When memory fails, songs stay faithful.

So when my mother – whose illness prevents her from remembering what day it is – listens to old tunes, she sings along. She completes lines in poems too, faultlessly.

She was never sentimental. She re-named Sinatra’s ‘My Way’, ‘The Egotist’s Anthem’. She probably wouldn’t have known the original song in French, with a completely different set of words (and meaning). The melody was written by Jacques Revaux in 1967, with lyrics by Gilles Thibaut. The English lyrics, which have been so successful over the years, were written by Canadian singer songwriter Paul Anka – Anka who toured with Buddy Holly in the age of innocence.

But I’m off topic already. No – not quite. ‘My Way’ is riven with metaphor. I’ve always found it the prime example of metaphor done to death and rhyme brutally slaughtered, though the version with Paul Anka singing it is less painful (to me) than Sinatra. The worst part is where he bites off more than he can chew: “But through it all, when there was doubt / I ate it up and spit it out”.

I have a habit of thinking about words of songs, long after they’ve gone past. It’s an annoying habit because instead of enjoying the sentiment, you end up analysing how you can eat something up and also spit it out. You find yourself reflecting that ‘planned each charted course’ is tautology, that its impossible to travel each and every highway, no matter how long you live, and that that ‘mention’ and ‘exemption’ are horrible rhymes.

And yet, there you are, sitting beside your mother singing ‘When you walk through a storm / Hold your head up high’.

The song comes from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, which we once possessed on a 33 rpm record. My little sister used to lie on her tummy on the floor beside the radiogram, with her ear pressed to one of the speakers. That way you get a lot of songs by heart. So the lyricist was Oscar Hammerstein and the song was written in 1945, the same year the Second World War ended.

In 1945, my mother would have been 21. Like the rest of the nation’s survivors, she’d come through one hell of a storm. In 1963, when I was 10 (and storm-free) and she was 39, I revisited the song through the Gerry and the Pacemakers cover, still my favourite. Since then, of course, it’s been adopted by numerous football clubs. It’s the song everybody knows, the universal adversity antidote:

When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark

At the end of the storm
Is a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of the lark

Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown

Walk on walk on with hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone
You’ll never walk alone

When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark

At the end of the storm
Is a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of the lark

Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown

Walk on walk on with hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone
You’ll never walk

You’ll never walk
You’ll never walk alone.

So much stronger on metaphor than ‘My way’! The storm goes right through the verses, and so does ‘walk on’ as a thread. Life as a journey, in wild and windy weather, with some kind of spiritual power floating in the background. It could fit anybody’s religion, or even lack of one. The repetition’s masterful, the rhyme is simple (dark/lark, high/sky, blown/alone). The sky will be golden, the lark’s song will be silver. What’s not to like?

Well, there’s the fact that it’s emotional manipulation. You don’t go out and walk through violent storms. You’d have to be a nutter. A tree might fall on you, for a start. And larks don’t spring into the sky right after storms. In fact, larks don’t spring into golden skies at all. Larks spring into blue skies.

That’s my analytical head. In fact, there I am, sitting beside my mother. She is nearly 90 and her memory is shot. I am 60. We’re both singing along word-perfect, she perfectly serenely, me with tears running down my cheeks.

I am hopelessly manipulated by the metaphor. Such is its power.

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.

Sometimes poems are time bombs.

You read them, and read them. You think you’ve ‘got’ them, whatever they are. Meaning extracted. Method noted. They’re compressed and filed somewhere in your brain with the rest, making whatever tiny difference they make.Sometimes you even read them a couple of times before discarding them as ‘useless’. They can sit there for decades before they explode.

Maybe an event in your life lights the fuse. Or a chance phrase that takes you back. Or they’ve always been there because you knew, somehow, you’d need them.

When I’m working on a poetry publication, I know the texts inside it well. Not off by heart or anything, but I’ll have read them many times. I may well have typed and re-typed them. I’ve probably tried formatting them in different ways. I’ll have talked to the author, too, especially about specific lines. During this process, my relationship with those poems is intense.

And then I forget. You wouldn’t think I could forget but I do. Sometimes I even forget the name of the publication. This is very annoying. I will read a poem in a magazine that reminds me of a poem I once published – where was it, where was it? I will find it in the end, but it’s far from instant. What must this be like for Neil Astley, who has published so many booksful?

Sometimes people take out a HappenStance subscription and they say, ‘Choose a pamphlet for me. One you’d really recommend.’ This is like saying, ‘Which of your children do you love best?’ I recommend them all. Obviously. Why else would I have spent all this time and money on the wee souls? But they’re all different. Some are easier to get on with than others. Some are hyper, especially if you read them at night. Others are quiet, but right under your nose they’re up to mischief.

This metaphor of children doesn’t match the one about the time bomb, which I’m coming back to. But the child metaphor is relevant to the way I feel about the poems I’ve published. The time bomb relates to the effect they can have on me – to the effect all poems can have.

My mother has Alzheimer’s Dementia. I knew something about this illness before it developed in her, or thought I did. But now I (and my sister) are learning about it from the inside. When I visit, the impaired chemical connections that affect her brain have an effect on my brain too. (In communication, if the signals on one side are wrong, the responses from the other side start to founder.)

Anyway, my mother’s brain now struggles to manage words. Sometimes they do what they’re supposed to. At other times, they escape and fly off in all sorts of directions. She’s resourceful. She finds other words to replace those that won’t comply. But conversations quickly become surreal. It’s comical too, though not for her, because irony only works if you can hold in your head what’s not said, as well as what is.

She gets angry about leaves (I mean those messy little things that fall off trees). When we go out, she’ll scoop up a handful and put them in her pocket when she thinks I’m not looking. ‘You can’t pick them all up,’ I say. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘But I can make a start.’ And then she looks hard at the leaves on the ground, blackening into winter. ‘It’s not the leaves I don’t like really,’ she says. ‘It’s the stalks. I hate those stalks.’

I wonder what the stalks represent to her. I have no idea. But I think the impulse to clear things up – odd things, like the stalks of leaves – must connect with the brain’s need to make order at the same time as order is de-forming and re-forming.

The time-bomb poem is by Lorna Dowell from Crossing the Ellipsis. It’s about the red rubber bands the Royal Mail uses to group the letters. The postmen and women drop them. They drop them on paths and pavements and outside your door. Some people pick them up. Most people don’t even notice they’re there.

No, the poem isn’t really about the red rubber bands, but it starts with them, and the agitation of the person who’s collecting them, wrapping them round a pencil neatly. The ‘collector’ is collecting things she needs, and her need is urgent. The red bands build up till they look like a microphone, which she holds out to the person who arrives to see her.

So the poem comes back and explodes in my head and the visitor at the start of the poem is me, and the person collecting the troublesome bands is my mother. Her voice is my mother’s: urgent, demanding, sharing despair over the utter unreasonableness of things.

But as she tells me about the messy red bands, words escape her. It’s like a play but the script has gone wrong. She has to improvise and find words for words, though the supply is diminishing, and my puzzled expression isn’t helping.

She’s scared of being thought stupid. I’m scared of making her feel stupid.

It is awful. The bands round the pencil that were a microphone held out to me for comment, morph into a big red lollipop. No, not a lollipop. It’s a round red ball. It’s a gobstopper.

Gobstopper. It’s a funny word, isn’t it? The name for that enormous candy confection that’s half delicious and half frightening because you can’t talk when you’re eating it. Shut your gob, that’s the playground taunt, the nasty silencer. As you hold it in your mouth, it shrinks until it becomes manageable.

But in this poem, the gobstopper is growing, and it’s not sweet. It is a nightmare.

In search of . . .

              red rubber bands, the collector
wraps them over and over the end
of a blunted lead pencil, creating
a lollipop mic she’s holding up
to capture my comments,
should they slip out
as she delivers her protest:

These I have found all over . . .
the pace/space/spacement,
in the path, down my garden, drip/drip
(dropped?)
                by the—you know, the one
in the red van—that man who de . . .
(decides?)
                 deceivers the letters.
You should see inside where he leaves—
all over this. . . .

                               HANDS UP
SMOOTHING FLAT, FEELING ALONG
AN INVISIBLE DASH

                       In such a hurry
he just row/rope . . .
you know—    

                     DEMONSTRATES
RIPPING OFF BANDS

I know. I’m not stupid. I know
why they use them—to hold
them—what are they? These things—

DRAWS A BLANK PAGE
IN THE SPACE BETWEEN US

—together.

SILENCE

We stare at a red rubber rattle
erased of all sound. I
reflect on the end held up
before me—a gobstopper

growing.