‘The poetic’ emerges naturally from the language under certain performance conditions; but when considered as a conceptual phenomenon, it is as much a mode of reading as it is of speaking or writing. This can be thought of in terms of three vaguely defined sub-modes. Any one of these activities can produce effects in the reader that might be called ‘poetic’ – by which is almost invariably meant a kind of ‘meaning-infused aesthetic experience’; however these effects only arise through creative investment, not passive reception. The three modes also bleed rather seamlessly into one another, as they really represent points on a scale from the largely semantic appreciation of the text to a purely musical or aesthetic one.

Take our old standby, the word ‘moon’. Give it some space, some page-silence, as we do words within a poem; stare at it for a minute.

moon

What kind of reading have we just made? Firstly, our reading has become an act of determined and wilful oversignification – of ‘reading in’ far more than we would in a simple monosemic interpretation: we might start to think of all connotations and alternative senses of the word ‘moon’ (at least one is rather unfortunate). Secondly, it’s one of conscious overattention to the phonosemantic dimension of the language, that interfusion of sound and sense which produces synaesthetic effect. This might lead us to hear the nasal-rounded, empty white sphere of the moon. Thirdly, it’s one of unconscious, receptive oversensitivity to its sensual physical properties, its acoustic mark, its music and rhythm. Here, we feel the shape of the word ‘moon’ in our mouth, its envelope of nasals and its long vowel, and experience it as a lyric effect.

(I’ve covered this at length in the first essay, but before we go on I should provide a quick recap. Poets have known for thousands of years that words are definitely not the kind of arbitrary signs Saussure claimed. The mere fact that ‘moon’ is represented by very different phonemes in other languages is no disproof of the existence of a broad iconic principle which underlies the structure of speech. It isn’t the referent itself that imprints itself into the sound of speech, but – since the process is directed by the mind – an aspect of the conceptual domain of the referent. This aspect will be different, depending on cultural circumstances and environmental exigencies. These determine the salient quale the word will then iconically reflect, even thought the word-sound will also function indexically for its entire conceptual domain. So the word for the moon, in various languages, might phonosemantically connote ‘light’, or ‘roundness’, or ‘distance’, or ‘the hunt’, or ‘tide-pulling’, or ‘menses’, and so on; but there is no universal quale of ‘moonness’. Phonesthemes have no ‘dictionary definitions’, but are mere phonemic nodes which indicate a quale capable of being shared across lexemes; and while I would maintain they are acutely ‘felt’, their actual presence in the language can be argued only by pointing to tendencies, not instantiations. I should admit that I have no particular evidence for all this, but speaking ‘as a poet’ – a dubious and narrow expertise one should rarely brandish – it strikes me as simple common sense.)

Any text can receive a ‘hypersensitive’ reading. Take the standard matchbox warning Keep away from damp places and small children – which, when you think about it for a moment, is excellent general advice. To supply this reading, you have to wilfully remove it from its specific domain, in this case ‘safety instructions on matchboxes’, and allow it its polysemy by releasing it back into its generic domain – in this case that of ‘general advice’, a possibility aided by its imperative mood. Note that for this domain-shift to happen, you need to reread. Your first reading will likely be made, quite unthinkingly, in the context of the specific domain, which is often established by straightforward cultural circumstance. Most so-called ‘found poems’ release a specific-domain sign into the generic domain (additionally rendered ‘pregnant with significance’ through its merely ‘being a poem’), or into a different specific domain circumscribed by a title:

The above, rendered immediately symbolic by its title, was originally liberated from the specific domain of a novel called The Blue Bed, by Glyn Jones (initially without acknowledgement).2

One’s a crown, two’s a crown,

three, four, five distal occlusal,

six distal occlusal, seven occlusal.

Upper left: one mesial incisal, […]

(PAUL FARLEY, ‘Relic’)3

Here the title reframes the material, and indicates that we might also read the author’s own dental records as an alarming memento mori.

Many poetic effects that fall into the broad category of ‘the play on words’, e.g. paronomasia and punning, will domain-shift from the specific to the generic, or vice-versa. (Think of all actress-and-bishop jokes.) Clichéd and idiomatic phrasemes – which are learned by rote by the right brain as single lexicalised entries, as synonyms for other things – catch the strange light-angles characteristic of their new context and are considered afresh, as words heard as if for the first time, with all the double-take poignancy of them being additionally familiar. I tend to think of this ‘reframing of the known’ as the definition of poetic originality, as distinct from poetic ‘novelty’. Look at the bolded phrases in this passage from ‘Mules’ by Paul Muldoon:

In a sense, this is one cliché after another; but the poet requires us to reinterpret and renew each of those worn phrases in the new thematic domain, one which concerns sterile crossbreeds, sterility, the earthly and the divine, miscegenation, and otherworldliness in general. Therefore ‘feet of clay’ takes on qualities of ‘the earthbound’, in contrast to the divine star – a mark of pedigree – on the mare’s brow; ‘cross wrenched from his shoulders’ manages to connote both Christ and the lifted burden of the donkey, who is delivered of the mule’s unnatural crossbreed; the boxing-derived cliché ‘punch below their belts’ connotes both the ‘wrongness’ and illegitimacy of this breeding, and the genital seat of it all; and ‘neither one thing or the other’ dramatically literalises a phraseme so tired it is usually lexicalised with a single stress on ‘other’.6 (I’ll explore the complex business of the subversion of phraseme and collocation in a more technical way in Part III on metre.)

Now if you turn over our box of matches, you might see Strike softly away from the body – which to my ear sounds rather lovely, when I ‘overattend’ to its lyric qualities, and suggestions of other meanings. As we’ve seen, ambiguity, polysemy and altered sense in poetry are achieved largely by domain-shift, where we choose to read a word, phrase or detail in either a larger, smaller or multiple frame. We can release it from its specific use into a wider generic domain, or take it from the generic domain to a specific one (both these moves are intra-domain; more precisely, ‘synecdochic’); or we can reframe it within another specific domain (as in Farley’s ‘Relic’, which uses an inter-domain strategy). This process draws out and makes salient alternative senses from the umbra of its central and secondary attributes. Although perhaps the most fundamental reframing is produced by the words simply being read within the larger domain of ‘reading poetry’, with all its unique protocols, oversignifyings and overattentions.7

Poets start with the assumption of an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to reward this reader for their additional investment – texts that we find unusually striking, apposite, or musical – are usually adjudged ‘poetic’, but this oversignifying faculty is anterior to the poem itself. The work of the poet is to contribute a text that will firstly invite such a reading, and secondly reward such a reading. What we’re left with is a cultural contract between reader and writer, involving three identifiable and independent stages. A poem is usually (a) written as a poem; (b) presented as a poem; then (c) read as a poem. It is written as a poem, with the built-in polysemic density, lyric integration and originality we tend to require of it; it is then presented as a poem – conventionally through designation, lineation (whose most immediate visual consequence is to declare the self-importance of the text), and obvious, identifiable poetic ‘effect’; then it is read as a poem, in that state of mild paranoia that more or less defines the poetry reader.8

One might say that in the act of ‘over-reading’, the reader has taken the poem as a synecdoche,9 where the poem is a part that stands for a whole, a smaller thing which stands for a larger. This has led us to identify synecdoche as poetry’s ‘master trope’. A poem ‘about’ x is often read as being also ‘about’ the larger set of terms y to which x belongs, to a greater or lesser, more- or less-conscious degree. A poem concerning a couple’s argument over a biscuit, then, will often and unthinkingly be seen as ‘about’ the entire failing relationship. Philip Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’ shows details of a disappointed life which is also ‘about’ that entire disappointed life (and, it emerges, that of the poem’s speaker).10 The larger x we are invited to ponder via representative member y can either be directly stated, implied by the poem itself (often through the anchorage of its title), or invoked for no other reason than y is ‘in a poem’; or it can – as in the case of our couple arguing over the biscuit – be declared via the fondement or tonal context, which directs us far more emphatically to ‘the set of failing relations’ than it does to, say, the poem’s being a political allegory. Things get a little shakier when we say that Burns’s ‘To a Mouse’ is ‘about’ one little life’s helplessness before capricious fate, which represents the helpless fate of all things; or that Frost’s ‘Design’ is a little godless scenario he presents as a teaspoonful of our whole godless universe. I mentioned that we read our existential trope – the living experience of our senses – as either metaphor or a metonym of the universal set, depending on whether we regard our experience of things as ‘symbolic’ or partial. I suspect that poets, being the designing gods of their little universes, think they are creating things that are as much symbol as synecdoche – and that readers are only too happy to help them. Symbols are inter-domain,11 and therefore create meaning – of which there is none in the real universe, unless some conscious creature is projecting it; perhaps symbols are better at creating a ‘momentary stay against confusion’. By contrast, a synecdoche may ‘stand for’ a larger set, but technically it contributes no more order or sense to that set than it already possesses: we would perhaps prefer to see the fate of Burns’s mouse as symbolising a larger domain, that fatal zone where ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men / gang aft agley’ – one which will ‘make sense of things’, not merely enclose representative members within a larger set.12 Nonetheless, even when a poet has merely revealed that a scenario, event, or detail is a representative part of a larger enclosing whole, it can be just as ‘meaningful’ as any symbol, if the larger domain comes as a surprise. Indeed, ‘what but design of darkness to appal?’ – Frost asks, chillingly – could possibly explain the hellish conjunction of the white spider, white moth and white hea-lall tableaux in ‘Design’?13 [For a discussion of this kind of ‘reveal’ in the context of experimentalism, see endnote 12.] But in terms of hard analysis, the relation that the poem has to either its enclosing set or its allegorical abstraction is both symbol and synecdoche, and likely to go duck-rabbit on anyone trying to pin it down, for reasons I’ll unpack. (It’s largely to do with symbol belonging to distinct trope-type, one which collapses the intra-domain and inter-domain functions.)

To summarise: while the poem works in much the same way as prose, evoking its reality-states through the usual showing-and-telling, it also invokes and/or symbolises a larger state by positioning itself as interpretable object. Much of this depends on its relationship to silence. Silence is a universal signifier: to invoke it or arrange it is to prepare for important news, for music, for contemplative space. A poem is in one sense just a codified pattern of silence: this silence is advertised most prominently by the white page (‘white/empty field = silence’ seems to be our instinctive synaesthetic mapping); created by lineation and stanza; imposed by the pattern of temporal pause that line and stanza both propose; invoked by the pointedly musical manipulation of word-sound (against which we are asked to hear the silence as physically contrastive, very much like the dark outlines Dutch painters put around figures to give them more prominence); and flagged up by the practices of rhetorical omission or elision that in normal speech we might label obscure, perverse or discontinuous.

This collusion of writerly and readerly intent means the text is transformed into what we might call a ‘supercharged semic field’, where the mere salience of a detail is enough to declare it symbolic (if we read it as inter-domain) or evidential (if we read it as intra-domain). Readers just assume that if something occupies the state of being-in-a-poem, it must mean something beyond its local sense: those are the terms of the contract. A poem is generally assumed to be an artifice that takes the form of an unusually unified, meaningful speech act, and a ‘poetic reading’ is the brain’s attempt to resolve it as such through the formation of an enclosing thematic domain.14 In short, the poem has two authors hell-bent on expressing themselves – the poet and the reader; between them, poems are doubly charged. If this is always borne in mind, many of poetry’s more mysterious phenomena can be more easily explained.

1 Hugh MacDiarmid, The Islands of Scotland (London: Scribner, 1939).

2 MacDiarmid’s defence of unconscious theft was not quite as ingenious as that of a talented former student of mine: when confronted with an essay he had cut and pasted from a news website, he held his head in his hands and moaned, ‘I can’t believe it’s happened again.’ He then went on to claim a rare and complex medical syndrome whose main symptoms were photographic memory, kleptomania and amnesia, an excuse so brilliant I felt I had no option but to pass him.

3 Paul Farley, The Ice Age (London: Picador, 2002).

4 Paul Muldoon, Mules (London: Faber & Faber, 1977).

5 Novelty – which we can characterise by the reader’s reaction of ‘I didn’t see that coming’ – is no bad thing in the poem, and when experienced in contrast to the ‘background default’ of broadly ‘received’ speech can be thought of as the necessary pink-noise variation we need to keep ourselves and our readers awake. But poetry which consists of nothing but the relentless parade of novel effect is soon incapable of surprise.

6 (Note that the instability of the phrase is further enhanced by its being deliberately ungrammatical; ‘nor’ is correct, but most folk say ‘or’, so it also has dialectal verisimilitude, but that’s exactly half Muldoon’s point.) The interpretation that the poem is ‘really’ about the English and Irish languages or cultures strikes me as fanciful, and a classic example of ‘critic’s projection’ – even if one might reasonably claim that such a subject is, maybe, hovering in the wings as a ‘resonance’. One can certainly make it ‘about’ this – but not without importing a frame the text does not supply, beyond the poem featuring Muldoon’s father and the vaguely English surname ‘Parsons’. The larger worry is why on earth you’d want to make such an interpretation, since (like most allegorical readings) it’s just no fun: it diminishes the poem badly, and is not consonant with its other themes. The poets of ‘the provinces’ suffer greatly from this kind of thing. To a metropolitan reader or critic, their local history, culture and speech seem to be the most salient things about them – and are therefore often assumed to be the subjects the poets are themselves addressing. This rarely is the case. (I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been asked ‘how it feels to be Scottish’, which is like being asked how it feels to have toenails.)

7 Skipping ahead a little, my formula is that ‘poetic meaning’ is the complexity that results when an element is domain-shifted from a generic sense to a local, specific sense the generic encloses. Generic sense is the carrier wave of specific meaning. From this statement I’d extrapolate the general point that, while you may bend and twist them, if you break the conventions of syntax, grammar and interdependent, linked statement, you’re in danger of destroying the transmissionary medium of poetry – and are effectively revving up a motorcycle in the concert hall. Any deeper ‘meaning’ is then largely confined to the iconoclastic gesture itself.

8 I appreciate that this will soon become a tedious mantra, but words in poems are restored much of their own individual referentiality since their speed of delivery is no longer driven by that of conversational speech. In normal conversation the ‘experienced referentiality’ of the lexeme is attenuated to little more than a ghostly marker within the larger performance, argument or phatic exchange of the sentence itself. Under the usual somnambulant conditions, the brain tends to conceive of the phrase, not the word, as the semantic unit; while the thought it expresses may not be so, nearly every phrase we utter is unoriginal, and already part-way to phraseme and lexicalisation. (I know this sounds insulting to humans; but if you have ever experienced a panic attack involving severe disassociation, you will have been struck by the ease with which your brain produces perfectly coherent speech, entirely free from linguistic originality or innovation; it does so through a kind of zombie stock-phrase selection. I am always astonished by those who claim that speech is evidence of consciousness, let alone a higher consciousness. Speech is mostly human twitter and bark, and sometimes merely the rustle of leaves.) In poetry, lineation, metre and the cultural frame of ‘important speech’ guarantee this slower delivery, and our sense of semantic unit is shifted back a little towards the word.

9 As I discussed in the first part of this essay, synecdoche is just a sub-type of metonymy. The application of ‘synecdoche’ in this context is especially loose, since the relational mapping is less ‘part for whole’ than ‘representative member for set’.

10 Philip Larkin, ‘Mr Bleaney’, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber & Faber, 2003).

11 I have conveniently elided a fundamental distinction as if it was a passing detail: the difference between a symbol where the V stands for a text-absent concrete tenor, and where V stands for a text-absent abstraction. They are, as far as I can tell, conflated in most analyses. However they are conceptually so different they should not share the same name. We’ll get to it, but for now: our ideas of concrete things are also polyadic specific domains, composed of aspects and components and connotations; abstractions, on the other hand, are monadic and belong only to the domain of abstractions.

12 Robert Burns, ‘To a Mouse’, Collected Poems of Robert Burns (London: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994).

13 Robert Frost, ‘Design’, The Collected Poems (London: Vintage Classics, 2013).

14 With the usual qualifications: there are poetries and reading-conventions where ‘unified statement’ is not automatically assumed to be the poem’s ambition. Horses for courses.