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When I was
about nine years old, my teachers would read poetry aloud to us.
They chose works of mind-shaking triviality, and read them in ponderous
voices, to impress us with their importance. This had the effect
of destroying most of my contemporaries' interest in poetry for
ever.
For reasons
which now escape me, I and a young friend had discovered Macaulay's
Lays of Ancient Rome, at first in a somewhat abbreviated form;
and we were particularly fascinated by Horatius:
A Lay About the Year of the City CCCLX
. The first version we saw began with Stanza XXVI, "Then out
spake brave Horatius,/ The Captain of the Gate:/ 'To every man upon
this earth/ Death cometh soon or late'" and we thought that was
pretty neat. But then I found at home a little book called "Favorite
Classics" which had the whole poem: it begins: "Lars Porsena of
Clusium/By the Nine Gods he swore/That the great house of Tarquin/Should
suffer wrong no more." With the effortlessness of children, we memorized
the entire seventy verses of this poem, and would declaim considerable
portions of it, at the top of our voices, sitting on the fence around
the school bicycle sheds, banging our heels against the corrugated
iron surrounds. The other kids would gather round, in mixed admiration
and total disbelief.
I like to
think that we may have helped them understand the joy of poetry,
but I suspect they thought we were out of our tiny minds.
I am surprised
how much of this poem I can still declaim, more than fifty years
later, without actually having read it ever since. The reaction
I get from listeners has not changed all that much, either.
This is why,
of course, history favors the concept of poetry as a declarative
art. One can argue that the primary function of poetry was to facilitate
the oral transmission of folk history to an audience which might
have been illiterate, or indeed in a society where the concept of
writing had not yet emerged. The tricks of the poet - alliteration
in Piers Plowman, rhyming in the Canterbury Tales, the rhythm of
the iambic pentameters in Shakespeare's blank verse, the leitmotifs
in Homer (the wine-dark sea) or in El Cid (who in a good hour was
born!) - aid memorization, and ensure that the listeners could recognize
the well-known reminders to be sure that the tradition was being
handed down in its true form.
However, in
more modern times, the additional dimensions presented by the written
form offer the possibility of greater subtlety and (perhaps) a more
profound art. Probably the earliest example of this is in Chinese
poetry, where the elements of the ideograms (particularly the phonetic
elements) allow the skilled poet to construct a counterpoint to
the straightforward literal meaning.
As early as
1923 e. e. cummings introduced the concept of almost entirely lower-case
words with the arrangement on the page a critical element in the
understanding of the poem: this can't be reproduced in the way I
have laid out the other poems in this article, but here's a fragment
from the first of his CHANSONS INNOCENTES:
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
His later poems carry the visual structure on the page to higher
levels of complexity.
At another level, the use of entirely lower case type by Don Marquis
for poems purportedly written by archy the cockroach, who achieved
this by diving head-first onto the typewriter keys, (and hence could
not simultaneously hit the shift key!) is a dimension which is entirely
lost if the poems are read out loud. (Although I must say, the words
attributed by archy to mehitabel the cat: "but wotthehell/ little
archy wot/ thehell/ it s cheerio/ my deario/ that pulls a/ lady
through/ exclamation point" goes over well read out loud!
Poets have
experimented with layout on the page, of course: Lewis Carrol's
poem by the Mouse in Alice in Wonderland: "Fury
said to/a mouse, That/ he met in the house" and so on, which is
laid out on the page to fit Alice's idea of it as a "long and a
sad tale (tail)" is an example. Interestingly, Dylan Thomas, who
wrote much poetry which benefited from being read out loud (particularly
by a fellow Welshman such as Richard Burton), wrote poetry in which
the page layout is an important element - for example Vision
and Prayer in Deaths and Entrances, which begins "Who/ Are you/
Who is born/ In the next room/ " and ends "His lightning answers
my/ Cry. My voice burns in his hand./ Now I am lost in the blinding/
One. The sun roars at the prayer's end."
In my view,
the poetry of Thomas Stearns Eliot, the American who lived much
of his life in England, is an example of the highest level of the
art where it can be read out loud, and has all the traditional equipment
of the oral tradition - the Love
Song of J. Arthur Prufrock is an excellent example "In the room
the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo" "I grow old…I
grow old…/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."
"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. /I do not think
that they will sing to me." - but which has a higher dimension for
the private reader. The Waste Land is not a work which one would
think of reading out loud, for example. On the other hand, "Old
Possum's Practical Cats" begs to be read out loud, and even the
most private reader's lips will be moving as he (or she) reads "Macavity,
Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,/ He's broken every human
law, he breaks the law of gravity."
The majority
of modern poets write to be read in private - there is no rhyme,
the formal rhythmic structures are absent, the formal structural
elements of (for example) the three different forms of sonnet (four
if you are a Gerard Manley Hopkins fan) are regarded as artificial
constraints on the poet's manipulation of words. The page layout
is of crucial importance, because this is the tool that allows the
poet to distinguish his or her poem from a string of words. If you
doubt this, do the following exercise: take one of Shakespeare's
speeches or soliloquies, and type it out as a string of words, with
punctuation, but without line breaks; so that it looks like a paragraph
in a prose book. Then have somebody read it. The poetry of iambic
pentameters will shine through, rough hew them as you will! The
same exercise with much modern poetry will often not reveal the
poet's intentions. The page layout will be important to the reader,
and even if the poem is to read aloud, will be an important guide
to the performer.
It is interesting
that for much of his work, Dylan Thomas shows himself to be acutely
aware of the sound of the words in his poems read aloud, and eschews
formal structure; but for the occasion of his father's
decline towards death, which touched him deeply, he uses a very
formal structure, the Villanelle. Most people aware of this poem
are also deeply moved by it: it ends "And you, my father, there
on the sad height,/Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears,
I pray./Do not go gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage against
the dying of the light". Interestingly, at the time many poets,
as well as his other admirers, were puzzled by his use one of the
most formal structures in Western poetry for an occasion such as
this, and believed he should have allowed his prodigious emotional
skills free rein. With the cold sieve of history as our aid, it
is possible to understand that the control required in fact allows
the depth of his sorrow to be expressed with greater power. A critic
comments on the use of "high-frequency" vowels in the rhyming words,
and comments that "The effect is not only in the high-frequency
vowels themselves, but in the fact that they occur about twice as
often here as they do in the normal run of English speech. The unlooked-for
percentage must come as a shock of excitement, an aural pick-me-up,
[my emphasis] to the sensitive, if largely subconscious, mechanisms
of the brain." (John Frederick Nims).
These points
above illustrate that, in fact, both the silent reading mode and
the vocal declarative mode have their place in poetry - which will
come as no surprise!
There is,
however, a further issue. If a poem is to be read aloud, who should
read it? Again, Dylan Thomas provides an example. He himself read
his own poetry well; and since he was so concerned in his 'declarative'
work with the sound of words, and more particularly the sound of
the words as spoken by a Welshman, this is scarcely a surprise.
Few would argue, though, with the proposition that they sound even
better read by Burton! One would hope, nevertheless, that the art
is robust enough that it still shines through when read aloud by,
say, a young American girl who may never have heard of Wales, and
who may know nothing of Thomas's life. Great works of music are
capable of many nuances of interpretation, and in fact a listener
gains more by listening to these differences in approach than he
or she would in listening always to the 'accepted' version. This
is most obviously true for works whose composer is now dead, and
more particularly for those whose lives preceded the invention of
recording. Does a study of Elizabethan history improve our appreciation
of the Shakespearean sonnets? Are they improved by a study of what
Shakespeare's accent might have been? Is the sound of Beethoven's
music improved by having it played on the instruments as they were
in his time?
This brings
up, of course, the issue of poetry in translation. If we accept
that the Iliad was intended as a declarative work, should a translator
try to produce a work which is also declarative in character? Be
as careful as you like, a poem in translation will be different
from the original, because the ears that hear it will be different
to the ears that heard it in the original. The knowledge base will
be different - usually very different, and the resonances in the
mind of the listener with the poet's language are impossible even
to imagine. Our view of the direct involvement of the Gods with
the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans will, at best, be
to see it as an allegory; but for Homer's audience it would have
had an immediate reality which it is impossible for us to imagine.
Was Achilles really just a spoilt jock, or was there a nobility
which it is difficult (for me, at least) to see? Is the Rubaiyat
of Omar Khayyam a translation of a poem by a historical Persian
poet, or is it in fact a poem by Edward Fitzgerald? "I often wonder
what the Vinters buy/ One half so precious as the Goods they sell."
A variation
which I believe to be recent is the reading of poetry (often, but
not always, by the poet) accompanied by music - sometimes jazz,
but sometimes composed works by a third party. A particular example
is a performance by John Betjeman, reading a number of his poems,
with a musical accompaniment. Betjeman is a competent reader of
his own work, but scarcely charismatic: in my view the addition
of the excellent music adds to the enjoyment of the poetry, and
even enhances one's appreciation of what the poet's intentions are.
"Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough/ It isn't fit for humans
now./ There isn't grass to graze a cow/ Swarm over, Death!"
So: should
poetry be declaimed, or sung, or chanted, or read privately in a
dim-lit room? The discussion shows that the answer is quite clear:
Yes!
boss
yours for
rum crime and riot
archie the cockroach
but
itll do for
all of us
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