THE SHAPE OF THE POEM ON THE PAGE

After close reading of about 1500 poems, all shapes and sizes, you start to think about shape and shaping a lot.

[Nerd alert: this blog entry is long and obsessive. It involves mangling a poem by Thomas Hardy.]

I’m not talking about concrete poems, where the shape is self-evidently a statement. Just contemporary poems, which can look like almost anything.

On the traditional end of the spectrum, there are still a surprising number of sonnets leaping into action. It’s astonishing how many ways you can shape a fourteen-line poem.

Even if you go for iambic pentameter and a solid block, your choice of words changes the shape substantially. You’ve got a maximum of eleven syllables per line if you end on a feminine rhyme. If you write monosyllables (quite apart from any other effect) your line looks long. Polysyllabic words make the line longer, especially if they have double vowels squeezing them out:

the trees will freeze and then the freeze will flow
(so avaricious mandolins respire)

Those two lines are the same in syllable count. But they look completely different, without even moving the beginnings in and out to mirror the syllable count as poets used to do.

I was always fascinated by Thomas Hardy’s inny-outy shapes, though they can also drive you nuts. Here’s ‘Her Song’, not least because today it is Sunday:

 I sang that song on Sunday,                     
    To witch an idle while,              
I sang that song on Monday,                    
    As fittest to beguile;                 
I sang it as the year outwore,                  
          And the new slid in;              
I thought not what might shape before 
    Another would begin.                

 I sang that song in summer,
    All unforeknowingly,
To him as a new-comer
    From regions strange to me:
I sang it when in afteryears
         The shades stretched out,
And paths were faint; and flocking fears
    Brought cup-eyed care and doubt.

Sings he that song on Sundays
    In some dim land afar,
On Saturdays or Mondays,
    As when the evening star
Glimpsed in upon his bending face,
         And my hanging hair,
And time untouched me with a trace
    Of soul-smart or despair?

So why does Hardy move line six further in than the other indented lines? Because it’s shorter than any of the others, but slower. Because the rhythm changes. Because its lyrical and the lines swing like a song. Because it strengthens the way you follow the highly compressed story. The longest line (the seventh in each stanza) extends itself visibly and, if you read the poem aloud, seems to hang in space for a moment before the enjambment resolves the meaning on the following line.

He uses some odd expressions doesn’t he – “And time untouched me”? What’s that about? You can work it out though – ‘and time hadn’t even touched me’ is effectively what it must mean. There’s ‘she’ in stanza one; he and she come fleetingly together in stanza two; in stanza three there he is on his own ‘in some dim land afar’. The lovers have come and gone. The song remains the same.

But I didn’t mean to get intrigued by the poem, only its shape. That’s the effect Thomas Hardy can have on you. He creates these fascinating shapes which, by and large, guide you through the poem, its sound and its sense.

There is a magic thing in poetry, where the sound, the sense and the shape come together and somehow re-enact what the poem is talking about. It’s rare.

It seems to me that in contemporary writing the opposite often happens. Poetry exercises its constraints. The poet rebels. Rebellion usually involves breaking patterns. This is fine, until the rebellion itself sets even more rigid patterns. So a person who likes the look of couplets will write a sonnet laid out in seven groups of two lines. Why? Rebellion can only be the answer once. After that, the shape and the stanza divisions need to be doing something other than just slowing the reader down (though that may be one function of stanzas).

The shape of the poem on the page controls how you first perceive it (assuming it fits on one page, as the majority of modern poems do, and assuming reading is your method of approaching the poem, as opposed to listening). After that, the shape controls how you read. It directly affects the messages between the eye and the brain. If you capitalise the first word in the line, it makes the left-hand edge intense; it creates more interference with enjambment. The line breaks in particular can make the reader’s life easier or extremely difficult. If difficulty is a concept in the poem there might be a good reason for the latter.

I’m going to translate Thomas Hardy a little and lay him out differently. See what happens. Before I do that, I have to comment on ‘cup-eyed care’. What a weird expression! I like it because it’s weird. Are the cups the huge ‘bags’ under the eyes of a traumatised person? I guess so.

I sang that song on Sunday to witch an idle while. I sang that song on Monday,
as fittest to beguile; I sang it as the year outwore and the new
slid in; I thought not what might shape
before another would begin.                   

I sang that song in summer, all unforeknowingly, to him as a new-comer
from regions strange to me: I sang it when in afteryears the shades
stretched out and paths were faint; and flocking
fears brought cup-eyed care and doubt.

Does he sing that song on Sundays in some dim land afar, on Saturdays
or Mondays, as when the evening star glimpsed in upon
his bending face, and my hanging hair, and time
untouched me with a trace of soul-smart or despair?

I’ll bring it further into the contemporary mode (notice this is a ‘now’ and ‘then’ poem, like many, but Hardy never uses those two little words).

I sang that song on Sunday to witch an idle while.
I sang that song on Monday, as fittest to beguile.

I sang it as the year outwore and the new slid in;
I thought not what might shape before another would begin.                     

I sang that song in summer, all unforeknowingly,
to him as a new-comer from regions strange to me.

I sang it when in afteryears the shades stretched out
and paths were faint, and flocking fears brought cup-eyed care and doubt.

Does he sing that song on Sundays in some dim land afar,
on Saturdays or Mondays, as when the evening star

glimpsed in upon his bending face, and my hanging hair,
and time untouched me with a trace of soul-smart or despair?

In that couplet version you can see rather a good effect with the cross-stanza enjambment between the last two couplets, driven beautifully by the force of the question – and a clear question because it begins ‘Does he’.

But we contemporary poets like cross-stanza enjambment a lot. We like it so much that in some cases it starts to be a key feature of the poem. Like this:

I sang that song on Sunday to witch
an idle while. I sang that song on Monday, as fittest

to beguile. I sang it as the year outwore and the new
slid in; I thought not what might shape before another

would begin. I sang that song in summer (unforeknowingly)
to him as a new-comer from regions

strange to me. I sang it when in afteryears the shades
stretched out and paths were faint, and flocking fears

brought cup-eyed care and doubt. Does he sing that song
on Sundays in some dim land afar, on Saturdays or Mondays, as when

the evening star glimpsed in upon his bending face,
and my hanging hair; and time untouched me

with a trace of soul-smart or despair?

Obviously Hardy’s rhyme scheme is trying to pull the poem back into a different shape from the one above. But in most contemporary writing there is no rhyme scheme, and often there’s no obvious control of assonance either. The shape of the poem often seems to be doing not much except being a nice shape.

Some people like three line stanzas and do them a lot. Personally, I was always prone to quatrains, and had consciously to think about that when assembling poems to make a book. Some people take a perfectly normal poem shape and make it look like a paper doiley by putting holes into the layout. Like this:

    I sang that song

         on Sunday to    witch     an idle while    I sang 

that song     on Monday

as fittest     to beguile  I sang it as    

      the year     outwore       and the            new

slid in      I thought     not     what    might shape

          before      another would             begin 

The  doiley has the advantage of standing for punctuation pauses where necessary. Also you can mess about with it for days and have quite a nice time. In fact, I can enjoy reading Hardy ‘endoiled’, now I come to think about it, although it would occur to me, when I read it out loud, that the gaps were perhaps not magical – just interesting.

When you first start writing poems, obviously you think hard about how you’re going to shape the words on the page. You can take a traditional form that helps you decide what to do with the lines. You can take a metrical pattern that will show where the line breaks must fall. You can divide into neat chunks (two, or three, or four, or five, or six-line groups). You can decide a sort of line length you like the look of and divide your line words into lines roughly three or four inches long. You can do it by breath. You can do it by counting syllables. By counting words. You can call it a prose poem and fully justify it (in both senses).

Or you can take your shaping from the phrasing of the lines, and let your line break where the phrase ends. You can let the stanza end where the paragraph ends. It sounds boring, but you could do worse. Especially if your ear is attuned to the sounds of the words you choose.

I sang that song on Sunday,                     
to witch an idle while,                  
I sang that song on Monday,                    
as fittest to beguile;                      

I sang it as the year outwore,                  
and the new slid in;                       
I thought not what might shape before 
another would begin.

In his original, Thomas Hardy does all that at the same time as working an intricate pattern of rhyme, metre and repetition. And in the whole poem he doesn’t even tell you what happened.

He doesn’t have to. The poem is shaping the relationship. Or vice versa.