1. So that’s it for poetic forms. Four hundred and fifty years of the sonnet, occasional sestinas and villanelles, the rarer occasional pantoum. One could add the ballad—short narrative poems, traditionally in four-line stanzas. And a couple more recent English language adaptation—the ghazal (see Chapter 2) from Persian and Arabic, the blues from the American vernacular.
2. Much richer in the literary tradition is the idea of kinds of poems, poems with particular subject matter and/or particular angles of approach that don’t, however, specify their length or a particular metrical pattern or rhyme scheme.
3. The OED is uncharacteristically unhelpful with the notion of genre. It means “kind” and got applied to people as well as stories in the nineteenth century, and it came to be used in art to describe paintings of ordinary life. In poetry it means types of poems, usually with particular historical conventions attached to them. Lyric itself is a genre.
4. So it’s interesting to think about the history of the lyric as we glimpse it coming into view with the invention of writing.
EGYPT
The following song was said to be composed circa 1350 BC, possibly by King Akhenaton himself (who is the speaker in the poem.)
When in splendor you first took your throne,
O living Aton,
High in the precinct of heaven,
O living God,
Life truly began!
Now from eastern horizon risen and streaming,
You have flooded the world
With your beauty.
You are majestic, awesome, bedazzling, exalted,
Yet your rays, they touch lightly, compass the lands
To the limits of all your creation.
There in the sun, you reach to the farthest
Of those you would gather in
For your son whom you love.
Though you are far your light is wide upon the earth
And you shine in the faces of all
Who turn to follow your journeying
(Ancient Egyptian Literature, translated by John L. Foster, University of Texas Press, 2001)
ISRAEL
On the psalms: “We know little about how the anthology was made or when most of the pieces were composed . . . The biblical collection consists of poems written over a period of at least five centuries. Some psalms may well go back to the earliest centuries of the Davidic dynasty, that is, the 10th and 9th centuries BCE.”
The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul;
He leads me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake;
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
I will fear no evil.
For You are with me;
Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oil.
My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life;
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
GREECE
This is one of the earliest fragments of a poem by Sappho. It comes from a poorly spelled inscription in a piece of pottery from the third century BC. It was probably composed in the late seventh/early sixth century BC. Nobody knows for sure whether the technology of writing had reached Lesbos in her lifetime.
Come to me from Crete to this holy place
Where your apple grove is,
And the sweet smoke of libanum rises
From your altar
Where cold water rushes through apple blossoms,
The whole place overshadowed by roses,
And from the shimmering apple leaves
Sleep descends
Here where horses graze the meadow
And the spring flowers are blooming
And the winds are sweet and cooling
[a line or two missing here]
In this place, Kupris, goddess,
Pour nectar into the golden cups,
And bless our festivities
With your good wine.
Kupris is a name for Aphrodite. (Should you ever go into the White Mountains on Crete to hike down the trail in Samaria Gorge to the Libyan Sea, someone is apt to point out to you on the way up the hillside cave where Aphrodite is said to have dwelt. It’s surrounded by wild oleander and bearded goats grazing in the summer heat.) There are many translations of this poem.
CHINA
The Shih Ching, the oldest collection of Chinese poetry, is a collection of folk songs dating from 1,000 to 600 BC. They are traditionally believed to have been assembled by Confucius. They are full of the sense of daily living and ceremonial occasions. There are many translations. Ezra Pound translated the entire book. Mao Tse Tung edited an edition, establishing their modern order. This is the first of them in all editions, and it’s learned by heart today by all Chinese schoolchildren.
Gwak! Gwak! cries the osprey
On sandbars in the river.
A good girl, mild-mannered,
Fine match for the gentleman.
Thick grows the watercress,
Left and right it grows.
A good girl, mild-mannered,
Sleeping and waking, he searches for her.
Searches and cannot find her.
Sleeping and waking, thinking of her.
Endlessly, endlessly
Tossing and turning.
Thick grows the watercress,
Left and right we pick it.
A good girl, mild-mannered,
The harp and the lute are her friends.
Thick grows the watercress.
Left and right we sort it.
A good girl, mild-mannered.
The bell and the drum delight her.
This is said (by whom?) to be a wedding song for a royal family. There are also many translations of this poem. See Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1984.
A thing to notice about these poems is that three of the four are prayers. That is to say, the impulse of prayer seems to be very near the origin of the lyric.
5. I learned the structure of prayer very early in a Catholic childhood. Others with other childhoods will have learned other prayers, or none, but we memorized ours and often rushed through them in the recitation, if there was recess or the end of Mass in the offing. For the “Hail Mary,” for example, we could say the first part in one breath:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women and blessed in the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
And another breath for the second part:
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at The hour of our death. Amen.
A transparent structure. Praise, then ask. The “Our Father” was the same. “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name” and then more of the same, and then the ask: “Give us this day our daily bread.” It may be a clue to the deep, formal structure of various lyric forms. The function of prayer is to get into right relationship to a power or a desired good, or to ward off an evil. Even the Chinese folk song, after it has conjured fertility—the osprey, which is said to be a tradition symbol of conjugal accord (perhaps because those birds are so attentive to their nests) and the watercress—is about getting the man and the desirable sort of bride together.
6. The praise part of the formula led to the litany. The corresponding part to do with warding off death or misfortune or other evils would be not the list of great attributes of the desired person or condition, but a bill of complaints, as in this other poem from the Shih Ching, a song of soldiers guarding the frontier:
We pick ferns, we pick ferns,
For the ferns are sprouting now.
Oh to go home, to go home
Before the year is over!
No rooms, no houses for us,
All because of the northern tribes,
No time to kneel or sit down,
All because of the northern tribes.
We pick ferns, we pick ferns,
The ferns now are tender;
Oh to go home, to go home!
Our hearts are saddened,
Our sad hearts, smoulder and burn.
We are hungry, we are thirsty,
No limit to our border duty,
No way to send home for news.
And so on through six stanzas. The poem ends:
Slow, slow our march.
We are thirsty, we are hungry,
Our hearts worn with sorrow,
No one knows our woe.
An example from another tradition comes from Tudor England, said to have been composed by twenty-year-old Chidiock Tichborne on the eve of his execution for treason:
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
And so on—through three stanzas.
That is—as the litany is formally a list, so is the complaint, or dirge, or planh, as it came to be called in medieval Provencal. And lists in theory have no end. If they become prayers, they end with a wish, one way the formal imagination works at closure. If they get complicated, if they enact change, they evolve into the ode and the elegy, a place to begin to speak about genre.
7. Litany and surrealism. Maybe it has to do with Catholic countries.
André Breton, “Free Union”:
My love whose hair is woodfire
Her thoughts heat lightning
Her waist an hourglass
My love an otter in the tiger’s jaws
Her mouth a rosette bouquet of stars of the highest magnitude
Pablo Neruda: “Heights of Macchu Picchu,” part 9:
Interstellar eagle, vine-in-a-mist.
Forsaken bastion, blind scimitar.
Orion belt, ceremonial bread.
Torrential stairway, immeasureable eyelids.
But see also Christopher Smart, “For I consider my cat Geoffrey”; Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” various sections; Gertrude Stein, “Lifting Belly”; Lyn Hejinian, “Happily.”
8. Poem as prayer. It implies a psychic distance from the desired object. In one way of thinking, then, lyric is the site of an absence.
Western wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down doth rain.
Christ! That my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.
*
Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights would be
Our luxury!
And is incurably subjunctive—has a way of seeming to give us symbolically what is absent physically. Martin Heidegger can speak of the poem calling the world into being through the word. The work of thinkers associated with deconstruction—Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man—was to insist that the word is not the thing—that poetry cannot, by definition, possess what it desires and seems to claim to possess.
Thinking about lyric, about the formal imagination working its way from the beginning of a poem to the end, one can turn to the work of genre, to the shapes of thought and arcs of feeling in the traditional kinds.
9. So the rhythms of formal shaping in a poem are always working at at least a couple of levels—that of prosody, numbers falling through numbers to create the expressive effect of a piece, and that of—don’t know what to call it—thematic development, the way the poem makes its trajectory, creates its sense of movement (or doesn’t) from beginning to end, some of which is apt to get prompts from generic expectations, conscious or not. Back to Emily Dickinson’s “I cannot live with you—.” The poem develops systematically every possible reason why the lovers couldn’t live together and why neither could watch the other die and why they couldn’t be in heaven either. It’s about the faithfulness, the generative intensity of that impossibility. The movement has an inextinguishable finality and it ends with the killer lines that name the condition exactly. That’s one way her formal imagination was working. Another was that she was, as she usually did, ringing another set of variations on the hymn stanza:
I cannot live with you
That would be life
And life is over there
Behind the shelf
This is the six syllables and three stresses followed by four syllables and two stresses version of the eight syllable, four stress followed by six syllable, three stress movement of the classic hymn meter. What the form expresses, especially in the curtailed version, is restraint, which is what the poem is about. And it matters that “life” and “shelf” don’t quite rhyme. And the poem in a way explains why she had such a great ear for slant rhyme and off rhyme. Full rhyme expresses perfect union. Her theme was, to borrow Richard Wilbur’s phrase, “sumptuous destitution.”
This is why Robert Creeley’s well-known formulation—“form is never more than an extension of content”—isn’t quite adequate. The idea of “extension” doesn’t quite capture the mysterious way in which prosodic form and the formal shape of the development of content interact.
Quite often the song can be there first, showing the conscious content the way, or resisting it. The main thing is that, in the great poems, we experience the relation between them as indissoluble. And that way in which they can’t be teased apart is ultimately what we mean by form.