In the Name of Poetry

On Poetry

“Another” –Robert Herrick

“Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.”
— Alfred de Musset

The experience of reading different kinds of poetry is unique and special. This is especially true, when the poet tries to describe feelings and emotions on one hand and on the other is also trying to shape the experience in a condensed form that talks to the reader without beating about the bush.

Poetry sometimes uses restricted forms of language. The content of a line or a few lines is often conveyed in a single word. This article is based on one such a poem, “Another”, written by the English Poet, Robert Herrick in the 17th Century. Herrick was a pastoral lyricist who wrote around 1300 poems, exquisite and unrivalled. His poems cover a wide range of emotions and subjects and he is notable for the technical mastery of the interplay of thought and rhythm of his poems. The artistic derivation of his poems has raised numerous questions about writing creative poetry and also the function of poetry within the framework of human experience. Let’s take a look.

Here a pretty baby lies
Sung asleep with lullabies:
Pray be silent and not stir
Th’ easy earth that covers her.

The poem is small, but one that demands careful reading. Herrick has not just illustrated simplification of language with brevity and concision, but also has caused a dramatic shift in the fourth line, describing the baby as actually dead. In the first three lines of the poem, the sleeping baby is described in all wonder. The marvel persists as the baby sleeps listening to lullabies and the air around, as still and silent as can be. However, the fourth line describes the earth covering her, producing a bristly emotion of change, giving a sudden alteration of perspective. The earth covering the baby instead of her bed cover leaves the baby buried inside the earth. The spark of the reader’s imagination suddenly into a new and unexpected descriptional metaphor of the earth turning into a death bed is the hallmark of the poem.

It is a simple poem that needs nothing but alternative thought. The effect of reading it with alternative thought almost reverses the reader’s perspective of the poem. It is reality itself, left for the reader to grasp from the idea of the poem. Thus, the objective element of poems like these, helps the reader understand the very essence of poetry. A poem like the one above is a simply wrapped package that appears unremarkable at first glance, until you read it. Once read, it gives the poet a chance to tread further in uncommon forms of writing and gives the reader a chance to think by alternative means and perspectives.

So, poetry need not always use flowery expressions and words. Even the simplest possible kind of configuration in the words of a poem, which encloses a group of words as if it were drawing stars together to form a cluster and suddenly bringing a lightning of change, is to be appreciated and acknowledged. The appeal is one that would pilot poetic expressions to excellence through a very simple form and style.

As the saying goes, “Poetry is thoughts that we breathe, and the words that we burn,” its all about the best words in the best order, coupled with a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and distilled word power.

Poetry generally involves two roles, readers and writers. There is a symbiotic relationship between the roles, and with only one, poetry, simply does not happen. The locality, in time-continuum existence, and transcendence of meaning in poetry depend on both these two elements. Both are essential components. Poetry does not know causes and effects; it is something that only comes into being when it is written-AND-read. The reader’s function, in the assembling of poetry, is to unlock the poem, the writer has preordained and free it into the source-pool of the Literature Generalize, the vast body of collective literature. When a poem is not read, it stays as what it was, a germ that infected the brain of the writer. Unread writers (unwritten readers) are of a leprous kind, infected by deadly incubations and therefore dangerous. So, a good poet earns his prestige, not through the number of his medals, prizes and honoraries, but by reading and being read many many times. However, there is still a devil that exists in the detail of the reader/writer relationship that produces egocentricity. A statement such as “‘He’ is a reader’ when made is assumed as the reader is masculine. The he is a he. Is ‘he/she’ in connection with reader not a more suitable description for a reader? Can a ‘she’ not read a poem? The immediate answer to this is no! No, because it is neither a he nor a she that is conceived in the mind of a reader when he reads ‘he’ or ‘he/she’. The meaning he gives to a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ is different. When the writer employs the word she, in the reader’s (writer’s?) perception, the semantic categorization is ‘I or me’ and immediate proof of his or her involvement and role in making the poetry happen. For the reader there is no such thing as ‘he or she’. In his/her mind the value of ‘he’ is always egocentrically categorized. One does not have this in prose. It only occurs in poetry. Even if the ‘he’ was categorically stated and precisely described as being a male Homo Sapiens Generalis, with all the usual male characteristics, beard, genitalia, etc., there is nothing in the brain that connects the ‘she’ with femininity and the ‘he’ with masculinity. It connects ‘he/she’ with the being. The answer is simple: ‘Poems aren’t poems at all, they are always something and someone else!’

The poetry reader always places himself as the protagonist, while the prose reader seldom does. This is a phenomenon that must convey something about the strangeness of poetry. The reader enjoys a personal reaction and therefore creates from the time of reading, an individual instance of the poem’s entity. It is empirical that a poem cannot have no readers, for the writer automatically acts as her own reader.
Ultimately, it is all in the hands of the poet that is unveiled by a poem. Or to put it another way: Is it the poet that’s found in the poem or the poem that makes the poet?

– by Suma V S

 

Suma V.S- Writing was a hobby, but soon, the infatuation towards reading led to a passion for writing only to last for a lifetime. Having graduated in Computer Applications and obtaining a Masters in Business Management with a specialization in Human Resources, she worked for the corporate sector in the area of Communication and Personality Development. In 2005, she left India to join her husband in Seattle, Washington. Leaving her home country has helped her demystify the process of good writing and deepened her understanding and ideas of writing with a sense of passion. Suma has completed a collection of fifty love poems, called ‘Love Bytes’. Presently, she is working on another collection, based on Nature, called ‘Nature, As it Is’ and a novel based on the chakras of life.