” (“political naïveté,” in modern terms) by its detractors. Finally, we come, at the end, to the chief authority figure, who in a liturgical or court procession would be the Bishop or King. Here, we see the chief agent of all the miscarriages of justice, leading his ultimate allegorical victim:

And captive good attending captain ill.

Captain Ill is a secularized form of Satan, “the prince of this world.” Just as the speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnet sees more clearly as the procession winds on, so do we, until the author of all evil is revealed. This leaves the speaker with no hope of amelioration. Because Ill is Captain, and Good is always Captive in his power, there is no visible justice in this world. And so the speaker, though he is still longing for death, decides against it, not out of hope but out of protectiveness for his beloved:

Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,

Save that to die, I leave my love alone.

“Alone” is a terrible word in the evil world of this sonnet. In danger of being alone, strumpeted, tongue-tied, disgraced, disabled — who, in these circumstances, could abandon his beloved?

We can see the “shape” of this poem in several ways:

1. As a long procession bracketed by the speaker’s two declarations of exhaustion;
2. More precisely, we can see the procession itself subdivided into three main parts: one-by-one, two-by-two, and a final archetype (a generalizing personification) of Good in captivity to Ill;
3. Or we can see a single shape (disillusion and exhaustion) for the first thirteen lines, “redeemed” by line 14, which reveals that the speaker has one value, love, as yet uncorrupted by the world.

The more ways we see the governing linguistic order of the poem, the more human complexity we can perceive within it.

The ordering of experience in shapes of radial or logical clarification — clarification by hierarchy, clarification by a comparison of then to now, clarification by here versus there, or clarification by rise-and-decline (to name only four common “shapes”) — is what gives poetry its aura of mastery. Even when its “content” is tragic — as in Dickinson’s list of the heart’s requests, or Shakespeare’s procession of injustice — the fact that the list has been ordered into an understood set or a hierarchy reassures us that the mind can understand what the heart cannot endure, and that the imagination can find a linguistic shape for the structures of reality, even for those that are most tragic.

There is no linguistic ingredient too small to attract the poet’s interest. Wallace Stevens makes poems that turn on the difference between the definite and indefinite article (“the” versus “a”); Yeats constructs a poem (“In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz”) that turns on a movement from “I” to “you” to “we” as a sign of reconciliation of enemies. Shakespeare can build a whole sonnet (“Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” Sonnet 129) on a contrast between nouns and adjectives (nouns give essence, we are reminded; adjectives give qualities). The play of language is the chief cause for the aesthetic success of any poem. Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with line breaks added.

Let’s look at a sample poem, Michael Drayton’s “Since there’s no help,” to try to bring to bear on it what this chapter has said about examining the language of a poem very closely at several levels — its sound-units, its etymological roots, its sentences with their words functioning as parts of speech, its subjects and predicates, tenses and moods, its imaginative play of language, and its processes of implication. The poem is spoken by a young man whose beloved, we infer, has just declared that their love affair is over:

MICHAEL DRAYTON (1564–1631)

Since there’s no help

Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part;

Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,

And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart

That thus so cleanly I myself can free;

Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,

And when we meet at any time again,

Be it not seen in either of our brows

That we one jot of former love retain.

Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath,

When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,

When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,

And innocence is closing up his eyes;

Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,

From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.

Here are the main independent clauses of the first sentence of the poem, which occupies the octave, or first eight lines, of the sonnet. The clauses are here written out as statements, with the pronouns in boldface and the predicates italicized:

Come let us kiss and part

I have done

You get no more of me

I am glad

[let us] shake hands

[let us] cancel vows

be it not seen

The first sentence, then, moves through several verbs in the hortatory mood — “let us kiss and part,” “let us shake hands,” “let us cancel all our vows,” “[let] it not be seen” — interspersed with verbs in the indicative mood, one in the past tense (“I have done”) and two in the future tense (“you [will] get no more of me” and “when we [shall] meet at any [future] time”). The pronouns change from us to I to you to me to I to us to it. All of these changes are indexes of the speaker’s troubled state, as he darts from mood to mood, from tense to tense, and from subject position to object position. Although many of the dependent clauses add information (“Since there’s no help,” “that thus so cleanly I myself can free,” “that we one jot of former love retain”), yet the skeleton above of the main clauses makes the import of the sentence clear.

The case is very different when we come to the second sentence, which takes up the last six lines (the sestet) of the sonnet. It has only one main clause: “Thou mightst him yet recover.” All the other clauses are strung from this one. “Thou mightst him recover” — when?

Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath

[Now] when passion speechless lies

[Now] when faith is kneeling by his bed

[Now] when innocence is closing up his eyes

Now when all have given him over

All of these adverbial clauses “lead up” like the steps of a staircase to the main clause, giving the sestet its long suspense. In this way, the relatively straightforward march of main clauses in the octave changes dramatically once we meet the long delay of the main clause in the sestet.

When we look at the kind of words these two sentences are composed of, we notice that with a few exceptions — “cancel” and “retain” — most of the words of the octave are those short brisk words we tend to associate with our Anglo-Saxon linguistic heritage — “help,” “come,” “kiss,” “get,” “glad,” “heart,” “clean,” and so on. When we come to the sestet, the number of Latin- or Romance-derived words rises — “pulse,” “fail,” “passion,” “faith,” “innocence,” “close,” “recover.” Even if readers do not recognize the roots of all these words, they will sense how the more ceremonious sestet departs from the brisk colloquial nature of the words in the octave, not only because of the rise of Latin-derived words but also because of the suspended syntax.

It is clear that the speaker speaks about himself in the first person (“I”) in the octave: “Nay, I have done, you get no more of me.” But in the sestet, we see a change in language: instead of speaking directly about himself, the speaker speaks in the third person of someone called “Passion” who is lying on his “bed of death,” whose “pulse [is] failing,” who is emitting the last gasp of love’s breath. This dying person is attended by two mourners: Faith is kneeling by his deathbed, and Innocence is closing the eyes of the dying man. This little third-person tableau is a way of avoiding first-person speech (otherwise, by the principle of inertia, the speaker would have continued as he began). The change to the third person makes us ask, “What would this closing tableau have been like if it, like the octave, had been put in the first person?”

Now, at the last gasp of my loving breath,

My passion has no words to say to thee,

I seem to lose the faith I had, and death

Of love is death of innocence in me.

Now if thou wouldst, when I have given love over,

From death to life thou mightst me yet recover.

We can see that it’s more dignified to ask the woman to rescue “Passion” than to say, “Please, even at this last gasp of passion, rescue me.”

Because the octave has been phrased in the hortatory (“let us”) and indicative (“I am glad”) moods, we especially notice, when we come to the sestet, that it turns for its main clause to the conditional mood: “Now if thou wouldst . . . / thou mightst him yet recover.” This holds out a grain of hope — if she would do this, she might bring him back to life. This is “politer” than saying, in the imperative, “Do this, and he will be cured.” It is a plea, not a command.

After the relatively plain octave, in which the words are linked by the concept of saying farewell and canceling vows, we come to two conspicuous sets of linked words in the sestet. One is a set of abstract nouns — Love, Passion, Faith, and Innocence. They are the actors in the little tableau. The other set of words is medical and funereal — “gasp,” “breath,” “pulse failing,” “speechless,” “bed of death,” “closing . . . eyes,” “life,” “recover.” Normally, it is human beings who are in the situation where here we find Passion — dying among mourners. Drayton brings together in the sestet two incompatible sets of linked words — one abstract, one medically concrete — and constructs his surprising little third-person tableau with them to show us how the lover feels: he is not really dying physically, but emotionally: “a deathbed scene” is the best description for what is happening to his passion — and he hopes that externalizing his inward feelings in this theatrical tableau may persuade his beloved to have pity on him.

We see from the closing tableau, and the plea with which it ends, that the speaker put on his original bluster (“Nay, I have done, you get no more of me, / And I am glad, yea glad”) to hide the real dismay and despair that his closing tableau reveals.

These are only some of the moves we could make in beginning to study the language of this poem, and to ask the questions it provokes: “Why the change in person between octave and sestet?” “Why the introduction of the little tableau?” “Why is the sestet so ceremoniously written after the colloquial language of the octave?” “Why is the main clause of the sestet in the conditional mood?” “Why is the main clause of the sestet so long suspended adverbially before we get to it?”

Of course, we eventually have to move on from the use of language to the wider purposes of the poem — Drayton’s conception of passion, and its relation to love, faith, and innocence, and his apt psychological observation of the defenses put up by the jilted lover, before the lover breaks down into his final abject plea. But that is material for a longer study, in which we might compare this poem to others written by Drayton and get a better idea of his general poetic procedures. In each case, though, the first place to begin is with the play of language. In it, we find the imagination at work.