Reading Poetry

An introduction

Tom Furniss
Teaching at university level which is not also in touch with
Michael Bath
research is not university teaching. (John Smith, late leader
of the British Labour Party, 1993)

I'".'·.· ,.
'i~' '

PRENTICE HALL
ION DON NEW YORK TORONTO SYDNEY TOK YO
SINCiAPORI MADRID MEXICO CITY MUNICH
Chapter 1

What Is Poetry? How Do We

Read It?

Received Ideas and Common Assumptions

One of the concerns of this book will be repeatedly to ask questions about what
poetry is, and to question those things about poetry which we take for granted -
including the category of poetry itself. This might seem a rather peculiar line of
enquiry, since we tend to assume that we know what poetry is. 1 Our claim, however,
is that reading poetry involves often unrecognized or unthought-out assumptions
ahout the nature of poetry. We want to show that it is important to become aware
of these assumptions and to place them alongside other, quite different assumptions,
because this will enhance or even transform our reading of poetry.
Attempts to answer the question 'What is poetry?' usually end up trying to define
it against what it is not. There are perhaps three interrelated ways of doing this.
Poetry can be defined as a genre by saying that it is different from the other main
literary genres, fiction and drama. A second definition - based on features of language
distinguishes between the way poetry uses language and so-called 'ordinary' uses
of language. A third definition - this time on formal lines - would differentiate poetry
from prose on the basis that it is arranged differently on the page. 2 We will examine
each of these claims throughout the course of this book. What this examination will
reveal is a set of common assumptions about poetry which are probably shared by
11 large proportion of readers in Britain and North America in the late twentieth
century (and perhaps in many other parts of the English-speaking world and beyond).
One of the arguments of this book will be to suggest that poetry is not one thing
hut many things. This is not only because we have different ways of describing poetry,
or hecause there is a huge variety of language practices which are included under the
nmhrella term 'poetry', but also because what are assumed to be the defining
diaracteristics of poetry change through history. These changing assumptions

I! 1~ revealing that M.H. Abrams docs not provide an entry on ·poctr)'' in his Glossary ol I.i1aar_r Terms
(ho.: doc~ give entries on 'novel' and 'drama')
I· ur a more elaborate exposition of the various ways of defining poetry against what it is not, see l'rince11111.
pp. 938 -42.
4 Formal Introduction
not only affect the practice of poets but also influence the kinds of poetry which. are
valued and the ways of reading which readers tend to adopt. The result of all this 1s
that the category we call poetry is unstable and, possibly, that there may be no
essential thing called 'poetry' at all.
Yet it would seem possible to challenge this line of argument by the common-
sensical assertion that we know a poem when we see one. Even readers- who have
not read very much poetry seem to share certain conceptions about what. poetry is,
and about what constitutes 'good' poetry. It will therefore be useful at this pomt to
examine a poem to which, experience tells us, most people will usually respond. as
'good' or 'proper' poetry. In doing this we will try to identify those features which
make it seem 'poetic' to such readers. For reasons which we will examine later, Keats
seems to embody our collective idea of the quintessential poet, and his 'Ode to a
Nightingale' (1819) is often thought of as an exemplary poem. It is for these reaso~s
that we will make this poem a test case in our attempt to make exphc1t our culture s
implicit assumptions about what poetry is.
Ode to a Nightingale
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock 1 had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 5 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantin~;
But being too happy in thine happiness -
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 10
2 Darkling I listen; and for many a time
0, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Pr0Ven9al song, and sunburnt mirth 1
O for a beaker full of the warm South, 15
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth,
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 20
3 Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
'J'he weariness, the fever. and the fret
}{ere, where men sit and hear each other groan;
What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It? 5
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, 25
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow. 30
4
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards.
Already with thee! tender is the night, 35
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; '
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 40
5
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet.
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit tree wild· 45
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50
6
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain
To thy high requiem become a sod. 60
7
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this rassing night was heard
In ancient days hy cmrcror and clown:
Pt~rh:in..: !hr• .i1•lf• .,,.rtt•• L'""" oi...,,, r,. ... .,~
 What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It? 7
6 Formal Introduction
Perhaps one of the reasons this pessimistic but deeply moving poem is so popular
Through the sad heart of Ruth. when, sick for home,
is the assumption that it gives us a direct access to the profound inner experience of
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
the poet himself. Many readers have sought to 'explain' the poem by referring to
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Keats's biography - especially to the fact that he had recently nursed his brother as
70 he died of tuberculosis. The poem becomes additionally poignant when we remember
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
that Keats himself died of the same disease only two years later at the age of
8 twenty-five. 3 For these reasons, Keats's life and poetry have been fused in the
forlorn! the very word is like a bell imaginations of readers perhaps more than with any other poet. This is a particularly
To toll me back from thee to my sole self! telling instance of our claim that the assumptions we bring to a poem subtly shape
Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well tiur reading of it. For reasons that will emerge only in the course of this book, we
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. want to discourage you from reading poems for biographical meaning · which is
75
Adieu'· adieu~ thy plaintive anthem fades why we ascribe the voice in this poem to a "poetic speaker' rather than to Keats.
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
J1owever interesting Keats was as a human being, we want to encourage you to
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
concentrate on reading his poetry rather than trying to recreate his thoughts and
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream? feelings. As T.S. Eliot puts it: 'Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed
80 not upon the poet but upon the poetry.' 4
Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?
'Ode to a Nightingale' invites us to read it as an intense and sincere expression of
experience ~- as the opening words of the poem ('My heart aches') attest. This is
.ke to do here is draw attention to various features of the poem reinforced by the speaker's claim that his 'pain' arises not through "envy' of the
w hat we wou ld 11 . , · ·ll ·1 · · g
which contribute to the feeling that this is 'authentic poetry . This w1 enta1 exam~mn nightingale's 'happy lot' but through a profound empathy which he feels with the
how the poem uses certain poetic conventions whic~ are the~selves base on nightingale. In fact, the whole poem is driven by the speaker's attempt to merge his
particular assumptions about what poetry is. It will also mvolve ~sk1~.g :h~~~~~ t~~:~ consciousness with the nightingale. In the second stanza (poems are divided into
assum tions and conventions require us to read poetry 1n ways w 1c ~ , 'stanzas' not 'verses') he apparently wishes for wine, on the assumption that it will
them p that is, do particular kinds of poetry encourage or demand partt~ul:ro~::rs enable him to join the nightingale. We learn in the third stanza why the speaker
of reading" Our answers to both questions are deeply bound up with eac. ; wants to 'dissolve' and to merge his consciousness with the bird. The real world, he
our assumptions about what poetry is will shape .our way of readmg po.etry, and l~u claims, is a place 'where men sit and hear each other groan' (24). In the fourth stanza,
way of reading poetry will tend to influence which poems we regard as exe~p ary he abandons the idea of wine (represented figuratively by Bacchus, the god of wine)
poetry. In other words, we want to suggest that poetry is as much a product o ways in favour of poetry as a means of escaping this world and flying to the nightingale
of reading as of ways of wnttng. on 'the viewless wings of Poesy'. For one brief moment, the speaker apparently feels
that poetry has indeed transported him from the human world to the realm of the
nightinghale: 'Already with thee' tender is the night' (35). The speaker feels that this
Poetry As Expression - the Experience of Its Speaker? intense moment of poetic communication is a perfect moment do die, and so leave
t · r culture are that the world and its woes for ever: 'Now more than ever seems it rich to die'. Yet the
Some of the most deep-rooted preconceptions a b out poe ry. i~ ou , Inst stanza brings the speaker back to earth when he realizes that his union with the
it records profound personal emotion and experience, that _it IS often abo~t natt~re, nightingale was simply an illusion; the bird's song fades away into the next valley
and that it should be 'imaginative'. Keats's 'Ode' _seei:ns in?eed to ~on_ rm. ese nnd he is left alone, bewildered and "forlorn'.
. . The very event 1·tself - a poet listenmg m sohtude to a mghtmgale, What we have achieved so far is a paraphrase of the poem's 'plot', and this has
prcconccp t ions. L • h· '
. . d -d b woods and flowers seems especially poetic. And t rn .p_oet s helped us begin to clarify what the poem is 'about'. This is quite an effective way of
su1 ro.un _r.: y . . d a owcrful and deeply s1gn1hcant
i1nag1nat1vc response to the btrd IS presente as p . ·11 b . k. hep.inning to analyze any poem because it provides a provisional framework upon
· · · d h· O of the questions that we w1 e as mg
ex ericncc which we are invite to s arc. ne . . . which we can build a more precise analysis of the poem's local details. What we have
is ii1e extent to which the 'poetic' quality of this event is denved from the. prlofund1hty also achieved is confirmation of the fat:l that this poem does indeed confonn with
· · · h ·f· · · - in which the poem arucu ates t e
or the experience 1tsclf, lrom t c spec1 IC ways . . . . It 'I our expectation that poetry records intense personal experience though we an.•
·.-1)"1'1"\1'"'' or fron1 the r:.1ct that Keats has chosen a topic wh1c~ ceArta1n Chu lul ra
l '' " " '"''"'• · · · II t s we s a sec
·1"s111111111·ons h·1ve attuned us to regard as already 1ntr1ns1ca y poe tc. , h. l. l ·. h
',~. ' ' . , .. , }' , ·1re 1H S W llC h11 ;i tl l'l'l1I cxarnpk of ~u!:h a rcadin!(, Sl'l' Briun Sln111· ( l'l'l~J '/'Ji,· /'ocl1T of/\•'•//.\
0

below in ( 'h·ipter 10, nightingales as opposed to, say, star 1ngs • . _ '] 1;1d111011 and lhc lnd1v1dunl lall·nt', 111 111"1 (l'l\li S 1·/1·, r,·,/ /'iu.w, p. ;y,
L'ontL' :dn·;id~ invested with 'poetic value' frotn their frequent appcan11H.:c tn poctiy.
8 Formal Introduction
suggesting that it is the experience of an invented speaker rather than that of the
poet himself.
Poetry as a Response in the Reader?
The assumption that poetry is the expression of intense personal experience usually
involves a related assumption about what we are supposed to do when we read such
a poem. Victorian readers assumed that the proper response to such poetry was to
be moved by it, and high-school students preparing for examinations in literature in
the late twentieth century are told that the most important qualification for studying
a poem is to have some kind of personal response to it. But it is not clear what such
a response might involve. Are we expected to experience a sympathetic response to
the poet's (or the speaker's) intense feelings? In reading the first stanza of 'Ode to a
Nightingale', should we, too, try to experience a happiness so intense that it is almost
painful? Should we try to empathize with the nightingale in the way that the poetic
speaker does? And are we expected to share the speaker's sense of loss in the last
stanza, when the vision has dissolved? Framing these questions in this way allows
us to suggest that although we want to encourage students to enjoy the imaginative
pleasure of reading poetry, such responses in themselves can be pretty vacuous. More
profound aesthetic pleasures, we want to argue, emerge from a more careful and
sustained intellectual analysis.
Poetry and the World: The Poem as a Representation of Life?
Another way of approaching the poem would be to ask how accurately it represents
the real world. Such an approach does not seem to get us very far with this poem,
since it is not really a description of an action or an object at all. It is not really
'about' a nightingale, but about the idea of a nightingale and what it means for the
speaker. This is shown by the way the speaker seems to believe that this particular
bird is 'immortal' (61), and by the way he addresses it as if it could understand and
respond. This latter feature is an example of a poetic convention called 'apostrophe'
which can be defined as 'a figure of speech in which the speaker turns to address
an abstract or an absent thing as though it were living and present'. Yet even this
extremely poetic convention does not entirely remove the poem from recognizable
experience: we talk to pets and toy animals in this way, and even though not many
of us yearn to pair up with a nightingale, most of us may have occasionally felt that
the world is a pretty miserable place, and we may have tried to escape in some way
or other. Thus, the driving force of the poem - the recognition of sorrow and despair,
and the desire to escape them seems to be in touch with more general human
cxpcricn<.:c, as is the insight that our various means of escape bring only temporary
relief.
What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It? 9
Reading tor the Message?
Thus we could say that the poem gives us a particular insight into 'the human
condition'. Such a response alerts us to another way of reading which has been
c.urrent in the history of literature and is still in circulation - that is, to assume that
literature can offer us deep insights about life. Such an assumption encourages us to
read Hterature for its 'moral message'. Keats's 'Ode' seems to be saying that the
ecstasies offered us by nature, wine, poetry, love and beauty are transient illusions
which provide only temporary respite from the permanence of human suffering (see
Imes 29-30). But, once more, the approach to poetry in search of its 'message' seems
lo lead to pretty banal conclusions.
Romantic Poetry
Many of the assumptions we have examined and questioned in the previous sections
that poetry records or represents the profound imaginative experience and moral
insight of a creative genius - derive from ideas developed by Romantic writers in the
period in which, Keats lived. One of the characteristic assumptions of Romantic theory
ts Wordsworth s assertion that 'all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of [the]
powerful feehngs' of a specially gifted individual - someone who 'being possessed of
more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply'.' Romantic
theory thus tends to stress that poetry is the direct product of the special imaginative
~11pac1.ty of the md1V1dual genius. The quality of a poem is a measure of the poet's
Ncns1b1hty, and the quahty of a reader's response is in turn a measure of his or her
Ncnsibility.
Yet the fact that most readers tend to share these Romantic assumptions does
not mean that thi.s is the only way to read poetry in general, or even Romantic poetry
In particular. This IS only one of a number of possible ways of reading poetry; we
do not have to read Romantic poetry on its own terms - that is, as if we were
Romantics. The fact that so many people hold Romantic assumptions about art does
not mean that they are true, or always insightful; it indicates, instead, how such
llNSUmptions continue to be reproduced in education and the media. In the twentieth
century, and especially in the last thirty years or so, literary theorists and critics of
vu rious persuasions have begun to resist and criticize such Romantic readings and
wuys of 'explaining' poetry. One of the projects of this book, in fact, is to put you
111 touch wtth some of these more recent assumptions about poetry, since we feel thal
they yield more insights into poetic texts than those available to 'Romantic' ways of
ll'Uding.
'l'11'1acc to Lyrical B<Jllads', in Wordsworth 11968) Lyrical Ballad.~. pp. 241 72, 246. 'Organic sc11sihili1y'
tl'il'l~ ln the responsiveness of lhe senses.
10 Formal Introduction
What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It? 11
Close Reading and the Language of Poetry it had earlier created. In the very moment when the speaker claims that the song of
the mghtmgale has had a magic charm throughout history, the chime of his own
Romantic readings of literary texts tend to focus on questions about sincerity. of words breaks the spell:
feeling, emotional response, and profundity of insight. More recent ways of readmg
poetry, however, beginning with New Criticism, place more emphasrn on the dose The voice I hear this passing night was heard
reading of the actual language of the poetic text itself. One of the thmgs we w1U be In ancient days by emperor ind clown;
stressing in this book is that a particularly rewarding and challengmg way of readmg Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
poetry is the careful analysis of the interplay betwee.n .the language and form of Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home
She stood in tears amid the alien corn; '
individual poems. In fact, we will attempt to show that It IS only through this process
The same that oft-times hath
that the emotional power, mimetic possibilities, and moral 1mphcat10ns of a poetic Charm 'd magic casements, opening on the foam
text can be produced and experienced. The stress on 'dose reading' will inevitably Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
raise the question of whether the language of poetry differs from other discourses
and uses of language. Although many readers say that a poem ought to be enjoyed Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
for its own sake, the critical reading of poetry involves trying to understand how To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
that pleasure is produced. What will emerge in this chapter is that poetry - or at Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
least this poem - achieves its emotional power by workmg the resources of the As she is fam 'd to do. deceiving elf. (68 74).
language to the limit. .
The concentrated use of alliteration in the penultimate stanza (culminating in 'faery
'Ode to a Nightingale' is particularly interesting in terms of the way It .uses
l1111ds forlorn') could be said to present an equivalent to the charm of the nightingale's
language to produce specific effects. One way in which its language an.nounces itself
song. Yet the critical moment of this technique suddenly reverses its effect in that the
as 'poetic' is through the employment of what is called 'poelic d1ct10n -- words and
word 'forlorn' brings the poetic speaker down to earth. This occurs as much through
phrases which we conventionally associate with poetry. The use of second-person
!he sound of the word as through its meaning. We are told that the word 'forlorn'
pronouns such as 'thou' and 'thy', of phrases like 'verdurous glooms', and allus10ns
rd10es 'like a bell' to 'toll' the speaker back to his 'sole self'. (In doing so, it changes
to classical mythology all conform to our received notions of poetic language. Poetic
iLs meaning: applied to the 'faery lands' it means lost or disappeared, but when the
diction of this kind is sometimes called 'flowery', but this is not a very accurate or
speaker applies it to himself it means forsaken or wretched.) Such chiming effects
revealing term. Poets, critics and linguists have come u~ w~th a num.ber of .m?re
resonate throughout the first four lines of the last stanza, through end-rhyme, internal
suggestive ways of describing 'poetic' langu~ge, each o.f ;vh1c? mvolves, d1fferentiatmg
rhyme and assonance ('bell', 'toll', 'sole self', 'well', 'elf'). In an interesting way, these
between poetic and what 1s usually called non-poetic or. ordmary language (we
conventional poetic devices work here to undo the poetic effects of the earlier part
will see that such distinctions are not as stable as we might thmk). One way of
describing the way Keats is using language is to call it a 'heightened' language. Gerard of !he poem. The poem seems to get tangled up in the material nature of language
itself, and can no longer produce transcendental illusions.
Manley Hopkins, for example, suggested that .poetic langu.age is The cu~r.ent la.ngua,ge
As well as emphasizing or foregrounding the sounds of words, the poem seems
heightened'. Another way of describing poetic language Ism te.rm.s of hteranness -
In explore the possibilities and pleasures of figurative language. In the second stanza,
that is the sum of those qualities of the language which make It literary rather than
for example, the speaker is literally asking for a glass of wine, but this is never explicitly
non-li;erary. The most helpful descriptive term of all is 'register', a term. used .by
n1cntioned. Jnstead, the poem presents us with figurative terms for wine, calling it 'a
linguists to refer to the fact that language. varies according to the context m which
draught of vintage' (11) and 'a beaker full of the warm South' (15). These figures are
it is used. 6 The language appropriate to a sc1enlific report 1s different from the language
effective in that they endow the wine with certain associations and connotations. The
used in soap operas or in a letter to a friend, and each discourse, act1v1t.y or context
()\/(>rd Enolish Dictionary reminds us that 'vintage' means enriched through time,
has its own appropriate register. The peculiar conventions of poetic .langu.age,
rare, mature, valuable, 'usually connoting [a wine] of good or outstanding quality'.
therefore mark it as the register appropriate to poetry. As we will see, this register
'J'hc poem also endows the wine with the positive associations we have with nature:
changes ;hrough history (which is why some poems use a register which seems more
'lasting of Flora and the country green' ( 13), this wine is the essence of flowers and
archaic to us than others).
I he countryside ('Flora' here refers not to a modern brand of margarine but to the
Another striking feature of Keats's language in this poem is the sustained use of
Ro1nan goddess of springtime and flowers). Its association in the poem with dance,
sound-patterning, such as rhyme or alliteration. 'Ode to a Nightingale' can be said
song, and mirth also 1nakes this wine celebratory. The second metaphor wine as
to he a 1nclodious poem about a melodious bird since it plays upon the pleasure w,e
often get from the sounds of language. In an unexpec.ted way, howev~r, t~e poe~ s
denouement suggests that it is the sound of words which destroys the 11lus1on which For 0111 i111rnduct1n11 lo the notion of register in litcr;ilurc, sec Momg.imcry <'I a/_ ( 19921,
pp. \~ (il .
w,, 1·.1· of lfr1id11111,
12 Formal Introduction
'the warm South' - does not simply tell us that this wine comes from southern
countries, but picks up on particular associations of southern Europe which are then
developed in· Proven,al song' and 'sunburnt mirth' (14). In this way, Keats's fig4rative
descriptions of the wine draw on some of the connotations of southern Europe that
were prevalent in Britain in his time and are still used in holiday and wine
advertisements on British television. Keats's highly 'poetic' language turns out to
employ techniques and devices which are now most often seen in advertising. This
is appropriate because in a sense the speaker is trying to sell himself (and/or the
reader) the idea that wine might offer a way out of the everyday suffering which is
so vividly presented in the following stanza's account of 'leaden-eyed despairs' (27).
This brief example of 'close reading' (which could be extended throughout the
poem) suggests that reading poetry involves a special way of attending to its language
(a reading in slow motion) which appears different from the way we read 'everyday'
language (though this way of reading also turns out to be appropriate for analyzing
other media - such as advertisements - which attempt to affect us in powerful and
subtle ways). Close reading pays careful attention to the language of poetry, and to
how it works-how the poem achieves its effects through employing poetic conventions
and techniques which exploit specific cultural connotations. We move away from the
rather vague personal impressions which result from Romantic assumptions about
poetry and arrive at a way of reading which talks about how the actual language of
the poem generates effects and meanings. This attention to the conventions of poetic
language is one of the ways of discussing poetry which will be encouraged throughout
this book.
Yet the fact that such techniques of 'close reading' are useful in analyzing other
kinds of language as well as poetry indicates that the features they respond to cannot
be defining features of poetry. All discourses employ figurative language (in varying
degrees and for different purposes), and the sound effects of alliteration, rhyme, and
so on, can occur in any kind of language use (and they are not invariably present in
poetry). This fact has led critics and theorists to attempt to distinguish poetic uses
of such figurative and aural devices from their use in other kinds of discourse (sermons,
political speeches and slogans, advertisements, catch phrases, jokes, novels, plays,
songs). Some writers have suggested that these features are used for different purposes
in poetry from those they have in other discourses (for aesthetic pleasure rather than,
say, political persuasion). Others have said that whereas such features are a kind of
spurious decoration in most instances, in poetry they reveal a 'verbal art' whose
carefully designed 'form· is as important as its 'content". But all such arguments are
problematic attempts to distinguish poetry from prose and other non-poetic discourses
on the basis of features which arc actually common to both.
The Lineation of Poetry
In fact the only watertight distinction between poetry and most non-poetic discourses
is that poetry is set out on the page in lines, whereas prose runs right to the far edge.
We will sec in later chapters that this is not a trivial fact but a distinguishing feature
What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It? 13
which has numerous consequences. The lines of 'Ode to a Nightingale' are divided
Into equal groups ('stanzas') and into lines of equal length. Lines of poetry are
measured not by a ruler or by the width of the page but according to the poet's own
design. Keats's poem is an example of metrical verse in that the length of each line
ff ts into a regular template: the number of stressed and unstressed syllables per line
11 kept constant. To keep it simple, for the moment, each of Keats's lines has ten
1yllables (except for the eighth line of each stanza, which has only six). The
consequences of employing such a metrical form are manifold; here, we simply want
to stress a couple of points. The poem's metrical regularity sets up a visual and aural
frumework or pattern within which all the other linguistic effects we have talked
about take place. An instance of this is that rhyme words do not appear randomly,
hut at the end of lines (they are end-rhymes). The rhyme words thus contribute to
the poem's overall pattern, reinforcing the metrical structure. At the same time, when
Keats employs extra rhymes which are internal to the line (the 'internal rhymes' of
'toll' and 'sole', for instance) this draws extra attention to these important words
und the relation between them. Every other sound effect and figurative device slots
Into and reinforces this pattern, and this becomes part of our experience of reading
the poem. Indeed, it is a powerful means by which this poem becomes 'poetic'. Thus
we would claim that it is the division into lines which is the basis of poetry and the
origin of the poetic effect (rhyme, by contrast, is not a necessary feature of poetry).
Yet the highly regula~ pattern of lines in the 'Ode' does not produce a sense that
the poem is rigidly structured. In fact, our own feeling about the poem is that it seems
frec-nowing and 'spontaneous'. We want to suggest that this effect is, paradoxically,
11 product of technique rather than chance or spontaneity. It is largely produced by
the fact that although Keats has set up a strict metrical template of equal line lengths,
the structure of his sentences hardly ever coincides with the line structure. Thus, for
example, the sentence beginning 'thy plaintive anthem' starts somewhere in the middle
of the line and then spills over the ends of three lines before pausing at 'Valley-glades'
and finally ending at the end of a line with 'waking dream':
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep? (75- 80)
In dynamic contrast to this, the last line is divided into two equal, self-contained
phrases which fit neatly within the line structure. It is this unpredictable interplay
between regular line and stanza form and irregular sentence structure which gives
tile language a sense of spontaneous energy. (You could test this hy converting the
poem into prose and seeing if the movement of the sentences produces the san1c cffccls.)
lA Formol Introduction
Poetry and Meaning
But although such close attention to the local effects of linguistic detail is fascil)ating
in itself, it becomes more interesting when we can relate it to larger questions - such
as 'What does the poem mean?' We have already offered one kind of answer to this
in suggesting that the poem can be read as a comment upon 'the human condition'.
Yet we want to alert you to the problematic nature of such general claims about
poems - and, indeed, about the claim that there is a universal 'human condition'.
Recent theories of literature have taught us to be suspicious about such claims by
stressing that all meaning is historically and culturally specific rather than µniversal.
In our close reading of the 'Ode' we had to specify what 'the warm South' might
mean in a poem written in Britain in the early nineteenth century. The Mediterranean
countries of southern Europe have a significance in Britain which is historically and
culturally specific to Britain. For an Australian or South American reader, by contrast,
the south may connote cold rather than warmth.
Recent theories have also suggested that different ways of reading, informed by
different assumptions about what poetry is and about the purpose of reading poetry,
may well produce different versions of the 'same' poem ijust as different directors
will produce very different interpretations of the 'same' play). Yet all such readings
or 'productions' have to prove themselves by close reference to the language of the
poem itself. The idea that different readings may be equally valid does not mean that
·anything goes', nor does it mean that an interpretation cannot be wrong.
The complex language of Keats's 'Ode' yields different readings according to the
assumptions we bring to it and the questions we ask of it. Our present concern in
this chapter is to ask 'What is poetry?'. This means that our approach to Keats_'s
poem is not a disinterested one -- we have a question in mind before. we read ~t.
Approaching Keats's poem with this question in mind produces a revealing result m
that it allows us to suggest that the 'Ode' can be read as a poem about poetry itself.
This can be seen in the way many of the images it uses, though they refer to various
other things, turn out to have associations with poetry. Thus the speaker chooses
wine as his first avenue of escape from the tribulations of mortal suffering, but its
power derives from the way it is said to taste of 'Provern;al song' (14) - which_ links
it with the late-medieval troubadours, who were poet-mus1c1ans of Provence in the
eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Much the same connection between wine and poetry
is made when wine is described as 'the true, the blushful Hippocrene' ( 16); this suggests
that this wine will induce poetic inspiration, since the Hippocrene was a fountain of
7 kind of cheat whose limitation is either that it is not true or lasting or that it does
the Muses who were thought to inspire classical poets in Ancient Greece. However,
having initially identified wine and the heightening of the senses (or intoxication) it
provides with the effect of poetry in these images. the speaker goes on to affirm the
superiority of poetry itself as a means of transcending his condition:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy ... (31 33)
Whot Is Poetry? How Do We Reod It? 15
It is poetry itself, then, which seems to offer the speaker the best chance of soaring
up to the heightened world of the nightingale. By employing the 'wings of Poesy',
the speaker will not only achieve poetic 'flight' - or a flight of the imagination - but
will thereby become like the nightingale.
In this way, the poem emerges as a celebration or exploration of the power of
poetry itself to help us escape a world of suffering. But the poetry being tested here
iN not poetry in general but a specifically Romantic kind of poetry. A key term for
Ro1nantic poetry is 'imagination' - though it is important to realize that this term
h11s a history of changing uses, and that even the Romantic poets had different theories
nhoul what it is and how it works. 8 For Keats, the imagination was primarily a
means of achieving a sympathetic oneness between the self and other things - between
1111 observing human being and the person, creature or object being observed. In one
of his letters, Keats claimed: 'if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in
its existence and pick about the Gravel'. 9 This is a specific instance of Keats's repeated
Nllggcstion in his letters that the poetic imagination is exhibited by the poet's capacity
to dissolve his own identity in an act of empathy with something outside the self.
The 'poetical Character', he writes, 'has no self - it is everything and nothing - It
hns no character. ... A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because
he has no identity.' Instead, the poet is continually informing 'and filling some other
°
llody'. 1 Keats's account of the poetic imagination and the character of the poet
lc11ds further support to our claim that 'Ode to a Nightingale' is a poem about poetry
Hince. as we have seen, its speaker strives to escape from suffering by losing his own
identity and becoming one with the nightingale through an act of sympathetic
ldc11tification. And it is the poetic imagination - the 'wings of Poesy' - which holds
out the greatest promise for such a merging of speaker and bird. 11
Yet, just as wine is rejected in favour of poetry, so poetry itself is found wanting
11t the end of the poem by failing to fulfil its promise:
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu~ the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do. deceiving elf. (71- 74)
The poem ends, therefore, by recognizing the limitations of the imagination: the
'l'nncy' has failed, and leaves the speaker alone with his 'sole self' (for Keats, the
12
lcnns 'fancy' and 'imagination' were interchangeable). However wonderful the sense
of flight which the fancy or imagination can produce, it is revealed at the end as a
not cheat effectively enough. The speaker's attempt to use the poetic imagination as
11 1ncans of overcoming the difference between self and other fails, and the nightingale's
'plaintive anthem' vanishes into 'the next valley-glades'. It is therefore possible to
i\ good edition of lhc poem will present footnote~ explaining ~uch allusions, hut Vl)U will he ahk: to trace
I lit•111 for yourself hy u~ing a reference hook ~uch as Brewer's Dictimwrr 11{ Pl1ra.~; and Fahie.
I or a ~uccincl discussion of the imagination as a changing historical term, sec l'rince1011, pp. 566 74.
Keal~ lo Benjamin Halley. 22 November 1817. in Keats (1970) Letters, p. 38
'" K,•;1h 10 Hichard Woodhouse. 27 October 1818, in Keat~ (1970) p. 157.
'' kt Ier lo Benjarnm Bailey referred to above, Keats talk~ of the 'Wings ofim;iginalion', Kc;ih ( 1970) p. 17
111 11!1·
 16 Formal Introduction
suggest that this quintessential Romantic poem also investigates and criticizes
Romantic conceptions of poetry in so far as they claim that the poetic imagination
can transcend 'the human condition' or overcome the difference betwee.n self and
other, or self and nature. The 'Ode to a Nightingale', then, needs to be read not as
a beautiful, escapist poem but as a poem which takes a hard, critical look at 'Romantic'
assumptions about poetry - including Keats's own. (This reading depends entirely
on the last stanza, and it would thus be an interesting experiment to read the poem
without it.'' Try it now, and try to articulate your sense of the difference between
the complete and the shortened versions of the poem.)
The Poet's Intention
We have acknowledged that this way of reading Keats's poem depends, to some
extent, on the assumptions we brought to it and the questions we asked of it. Our
argu1nent that it is a poem about poetry arose in the context of a discussion in which
we ourselves were asking the question: 'What is poetry?' In reading a poem for its
1nessage, critics often appear to be saying that poems 'really' mean something different
from what they appear to mean, and students of literature arc often led to assume
that the interpretation of a text is a matter of finding its 'hidden message' - Keats's
'Ode to a Nightingale', we seem to have suggested, is not 'really' about a nightingale,
but about poetry.
A natural response to this would be to ask whether. in interpreting the poem in
this way, we were claiming that we now understood what Keats was 'real1y' trying
to say in this poem. This raises the problem of the author's intention. It seems quite
natural to assu1ne that the purpose of reading poetry is to discover the poet's intention
in writing it. and thus it may be surprising to learn that a great deal of controversy
has arisen over this assumption. Eliot's insistence that criticism should be directed
upon the poem rather than the poet led the so-called New Critics to claim that a
poem should be read on its own terms rather than in terms of its author's statements
about his or her intentions when writing it. A poet's intentions, they argued, are of
interest only if they arc fully realized in the poem itself. There would thus be no point
in going to the author to seek confirmation of a particular interpretation.
It is possible to identify at least four interrelated problems with the notion of
1
" The terms ·rancy· and 'imagination' \~ere used inten:hangcab!y in eighteenth-century poetry and by mo'it
Romantic poets in the early nineteenth century. despite the fact that critics and theorists in England and
Germany had he gun lo distingui>h the terms as referring lo q uitc distinct creutivc proccsSC'i. In this distinction.
'fancy· hecomc'i downgraded a'i a mechanistic procc-;~ of assembling idea~. \~hile 'imagi1wtion· comes to
refer tn a nawral. even semi-di; inc. crc<ttivc facull v. The most well-known and eventually in fl ucntial distinction
between fancy and the imagination ;d(lng the~~ Imes was made by Coleridge in his Bin9r11phio Literi1ria
( 1817). Kc.ib "s use of ·fruicy' in ·ode lo a Nightingale' as a term to describe his version of the sympathetic
imagination ignore~ this distinction. (Sec Princeton. pp. 566 67, and pp. 401 2.)
1' ll is interesting th;ll an early review of the collection of poems in which Keat-; Jirst published ·ode to a
Nightingale' quoted the whole poem minus the tirst and last st;mzas. The anonymous reviewer of !820 found
the ·ode' lhc mos! dcl1ghtful pn<em in the cnllcction. claiming: ·The third and seventh stan1a~ have a charm
for u~ which we find it dillkult to cxplam' (quoted in Mallhcws.cd. (1971) Keu1.1; The critical heritage. pp
:?.14 l."'J
What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It? 17
uuthorial intention. First, there is the problem of access. In many cases, as with Keats,
the poet may be dead and may have left no record of his or her intentions concerning
u particular poem. Secondly, even when we have access to statements of intention
which are independent of the poem, we should not necessarily be constrained by
them since, after all, poets sometimes deliberately mislead readers, or forget what
their original intentions were; their intentions may have changed in the course of
writing, or in subsequent revisions, and a writer may have great difficulty summing
up what he or she was trying to do at any particular stage of writing. Thirdly, people
often say things which have meanings they did not consciously intend and were not
uwarc of, and -- particularly in poetry - those unintended meanings are often as
interesting as intended meanings - it is difficult to assume, in the wake of Freud,
that all human intentions can be consistent and unitary. Fourthly, in the light of
these considerations, we need to ask why the author's intentions should be privileged
over what the text itself seems to say, or what careful readers discover it to be saying.
We can apply some of these questions to our interpretation of Keats's 'Ode'. It
wilt, we hope, be clear from our discussion that we were anxious to justify our reading
hy close reference to the poem itself, which is why we constantly quoted the evidence
from the text which supported our interpretation. Clearly we cannot ask Keats whether
he knew that he was 'really' writing a poem about poetry, but even if we could, it is
worth asking whether it would make any difference. Would it invalidate our
interpretation if Keats (in a surviving letter, for instance) had described his intentions
In quite different terms from our own claims about the poem? If Keats's conscious
intentions were different from our interpretation of the poem's meaning, but
nevertheless compatible with it, what would you conclude from this'' And if Keats's
declared intentions were wholly at odds with our interpretation, what would you
conclude from that? Is an author always the best reader of his or her own writing?
l·:ven if the answer is no, does that mean that an author's intentions have no interest
for us as readers? If we can find evidence of a writer's beliefs and preoccupations
fro1n his or her other actions and writings -- as we did earlier when we documented
Keats's ideas of the imagination and of the 'poetical Character' from his letters - is
not such evidence valuable when it supports our reading'' If so, why should we ignore
ii when it contradicts our interpretation? Does such 'external' evidence have the same
value, however, as evidence drawn fro1n the text of the poem itself?
'The fact that we have not given categorical answers to these questions may suggest
why the issue of authorial intention should have proved so problematic and
controversial for modern criticism. t 4 However, we would insist that our particular
interpretation of Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' did not need to support itself by
clai1ning that what we had uncovered was Keats's intention in writing the poem.
·rhal is not what we were claiming for our reading. We do nevertheless believe that
'' r he anli-mtcntionalist case is forcibly argued _by Wims;lll and Bcard~lcy, _'The lntcmional h11lac~·', .in W K
\Vim~att (1954) Thi' Vaf>al lnm. reprullcd 111 Lodge. ed. (_1972) T11e1111dh C1'11/111} /,11,.'mrr ( n11u.,1w ·I
1nu/a. pp. )34 44. The ctmtrary vie\~. that all valid meanmgs are intended rnc;m1ng\. 1s.<11gued hy 1·.D
H1rscli (19(17) Va!idi/\' in J111er1wr1111i1111. More recent theories have qucs1iuned the idea ol 111tcnl1on.n101'L'
1;1d1cally hy prnhlcmanzrng our idea of the ;iutlwr. -;ee Roland Harthc'i. · 1hc l.k.ilil ol. the A.ulho1 .ind
M1d1cl h1ucault. 'What JS an Author"'. hnlh in Lodge, ed. (19XXJ Aloi/em Cn/it/'111 w1d //1,·1w1 -I n·o1da.
PP- 1(17 72. 197 210.
18 Formal Introduction
what we have identified is an important and interesting meaning of the·poem,
and not something we have arbitrarily invented or imagined. It is for these
reasons that the ways of reading poems presented in this book will rarely worry
about or make claims for the author's intentions. This is not to say that an
author's intentions are irrelevant or uninteresting - they are not - but that we
can never be certain what those intentions were, and that in any case such
intentions are not the final arbiter of a poem's meaning. In fact in this book
we are less concerned with \i'hat poems mean than with hoi-i· they mean. This
entails that our focus is on reading poetic texts themselves, not on reading the
minds of poets.
And Now for Something Completely Different
We have claimed that Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' represents most readers' idea
about what poetry is. To test this claim, we would like to compare Keats's poem
with the poem below, published in 1974 by Charles Simic:
'l'he Garden of Earthly Delights
Buck has a headache. Tony ate
a real hot pepper. Sylvia \Veighs
herself naked on the bathroom
scale. Gary owes $800 to the
Internal Revenue. Roger says
poetry is the manufacture of lightning rods.
JosC wants to punch his wife
in the mouth. Ted's afraid
of his o\vn shadow. Ray talks
to his tomato plants. Paul 10
wants a job in the post office
selling sta1nps. Mary keeps
s1niling at herself in the mirror.
And L
I piss in the sink 15
with a feeling of
eternity.
Although it is true that in impromptu surveys so1ne students say they prefer Simic's
poem to Keats's (some even claim that it is 1nore 'poetic'). nevertheless there is usually
an overwhchning consensus that Keats's poem is both 'better' and more "poetic'
than Si1nic's. It might be said that this result is inevitable, since we have chosen a
poem which see1ns as utterly unlike Keats's as could be imagined. But this is precisely
why a comparison between the tVv'O poems will alk)\V us to becon1e inore aware or
those features of Keats's poe1n which niake it sound and look n1ore like "real' poetry
(or our received idea about what poetry is). Our method here will be, once inore, to
look closely at the poe1n's language to sec how it achieves its effects.
What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It? 19
In terms of poetic fonn, Keats's poe1n looks and sounds poetic through his use
of fonnal features such as metre and rhyme, whereas Simic's reads more like a list
of co1n1ncnts which have no relation to the fact that it is divided into lines (the fact
that ·weighs' rhymes \Vi th 'says' in so1nc accents seems entirely coincidental). A second
upparcnt difference between the poems is in terms of their subject matter. Our received
ideas about poetry suggest that flowers and birds are inherently more poetic subjects
than bathroom scales or tax problems. This,difference is related to a difference of
diction or register (that is, the choice of words and phrases): compare 'so1ne melodious
plot Of beechen green' with 'Gary owes $800 to the/ Internal Revenue'. A further
difference between the poe1ns is in the different images we are given of the poetic
i'ipcakers. Whereas Keats's speaker displays a 'poetic' sensibility (this is one of the
111ain points or the poc1n), Simic's see1ns quite the reverse - as revealed in his ad1nission
'I piss in the sink' (15). The impression that Keats's diction is more 'poetic' than
Si1nic's is also produced by the fonner's use of cultural allusions (rererences to the
n1yths and literature of earlier periods or cultures) - for exan1ple, in calling the
11i~htingale a 'light-winged Dryad of the trees' (a Dryad was' a tree-nymph' in classical
111ythology).
·rhis co1nparison has revealed so1ne of the features of what we usually think of
us 'traditional' poetry, but it also indicates that there are radically different kinds of
poetry (we will explore this further in later chapters). One of the things which seems
l.."lc;ir enough is that Simic is not trying to write a poe1n like Keats's. This means that
Wl' ought to judge each poem in terms of what it achieves rather than what we think
it ought to have achieved based on our conceptions of \Vhat poetry should be. There
url' reasons for enjoying Si1nic's poen1, but they are different rro1n the reasons why
5
Wl' tnight enjoy Keats's.
Rather than e1nploying the kind of'poetic' language found in Keats, Simic's poem
sce1ns 1nore like a list of1nundane observations about everyday urban life in the USA
in the late t\.venticth century. The poc1n therefore raises interesting points in a
discussion of what poetry is. since it plays upon our expectations about poetry. If
WL' feel a sense of shock at encountering such 'ordinary' language in a poem, that is
hl'cause we are expecting something else probably something like Keats. This sense
of shock is perhaps inost acute \vhen we encounter the \\ ord 'piss' in a poem. This
1
is not because the word itself is so shocking - it is used quite casually in some contexts
hut because it appears in a pocn1. Again, the effect or this depends upon its
discrepancy \Vith our expectations about poetry, and can therefore alert us to those
l'xpcctations.
Part of the poen1 's itnpact, then, depends on its relationship to other poems. But
llu:rc is also an internal tension at \Vork in the poc1n itself. The use of inundanc
language acts as a setting against \Vhich sudden glin1pses of 1norc 'poetic' language
..,cc1n all the more startling. This juxtaposition or vulgar and poetic registers is 1nost
;1c11tc in the last four lines:
And I,
I piss in the sink
with a feeling: of
eternity.
20 Formal Introduction
The effect here depends precisely upon the clash between sacred and profane language
without this, the effect of either would be diluted. Perhaps, too, these lines, set apart
as they are from the rest of the poem, make a kind of Romantic claim about the
poem's speaker, foregrounding his 'poetic sensibility' in contrast to the other
characters. These lines become still more intriguing if we think a little more about
the poem's title. Simic's title alludes to a triptych of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch
called 'Garden of Terrestrial Delights' (c.1510). Bosch's title is ironic, since it depicts
the chaos of evil and suffering which besets human beings on earth and in hell. It
would be worth your while to seek out a print of the paintings; for now, E.H.
Gombrich's description of the left- and right-hand panels will give you an idea:
On the left we watch evil invading the v.'orid. The creation of Eve is followed by the
temptation of Adam and both arc driven out of Paradise, while high above in the sky we
sec the fall of the rebellious angels, \Vho arc hurled from heaven as a swarm of repulsive
insects. On the other wing we arc sho\vn a vision of hell. There we see horror piled upon
horror. fires and torments and all manner of fearful demons, half animal, half human or
half machine, \vho plague and punish the poor sinful souls for all eternity. 15
Simic's allusion to this painting invites us to look for parallels between poem and
painting. ls Simic suggesting that the mundane chaos of modern life is like Bosch's
vision of hell" And does this allow us to reinterpret the poem's last lines as either a
n1oment of transcendence or a 1no1nent of despair in which the speaker feels that, as
in hell. his torments will go on for all eternity? Have we. then, unexpectedly arrived
at the possibility that Keats's and Simic's poe1ns are radically different versions of
the sa1ne theme? Is Simic's speaker also seeking a way out of a world in which we
"sit and hear each other groan'?
It might even be that, as in Keats's poe1n, the vehicle of escape or transcendence
in Simic's poem is poetry itself. Within the list of mundane observations which makes
up the first part of the poem. there is an unexpected claim about the nature of poetry:
'Roger says I poetry is the manufacture of lightning rods' (5 6). The statement is
quite surprising, since we are being invited to think of poetry as a inanufacturing
process. This is startling because it contradicts most of our received ideas about
poetry. Keats himself asserted: 'if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a
tree it had better not come at all'. 10 Our idea that poetry comes 'naturally' to the
poet, and that it should not involve labour or anything artificial or technical, is yet
another assumption which we have inherited fro1n Romanticism. Simic's metaphor
is intriguing because there may not. at first sight, be any obvious similarity between
poetry and the 'manufacture of lightning rods'. One \Vay of interpreting this metaphor
is to think about the function of lightning rods: to conduct electrical energy from
storms to the earth. The metaphor might therefore be claiming that poetry creates
so1ne kind of 1nediu1n \vhich conducts energy fro1n the "heavens' to the earth. It
would then be a very new metaphor for the very old concept that poetry is a vehicle
for sotne kind of divine inspiration. In this reading the poem co1nbincs two previously
incompatible ideas: although the writing of poetry might be a n1anufacturing activity.
the product (a poem) works as a 1nediu1n V·ihich will conduct inspiration, spark the
1' (iomhrich i l'J7::'1 I he S1or1· of ·1rr. r- 27<1
What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It? 21
reader's .ima.gination, or even set up a channel through which a lightning-like
hnu~1nat1ve impulse may pass from author to reader. In other words, there is a
~onccpt of imagination at work in this poem which is only partly dissimilar to
Ro111antic ideas.
Readers' Assumptions and the Reading Experience
<>ur readings of Keats's and Simic's poems have demonstrated that we do not (perhaps
L'unnot) approach any poem as 'innocent' readers free from preconceptions about
poetry. Although Simic's poem is a remarkably 'individual' and 'modern' poem, our
response to and understanding of it partly depend on our knowledge of poems such
us 'Ode to a Nightingale'. The impact of the poem relies precisely upon the disjunction
ht•tween our preconceptions about poetry and the poem we actually read. What this
111cans is that our original question -- "What is poetry?' - is not an irrelevant question
even though. we. may not be able definitively to answer it. On the contrary, this is a
question which influences our response to everything we take to be poetry, since we
have a large number of internalized assumptions about what poetry is and what it
docs \Vhich we bring to bear on any poem 'A'e read.
Most of the features we have identified as being authentically 'poetic' in Keats's
.11.0:111 are actually characteristic of Romantic poetry rather than poetry in general.
I his fact reveals the way in which our assumptions are shaped by the history of
culture. Although we may believe that our ideas arc personal to us. attention to the
history of culture (of which the history of poetry is a part) reveals that our assumptions
un: rnhented fro1n the past and fro1n the way our present culture relates to the past.
We should be wary of thinking that the continued existence of Romantic ideas about
roctry mea~s tha~ they are more correct or better than other ideas. Periods prior to
the Romantic period had very different ideas about poetry, ideas which shaped the
ways 1n which poetry was written, read and valued. This means that one of the tasks
Ihut face us if we want to become better readers of poetry is to fa1niliarize ourselves
wi!h these different conventions by reading more poetry from different periods.
Yet gaining a familiarity with the changing historical assu1nptions about poetry
111ay lead us .to question our own place \.vithin that history. Why is it. for example,
Ihat we continue to have and value Romantic conceptions about poetry more than
l ."O years after the 'official' end of the Ron1antic period? One answer to this is the
fact that Romantic conceptions continued to have force throughout the nineteenth
l'l'ntury. and still influence popular ideas about literature and writers in the late
twentieth. Some of these ideas were given new life in the theory and practice of the
\1 -callcd New Criticism \Vhich shaped university teaching of literature in the USA
1
:111d Britain in the middle decades of the twentieth century. A combination of popular
1dl·as about poetry and a \vatcred-do\vn version of New C'riticis1n continues to
111lluence the way literature is taught in schools in Britain and the lJSA. 17 The sainc
as ...;111nptions underlie the 'A'ay poetry is discussed on television, in hook reviews in
22 Formal Introduction What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It? 23

newspapers and 1nagazines, and in popular fihns such as Drad Poets Society. This is Exercises
one of the reasons why we continue to regard Keats's "Ode' (written nearly two
hundred years ago) as an exemplary poem. I. !lead the following poem (by Ted Hughes. 1957) several times. and then answer
The fact that different theories about poetry have been held at different historical tl1e questions that follow:
n101nents indicates why it is impossible to give a definitive answer to the question
'What is poetry?'. All answers to that question will inevitably be historically and
The Thought-Fox
theoretically contingent. And the fact that our assumptions about poetry are shaped
by our own place in history, and by the unconscious theories about literature which I imagine this 111idnight moment's forest:
our particular culture holds and disseminates, means that we ourselves cannot stand Something else is alive
outside history and theory to see what poetry 'really is'. Beside the clock's loneliness
The idea that we cannot step outside history or theory is a relatively recent one. And this blank page where my fingers move.
Its consequence is that many literary critics have become quite self-conscious about
Through the window I see no star: 5
their own 'position· as readers in relation to a text. This self-reflexivity has led to a So1nething more near
proliferation of literary theories. Since Ne\.v (~riticism lost its dominant place in the Though deeper within darkness
study of literature in universities, no single literary theory has taken its place. Most Is entering the loneliness:
literature departments in universities these days feel it necessary to teach classes on
(~old, delicately as the dark snow,
·literary theory', and guides to literary theory have flooded the market. Such classes
and books will typically discuss a range of theories. including Russian Formalism, A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; 10
Two eyes serve a move1nent, that now
Structuralistn. Post-Structuralis1n. Psychoanalysis. Marxis1n, Feminism, Reader
And again nov.·, and now. and no\v
Response, and Ne1,v Historicism. 18 Each of these theoretical approaches to literature
brings its own explicitly fonnulated assumptions and agenda to a literary text. and Sets neat prints into the snow
asks its 01,vn characteristic questions of it. There arc inco1npatibilities between these Bct\.vcen trees, and warily a Jame
theories, and some critics 1,vill adopt one at the expense of the others in order to be Shadow Jags by stutnp and 111 hollo\\· 15
able to declare an identifiable 'position'. 19 More interesting interpretative work is Of a body that is bold to conic
done. hov. ever, by critics v..'ho explore the overlap bct\veen theories and are prepared
1

Across clearings, an eye.

to use whatever critical tools and theoretical assun1ptions particular passages in a A widening deepening greenness,
literary text seem to call for. This is why we are not setting out to teach any particular Hrilliantly, concentratedly.
literary theory so that you v. ill be able to ·apply' it to the next poem you come
1
Coming about it<> own business 20
across. Instead, we v. ant to sti1nulate you to think about poetry in theoretically
1

Till, 'vvith a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

informed 1,vays v. hich will allow you to be attentive to the theoretical i1nplications
1

It enters tht.: dark hole of the head.

of" the features of each particular poe1n you read. The window is starless stilt; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

(<ti Try to describe who (or \vhat) the speaker of this poe1n is and the situation
v..·hich the poe1n presents.
~bl Why docs the poc1n begin \vi th · 1 i1nagine '? Hovv 1nuch of v..'hat follows is
in1agined - is it just the ·1nidnight 1no1ncnt 's forest', or everything in the poe1n'?
(cl Hov. ' does Hughes 1nake the coining and 1nove1nent of the fox seem vividly
I· or a ,cn~c of the ;1nadnuni~1ic lh>mantic :h,ulllplinn" which ~hare the tc<to.:hmg of pcictry m Hnfr;l1 ~ch nob. in1111ediate in lines 9 21 '!
,cc ~\;1kolrn Ped ;ind !);iy1d Rnhi1btll1 ( l 977) / /w ( nt1cal l: Yll!lli11u1w11· -111 u111wouch /(! /iternr1· <l/'f!l"<'clill10n
ell <111 adi m11nl ll'rd. S.11. Bu nun I 19X61 l-/.1Td 1~·11,1/i,/1: and Da\'id Cnckhurn i 19901 The Pru, linli G11id<'
(d) Rewrite the \Vhole poem: (i) \Vithout stanza divisions; (ii) in continuous prose.
10 R.<'1 i"'" lli!lir•'i' Grudt' /'ol'lri What differences arc there hetv. een each version?
1

1" I or g,1od example' of sud1 hnok-,. ~cc Ann .klki~<lll and D;1\'id RohC) i19X6J .\ludel'll /Jlerun· [/!corr: '1
111/llJ'cll"Olfr<' 1111rod11,1w11: Terr) b1gle1011 ( 19XJI L11a11n Theur\': 11! imrodu, 11011: Ramun Scld..:n ( 198~) ,1
(c) In the chapter 1,ve discussed the clTect in "Ode to a Nightingale' of the dyna111i1:
lfrw/,·r·,. (r111dc 10 ('011/,•m/N!/"<irr Litemn /'/won R<1111;m Selden {1989) l'ri1c1ici11!} T/1con u11rl R,,.,1,/11111 and irregular interplay bet\vecn line endings and sentence strut:turc. J)ocs
/,11,·1·u/111·e: -l11111lr0</1111u111: Pctl:r Collier ;111d !klga (iL:y~·r-Ryan 110901 L1l<T<1J'\ fheon Todin
,., h>r :111 n;1m11k ,,1 an :1pp1t>:id1 \\'hich n~.1dl~ ,..:p.iral<'' dilk1·c·nt thcorcti(,\I aprrp;1d1c~ tt> ructry. ,~c D·.i\id
llughes use sitnilar techniques to achieve appropriate cffct..:ts in this poen1'!
Burhb1ndn i llJ'/11 ('u111<'lll/"ll'<ll'I l.11,T<11'1' ·1 h<'ul"l ,111,/ 1hc R.eud111!/ <'I l'rwln Begin by 1narking when.~ each senti:ncc in the poe111 begins and ends. and 11nll·
24 Formol Introduction
what relationship there is between these sentences and the line and stanza
structure. How does the relation between verse form and sentence structure
work in the long second sentence which presents the movement of the fox?
(f) How do you interpret the fact that the fox 'enters the dark hole of the head'
(22)'' What is the dark hole of the head'' Is there any relation between this
dark hole into which the fox disappears and the earlier lines which tell us that
'Something more near/ Though deeper within darkness/ Is entering the
loneliness (6· 8)"
(g) What difference would it make if the poem began with the second stanza
('Through the window I see no star') and ended halfway through the last
stanza with 'It enters the dark hole of the night">
(h) Why is the poem called 'The Thought-Fox"'
(i) Why does the poem end with the line 'The page is printed"' What page is
printed'' And what is printed on it'' What do you make of the echo between
this line and the fact that we are told that the fox· Sets neat prints into the snow'?
(j) What assumptions about poetry can you discover in the poem? Are they more
like Keats's or more like Simic's"
2. Here is a selection of the many poems about poetry that have been written in
English in all periods. Read as many of them as you can (they can all be found
in the Norton Anthology of' Poetry, ed. A. W. Allison, 3rd edition): Shakespeare,
'Sonnet 55' ( 1609); Anne Bradstreet. 'The Author to Her Book' (1678): William
Morris, 'The Earthly Paradise' ( 1868 · 70); A.E. Housman, 'Terence, This is Stupid
Stuff .. .' (1896): Marianne Moore, 'Poetry' (1921); Archibald MacLeish, 'Ars
Poetica' (1926): A.R. Ammons, 'Poetics' ( 1971 ); John Ashbery, 'Paradoxes and
Oxymorons' (1981); Tom Wayman, 'What Good Poems Are For' (1980); Leslie
Marmion Silko. 'How to Write a Poem about the Sky' ( 1981 ).
Read each poem several tin1cs and try to articulate the theory of poetry it is
promoting or the assumptions about poetry which it takes for granted. How do the
assumptions in each poe1n compare with those of Keats and those of Si1nic'?
Chapter 2
Rhythm and Metre
We've All Got Rhythm
In nsking the question 'What is poetry?' in Chapter I, we argued that the only
IUNtninable difference between poetry and other language uses is that poetry is divided
Into lines. If this is the defining feature of poetry, from which all else follows, then
this must be the first thing we attend to in this book. This means that we need to
he~in with an account of poetic rhythm and metre.
This is a necessary but risky way of beginning. Our experience of teaching poetry
1u11gests that the aspect of studying poetry over which students experience most
anxiety is the fact that they may be required to analyze a poem's rhythm or metre.
One or reasons for this anxiety is that the method of analysis which is usually taught
In schools, universities and textbooks adopts a set of terms and assumptions which
arc. quite literally, alien to poetry in English. Students are required to cut up poetry
Into 'feet' which are given Greek names which have to be memorized. This artificial
rrocess seems to have little to do with the way we actually experience and derive
filcusure from poetic rhythms. We believe that the approach we will use in this book
11 much more user-friendly and appropriate to our experience of poetry. 1
It is curious that poetic rhythm should cause such unease. Rhythm is fundamental
to our very existence and to the way we experience life in our bodies. Our bodies
work in rhythmic ways: our heartbeat, our breathing, the way we walk, run, dance,
1wim. We experience time as rhythmical the rhythms of darkness and light, of work
""" rest, the phases of the moon, the regular cycle of the seasons, and so on. Rhythm
hus physical and mental effects upon us which are deeply related to aesthetic
rxpcricnce. When we dance we move our bodies in rhythmic ways which coincide
with the rhythms of music. and this can have a range of different pleasurable effects
fron1 those of the waltz to those of house music. Jogging, swimming, and even
walking become a pleasure only when and if we get into a rhythm.
I he discu~sion of rhythm and metre which follows i~ based on principles of analysis developed hy Derck
Allridge (1982) The Rh_rthm.1 of fnylish Poclr_r and (1995) l'oetic Rhythm. For variations on trnditiorntl
owlliods of analysing metre. see (ieollrey Leech ( l 969) ;1 Unyui.~tic Guide to l:.'ny/ish Poetry, pp. IOJ JO; Paul
hi~~cll (1979) Poetic /Heier um/ Poetic Form; John Hollander (1989) Rhyme',\ Rea.1"1111: /I f/Uilfr /o /·.'1111/i.'/i
1·,·1·"·: ,.1/wwn.1, pp. 112 17; and Jon Stallv.·orthy. 'Versification'. in /\.W. /\llis(1n. el al. ( 198JJ '/'lw N111'/m1
·1111/i11/01n· of 1'01•1r1\ pp. 1403 22
26 Formal Introduction
If we are able to absorb and gain pleasures from the rhythms of physical movement,
dance, and music, we need to examine why it is that the question of rhythm in poetry
causes so much anxiety. One of the answers to this is perhaps that students are not
usually given credit for simply enjoying a poem's rhythm or metre but are asked to
describe or analyze it in technical terms. Moreover, many people find it difficult to
bring to conscious knowledge what they unconsciously 'know' and enjoy. Thus, for
example, it is possible to experience the intoxicating, trancelike effect of dancing to
house music without ever consciously recognizing that it achieves this effect through
an almost monotonous use of 4 x 4 rhythmic patterns (see below). In a similar way,
readers may derive pleasure from a poem's use of rhythm without being able to
analyze that rhythm. In fact, people find it hard at first even to 'hear' the rhythmic
patterns of their everyday speech. The very attempt to become conscious of the way
we pronounce a word or phrase can make us unable to hear how we say it, or even
make us 'forget' how to say it!
The problem here is not restricted to the question of metre. Instead, this is simply
the most stark aspect of a larger problem. Put simply, the issue at stake here is the
!)ltmti.bi~/'b.:t~w~~en ent and anal sis. This apparent incompati-
ility - or t e assumption that they mco atible -- involves fundamental
theoretical questions. In fact the distinction made by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
between Kunst (art) and Wissenschaji (science) has become a major distinction in
Western culture (enshrined in different subjects at school and in different faculties in
universities). The distinction and relation between art and science has been a major
question in Western philosophy. Wordsworth's claim that 'we murder to dissect' 2 is
a typically Romantic response to this question, suggesting that analysis somehow
does violence to the artistic object which is analyzed.
Yet it is impossible to study literature at university without analysis. To study
literature involves not just imaginatively responding to texts but becoming able to
describe why and how a text induces particular kinds of elfect and response. One of
the aims of this book is to show that this process of analysis can in itself be a source
of pleasure. In effect, then, we will be questioning the Romantic assumption that
analysis 'murders' art. This assumption will be questioned in at least two ways: first,
by asking whether any kind of reading could be completely free from analysis; secondly,
by trying to give our readers the experience that analysis can enhance rather than
destroy enjoyment - that, to rework Wordsworth's metaphor, analysis brings poetry
more 'alive'.
We cannot ignore the fact that poems are organized according to rhythmic and
metrical principles. Such principles are the reason why poetry is laid out on the page
in the way it is - that is, in lines whose length is governed not by the margins of the
page (as in prose) but according to a design predetermined by the poet. This visual
difference between poetry and prose is not sitnply a trivial fact which we can note
and then ignore. Instead, it is the first signal that a reader is likely to register
that he or she is confronted by a poem rather than some other kind of written
Sec· 1hl' l'ahk., 'I urned'. in Wnnhworlh (llJ6K) Jlw f.rrini/ Bal!ail.1·, rP- 105 6
Rhythm and Metre 27 (
l1nguage. The spatial layout of lines on a page says to the reader 'this is poetry',
and is likely to affect the way he or she reads the words which are organized in this
wuy.
A telling example of this fact occurred to one of the present writers as an
undergraduate student in the late 1970s. In a first-year class called' Practical Criticism',
aroups of students were presented each week with an anonymous poem to analyze
In Ihe course of the seminar through open discussion. Although such a class format
wus somewhat old-fashioned by then, some of the lecturers managed to use it in
Instructive ways. One week we were presented with a poem, as usual, and we spent
nhout forty minutes analyzing it as a group, finding all kinds of subtle and significant
lhings in its figurative language and form. After we had done this, however, the tutor
revealed that the 'poem· we had so carefully analyzed was in fact a short item from
II newspaper which had been rearranged into lines and presented to us as a poem.
Ruther than feeling that we had been cheated into making fools of ourselves, we
realized that we had been coaxed into arriving at an important insight - that the
luyout on the page (together with the expectations set up by the institutional context)
hud stimulated us to read this news item as if it were poetry. 3 The general lesson of
this is that the way poetry is laid out on the page acts as a visual signal which causes
us lo alter the way in which we read. A second and related lesson is that the experience
of poetry perhaps relies as much on how we read as on what we read.
Written Poetry and the Traces of Poetry's Oral Origins
Al this point it is worth making some other apparently obvious remarks which
nevertheless have more consequences than are initially apparent. When we think of
poetry as being organized into lines on a page, we are thinking of written poetry.
Our experience of poetry in contemporary Western culture is mostly through silent
reading. Even when we do hear poetry being performed orally (on recordings, at
poetry readings or 'performances') it is usually read or memorized from a written
text. In the past, however, poetry was also, or even pre-eminently, an oral form (this
is still the case in many contemporary cultures): bards and balladeers would entertain
ut court or act as circulators of news by moving from place to place. Such oral poetry
was composed and transmitted mainly by and for people who could not read or
write. Even after the development of the printing press in the fifteenth century, books
remained rare and illiteracy was widespread. The oral bards did not necessarily
compose their poetry but inherited and transmitted traditional poems which they
would modify in performance or in response to events. Such poetry had to be
111cn1orizcd (though not necessarily word-for-word), and vari°'-u§.AR.Qe~icci
Iaids to memory) were built into the poems themselves. These inchlcted rituaiki'ic v
furmulae and different kinds of sound parallelism, such as ~vI1l<Y,'!IJld
\.~ ~ ~· - · 'v
I h1~ cxcn.:isc was modelled on an cxcr<.:1'-l: cairicd out hy Stanley Fi~h and rcp(lrt1xt in llw cs~ay 'llow t"
Kcco~111t'.l' a l'ocrn when You Sec One'. Ill h'h 1l'J~lll /\ Flh'rl' a Fe\/ i11 1/J1, Class'.'
 28 Formal Introduction
The oral (or aural) origins of poetry still persist in written poetry today. Many
of the devices of written poems which we analyze in the classroom (alliteration, rhyme
and metre) were originally devised in order to make poetry more memorable for both
the bard and the listeners. It is even possible to suggest that without such oral/aural
ghosts of the past, poetry would cease to be poetry. This is most clearly the case with
rhythm and metre. Rhythm in language is, by definition, an aural effect - something
we hear (whether in reading aloud or through sounding the words silently in our
imagination). Metre is simply the organization of the rhythms of the language into
regular units. 'Metre' is etymologically related to 'measure', and 'measure' has a
couple of specialized meanings which it is revealing to note. According to the Shorter
Oxford English Dictionary, 'measure' can mean: (a) a 'measured sound or movement';
(b) 'an air, tune, melody' and 'the time of a piece of music'; (c) 'rhythmical motion,
especially as regulated by music'; and (d) 'a grave or stately dance'. These meanings
of 'measure' indicate the close relationships between the aural and physical rhythms
of poetry, music and dance, but they also suggest why written poetry is laid out on
~
the page in measured lines. Poetic lines on the page are arranged in order to indicate
in a spatial way the rhythms and measures of the poem as It 1s performed and
experienced as sound in time.
Poetry is not, of course, the only kind of discourse which is written in lines. When
songs of all kinds are written down, they are organized into lines. The length of the
lines is not arbitrarily chosen but forms a regular pattern which indicates the linguistic
and musical rhythms. This similarity between songs and poems offers one way of
taking some of the mystery out of the question of metre in poetry. Although poetry
is increasingly experienced through silent reading, we hear songs everywhere in our
culture - as nursery rhymes, hymns and carols, football chants, jingles, pop songs,
and so on. As children we seem to derive great pleasure from the rhythmic structures
of the stories, rhymes, poems and songs which are read to us. 4 Yet as we grow older
we seem to lose that immediate pleasure in the rhythms of the texts we read - perhaps
because we are taught to get information, excitement or pleasure from the content
rather than the form of what we read (though if we have to read regularly to young
n
1
children, we can regain the skills and pleasures of reading rhythmically). With songs,
however, the rhythmic performance of the words along with the music is at least as
important as what the words say. Even if we are not musicians, by listening to a song
several times we absorb and understand (if only in an unconscious way) its rhythmical
form. This kind of knowledge can remain with us all our lives.
Have You Got Rhythm?
To test out our claim that we've all got rhythm, we would like you to try the following
exercise. We have taken the first few lines of a traditional ballad and rearranged them
as prose. What we'd like you to do is arrange thc1n into what you take to be the
original lines of the song. We ;111ticipatc that most of you will be able to do this
l he ver~e ~lorie~ 1il Dr Seu~>. with their exlraurdinar)' rhythm' and rhyme~. are
in m;iny t\11gl11ph1inc n1untric~.
Rhythm and Metre 29
not because you will necessarily know this particular ballad, but because you will be
able to 'hear' how it goes through an unconscious familiarity with the ballad structure.
This tacit familiarity comes through exposure to other ballads and the many kinds
of song whose forms are similar to the ballad. Of course, those readers who know
the song which Bob Dylan based upon it - 'It's a Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall' - will
hnve a head start.
I
·o where h~.'lou been, Lord Randal, my sony·And where ha' you bee~ my handsome
young man?i_:I ha' been at the gre~n ood; nfother, mak my bed soor;,-for I'm wea~d
wi' huntin', and fain wad lie down.' And wha !)let ye there, Lord Randal, my son?_,And
wha met you tj1ere, my handsome oung manf"o I met wi' my true-Jove; mother, mak
my bed soon/ror I'm wearied wi' huntin ', atfct fain wad lie down.'
When you have arranged this into lines, we believe that you will also be able to
divide the lines up into stanzas. Try it now.
What Is Rhythm?
We need to begin at the beginning by asking what rhythm is. The simple answer to
this is that rhythm occurs whenever there is a regular repetition of similar events
which are divided from each other by recognizably different events. A basic visual
example of this would be a regularly flashing light (like that of a lighthouse). This
can he said to develop a binary sequence which goes as follows: light-dark, light-dark,
light-dark, and so on. An aural example would be the regular sound of a bleeper:
bicep-quiet, bleep--quiet. Rhythms can occur not only as on-off sequences like these,
but in a variety of different ways. The only requirement is that there is an alternation
between similar but recognizably different events. Walking can become rhythmical
because it involves moving alternate legs - in fact, the regularity of military marching
is achieved through the regimental sergeant-major's rhythmical chanting of'left-right,
left-right, left-right'. (It would be interesting to know whether this makes marching
n pleasurable activity; certainly, the use of marching songs helps endurance on long
marches.)
The rhythms we have looked at so far involve the sequential alternation of two
events-; whi we can call binary o ' uple' rhythms. (For purposes which will soon
hecornec ar,it 1 lbe ulto 1nko up mintermsofnumbers:'one-two,
one two, one--two'.) Although there are more complex rhythms than duple rhythm,
they are always composed out of sequences of'beats' and 'oflbeats'. A dance rhythm
which may be familiar to some readers is that of the waltz. Beginners learning to
dance the waltz have to programme their bodies to move according to the waltz
rhythm, otherwise they risk the humiliation of continually treading on their partner's
toes. The basic rhythm of the waltz is easy enough and is often counted out in the
learning process: 'one-two-three, one --two-three.' Th~, for
ohvious reasons. But the crucial question to the novice dancer is where the beats and
JffC'dt favourites with children ollheats fall. This is why a beginner is made to hear where the beat falls in the way
the sequence of numbers is chanted: 'one-two- three, one two-three. one two thn:c
30 Formal Introduction Rhythm and Metre 31

.. .'.In this rhythm. then, the beat is achieved by the 'one', while the ollbeat is achieved If you read these metrical forms out loud you will discover that they both have a
by the 'two-three'. Because the strong beat comes before the weaker beat, the pattern atrongly insistent metrical pattern which almost coaxes you into a chant-like rendition.
'beat-offbeat' is calle,d a~y\)lQJ. Thus the waltz rhythm can be called a 'falling Furthermore, you will perhaps feel that a momentum emerges which seems to insist
triple rhythm'. (If th~ress hadfallen on the third element rather than the first - that all four lines have to be chanted in order to complete the pattern. This pattern
'one-two-three, one-two-three' - then this would be callee\_ a rjgllljl _:~Indeed, of four four-beat lines is very common in poetry and in songs, so it is useful to have
the relationship between counting and rhythm is programm¥into us from our early 11 way of describing it. Following Attridge. we will call it the 4 x 4 pattern.' The
years in playground games and in the classroom, where multiplication tables are (or insistent momentum of this pattern is such that it can survive even if we mix up the
used to be) memorized through the rhythms of group chantmg - a techmque which kinds of unit which compose it. Thus the following lines employ a mixture of duple
was so effective that the present writers can still hear the tones of the way we chanted and triple units:
the tables (this is just one example of how rhythmic language can be memorable). and one and two and three and four
We have now gathered all the principles and terms we need in order to describe and five and six and seven and eight
most rhythmic sequences. All we need to ask of any rhythm is whether it is (i) duple and nine and ten and eleven and twelve
or triple, and (ii) rising or falling. Thus, in fact, there are four basic kinds of rhythm: and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and sixteen.

(a) rising duple: 'one··two, one-two'; l 11 order to mark the beat pattern, we want to follow Attridge in using the following
(b) falling duple: 'one-two. one-two'; 1:011vcntion (with 'b' underneath the beats and 'o' underneath the offbeats):
(c) rising triple: 'one-two-three, one two-three';
and one and two and three and four
(d) falling triple: 'one-two three, one-two-three'. o b o bo b o h
The use of counting to establish rhythm is not restricted to learning to waltz; it is a and five and six and seven and eight
feature of all music, and can be used to help co-ordinate different musicians in a obohohob
hand or ensemble, or to work out what 'time signature' a piece of music is in.
·!'he other major metrical form in poetry in English is the five-beat form, in which
the lines are measured into rhythmic units of five:

What Is Metre? and one and two and three and four and five
oho ho bob ob
If we have now articulated 1he basic building blocks of rhythm, we need to add only
and six and seven and eight and nine and ten
that metrical form (metre) is achieved simply through measuring the way rhythmic

units are combined together - that is, through arranging rhythmic units in groups
which are regularly repeated. In poetry written in English there are two basic measures
or numbers of rhythmic unit per line: ~ er · e a ve r li . The dift'erences
between these can be illustrated by aa'apting the countin principles used thus far.
lfwe put an 'and' between numbers we can establish clearly where beats and offbeats
occur, since the word 'and' is very rarely given stress in English speech: 'one and two
and three'. Thus a metre consisting of four-beat lines will look like this:
~
obobobobob
The distinctive feature of the five-beat metre is that it does not have the chant-like
Llllality of the four-beat metre, nor does it have the latter's tendency to organize itself
into groups of four lines. We will examine the consequences of these facts later.
/ We now have all the basic terms and principles needed for describing poetic metre:
we are able to describe the rhythmic units (see above) and are able to say whether
I hey are measured out in four-beat lines or five-beat lines.

and one and two and three and four

and five and six and seven and eight
The Syllable as the Basic Unit of Rhythm in Language
and one and two and three and four
and five nnd six and seven and eight.
'J'hc rhyth1nic units we have examined above consist of groups of two or three words:
In this example, we have used rising duple units (in which 'seven' is pronounced 'h:ft ri 1_ht', 'one-two three', ~and one', and so on.,~is irn.pbfffi'R.Uo ~1t
virtually as one syllable). A four-beat rising triple metre would look like this: 1c as1c ·nt o thm 1s not the d bu he sv11abr~c have been able to
and a one and a two and a three and a four
cl;1rify the princ1p cs of r mic a metrical form beca e we have, for the 1nost
and a five and a six and a seven and an eight part. been using one-syllable words (we compressed 'seven' into one syllabic, and we
and a one and a two and a three and a four
and a live and a si'X and a seven and an eight. /\Ill idge ( 19X2l Rln1/11n1· u/ l·.1111/ish Poetrr, p. 8_l.
32 Formal Introduction Rhythm and Metre 33

introduced multisyllabic words such as 'eleven' or 'thirteen' without comment). In the analyses of rhythmic units and lines thus far, it is clear where the beats
In the analysis of poetic rhythms and metre, it is important to understand what occur in the lines. Most readers will give more emphasis to the numbers rather than
a syllable is and to be able to analyze a multisyllabic word into its component the 'ands' in the following line:

l
syllables. The Shorter OED tells us that a syllable is 'a vocal sound or set of sounds
uttered with a single effort of articulation and forming a word or an element of a one and two and three and four.
word'. This is a crucial definition for an understanding of rhythm in language, because For the purpose of analyzing poetic rhythm and metre, we say that the numbers in
it reminds us that speech is produced through muscular movements of the human this line are 'stressed' while the 'ands' receive less stress (they are 'unstressed'). Stress
body-· this is why the rhythms of speech are fundamentally related to the other kinds occurs when we give slightly more 'weight' to one syllable than to another - through
of rhythms which we produce with our bodies, such as drumming, running, or dancing. •lightly increasing the duration and/or the loudness of the syllable, or through giving
Each 'effort of articulation' is produced through the combined actions of the lungs, It a slightly higher pitch. The awkward thing is that we do this automatically - we
the vocal cords, and the mouth (teeth, tongue, lips). A syllable is the result of a' single don't have to think about it. But when we try to become conscious of this we can
effort of articulation'. It is thus the basic element of rhythm in speech - in just the often find that we cannot hear or reproduce consciously what we habitually do
same way, for example, that a step is the basic element of rhythm in walking, marching, without thinking about it. It's a bit like trying to analyze what we do when we ride
or running. 11 hicycle or swim.
But in order to be clear what a syllable actually sounds like (or looks like on the One of the most important things to realize is that rhythm is a fact of everyday
page) it is worth quoting further from the Shorter OED's definition. It goes on to say lunguage use; it is not some mysterious thing confined to poetry or invented by
that a syllable is an element of 'a spoken language comprising a ... vowel or vowel lcuchers in order to baffle students. If we adopt the convention of marking a stressed
equivalent ... with or without one or more ... consonants or consonant equivalents'. Myllable with'/' above the vowel and an unstressed syllable with'-' above the vowel,
The vowels, you will remember, are the sounds represented by the letters u, e, i, o, u, we can begin by looking at the way we pronounce some multisyllabic words:
or by combinations of those letters (ou, ie, etc.), or by 'vowel equivalents' (y, for
example). Thus a syllable can consist simply of one vowel - as in one-syllable words -I - I
I
I - I - -
such as 'a' and '!'. More often, a syllable begins or ends with a consonant - as in eleven thirteen fourteen modernity
the following monosyllabic (single-syllabic) words: to, be, at, ill, by. More consonants I - !- - I -I- I - I
can be added, as follows: sad, sound, creeps, sprints. (In fact, linguists tell us that repetition interpretation fellowship
syllables in English can begin with as many as three consonants and end with as
many as four. 6 ) But no matter how many consonants are added, such syllables remain c important thing to e her nd to nounce multisyy)ltttm:..wffl'iOV
single syllables as long as they (i) are 'uttered with a single effort'; (ii) form 'a word ._w.,-w w · alt · te the stresses aM_ un~e~es.:_ Thi early c forms to our
or an element of a word', and (iii) contain a single vowel sound (a diphthong is, in definition of rhyt m abo ere uggeSte'a tiiarilcO'nsists of regularly alternating
this sense, a single vowel sound). events. One of the reasons for this is that speech production is a physical process
But the English language does not consist merely of single-syllable words. Many und, as we have seen, the human body tends to move in rhythmic ways. Thus the
words arc made up of two or more syllables. Two-syllable words require two distinct •Uccessive individual efforts required to produce multisyllabic words tend to alternate
efforts of the vocal apparatus in order to pronounce them: words like 'abstract' or in terms of the amount of energy expended. 7
'holy' are made up of two separate syllables: ab-stract, ho-ly. Syllables, then, are the This rhythmic feature can also be seen when we combine words into sentences:
basic building elements of words, and can be combined to make multisyllabic words I 1 - /- I -!-
of varying numbers of syllables. Such words can, in turn, be analyzed into the separate One of the reasons for this is that speech production
syllables of which they are made: multisyllabic ~ mul-ti-syl-la-bic. Although the
rhythmic units and metrical forms analyzed above consist of monosyllabic words, in I -
1nost instances poetry will contain a mixture of words of different numbers of syllables: is a physical process.

( >ur analysis of this sentence demonstrates several further points. First, we automati-
and five and fourteen and fifteen and six. rnlly speak in regularly rhythmic ways. Secondly, rhythm seems to act as a 'carrier'
of speech in other words, the regular rhythm seems to help keep the speech moving.
To be able to sec how this works in practice, we need to understand a few more basic
l'hirdly, even if the alternation of effort given to successive syllables is related lo the
facts about the English language.

I· or further disi.:ussion of the relation between speech rhythms and (heir produi.:tion h\ the body. sec i\ ll ridµr
( 19K2) Rhr1l1ms of' E11,1/1-;h Poi'/ry, pp. 64 72
 ~ r\J1111"'111111\J'-llJ\ofllUfl Rhythm and Metre 35

way our bodies produce speech through muscular action, stress patterns in speech I / . I -
are also affected by how 'important' a word is in the sentence. Thus the 'less important' and one and two and three and four
words such as 'of', 'the', 'is' - are given less stress here than the 'more important' o b o bo bo b
words such as 'speech' or the first syllable of'reasons'. Fourthly, this example shows I - I - I
that the stressed syllables are produced at roughly regular intervals in time, and that and five and six and seven and eight
the interva_I b~een stresses may be occupied by a varying number of unstressed obobobob
syllable"'-J~ is ~~-::_:~s~tim~' la~g';'.'ge. (All these features I /- -;--
might become more clear to you 1f you try to'imiigm'e'"how a computer-generated and nine and ten and eleven and twelve
version of the above sentence might sound: although computers can now be o b o b ob o b
programmed to generate the phonetic sounds of spoken language with some accuracy, I -
they do not reproduce the subtle modulations of stress which make up the rhythm and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and sixteen
of the language. This is why they talk like Daleks.) ob ob obob
In everyday speech we usually choose rhythmically regular rather than irregular 'l"hL'rc are some important things to notice here. First the actual str a'Jt""""-'"
ways of constructing phrases (without necessarily being conscious of the fact): wor · s co se ly he rn f eat · , can say that the rhythm
, tches the metre (we will see that this is not always !fie case). Secondly, although
/ lhcrc are four stresses in each line, the number of unstressed syllables varies
English is marked by its strong use of stress.
considerably. This can be seen simply by counting the number of syllables per line:
This means that when we do say or hear irregularly stressed phrasing, we are more while there are eight syllables in the first line, there are twelve in the fourth. Yet the
likely to take notice: momentum of the 4 x 4 pattern of beats seems to be unaffected by this variation in
the number of unstressed syllables In rw · th" ·
For line, not the number syllables. This is why this
'
Its use of strong stress is what marks English. )fill is ca ed "str ng·stres verse' - · 1s tti e the number of
unstressed syllables can vary considerably.
The analysis here reveals that the stresses, rather than being distributed evenly along Yet this variation in unstressed syllables means that although the beats coincide
the line, actually bunch together in the phrases 'strong stress' and 'marks English'. neatly with the stresses in a one-to·one relationship, the offbeats coincide with, or
·rhis is not an impossible sentence, of course, but its rhythmic irregularity does tend 'realized' by, varying numbers of unstressed syllables: sometimes an offbeat is
lll'L'

~
to draw attention to itself.
The fact that 'everyday' language is always rhythmic reveals that the difference
between poetry and 'ordinary' language use is not that one is rhythmic while the
other is unrhythmic. The difference, rather, is that poetry shapes the natural rhythms
of the language in order to achieve certain effects. Poetry may, for example, make
use of irregular stress patterns precisely because they draw attention to themselves.
But the major way in which poetry shapes the rhythms of the language is by measuring
it out into regular lines in order to form what we call metre.
We have argued that there are two basic metrical forms in English poetry - the
four-beat line and the five-beat line. What we would like to do now is explore actual
examples or these forms, together with their historical significance in the history of
poetry in English.
Four-Beat Metres
It is \Vorth re-examining our 'number model" of the four-beat form by con1bining
the method of marking stressed syllables with the method of marking beats and
oflbeats:
realized by a single unstressed syllable (as in the first line), sometimes by two unstressed
•yllables (as in the fourth line). This variation makes it difficult to attach a single
descriptive label to the rhythmic form of a whole poem or stanza of 4 x 4 verse. In
the above example, while the first line is clearly in rising duple rhythm, most of the
Inst line is in rising triple rhythm. As we will see from actual examples, such variation
is quite typical of 4 x 4 verse.
We said earlier that metre is etymologically related to measure. We can now see
that we can begin our analysis of a poem's metre by two simple measurements: (i) count
the total number of syllables per line; (ii) count the number of stresses per line (these will
usually, but not always, indicate the beats). If there are four stresses per line, you are
probably reading four-beat metre. If the number of syllables per line is constant, then
you simply need to work out the ratio of stresses to syllables in order to have a good
idea of whether it is duple (I: 2) or triple (I : 3) rhythm. If the number of syllables per
l111c varies, then your poem is not falling neatly into duple or triple rhythm.
The four-beat metre is the dominant form in popular or oral poetry, although it
ts also found in the literary tradition. It is found in nursery rhymes, hymns, songs,
ballads. pop songs and other kinds of popular poetry and song.~ ro~
\ nca'b'. alw~nf~Ji:.rhjillles~s in the first stanza of the Scottish popular
'm!llad'%e Twatorb1es : . -- \.;
U Formol Introduction Rhythm and Metre 37

I I I I n11tural rhythm of the words exactly coincides with the underlying metrical form, in
As I was walking all alane, this actual example there is somewhat of a mismatch between)latural rhythms and
b b b b metrical beat. Instead of being a 'fault', however, this adds interest to the ballad. '
,- Iii the fitst ttffe, rhythm and metre match, and this serves to set up a pattern of
I I I I
I heard twa corbies making a mane; expectation for the whole ballad:
b b b b
I I
I I I I ·o where ha' you been, Lord Randal, my son?
The tane unto the t'other say, b b b b
b b b b
In the third line, however, there are some revealing mismatches between metre and
I I I I
'Where sall we gang and dine to-day?' nutural rhythm:
b b b b
I I I - I I
A point to note here is the way stressed syllables often alliterate, and hence reinforce 'I ha' been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon,
the metrical structure: 'mak-' /'mane', 'tane'/'t'o-', 'dine'j'day'. The following stanza b b b b
from Blake's 'Song' (1783) shows a literary poet using a similar form at least two
hundred years after 'The Twa Corbies': Although the requirements of normal pronunciation lead us to stress the first syllable
of 'mother', in the context of this line this stress does not realize a beat, since the
How sweet I roam 'd from field to field,
metre does not require a beat (the four beats of the line are successfully realized by
And tasted all the summer's pride,
'Till I the prince of love beheld,
'heen', 'green-', 'mak', and 'soon'). This is an example of the fact that stresses do not
Who in the sunny beams did glide\ 1lways have the function of realizing beats It ws t e 4 x 4 met so siste
lhut it can override the natu stres alt s o speech. This reveals that tH e is
We are now in a position to examine the first stanza of 'Lord Randal' (another ~ ens1 be en demands of atura speecl;'nfythms and the demands of
Scottish popular ballad). This examination should reveal the metrical principles . metrical form. In this instance, we say that the first stresse<N;vllable_cl...'motl>ar' is \JJ..-
underlying your decision to arrange the words as you did (we are assuming that you \d~e~ into an offbeat position. '-.__/ ...,__,, ~ --.._,,,- ...__. 11"'
got it right!): " ' Altlfou~ this might seem complicated on a first reading, we believe it does describe
I I whnt we actually do or experience in reading such lines. This is why we asked you
'O where ha' you been, Lord Randal, my son? lo carry out the exercise on 'Lord Randal' before we got into any consideration of
b b b b metrical analysis. We believe (hope') that you were able to arrange the poem into
ltN hallad form simply by 'feeling' how its rhythms demanded this particular line
I I I I urnngement. Analysis is merely a way of accounting for or describing what we feel.
And where ha' you been, my handsome young man?'
b b b b Trying to analyze the third line before you had an overall feel for the ballad's metrical
movement might have led to all kinds of confusion and perplexity.
I I I I I This example shows that there are two simultaneous principles at work in metrical
'I ha' been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon,
roctry in English: the demands of natural speech rhythms and the demands of the
b b b b
underlying metrical pattern. Sometimes these harmoniously coincide; sometimes
I I - I tensions of various kinds occur between them. It is this continually varying relation
For I'm wearied wi' huntin', and fain wad lie down.' hctwccn natural speech rhythms and metrical form which makes this formal aspect
b b b b of poetry so interesting in its own right, and which means that poetry generally avoids
There are several different features here which reinforce this arrangement into lines lhc kind of mechanical, metronomic effects produced by our number models of
(the division into sentences, the question-and-answer structure, the near-rhymes at n1ctrical form given above.
the end of the lines ~ which were probably full rhymes in the Scots language in the In songs there are three rhythmic principles which interrelate with one another
sixteenth century). Yet although the above analysis of the rhythm and metre responds the natural rhythmic phrasing of the words, the metre, and the bar structure of the
to its insistent 4 x 4 form, a closer look at the analysis reveals a number of interesting music. lf we were to write out the first verse of the traditional English song
features. In contrast to the model of 4 x 4 metrical form presented above, where the '( in~cnslccves' as if it were a poem, it would appear as follows:
 38 Formal Introduction
Rhythm and Metre 39
- I - I I begins with the beat of a new bar. What this reveals, however, is that in this song
Alas. my love, but you do me wrong
the musical beat coincides with the metrical beat of the language: chord changes
b b b b
coincide with stressed syllables. This not only indicates the profound relation between
- I - I I songs and poems in the 4 x 4 metrical form, but should help you begin to 'feel' the
To cast me off discourteously, rhythms of the language and the ways in which they are shaped into metrical forms.
b b b b
Most of the examples we have looked at thus far have been rising rhythms. While
I - ·Lord Randal' varies the number of unstressed syllables between beats, and thus
And I have loved you so long, cannot be described as duple or triple, both 'The Twa Corbies' and Blake's 'Song'
b b b b are clear examples of rising duple metre. This is perhaps the most common rhythmic
I - I - I form, but there are interesting examples of falling rhythms and triple rhythms. Most
Delighting in your company. rhythms tend to settle into rising rhythms, even when they begin with a stress:
b b b b
1-/-/-/
The use of end-rhymes is typical of 4 x 4 metre poetry as well as song: the alternating Mary had a little lamb
pattern or this example is just one of a number of permutations. The stanza exhibits I
a fairly regular rising duple rhythm in 4 x 4 form, save for the fact that there appears Its fleece was white as snow;
to be a pa1r of successive stressed syllables in the third line which makes the line
Jlut Blake's 'The Tyger' ( 1794) maintains a falling pattern which adds to the sense
awkward to read as a poem. In the sixteenth century, however, words ending in '-ed'
of tension which the poem creates:
could be pronounced as two syllables: 'loved' (cf. wanted, tasted). (This serves as
) ~u~~)thcr remi?~er that pronunciati_on changes throu~h history, and we need to take I · I
.tccount of this when we are scanning metre or working out rhyme schemes.) In any Tyger Tyger! burning bright
.1

e<isc, 'Greensleeves' · ot a po' but a and rds i ng · ay b beqt..(!nd • •

strctc usica · 'love 'gets elongated in order to accommo ate "'in [n the forests of the night.
o at as well as the on eat it begins with. The last line is also interesting in that Triple metre is used frequently in popular verse and often has a light-hearted rocking
the metre requires the innocuous, normally unstressed word 'in' to be stressed in clli:ct:
ord~~ to realize the beat. We thus say that 'in' has been J:>IJ:Unot..e:d' into a stressed
position. ....., '-..J -...._,.
It is interesting to co1nparc our analysis with the way the first verse of Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross
'Greensleeves' is typically presented in teach-yourself-guitar books:
To sec a fine lady upon a white horse,
Dm c
Alas, my love, but you do me wrong To Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
Dm A1n •
cast n1e off discourteously, And She shall have music wherever she goes.
Dm c Yet this form is used for quite different effects in Thomas Hardy's 'The Voice' (1914):
I have loved you so long, De-
,
Dm A7 ()
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
lighting in your company.
We have not included bar lines here, or any indication of the strumming pattern (the Saying that nO\\l you arc not as you were
song.is in 3/4 time) because we are not trying to help you play the song but, rather, l 'hc dillerence between these two examples of triple rhythm ought to forewarn readers
to b~1ng out so1ne important points. The reason for the differences between the 'poem' against those who assert that certain rhythms 'mean' particular things, or will have
version an~ the s_ong is th~~~s)he-Ro_~pr~~"~etr~ mus~~~s are IH"l.·dctcrmined effects.
'- · ays hng _111 other words, a bar of ~us1c always begi11S wltn' a beat, not an ·rhc insistent 1nomentu1n of the 4 x 4 metre allows for other interesting variations
ollb at. Thus t first bar begins with the second syllable of' Alas', while the unstressed n11d effects. One of these occurs in the so-called 'ballad stanza' in which lhc stress
syllahle of each line is pushed hack to the end of the previous line, so that each line 11atlcrn is 4-3-4-3 rather than 4-4-4-4 ('Lord Randal', then, docs not use the 'hallad
40 Formal Introduction Rhythm and Metre 41

stanza' even though it is a ballad). Because the 4 x 4 pattern seems to have an I I - I - I I

inevitable and deeply familiar momentum of its own, we seem predisposed to complete and one and two and three and four and five
it even when it is not fully realized in the poem itself: b b b b b

Mary had a little lamb I /(-) I I I

b b b b and six and seven and eight and nine and ten.
b b b b b
Its fleece was white as snow;
b b b (b) In this model, the natural rhythms of the language fit neatly into the five-beat line.
Vet even in this highly regular, mechanical example of the five-beat line it will be
and everywhere that Mary went,
b b b b
lppurent that it does not have the inevitable, singsong momentum of the four-beat
line, and does not set up a pattern of expectation which requires four lines to be
Her lamb was sure to go. Qompleted. We ave p ed fo o · e b ve
b b b (b) ~om· ·. .· rio stanz tbs a .· what ll.ed--'¥ei:•efarng!:'.':l'~ whose
The bracketed 'b' at the end of the second and fourth lines indicates what we call a ~e md1cates that the number of Imes m each paragraph vanes according to the
'virtual beat' - a beat which the 4 x 4 metrical pattern induces us to 'hear even needs of the meaning, not according to some predetermined stanza pattern. Because
though it is not actually realized in the language. 8 Try chanting the rhyme out loud the live-beat line escapes from the singsong chant effect of the 4 x 4 metre (with its
'

~
while tapping the beats with a pencil - we believe that you will find yourself wanting 1Hsociations with nursery rhymes, hymns, ballads, and so on),~
to tap a fourth beat at the ends of lines two and four. In each verse of Robert Burn s's to na I speec th and can create the impression of an individual speaking
song 'Green Grow the Rashes' (1784), the virtual beat of the second and fourth lines ·c.
is filled in, as it were, with a meaningless syllable - perhaps to fulfil the demands of The majority of five-beat verse is formed out of rising, duple rhythmic units. And
the musical rhythm: whereas four-beat verse is flexible regarding the number of unstressed syllables which
muy appear between the stresses, five-beat verse is much more restrictive in this
There's nought but care on ev'ry han', respect. Because it therefore controls the total number of syllables in a line, as well
In ev'ry hour that passes, 0: •• the number of stresses, fiv t ve ailed 'sylla -stre ' verse - that is, as
What signifies the life o' man, well as defining the number of stresses per line, 1t also efines t e number of syllab!es. 9
An' 'twere na for the lasses, O? (5 8)
Since a five-beat line is usually in duple rhythm, it follows that there will be ten
In the course of your reading, you may well come across other line lengths - such 1yllables per line (which is why this verse form is sometimes called 'decasyllabic').
as two-beat lines - but all these can be thought of as variants of the four-beat line Thus we can say that the typical five-beat line will be a ten- able, ve-bea line·
- except, that is, for the five-beat line. ~uple;--<jsing__metre. In the traditional terminology, sue a Jin 1s ca 'iambic
pentameWf'. ~ this is such an important line, and because the term iambic
pentameter is used so frequently in literary criticism, we feel that students ought to
Five-Beat Metres he familiar at least with this term from traditional analysis. Iambic pentameter is
relatively easy to 'measure': if all the lines of a poem contain ten syllables and five
The other major metrical form in poetry in English is the five-beat form, in which Ntresses, then you have a five-beat metre which is almost certainly iambic pentameter.
the lines are measured into rhythmic units of five: Iambic pentameter is a hugely important metrical line. It is found almost
exclusively in 'literary' verse. A great deal of the major poetry and poetic drama of
I 1- /-I !he literary 'canon' in English is written in iambic pentameter. Particularly in the
and one and two and three and four and five
fonn of '_b_laqk _~~err;_~i!Jg;ih)'rned iambic pentameter). this flexible metrical form can
b b b b b
produce ihe effect of an individual speaking voice simultaneously with a sense of
heightened dignity. This is because iambic pentameter is not a fixed grid which forces
I - I (-) - I every syllable into its allotted place,- i es n t do e na al s r ms
and six and seven and eight and nine and ten 111 the way that the 4 x 4 line does. Instead, It shapes a whole range of natural speec
b b b b b
An alternative name is 'ueeentual-syllahie' verse, on the ha~is that stress is sometimes culled 'ucce111'; Wl'
Allridge uses lhL' IL'nn ·unrcali1cd beat' in Rh_r1h111.1· of Enwlish Por/r_\'. hut he switched to the less clumsy hnw followed Attridge in 1'1wlir Rhy1/1111 ill dc1:idi111< to ;ivoid the conrusion thn1 could ari.~c OVl'I' 'Ul"l"l'lll"
'virtunl heal' in (l'J9~1 /'o<'lic Rhrthm hy usini< the term ·~yllahle-strcs.~·.
<12 Formal Introduction
rhythms into the line, and thus inevitably sets up all kinds of subtle tensions with
the metrical pattern. No doubt this flexibility and subtlety is one reason why
Shakespeare used it as the dominant form in his plays, as in the following lines from
the well-known speech in Hamlet (III, i):
I - - I I - I , In most five-beat verse. In other words, the realization of iambic pentameter in actual
To be, or not to be - that is the question;
o b o b o b (o) b o b
;- /-- I-/-
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
b obobobob
I I - I I -
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
obobobobob
II !-/-/
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
o bbobobob
I - I - I I 1y11tax of what is being said can run against the grain, as it were, of the iambic
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep ...
o bo bob o bob
Perhaps the first thing to notice here is that these lines contain eleven rather than
ten syllables. An eleven-syllable line will occasionally appear in iambic pentameter,
but it is unusual to see a run of them like this. If we look through the lines in order
to see how the natural speech rhythms (indicated above the line) are shaped to realize
the offbeat-beat pattern of the iambic pentameter (indicated below the line), it is
possible to see a number of moments where subtle tensions and ambiguities appear.
In the first line, beats and stresses neatly coincide until we come to 'that is'; the
iambic pentameter would seem to require a stress on 'is' ('that is the question'), but
although natural speech rhythms would allow such an emphasis in certain contexts,
the actual context of these lines suggests that 'that' needs to be stressed (emphasizing
that that is the question which has to be faced). But although this would seem to
violate the iambic pentameter pattern, we do not actually feel any such violation in
reading it. This is because a 'virtual offbeat' is realized between 'be' and 'that' by
the syntactic pause (marked by the dash). And the flexibility of the metre then allows
the next offbeat to be realized by two unstressed syllables ('is the'). The effect of this
is that we have a perfect iambic pentameter line which has the rhythmic feel of
spontaneous speech.
The second line begins with a beat because of the stress on the first syllable of
'whether'. In traditional methods of scansion this would be called a 'reversed foot',
and we would be told that the metre had momentarily switched to a 'trochaic'
pentameter. We feel that this tells us very little about how readers experience or
pcrfonn the line which is as a flexible five-beat line rather than as a line of iambic
pentameter which starts off on the wrong foot. We do not hear or read lines of verse
as being cut up into separate 'feet', but in terms of the subtle ways in which the
Rhythm and Metre 43
tM:tuul language realises the metre. Our analysis suggests that the first beat is realised
by the two syllables of 'whether' (alternatively, we could say that the first offbeat is
realized by the two unstressed syllables '-er 'tis'). Later in the line there is another
, moment of subtle modification when the beat is realized by the unstressed word 'in'.
Similar modifications and complications appear throughout Hamlet's speech, and
puctry is open to all kinds of subtle modifications which make it a dynamically flexible
rurm (in marked contrast to the rather wooden rhythms of our counting models, in
Which stress and beat coincide in mechanical fashion). When the natural rhythms of
lhc language are shaped into lines of iambic pentameter, all kinds of adjustments are
mudc to both: not all stresses take beats, not all unstressed syllables are offbeats, and
beuts may be realized by pauses or by two syllables. Just as the music of live musicians
never follows a strict metronymic beat, poetry rarely falls rigidly into mechanical
metrical patterns.
The kind of mid-line break in the syntax which we noted in the first line of
Humlct's speech is called,a '~a\,(from the Latin for cutting). There is an even
1trongcr caesura in the fifth'iine when the first sentence of the speech ends mid-line
With a question mark. The use of caesura, then, is one way in which the sense and
poutameter line. A second device which adds to this effect is 'enjambement' or the
1
ru11-on line'. This occurs when the syntax and sense of what is being said overflow
lhc line ending, as occurs between the second and third lines of Hamlet's speech:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
When the devices of caesura and run-on lines are added to the fact that iambic
f'Cnta1neter is not a rigid template, and not so dominant as the 4 x 4 metre, it becomes
~lcur how unrhymed iambic pentameter can give the effect of producing flexible and
Individual speech rhythms which are subtly 'dignified' or 'elevated' by the underlying
metrical form.
Iambic pentameter may have been introduced into English verse through an
11ttcmpt to imitate the poetry of continental Europe. Chaucer used rhymed iambic
pentameter in the fourteenth century, but the form fell out of use, and changes in the
pronunciation of English mea~~ers to '
~mbic pentameter was reintroduced in the Early-Modern or 'Renaissance'
period (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) by poets such as Henry Howard,
Eurl of Surrey (1517 47). Surrey also invented English blank verse, based on Italian
11111dcls, in his translation of two books of the Aeneid (1539--46). The flexibility of
hlnnk verse made it the staple metrical form of Renaissance verse drama, and writers
""h as Christopher Marlowe paved the way for Shakespeare's use of it. Yet it is
111"" notable that many dramatists of the period (including Shakespeare) frequently
'l11ft between prose and blank verse in their plays. Often, but not always, blank verse
1s assigned only to the' noble' characters, or used when a certain formality of utterance
1.1i n:quirc<l. 'fhis suggests lhat although blank verse gives a sense of the natural
44 Formol Introduction
rhythms of speech, its metrical form makes it more formal (in a double sense) than
prose or colloquial speech.
Although blank verse came to dominate English Renaissance drama, Surrey's use
of blank verse in poetry attracted few imitators. Renaissance poetry is almost
invariably rhymed in both four- and five-beat metres (Shakespeare's poetry is always
rhymed). The first major break with rhyme in poetry is Milton's use of blank verse
in his epic poem Paradise Lost in 1667 (Surrey's pioneering example was also in the
epic form). In a preface to the second edition of Paradise Lost (1674), Milton celebrated
the 'liberty' of blank verse as escaping from the 'bondage of rhyming', and hence
posited a link between poetic and political liberty. Milton's break with rhyme in
Paradise Lost, together with a full exploitation of the elasticity of the iambic pentameter
form and English syntax, set a precedent for the use of blank verse which eventually
had enormous influence on the subsequent history of poetry in English (as we shall
see in later chapters).
Yet there is another line in iambic pentameter's history in which its metrical
constraints were reinforced rather than loosened and in which rhyme continued to
play an important role. The use of iambic pentameter in rhyming couplets (aa, bb)
was introduced into English poetry by Chaucer. In the sixteenth century, this form
became fairly standard for long poems such as Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593)
or Marlowe's Hero and l.Rander (1598). In the seventeenth century, such rhyming
couplets came to be called 'heroic couplets' because of their frequent use in epic
poems and plays. Despite Milton's example in Paradise Lost, the heroic couplet was
the dominant poetic form in all kinds of poetry from the mid-seventeenth to the
mid-eighteenth century. In this so-called 'Neoclassic Period' the heroic couplet was
given a constraining function in that it was often used as ~- Perhaps
the most effective way of understanding the closed couplet is to look at some lines
from Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1709):
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again. (ll, 215-18)
In these lines the units of meaning (the phrases and sentences) coincide neatly with
the metrical form (there is no use of run-on lines). Each sentence is bound up within
a rhyming couplet, and the line breaks coincide with the division of each sentence
into phrasal units of meaning. This does not mean, however, that Pope's verse is at
all 'wooden'. Within the constraining template of the metrical and grammatical
structure there is a degree of flexible interplay between speech rhythms and metrical
form. In the first of these lines, the natural stresses of 'little learning' and 'dangerous
thing' emphatically realize the iambic beat, while the unstressed 'is' in the position
of the line's third beat is much less prominent. The second line has a more complex
relation to iambic pentameter: although the caesura after 'deep' coincides with the
metre, the line as a whole is difficult to scan. We would normally want to stress both
words in 'drink deep', but this would break with the iambic pentameter pattern;
Rhythm and Metre 45
'tuste not' is another difficult phrase in the context of this line, since the natural
pronunciation (stressing 'taste'), though it realises the line's metrical requirements,
does not match the emphasis of the line (where 'not' needs to be stressed); and at
lhe end of the line, 'Pierian spring', with its stress-unstress-unstress-stress pronun-
ciution, also creates tensions with the iambic pentameter. In contrast, the following
couplet fits quite neatly into iambic pentameter. lTJle'-.!o~·vV<el):all.J<!ffi!<e'sc:i.-fRlm..-""<rser,..,-
of ed · rty - o · ited flexibility w· ·n a highl struct e me e
111 see in Chapter at tfi ect o orm co es exactly with Pope's political
Ideology as well as exemplifying the constraints he is recommending to fellow poets
In these lines (the Pierian spring in Greek mythology was one of the haunts of the
Muses). But if the closed heroic couplet is therefore appropriate to the constraint of
the 'conservative' thought of the Neoclassical period, .. Romanticism's emphasis on
~t jc and politjca' 1i9ert) •opened u13' the conp1et once more - as in the opening
lines of Keats's Endymion (1818):
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness. but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams ..
This brief history of the iambic pentameter shows something of the range of ways
In which this metrical form has been used (and continues to be used). We have seen
lhnt the most interesting poetry in iambic pentameter does not slavishly follow the
mctre's template but bends and shapes it to produce subtle rhythmic variations and
effects. This is done mainly through introducing tensions between the expected metrical
form and the actual rhythm of the language, and by ~gt~~
phrasi late t the li - through the use of caestlra anaend-stopped and run-on
.. We ha e also seen that alt ough rhythm and metre might initially appear to
he merely matters of poetic form, they are actually intimately related to questions of
menning. And the history of the way iambic pentameter has been used in English
poetry also indicates that questions of metrical form can open out to larger cultural
ind political questions.
Pree Verse
J<'rcc verse is the name given to poetry which does not conform to any metrical
rut tern. (Although free verse often discards rhy e, t sence of rhyme . itsel . ·
.._ l)l.lr~ig~ree vgi:_se.) But although free verse is not metnca, it n ertheless uses
~11nt• di~ons '\\.fl£h ~ the rhythms of the language for specific ends (otherwise
II would not be poetry). Free verse is associated with the experimental poetry of the
IWl'llticth century, yet there are interesting precedents from earlier periods. Milton
llM's lines of varying lengths, irregularly rhymed, in Samson Agonistes ( 1671 ). William
Bloke's poetry uses a wide range of different poetic metres and he so1ncti1ncs
r)lpcri1ncnts with forms which cannot he accommodated into any particular 1nctrc.
 Rhythm and Metre 47

In the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold also wrote poetry which broke with Williams. Jn his essay 'Reflections on v_ers_~ (1917), I;liot claimed that the term
regular metrical forms. The most influential forerunner of free verse, however, was WON something of a rri:isnomer, since. the individual lines of any 'free verse' can be
the American poet Walt Whitman, whose radical departures from regular metrical 1eunncd - that is, each line will fall into some kind of rhythmic pattern which could
forms are often said to be an important aspect of his attempt to create a specifically be described according to the number of stressed and unstressed syllables, and the
American poetry liberated from the European tradition and based on an ideology of pattern they form. 10 In ' ·at is ri to s · t in · of ree
individual freedom. A particularly interesting example of Whitman's play with the ..,..-.._be sc ned, bu s wr o at ma tri I. 1
poetic line is his 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer' (1865): sample o e Eng 1sh language will approximate to rhythmic regularity becaus l
•• we have seen, rhythm is the fundamental carrier of the language itself, but that
When I heard the learn 'd astronon1cr, docs not mean that we all speak or write in metrical verse. Metre does not consist
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns
Mimply in rhythmic lines but in a regular pattern of repeated line forms. Free verse
before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
dncs not develop such a pattern. In free verse the division into lines remains the
and measure them. Important formal feature (otherwise it would be prose rather than poetry), but this
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured division is not made according to a predetermined pattern. Contrapuntal tensions
with much applause in the lecture room, hctwccn line and meaning are set up, as in metrical poetry, but the poet creates these
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, ~lkcts by manipulating line lengths rather than through playing off units of meaning
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, 1t.,_t1inst a regular metrical template.
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Fxamples of such effects can be seen in the following poem by William Carlos
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. Williams ( 1935):
Try reading this poem a few times, concentrating on the rhythmic 'feel' of the lines.
In doing this, you will perhaps notice that there is something different about the To a Poor Old \\''oman
rhythmic form of the last line. It is easy enough to see that these lines vary considerably
munching a plum on
in length, and a rhythmic analysis confirms this. The eight lines contain 9, 12, 18, 22,
the street a paper bag
13, 14, 13, and 10 syllables respectively, while the stress pattern goes 4, 5, 6. 8, 5, 5,
of them in her hand
5. 5. Yet this analysis also reveals that the last line is likely to be a standard five-beat
line, since it contains ten syllables and five stresses. In fact, the line turns out to be They taste good to her
a fairly regular iambic pentameter: They taste good 5
to her. 1·hey taste
.
Look 'd up in perfect silence at the stars
good to her
You can sec it by
In this poem, then, the free verse is not used as a kind of analogue for American the way she gives herself
'freedom', but in an almost opposite way. The long, sometimes ungainly lines in the to the one half 10
hulk of the poem coincide with the speaker listening to the astronomer. and the sucked out in her hand
implication is that the astronomer's lecture is long-winded and rather mechanical.
Comforted
When the speaker goes out to look at the stars themselves, however, he experiences a solace of ripe plums
a moment of silent harmony. The contrast between this and the experience of the seeming to fill the air
lecture is emphasized by the perceptible difference between the harmonious line of They taste good to her 15

~
iambic pentameter and the ungainly lines which have gone before. In this poem, then,
natural harmony is experienced through conformity to a traditional metrical form 'l'hcrc arc consistencies in this 'free' verse. If we take the title as the first line, the
1
poc111 consists of four four-line stanzas. Yet our counting technique reveals the
rather than through breaking with it. This reveals that the analysis of rhythmic form
11011-1nctrical nature of these lines: the syllable count varies from three to six and the
in free verse cannot be done through importing any preconceptions about the meaning
-;I rcsses from one to three. The line divisions occur not according to a regular metrical
of form. Instead, the relationship between form and meaning always has to be read
in the terms set up by the individual poem itself. unit but in ways which cut up and manipulate phrases in order to produce semantic
The term 'free verse' (or vers lihrt'), however, is more properly reserved to describe l1l'sitations and aw·kwardnesscs which tease the reader (as in the first stanza or section).
the poetry of European 1nodcrnism. The poets who arc perhaps most associated with
free verse in Anglo-American poetry are Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos '" 1- linl ( 1975) .~elec!l'd l'ro.1·(', pp. 316.
... "ormar rnTroductlon Rhythm and Metre 49

The virtual absence of punctuation means that the reader has to decide how to 1tmantic or syntactic nuances (for example, in the last three lines). This is a first step
organize the relations between sense units; line breaks become ambiguous, since the towards 'visual poetry' and 'concrete poetry' in which the possibilities of the shape
reader often hesitates about whether or not a line ending should be treated as a of u poem on the page were taken a lot further (as we shall see in Chapter 3).
division of sense (is each line end-stopped or run-on?). The second stanza is almost Yet Eliot seems correct when he says in his essay on vers fibre that artistic freedom
a demonstration piece which indicates the semantic possibilities which occur when QMlt he perceived as such only against some kind of regularity (if there is no regularity
the same sentence is placed in different relationships with the line breaks. Try reading of uny kind in a poem, then it is simply chaotic). In metrical verse, metre itself can
this stanza for yourself and asking whether or not the emphasis of each repetition of ierve as a regular marker against which the free movement of syntax can be
the statement is subtly altered by the way it is broken up by the line divisions. lorcgrounded (as in Milton or Keats). In the free verse of'The Thought-Fox' the line
Eliot's claim that the individual lines of free verse can be scanned would be borne 1nd stanza structure sets up enough of a regularity for the precipitous movement of
out by Williams's poem. But free verse allowed poets to take still more radical liberties the syntax (and the fox) to be felt in the reading. In free verse, the syntax may be
with the line which would seem to preclude scansion altogether. e.e. cummings's 'O ~uite standard: 'The Thought-Fox' is divided into perfectly intelligible sentences, and
1( ) sweet spontaneous .. .' can be read as two quite conventional sentences divided
sweet spontaneous .. .' (1923) is a case in point:
UJI into four-line 'stanzas' (save for the last three lines). Some of Milton's sentences
0 sweet spontaneous In /'aradise Lost are far more disruptive of conventional syntax. It would seem that
earth how often have
the
lfl the ongoing experimentation with the dynamic interplay between line structure
doting
ind sentence structure, one of the elements is usually controlled tp.-\'ct as a foil against
which the irregularity of the other e!_ement can be exp_eriencec\:_5ummings tend_s to
fingers of 5 exrerirnent with only one of these d1mens10ns of poetic language at any one time.
prurient philosophers pinched The above example is genuinely free verse, yet the sentence structure is fairly
and gonventional. The following poem by cummings (1963) may look as if it is free verse,
poked
but is in fact highly regular:
thee
Me up at does
, has the naughty thumb 10
of science prodded out of the floor
thy quietly Stare
beauty . how a poisoned mouse
often have religions taken
still who alive 5
thee upon their scraggy knees 15
squeezing and is asking What
have i done that
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods You wouldn't have
(but
true 20
( 'ummings takes great liberties with syntax and grammar here in order to produce
to the incomparable nn nmbiguous poem which makes it impossible to decide whether the poem is spoken
couch of death thy hy the poisoned mouse or by the human poisoner. But the poem's form is highly
rhythmic
rc~ular, not only in the symmetry of the pattern of lines on the page and in its use
lover
of half-rhyme (does/mouse, etc.), but also in the fact that every line contains four
thou answerest 25 111yllahlcs and two stresses.
them only with
spring)
Exercises
The line lengths in this poem are much more diverse than they are in Williams's
poem, and single-syllable lines would seem beyond the need of scansion. Here
cummings is beginning to experiment with the possibilities opened up by free verse I ta) Pronounce each of the following words in a natural way and try to listen to the stress
of exploiting the shape the poem creates on the page and using space to suggest pattern~ of your pronunciation. Then (i) work out how many syllahlcs there arc; and (ii)
 Rhythm and Metre 51
- __ / / - ~ -·· / / '
mark '/'above the stressed syllabics and ·-' above the unstressed syllables. Are there how arc the plays, and after the plays
any ambiguities, or any words which might be stressed differently in different contexts or ,/ / ---
..-:- ,,.,,. - -
what other pleasures you're pursuing:
usages?
/- --~1 .._, (from Elizabeth Bishop, 'Letter to NY', 1955)
trainillg fallibility pronunc1at1on
I / r• • -- /_~ / / / _/_/
pfotest enteni"fg unusual natural deCisi6Il
(C N~w ~-h~.t I ~a~:yOu~fac_: by/e__a~~· 1 l~k cJwi1 wU Vl 11 vv1
(b) Now try marking the stress patterns of the following sentences (read them out
t~1 (jf&t p~ \-5
Less at its features than its darkenirig frame
loud or 'sound' them silently in your head and listen to yourself): - / .- / ' - . - ,' ,/ '

- / /- ' Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,

The training facilities are veiY Urlusua1. / /

Lie wlih quilled d;hlias and the shepherd's crook.

' ·- --
,. ~·
jC~ vhfft l
~ ,--
/
I 'II protest against this cfecision. ..... ,,. /·-(--~/

-·/·-/---'
The protest march was ineffective.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
- / /_ / - ./ .-·- _
_/ _
pt:iL \tz \;\;\;I,,( hr{
The lead and marble figures watch the show
(c) Identify the metrical pattern of the following lines of poetry by reading them ~- / -· I~ / - / - /
Of yet another summer loath to go
out loud and listening to the metrical beat which you feel as you do so. Then
(i) count the syllables in each line; (ii) mark the stressed and unstressed syllables; Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.
(iii) count the number of stressed syllables per line: (from Louise Bogan, 'Song for the Last Act', 1949)
}~ f- •;, It w~s p-;;-t D~ath,Rir; syiod u;, (iv) From what you have discovered, try to say whether each poem's rhythmic
·- - - I - pttltcrn is:
G And all the Dead, lie down -
/ /
It was;ot Night, for all the B~lls
free verse?
;---.-/ -, four-beat or five-beat verse?
~.:- Put out their Tongues, for Noon. rising or falling metre?
duple or triple metre (or a combination of both)?
(from Emily Dickinson, poem 510 [c.1862]) iambic pentameter?
/ / ,__
(
---
blank verse?
When the voices of children are heard on the green (v) Are there any places in the poems where the natural rhythms of words and
- - / ... -·· --/
~ And laughing is h_card on the hill, phrases have been overridden or complicated by the needs of the metrical pattern?
(' ,. / _/ .-- /
1 My heart is at rest wj,thi;n .my breast 1 l 1 What effects (if any) does this have 9

•L, A~d e:crYthing e(,~,;;J. 7 c:lLu ~C(il\, $ )( ~) (vi) Compare and contrast the different effects of the metre in each poem.
2. Try writing a poem of your own in three different versions: (a) four-beat verse; (b)
(from Willia1n Blake, 'Nurse's Song', 1789) live-beat verse; and (c) free verse. What differences are there between the different
~ versions of the poem?
--
",\ h;etl 1 ;-' -~ / / /
Long neglect has v.'orn ~t-Way
./ - / -- / ·- /
Half the sweet enchanting smile;
f».h L( ; I
Time has turned the bloom to gray;
'
I.
,(I, vv, / -~

Mold and damp the face defile.

/

II (fron1 En1ile BrontC. 'Long neglect ... ·. 1837)

..... / /
In your next letter I wish you'd say
I ) \_{ I - /"' /_ - / -. / -IL
'J· '-. where you are going and what you arc doing;
' vcl\\_
 8 le xluc11 1111111 ih

' Read
followthe
. following poem several times anti
, lhe11 ca 1ry out the instru ctions wl11 hapter 7

Pet Panther
earing Voices in Poetic Texts
My attention is a wild
animal: it will if idle
make trouble where there
was no harm: it will
sniff and scratch at the
breath's sills:
it will wind itself tight
around the pulse 111 1l11s chapter we want to investigate the consequences of the fact that, as M.11 .
or, undistracted by h1 .1ms puts it, 'we tend to think of all works of literature .. . as a mode of speech'
verbal toys, pommel the 11,/11,, ,w ry, p. 135), or, as Patricia Parker points out, 'in the absence of contrary
heart frantic : it will 111dtl ntions, we infer a voice even though we know that we are reading words on a
pounce on a stalled riddle I' 1pe '.1 This tendency in the reading of poetry ~s be related to the origins
and wrestle the mind numb: .ti poetry in oral performance, though we will argue that there are other factors at
attention, fierce animal 111 k as well. But if reading does consist in the automatic translation of writing into
I cry, as it coughs in my 1111.i µ1nary speech, then it seems possible to ask two questions: 'Who speaks the words
face, dislodges boulders 1111 1he page?' and ' How did we come to " overhear" these words?'
in my belly, lie down be
still, have mercy, her~
2
is song, coils of song, play Voices from Beyond the Grave
it out, run with it.
. (A.R. Ammons, 1983) \ l' ca n usefully ask these questions of a poem by Chidiock Tichborne, who wa s
(a) Begm by concentrating on the oem 's . . . n uted in 1586, shortly after the poem was written.
it is far-fetched or appropriate? \.vh t . m~t1al metaphor. Would you say t hnl
what similarity is there between v:hi~~et aen~round ~f the metaphor . that I
transferred from vehicle to te ? tenor. What connotat10ns 111 Tichborne's Elegy
(b) N nor .
ow go through the poem highli htin .
To what extent can the poem b g g or markmg all the other metaph111
. .. e seen as an extended meta h h. h I WRITTE N WITH HIS OWN HAND
t he 1111t1al metaphor? P or w 1c e abornti IN THE TOW ER BEFORE HIS EXECUTION

(c) For ea~h metaphor, try to decide if it is far-fet h d .

what similarity there is betwee h. I c e or appropnate by asl..11111 My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
h. h n ve IC e and tenor Are th
w ic seem particularly incongruous? . ere any metaphcu My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
congruou s metaphor in wa s h' h lpodem ~s playful~y extendmg ap initial!
(d) Would it be accurate to describe the . And all my good is but vain hope of gain ;
(c) T I y w ic ea to mcongrmty? The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
which the poem deals with? ls it ossibl~~~m s ast h~es resolve the ' prohll•111
ow iat extent do the metaphors in the ' I . . And now I live, and now my life is done.
f) th e use of metaphors in the poe: as a who~~·1these Imes ofTer a metapho1 1111
In what
l'11 l1 1l' 111 l'a1kc1, 1111 roduc1ion 10 Chuv 1v11 ll o~<·k und P Parker, eds (1985) Lyric l'oetr)': lk)'oml th<' N1•11
( poem'! way do the poem' s metap h ors charn ctl't
. 1t l' it :i s :i 1wentieth-cL·111111
(I 111
1tt/d1111, p 11"'
11 hvr ly \(1 '"'" ' " of 1hc 1111111111 111111 11 11 11·• 1 I~·
11111 involvin~
1hn 11 v h1 n f as u vmcc fr om hcyond lh l'
'' ' " • '"' 11r111w 11 und R ny k ( l'l'l~I ~7
111 11111•"'"' ''"11 '" l 111·1,111111'. Cr1 t1 <'11111 rr11d llw1111·. pp M
160 I II <lllrlJV>lc
My talc was heard and yet 11 w.1 11111 11tld
My fruit is fallen and yet my lcav ·s a1 · Ill II
My youth is spent and yet I am not old.
I saw the world and yet I was not seen; 10
My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
I sought my death and found in it my womb,
I looked for life and saw it was a shade,
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
In reading this poem, do you infer or imagine that it is being spoken? If so, who
speaks the words of this poem which has been printed on the page you are readin ,•1
And is the speaker speaking to you, to someone else, or to no one at all? Pause fo1
a moment and try to answer these questions.
If Abrams is correct in his supposition that we tend to think of writ.ten literal"}
texts as being spoken, it is likely that you will have experienced 'Tichborne's Eleg '
as speech. And because we tend to think of texts as being spoken by their autho1
you may have decided that it is Tichborne himself who is speaking the text. But you
may have more difficulty in deciding who he is speaking to. We might imagine that
there was someone in the Tower of London with him at the time (perhaps a confessor)
but the poem seems more like the kind of solitary self-reflection which might hr
stimulated by the imminent prospect of being executed. Yet if it is that, how is it thal
we come to 'hear' (or 'overhear') this speech more than four hundred years after thr
author's death? Speech is an ephemeral medium - it perishes in the moment it 1
uttered. If the poet spoke the words in 1586, then he cannot be speaking them in 199
(as we write this book), or in whatever year you come to read it. Unless, that is, w1
think of the poet as continually speaking to us from beyond the grave.
The poem's title and epigraph were supplied by its early publisher (they are clearh
not by Tichborne, since they refer to him in the third person). 'Elegy' is a gencrn
term which usually refers to a 'lament in verse for a particular person' (Abrams). Wt
thus have the unusual situation here of the poet writing his own elegy in anticipatio11
of his coming death. The epigraph indicates the mode of his death and stresses till
context in which the poem came to be written. We do not know why Tichborm
wrote the poem, though it may have been for private circulation among his fam1h
or friends. But the poem also has similarities with the kind of consoling 01
commemorative inscriptions scratched on the walls and windows of the Tower ol
London and other places of confinement (examples survive). All these circumstan ·1
might lead us to suppose that this was a highly personal poem in which the author
sums up his feelings at a moment of overwhelming personal crisis in his life. Yet th.,
circumstances also remind us that this poem was written, not pokeri, and we a1
forced to recognize that the words of the poem were prohahly never pokcn by 11
author. And if the author did not . peak the words in l 'l!H1, ill' is l'lca rly not sp •a k 111
them as you read the poem in th' twcn1ic1h (01 llu lwt 111v f11s1) ccnlury. Thus\\
•,ln1'1 ti lrxl 161
111 101 ·I to 1 • ·o •111/.e the gulf bctw · ·11 th · 11111 • tlead pcr ·on who one· wrot<' this
11111111 :ind th· ima 1 inary voice we hear wh •n we read it. Jn fact, this writin' docs
11111 ll' ·ord a speech event which once took place in the Tower of London, but creatl's
t Ill dl'cct of a speech event whenever it is read. This is why, throughout thi bo ik,
1 d1 stingui h between a poem's author and its speaker. Our experience of hcarin
1111 overhearing) a voice in this text, then, is an illusion created by ourselves bccaus •
111 lhc way we have been trained to read all writing as if it were speech. Rather than
l11 1111ng voices from beyond the grave, we create those voices ourselves through an
11111•1prctative interaction with written words on a page.
In what follows, we want to stress that 'Tichborne's Elegy' is not an exceptional
1 1· The points we have made can be generalized - not simply because most f lh ·
11111111s we read and study are by poets who are dead but, rather, because the acadcmi ·
11111 of poetry is mostly devoted to written poetry, poetry on the page. And writin •,
1 Roland Barthes has pointed out in his essay 'The Death of the Author', entails
1111 nb ence and metaphorical 'death' of the author, whether or not he or she i till
il1 w. 1 The same could be said of an audio-recording of a poet reading his or he1
11111•ms the sound of the voice in such a situation does not entail the presence or
1111· 11uthor. ~ )
V Ice and Genre
Inst of the time we assume that we know who is speaking in a text, because usual I
11 1· ·ms obvious. Yet we have seen that asking this question and thinking about 0111
111 ~ wcr can be quite productive. One of the things which this question can lead lo 1'
11 ay of thinking about genre. Poetry is conventionally distinguished into three m11111
'111 ·s or kinds: narrative, dramatic, and lyric. The distinctions between these gcnll'
111 bt: thought of in terms of who speaks the words on the page. Each genre emplo '
d1llt•rent ways to present itself as 'speech', but we need always to remember that th·
111 Vl r present actual speech, but only representations of speech. As Barbara Herrnstci 11
11111h puts it:
l"he various genres of literary art can to some extent be distinguished
11ccording to what types of discourse - for example, dialogues, anecdotes of
past events, public speeches, and private declarations - they characteristically
1 ·present. Thus lyric poems typically represent personal utterances. 4
I lit fact that 'Tichborne's Elegy' presents itself as an 'utterance by a single peak 'I\
' lio expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought, and feeling', and
11111 the peaker is 'musing in solitude' (Abrams, Glossary), marks it out a a lyri ·
11111111 ('elegy' is one of the sub-genres of lyric). Lyric poetry has its own chara tcri sl i ·
1y of presenting itself as speech. Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' is an cxampl ·or
1111 Romantic lyric in that it seems to give u access to the speaker's inmost exp •ricn · •
ll.111111·, (1'177) /11111111• - A/11111' Int Pl' 11' H
1111111 (1'178) 011 tlw A1111111111 111111, ,,,,, , I' H
 11 urh1 I Vol< •, 111 i'ot II< Ir xi 16
162 It xtut 11 '•tr 1lt I 1!1
ltwd at lea st 700 Y<ill' hdorc ' hri st II i • • . • • .
111 •rnch n way that it seems obvious Lo assume that till' ~P ·;1kn 1" 1t ' nuthor, John wo uld probably h IVl' hl'en sung ·1· ·, oner s poems desp1le the fa ct that thl'Y
narra~cd
· ' · tve resemble historical n l ·
"-{·a ts. Because the kind of poetry familiar to most modern readers 1s lyric poetry I IH:d person. We ca n sec this from the followin ove s in the
und thus resembles 'Tichborne's Elegy' and 'Ode to a Nightingale' there is a of The Iliad (c. 750 BC), in which the dead b g passage, taken from t_he final boo!-.
t ·ndency Lo think that all poetry is like this. We want to show, however, that there into the city of Troy which he has b d " odd_Y of the hero Hector 1s taken back
' een eien mg:
111e other kinds of poetry which are, in their own way,just as important and interesting
11s lyric poetry, and that part of their interest is in the different ways they present The girl wailed and cried
to all the city: 'Oh, look down, look down,
them selves as speech.
go to your windows, men of Troy and women
see Lord Hector now! Remember joy ,
at seemg him return alive from battle
Voices in Narrative Poetry exalting all our city and our land!, ,
Now, at the sight of Hector, all gave way
Narrative and dramatic poetry, in contrast with lyric poetry, are organized not a to loss and longing, and all crowded down
expressions of a single speaker's inner state but as stories involving events and t? meet the escort and body near the gates
characters. In dramatic poetry, the story is presented through the actions and speech till no one in the town was left at home.s ,
of characters; in narrative poetry, the actions and speech of characters are presented
Narrative poetry appears throughout the Engl~ .
~ng ( Oft1c _trad1t10n. Popular ballads
through a narrator (the storyteller). When we read a play it is easy to accept the ..
typically narrative poems which
ill'C
fiction that the words are spoken by the characters, the dramatis personae, and that no claim to be the poem's autho wBerlel od sung ot recited by 'bards' who made
their dialogue is 'overheard' as though the reader were part of the audience. (More I.d r. a a s tend to employ "th fi
t ur -person narration in fairly strict A d e1 er rst-person or
problematic, however, are the stage directions which are frequently included in play two stanzas of the Scottish ballad 'B ways.B gboo example can be seen in the first
texts, since they do not seem to be spoken at all.) In novels, it is usually possible to onny ar ara Allan':
111terpret the words on the page as either the speech of characters or the words of
It was in and about the Martinmas time
the narrator. In everyday life we sometimes tell stories about things that have happened Whe_n the green leaves were a falling, ,
to or involved ourselves ('I knocked on the door', or 'we were completely lost', and That Sir John Graeme, in the West Country
~o on): literary critics call this 'first-person' narration (because it involves the Fell in love with Barbara Allan. '
grammatical first person - I, we). But we can also tell stories about things we had
no involvement in ('then she started the car .. . ' or 'they washed up on an island', He sent his man down through the town
a nd so on): literary critics call this 'third-person' narration (because it involves the To the place where she was dwelling· ,
'O haste and come to my master dear .
gra mmatical third-person - she, he, they). Narrators are thus distinguished into
Gin* ye be Barbara Allan' '
first-person and third-person narrators. First-person narrators are often presented as . . ii
if they were characters telling the story - Conrad's narrator in Heart of Darkness
•dthough Shakespeare's narrative p~
In the hterary tradition, pure third- erson n . . .
V: arratlon is comparatively rare in poetry,
( t 899) tells a story about things which happened to him in the Congo, but the novel
/,11crece (1594), are early examples I ems, t e~ush and 1donis (15?3) and The Rape <~f
also includes the circumstances in which he tells the story (he is on a boat on the
Thames with some friends). Third-person narrators are more problematic in thi pt ior to the Romantic period - su~h :;~s o t ,e maJor narrative poems in English
respect, since such narrators never refer to themselves in the first person. To a certain
rnd Troilus and Criseyde (c 1385) S ha,uce~s The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387 94)
lfrro and Leander (1598) Milton', ppen;~r ~T. e Faerie Queene (1596), Marlowe 's
I ock (1712) - the presen~e of a firsst- a;~s~~e n ~st (16~7) and ~ope's The Rape of thl'
extent the third-person narrator is a fiction created by the reader rather than by the
author. This is because of our habit of processing writing as if it were speech. This
same habit explains why some readers tend to imagine that the voice of the third-person 11110 what would otherwise be third-p a rat~r mtrudes m one way or another
narrator is that of the author. But teachers encourage students to distinguish a novel's these poems, however, is typically rest~~;tseodnt~arratlve. The use of the 'I' ~arrator in
fictional narrator from its author because the narrator is always part of a novel 's iii . the Muse, though it occasionall recurs a firologue or~ preparatory mvocation
1l11rd-person narrative within a first y 'f the end m order to enclose the
lictional world and effect. -person rame'
Dramatic and narrative poems resemble plays and novels in terms of how they Under the dual influence of C lassical art and. h .
I l'Uso n, much of the roctry produced in th l t e Enhghtenment emphasis on
orgnnii'e and present themselves as the speech of characters and narrators. The epic e ate seventeenth century and much of
11111 r11tive poetry and the verse drama of ancient Greece and Rome have been hugely
1nl111e11t111l 1111 lit e rature in English. Indeed , the Western literary tradition is often said I l 1111ll' I ( 1'184) llw I/Ind, ll11ml It\ l("t. ti I 11 f"• .I rl ' I ' II '"''' .. . v. pp. 440 4 1.
to lw lm111tll'd 1111 till' l'pic narrative poems attributed to I Ionw1 , 11 <:1l'Ck poet who
th· ·1 ht· ·nth centur.y Lends Lo be imper onul, 1111d hl 11n· 10 be presented in the thud
P •rson. AL .the same Lime, ho.wever, the narrative cl •111cn1 h ·•ins Lo disappear (perhap~
under .the mnuence of the nse of the novel). In Lhis period, long poems pre en Led 111
lhc Llmd perso~ tend to be discourses or descriptive poems rather than narratives
~ohn Dryd~n pioneered this development in such poems as Religio Laici (1682), and
~L, was conL.mued by Alexander Pope in his poetic 'essays' and his various 'epis tles '
I he .Lrcn~ 1s well represented by Samuel Johnson in moralizing poems such as Tlw
Vamty of Human Wishes (1749), which begins as follows:
Let Observation, with extensive view
Survey mankind, from China to Peru· '
Remark each anxious toil, each eager ' strife,
And watch the busy scenes of crowded life;
Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate
O'erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate. (1 - 6)
'.Y~ical o.f such poetry at this period is the way the poem claims to rise above the
~1m1ted v1~w of a single observer in order to 'watch' and 'survey' the whole of
mankm~ . The general moral truth derived from this is presented as the discovery
of some impersonal abstraction called 'Observation' rather than the insights of the
poet or a first-person narrator.
This stress on impersonal observation can also be found in James Thomson's The
S1•(1.\'0ns ( 1726), w~ich ~levated third-person description of the landscape into a major
genre. The followmg Imes from 'Winter' give an idea of this:
The cherished fields
Put on their winter robe of purest white.
'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts
Along the mazy current. Low the woods
Bow their hoar head; and, ere the languid sun
Faint from the west emits his evening ray,
Earth's universal face, deep hid and chill,
Is one wild dazzling waste that buries wide
The works of man. (232- 40)
The easons was an influential work in what would come to be recognized as a new
sub-genre the loco-descriptive or topographic poem, in which the observation of
land ·cape is .coupled with moral observation (John Denham's Cooper's Hill (1642)
~~1s Lhe ~ghsh~language pioneer in this genre). Later poems such as Thomas Gray's
l ~ lc gy WnLten m a Country Churchyard' (1751), Oliver Goldsmith's 'The Deserted
Village' (1784) and William Cowper's The Task (1785) adapt this genre to their own
·net s, but more or less retain its 'third-person' technique.
Narrative poetry made an interesting comeback at the end of the eighteenth
l'Clllury, partly b~cau ~the Romantic poets took a renewed interest in popular ballad
1111d h · an to wntc their own ballad-like poems. Wordsworth and Coleridge included
ballad Ilk · poems, such as olcridge' ' The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', in their
l 1•rtl'lll llullml1 (1798/ 80). Burns's 'Tam O'Shanter' (1790) im1tntcs the third-person
111111n11vl' li'<.: h111q11l' of th e ballad form . As well as wiiti11111111r11M·I first-person lyii ·
fl" 111s Iii. · 'Ode to a N1ghltngule', Keats also wrolc 1h11d p ·rson nanat1ve pm·111~
11111 II 11., l\11tl 1•1111011 ( 1818), and literary ballad such as 'La Belle Dame sa ns men.: 1'
p '0) In fa<.:t, the Romantic poets' renewed interest in narrative poetry suggests that
111 111111mon view of the Romantic period as concerned solely with lyrical expression
1 1111s1eading of Romanticism (partly encouraged by the Romantics them elves). In
1111 l{omantie period itself, the Romantic lyrics which we now value were thought to
1.. ll•ss original than the narrative poems of Sir Walter Scott such as Marmion and
I hl' Lady of the Lake', or the verse tales of George Crabbe - which are now largely
111 idt·dcd. 6 And by far the most popular poems in the Romantic period were Byron 's7
lo111•11urrative poems such as Don Juan , Childe Harold' s Pilgrimage and The Corsair.
<)11e of the purposes of this historical survey of narrative poetry up to the Roman ti<.:
I" 1111d is to emphasize that there are other kinds o_i;poem than the Romantic lyric,
lllll many kinds of poetry in which the central interest is not the poetic sensibility
111 1he poet. This needs to be said, because - r reasons which we will touch on
d 1,111ia tic and narrative poetry have come to regarded as lesser genres in comparison
11 h the lyric.
Voices in Lyric Poems
glance at recent accounts of the lyric suggests that it is impossible to give an
di encompassing definition of the genre which would fit all sub-genres or individual
1
,am ples. 8 A lyric poem is not a song lyric, yet this use of the term lyric for the words
111 so ngs points to the history of the lyric as a poetic genre. In ancient Greece, a lyric
w:1s sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument - usually a lyre. The ly1ll
t 11tered English in the form of the songs of the wandering minstrels and balladcc1s
In the Early-Modern or 'Renaissance' period, however, with the development ul
p1 in ting, the lyric underwent a crucial historical transformation which involved an
111<.:reasing dissociation between song and lyric. The Renaissance also witnessed a new
lo<.: us on the individual as a unique human being or subject ('subject' here is a
philosophical term meaning something like 'self' - hence 'subjective'). This important
development is most clearly manifested in Renaissance portraiture, where the
111dividual personality of the sitter is captured by the artist, something quite
1111precedented in the painting of earlier periods. It can be claimed that we find a
.. 11nilar development in the lyric's potential for expressing individual selfhood, which
was also largely unprecedented, in the poetry of this period. Thus a huge ran ge of
111tcrnal thoughts and feelings - including philosophical questions, religious experience,
111 1812, Fra ncis Jeffrey, one of I he leading reviewers of the period, wrote that Crabbe was 't he most o riginul
wri 1er who has cve1 co me lwf1111· us' There arc signs that the critical neglect of Cra bbe is coming to an end.
l11s Selec ted Poe"'" 1·d111·d hy <111v111 I dw;111b, appeared in a Penguin edition in 1991.
1he ,lory of nu11 1111 v1• 111rllY d11r 11111 1• 1111 wllh Byro n but co ntinues through the Viclorian period, when
1
l i·nnyson's /di•//• 11/ 1h1 11111 y.1 H 1111111111wly 111•11111!11 , t11 1hc present day. We suggest that yo u look 111
1111•111s w i; h 11 s /\111!111 llu ~h I 11111 It '"""" ,i, I t11••N• ( IK49). F.litabcth Barrell Brnwn111g's Aurora I 1•111h
(IK~11t. < 'lll"\11111ll11 "''111 •1,11 l1h11 111~ 11111'!I'111111 ' l11 urneynf1hcMug1'(1927),11 111l111.011yo1hc"
1
S('t' ' I y111' Ill """',.,,,,,, I'll l l I I
 11 111111 JV I h1 I' u tic 1 161
166
11 111 ' t of reader'· l (I 11e) pocm 's ·peak er is th poet cxprcssrn 1 hrs 01 h 'I llllll(lll'
lo ve, l11st, nwurn111 •, political comment, and n101 · h 'l.lllll' characteristic th 111,
111d 111t1matc fccl11111" .wd experience. For u h reader -, this seems so obvious that 1t
,111d occas1ons of lyric ex pre ion. But although the lym.; thus ·volved int a 11 • rlil
Ir 1 he ·omc the very definition of poetry itself, and is often the motivati n f r readrn'
vd11clc for a wide variety of thoughts and emotions, and although the Renaissam 1
prnt1y in the first place. 10 Such an approach would therefore as umc that the
P ·11od has bee~ described as '_the most lyrical of England's poetic eras' (Prinn•t 1111
111 t person pronouns in 'A slumber did my spirit seal' refer to Wordsworth himself,
p. 7 0), the ~ync was not considered as 'elevated' a genre as drama or epic. Thi-. 1
11111 would value the poem because it appears to put us in touch with the prof und
why the maJOr works of the Renaissance through to the eighteenth century wc1 · 11 1
p~ rience of a profound genius.
vers · drama (such as Shakespeare's plays), or in forms which had some kind of a!li 11 11\
t\ less frequently asked question concerns how we have come to be privy to these
wrlh epic narrative.
11111 •1most thoughts of the poet. Do we imagine that Wordsworth is speaking directly
!s
1t only in t~e Rom~ntic period - the second great lyrical era - that the ty111
111 us in a way which miraculously erases the two-hundred-year gap between the
( specially the lync of feeling and meditation) became the pre-eminent poetic ge nr 1
11111ment of writing and the moment of ,reading? Even if we imagine this, is there any
l ndccd, the maJor ~oem _of the period - Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805)
1p11 in the poem that Wordsworthjs concerned with addressing a reader or an
rs '.t remarkable genenc achievement in that it consists of an autobiographical narrat rv1
11111lence? Does he not seem, in fact, o be too caught up in his own sense of love
n11s.e~ to the le~el ~f ~n epic lyric. The potential of the Renaissance lyric for represent 111 ,
111d lo s to worry about who 'hears' ·m? In fact, our sense of the 'sincerity' of the
111d1 v1dual subject1v1ty was taken up in the Romantic period in order to explore tlu
1111t·t 's emotions probably inclines us owards the latter position, since we tend to
lentra l concern ?f Ro_ma~ticism: the relationship between individual subjectivity and
lwh ·ve that sincere feeling is compromised if the speaker is concerned to 'display'
I he processes of 1magmat1ve creation. The lyric speaker thus became associated mo 11
t h.r 11 ~ver with the po_e~. This association has continued up until the present day 111 I h.1 1 feeling.
These assumptions about poetic sincerity, solitary emotion, and lack of concern
t lw 1111nds of poets, cntJcs, teachers, students, and general readers. We want to strcs
1hout impressing a reader or an audience can be called ' Romantic' because they were
1h.1t this association is not inevitable, and that it came about through historica l
111tluentially articulated by the Romantic poets themselves. Perhaps the most famous
p111n:sscs an? the promotion of a theory of poetic creativity and reading which ha'
t.rtement of such beliefs is Wordsworth's assertion (in a preface to the volume of
lu 111 increasingly challenged in the second half of the twentieth century.
p11cms in which' A slumber' first appeared) that 'poetry is the spontaneous over!low
I he following poem is an example of a Romantic lyric (which is, in fact, anothe r
111 powerful feelings'. The idea that the reader of poetry accidentally 'overhears' a
11· •y) :
1111t•t's spontaneous overflow was memorably articulated by Shelley in 1818 :
A slumber did my spirit seal;
l had no human fears: A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own
She seemed a thing that could not feel solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody
The touch of earthly years. of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know
not whence or why.
11
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees; I hu s the poet 'sings' in solitude with no concern for an audience. Readers or 'auditors'
Rolled round in earth 's diurnal course, 1111ply 'overhear' the poet 's self-communion. In 1833 John Stuart Mill developed
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
(William Word worth, 1800) thl·sc ideas into a general definition of poetry:

Who speaks the words of this poem which has been printed on the page you arc
ll'ad1ng? And i the speaker speaking to you, to someone else, or to no one at all'!
Pa use for a mo ment a nd try to answer these questions.
For many students and critics of poetry, the answer to the first of these que tions
\l' ·111s so o bvio.u that ~he question itself would not seem worth asking. This que tion
is lll'VC~lhclcss interesting because the 'obvious' answer to it can differ quite radically
,1rcord111 'to the reader ' underlying assumptions about poetry. In fact, there arc two
1111l11e11l1al ' interpretive communities' 9 whose very different answers to this kind ol
q11t•,t1011 eo 11sl1tule the opposing side of a critical debate which has haped the stud
111 p11l't1 111 /\11~•10 Am·ri ·an educational in titutions in th' twlnti·th century. For
Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience;
the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconscious-
ness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of
solitude. 1 2
111 ·o ntrast to eloquence or rhetoric, then, which is designed to impress or move an
111dience, poetry is supposed to be the private meditation of the poet, produced
I• 111 1111 Sw ar t Mill w111h· 111 IK 11 ' I v111 pll'lly, ·" 1t was the ea rliesl kind, is also .. more eminentl y und
f 1w111l111rlyro•11y1l111111111v111i11111111 l" 11!o: 1111l nl1'0·1ry', 111Essay1111Poerry).Seea lso 'gc11rc' rn " """"
" I l •[1• 11cl' of 1'1wll y 111 111 lh 11 11I /I ol It• 1111.111 111111 l'11w••rs, p. 486.
l'111·t1y 11 111111 V11111111 1I I 1 I""' I 111 I ol11111111I 11111<''• ·d (1'1~0) F11g/11/J ('11 11rn / I 11111·1 I 1111•11•,.111/1
I 11111111t l'I' Ill 11 111 I
168 h 1< 11 1lr<1 I
-. p1111t.111 •1111sl and w1lh 110 co nscw usncss ol, 111 d 1 'II 11p1111 , , ltst ·ncr or rcud •r.
In l.1·t. 11 1s probably our as ·urance that wear· ' 11v11l11.11111 -. pontane u · feeling
ult ·r ·d without any de ign upon u that allow · us lo h • so 1110vcd by it.
Th fact that we hare these Romantic assumptions indicates how successfully
Romanticism broke the Renaissance connection between poetry and rhetoric. The
r ·ason why most contemporary readers are likely to agree with the assumptions of
Wordsworth , Shelley, Mill, and others is that these assumptions came to dominate
lh way poetry was taught in student textbooks, and in British and American schools
.ind institutions of higher education until about 1940. Even today, such assumptions
:ire still promoted in schools, colleges, universities and popular films, and in most
·ha ntl books· and 'guides' to poetry. 13
Yet there i another interpretative community of university-trained readers and
l ·achcrs who would not agree with such 'Romantic' answers to our questions. Between
ahout 1940 and 1970 the set of reading assumptions and practices which called itself
' New riticism' encouraged university students of poetry - particularly in the USA
to put aside their Romantic, subjectivist assumptions about it. One of the basic
t ·ncts of New Criticism is 'to assume always that the speaker [ofa poem] is someone
oth •r than the poet himself'. 14 With this in mind, Robert Scholes offers the following
1dvicc to the apprentice reader :
In beginning our approach to a poem we must make some sort of tentative
decision about who the speaker is, what his situation is, and who he seems
to be addressing. 15
l l111 s New Criticism makes a clear distinction between the poet who wrote a poem
a11d the 'speaker' who is assumed to speak it. The New Critic can be said to be
interested in the 'speech situation' of the poem, and to argue that this can be worked
out from details contained in the poem itself. In other words, even a first-person lyric
po ·m is thought of as a kind of dramatic soliloquy spoken by a speaker who is
analo ous to a character in a play. According to W.K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks:
' Once we have dissociated the speaker of the lyric from the personality of the poet,
cv ·n the tinie t lyric reveals itself as drama.' 16
If we think of the 'I' in' A slumber did my spirit seal' as referring to Wordsworth
himself, we can easily be led into asking whether Wordsworth ever had such an
exp •ricncc, and our admiration of the poem might well be affected by the answer.
N ·w Critics would argue that such a question may be of interest to a biographer,
hul not to a literary critic. Attempting to understand the speech situation in
Wordsworth' poem allows us to shift away from simply 'appreciating' the poem. If
we think of the peaker and the speech situation as aspects of the poem which
Wordsworth has created rather than experienced, Scholes's questions can become
I h • sla 1ting p int of interpretation.
1' lo1 l'IX \ llcrhcr 1 I uckc r no ted that such assumptions still shaped the expectations of students entering
1rrull'r~rrrrl1111ll' d'"' ., rn the United, talcs; sec Tucker, · Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric ',
111 llrr l'k 111111 1'111 kcr, cd\, /. r·nc l'0t•tr1" Beyond the New Criticism, pp. 226 43 (229).
'' (1%1)
I 11111 ·rr« 1•,·rrrrll' r.
S1111111/ 11111/ S1•1111'. 21
11 .. 1.... 1S• """'
( l'lh'I) / ./1 •1111•11/\ 11/ ' '""""· rr. 11 12.
•• Wrrrr 111,,111 ll1uuk (l'lhli) / 111·11111 C11t1m111 I 1/11!1'/ h11torr, p 675
11 Hlr1J V I 111 l'u 111 It I• 169
J'hc nature and 1111.1111111 111 th· speaker of 'A ·lumber' can be infcrr ·d f1om th·
po ·m it elf. Uni ·ss lh •1 • 1s evidence to the contrary, we u ually a ume that th
' p •akcr is the same ex as the author. The location of the speaker's brief but enigma ti ·
111 ·dilation on the death of this unidentified female is not, perhaps, the most important
question, though we could infer that he is standing by her graveside, since he ccms
pamfully aware that she is now as inanimate as things like 'rocks, and stone , and
11 ·cs'. A number of critics have sought to identify the 'she' of the poem. ritics
problematically associate the 'she' with the 'Lucy' of various other poems which
Wordsworth wrote about someone called 'Lucy'. Critics make the inference because
Wordsworth wrote the 'Lucy poems' at the same time, because he published them
more or less as a group, and because the other poems are about the death of Lucy
111d its effects on the speaker. Biographical research, however, has failed to identify
I ucy with a single girl or woman in W rdsworth's life, while other kinds of research
have suggested that the name Lucy is artly drawn from several earlier poem by
d11Terent writers. Coleridge, to whom Wo sworth sent a copy of the poem shortly
1fter it was written, speculated in a letter hat 'Most probably in some gloomier
moment [Wordsworth] had fancied the moment in which his Sister might die'
(( 'oleridge to Thomas Poole, 6 April, 1799). Although this comment has prompted
'ome rather far-fetched speculations about the poem by recent critics, Coleridge seems
lo have had no inside information to support his notion. Critics and biographer
dike have to remain content with the fact that we shall never know to whom 'she'
1cfers - or even whether 'she· refers to anyone at all. 17
More interesting than these biographical questions about the 'external' spec h
rtuation is the speaker's 'internal situation' - the emotional dilemma of trying to
·ome to terms with the fact that she whom he once thought immortal has died, and
1s now equivalent to all the other inanimate objects which the earth carries round i11
rts endless turning. Yet such a paraphrase hardly begins to touch upon the ambiguiti ·s
of the text and the speaker's ambivalences which we infer from them. Thu , for
1·xample, we need to ask whether the speaker is blaming himself for 'slumbering'
for the fact that when she was alive he was somehow unaware of her mortality, and
hence of how precious she was:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years. (1 - 4)
What, we might ask, does 'human fears' imply in the context of this poem? Is it that
I he speaker blames himself for being in some way 'inhuman' in the way that his
's pirit' slumbered when she was alive and with him? Or is it that he never fully
11·cognized her humanity - both as someone uniquely valuable and a meon •
111ortal? This ambiguity and ambivalence re onate through the third and C urth lin ·s,
which can be read bolh as :i slat ·m •nt of how she seemed eternally young and full
(
S ., 11111111 (, ('111 """' (I 11'111 II 1I t •th /11•11/ 1 r 1111./ 1/i, l'11•l>ll'llwtln of ll1•111h11~ . pp •II 2
 11 utlr1 Vole s In I >o tk It xt• 171
170 I• xluu1 •;11ulc Jlt ~

W,I\ 111--l' 1hc Stillness in the Air

ol ltl · und as u te111ble indictment of the speakl'I 1111 th111~111 ol her as a 't hing th 1t
II ·tween the I leaves of Storm
1:011ld not feel '. And the poignant irony of the s · 011d ,t,1111.1 1s that she has now
The Eyes around - had wrung them dry 5
h ·come just such an ' immortal ' thing :
And Breaths were gathering firm
No motion has she now, no force; For that last Onset - when the King
She neither hears nor sees; Be witnessed - in the Room -
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees. (5-8) I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away
10
What portion of me be
The statement of such a realization memorializes her as being at one with the elemental, Assignable - and then it was
unchanging things of nature, but it is also an ironic reflection on the speaker's sense There interposed a Fly -
or his inability, when she was alive, fully to realize her mortality and humanity . With Blue - uncertain Buzz -
Thinking of the voice in 'A slumber did my spirit seal' as that of an invented between the light - and me -
speaker who is part of the poem (rather than its creator) has enabled us to focu on 15
And then the Windows failed - and then
that speaker's emotional drama as the central interpretative interest of the poem. In I could not see to s~-
this way, we have tried to show the kinds of reading which can result from adoptin)l f h ems of the division of poems into the
the New Critical assumption of the 'poetic speaker' - even in reading poems (such I11 fact, such a poem reveals some o t e p . . Id be
t•neric categories of dramatic, narrative and 1 nc. Although this .poem wou
ns Romantic lyrics) in which the voice seems closely identifiable with the poet.
Although Romantic lyrics - but not all Romantic poems - seem to present themselves
i l11 ssed as a lyric, it clearly has narrative and ramati~ elements smce ~he speak~r
be thought of only as a dramatic character or a fictional narrator w o recour~ s
us the intimate speech of the poet, there may be an interpretative payoff for suspendin!l
1111r belief and treating the poetic voice as an invented speaker. On a more general
~'1~:1t amounts to a story about her own •d1esath. As Dickinson herself suggested, t c
lt•vel, there are various theoretical and practical problems involved with the leaker of a poem is 'a supposed person. . b d
I Dickinson's poem is not an isolated or extreme case, but typical of~ large. o yf
.t \s umption that the speaker is the poet :
nf lyrical poems spoken by obviously fictional speakers. Indeed, the i~vent1on, of
The assumption that all poems simply recount the author's own feelings 01 poetic speakers can be seen as one of ~he richest and mo~t fundame7:a o~s~ec~~n~s
experience excludes the possibility that poets can imagine and write about poetic creativity. In many cases - as m I heard a Fly buzz - the who, ~The Ne •JO
experiences they have not had and might invent speakers different from themselves 10
be generated out of the invention of the speaker. Langston Hughes s g.
for the particular purpose of the poem; Speaks of Rivers' (1926) is another example:
2. We often have no way of telling whether the speaker's experience, feelings and
opinions are those of the poet, and it often does not matter: whether or not
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Wordsworth himself experienced the emotional dilemmas of 'A slumber did my
spirit seal' does not affect the poem's power or the way we might interpret it; {TO W.E.B. DUBOIS)
'· It is important to maintain the distinction between the voice in the poem and
the human being who wrote it, because the sense of a human voice speaking n
poem is an effect created by the poem: written poems, for the most part, are not I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
recordings of actual speech acts but fictional utterances in which the utteram:t• flow of human blood in human veins.
itself is part of the fiction.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
This last point attempts to stress that poems are not the written records of actual
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
sp ·et:h acts, but written texts which present themselves as if they were speech at:ts. 5
J built my hut near the Congo and it lulled ~e to sleep:
I yric poems are not real utterances but fictional representations of utterances. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids a~ove it.
Some of these points can be supported through looking at some poems in which I heard the singing of the Mississippi when A.be Lmcoln
11 would dearly be an interpretative error to believe that the speaker is the author went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
l•111dy Dickinson 's ' I heard a Fly buzz - when I died' (c.1862) i a case in point : bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I heard a Fly buzz when I died
The . tillness in the Room 11 l i· IW• 111 1 w lli ~V""'"' lul v IHh), 111 /II!' t..e11ers of Emilv Dil'kin.1011, ed . Todd, P· 257.

I've known rwcr~ .
Ancient, du~ky rivers.
My sou l has grown deep like the river . 10
Although thi poem is spoken in the first person, the speaker's claims about hr
experience clearly go beyond what is possible for an individual human being. ThL
longer central section of the poem suggests that this consciousness has lived thro u 11t
all of black history, from the origins of life in Africa through to the constructio n ol
the pyramids. It also takes in the American experience of slavery and the struggll'
again t it. Thus this speaker identifies himself with and speaks for all Africa n
Americans, and the poem works to raise and expand political consciousness, and to
celebrate the African and American history of black people. Yet the speaker go •s
beyond even this by claiming that his experience of rivers has allowed him to becoml'
'deep like the rivers', and to know and identify with rivers which are 'ancient as th l•
world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins'.
Voices in Dramatic Poetry
In this chapter we will not discuss poetic drama (such as Shakespeare's plays) on th ·
11ssumption that they are plays in verse designed primarily for the stage. Yet ther ·
1s a significant body of dramatic poetry, as opposed to poetic drama, which al o
rnmplicates the question of 'who speaks?' So-called 'closet drama' is written in th·
form of drama, but designed to be read rather than performed. There are important
examples of closet drama written in verse, such as Milton's Samson Agonistes (167 1)
and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820). Yet this is not the only kind of dramatic
poetry.
Some dramatic poetry resembles drama by placing two or more speakers in
conflictual dialogue with one another. Sometimes the dialogue is made explicit - as
in Samuel Daniel's 1605 restaging of Ulysses' temptation by the Siren which firs t
occurs in Homer's Odyssey (printing only the first exchange in the dialogue):
SIREN. Come, worthy Greek, Ulysses, come,
Possess these shores with me;
The winds and seas are troublesome,
And here we may be free.
Here may we sit and view their toil 5 1 pr ·s ·nted as a character placed in what is evidently a fictitious or dramatic ituatio1.1,
That travail in the deep,
And joy the day in mirth the while,
And spend the night in sleep.
ULYSSES. Fair nymph, if fame or honour were
To be attained with ease, I0
Then would I come and rest me there,
And leave such toil a the e.
( ,,, , ·,1w11d ·nee, and tlr1 Ir~ 1 h11t 1n h t v11kn ·e is external to the poem, wh ·1 '•"
Bui here it dwells, and here must I
Wrth d.111µ ·1 'e ·k it forth,
II
Io sp ·nd the trill· 111 11111111 ly
Becomes not men of wor I h
rtlu 1 111111livoiced poems leave the reader to identify the situation and charact •1i1 ·
Ir dilkicnt voice as in Josephine Miles's 'Reason' (1956):
Said, Pull her up a bit will you, Mac, I want to unload
there.
Said, Pull her up my rear end, first come first serve.
Said, Give her the gun, Bud, he needs a taste of his own
bumper.
Then the usher came out and got into the act:
Said, Pull her up, pull her up a bit, we need this space,
sir. 'i
Said, For God's sake, is this still a free country, or
what?
You go back and take care of Gary Cooper's horse
And leave me handle my own car.
Saw them unloading the lame old lady,
Ducked out under the wheel and gave her an elbo I0
Said, All you needed to do was just explain;
Reason, Reason is my middle name.
11 such poems seem to stretch conventional definitions of the lyric to the limit, th ·
rlll' 1s also creatively modified in the so-called ' dramatic lyric'. In one kind of
Ir 1111:1tic lyric, the speaker addresses another person in a specific situation; although
111 .iddressee' is implicitly present, he or she makes no reply. There are numcrnm
1111ples of this kind of dramatic lyric, but it can be exemplified by the first two l11ws
1d Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' (1681), which quickly establish the dra111:1J1t
1t11,1t1on:
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
111 111wtic lyrics in which male speakers attempt to woo or seduce female charact ·rs
hn ure implicitly present were quite common in the sixteenth and seventeenth
11t 111 ie . Such poems can usefully alert us to the importance of distinguishing bet we •n
tl11 .iddressee and the implied reader. The way in which the situation of the pcakcr
t d1 .1ma tized in such seduction scenarios means that it is not just the speaker who
11111 .tlso the woman he is addressing. In such cases the addressee - the woman is
1 111u ·h an imaginary construct as the speaker. This fictional, dramatized addrcssc
, 111 he distinguished from the audience or type of reader for whom, by implicatio11 ,
1111 po ·111 was written by using the term 'implied' reader for the latter. The 'implr •d'
11 rd •1, m reover, mi ht not always be quite the same as the actual readership 01
111d1t·11 ·c for the po •m. Scholars som ·time search out evidence for th· a ·111111
, ttll·r~hip in contt111p111.11y dm111m·11ts such a catalogues of p oplc's lihrn11·-..
tl 11 11 11pl1·d 1 •11d~1· lr.1 111 Ii 111111111d1111111 within the po·m its·lf.
 II

""" I "'head', au I o> 1h • second the metaph0<s of 'mwiage temple' and 'cloisternd'
oils imply that th ·i< union would somehow not violate he< religious se<uples (though
p ~e.d reader becomes most intere .
· 1d ·nt1fi ·at1on of the im J'
so ·rnlhl class, or cultural a
those f thoadd<es nd pohucal status of this im lied stmg where the gendci ''"' • is a pa<adox here, since 'cloisteml' implies a monastic chastity which is
~::; ;:~s '::ion~=~d.:;:re ~rent
~ct1oddnsressee: ~lea of(1633),
wh'.'h the speakec can, pe<haps, be seen in doff from "" umpatible with ma«iage). But if such gestmes of assmance a<O clea<ly addrnssed
designed lo seduce the fem a e a of a flea as the occasion for a esenes • ' the woman, it is less easy to say with any confidence f0< whose benefit the wit is
conceitin
I• uog manifested. The speake< could, of courne, be t<ying to laugh he< into bed, but
11 "equally possible to a<gue that the wit in such a poem is being displayed lo< the
Mark but this flea, and ma .
How little that which tho r: .
m ,this, .
Me it sucked first and u eny st me is;
"''"tainment of an implied reade< who is not the woman, and that it is possibly
I• mg displayed at bee expense. It makes some diffe<ence to the sexual politics of such
And in th. fl , now sucks thee, ' pncm if we assume that the implied readec is prnbably male. We are not a<guing
ts ea, our two blo 0 d .
Confess it th. s mmgled be· 11,ot this is the only way of reading the poem, o< that all Donne's love lyrics imply
A . , ts cannot be said ,
sm, or. shame, or loss of maidenhe • "'"le readec, but we do want to stress that itcou be im po<tant to make a distinction
A th ts enJ· oys be'o
Yet .
1 ' re1twoo ad, I 1wcen the addrnssee and the implied reade<, pa ·cula<ly when the speaking voice
nd pampered swells with , 111 the poem is as strongly dramatized as it is in 'The Flea'.
And this, alas , is more th anone we blood
would made
do of two , Not all !0<0 lyrics of th is period deny the female (jdressee a voice. In Si< W alte<
Oh . . I ,,1 ·gh's ' The Nymph's Reply to the Shephecd' (1600) the nymph rnsponds to
stay, three lives in one fie
Where we almost a spare, • lu.,tophe< Madowe's 'The Passionate Shephe<d to His Love' (1599). Madowe's
This flea is you a' dnaly more t.han married are. 10 hq>he<d attempts to woo 'his love' by prnmising he< all the pleasmes of a pastornl
o . n , and this
ur marriage bed d
Though parents g; adn marriage temple is; ' 1-,tence:
A d u ge, and you ,
n cloistered in these I' . , we re met, Come live with me and be my love,
Thou h tvmg walls of jet. And we will all the pleasures prove. (1 2)
g use make you apt to k.ll I
Let not to. th ts,
. se If-murder added I me,
b .
And sacnledge, th ree sms . in killing e,
th ree. I ,1\ •gh's 'nymph' replies in a sceptical vein:
Cruel and sudden hast tho . If all the world and love were young,
Purpled th ·1 : u smce And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
In what co~l~atth,. mflblood. of innocence?
ts ea gutlty b 20 These pretty pleasures might me move
Except in that dro wh· . e, To live with thee and be thy love. (\-4)
Yet thou triumph'~ an1~h it ~ucked from thee?
Find 'st not th If , say st that thou ti such dialogues are the voices of invented, fictionalired o< drnmatic speake<S:
, . yse , nor me the k
Tis true the wea er now;
Just so ~uch\1earn how false, fears be; 1.1t1owe's shepherd is as much a persona as Ralegh's nymph.
. onour, when th · Id' 25
'I <l
Will waste as this fl , d
' ea s eath took r~
ou y1e st to me
f '
1 • ramatic situat1·0 . h. I e rom thee.
lf . n m t is poe .
i.l this tradition of seductio .mis more fully developed than it i . Dramatic Monologue
o::~eops s~a
hn as each tanza d I n lyncs, such as Mmell's 'T ff s m most examples
"" implied action the speake<'s a<gument one e" Coy Mostress', in so tu th• nineteenth centu<y a numbe< of poets developed the drnmatic lyric into what
spn ,. , • fo< in ta pa<t of th.woman. Line JO 'Oh g fu<thec m mponse to
:~~,::;~~es :~3."hth<ee
' no>w call the drnmatic monologue. This kind of poem, which is simila< to a speech
"'"'"I; the nca, the readec to imagine' that lives in one ftea 111 1 play, u ually has the following features:
hus kill 'cl it · • r I d e last stanza implies that she h d . as JUSt attempted to
. ue an sudden h as isregarded h. I th poem i utte<ed by a single peake< who is cleady not the poet, and the
izin~ o~c~h t~~
"""'"" ·er It 9 20) M • astthou since I p 1d . " Pea and
'''II "' capital of the wit. of the poem rel:;;po: s naol wi,'h blood ot utl ·ra nee takes place in a specific situation at a critical moment;
(' tw sp •akc< add<esscs and int no ts woth one o< mo<e audito<S. a Ith ugh this is
thatvanbtag~. reassurance ~rnt1hng them to his own
"' """ 'OH'Hivc ad ese omagma<y actions by t . peakec s <hetoncat
u111v1n .• ;, 'r !he way he offers
u m1ss10n to hi . o e woman by t ·
'"v"" I «I o>HI y hy what the "HV k t"" • '" " ' s Ith • auditor's '<eplics' '" oo>t >iv "'

I h11s in the lirst ~1· . . ly.1mpltcat1on, al least some im . _.._. moral and reli •io us
" "pl " "lso oITm "' b . 11
. m wo not com prnm i c he <ymg I" ,1 \ II h Ill the IC I) ,
I h ,p·akl••'' 11tll'1illl · H'Vl.tl \11 111 lw1 \l,11,1d ·1 Ill till' 1 ·mk•
.•1111,1 argtt
1 th '·11 it wo11 11 lw
'S 1 p.
• · 1ess1on of her cl1·11"1•·1
' • " c1•
110 s111, or sha Ill " o1 loss ol
 176 I xl11<1I '•he If Jlc •,
l 11 11111 JV 11/

Pomts .( I) a1~<.l (3) arc supp sc<.l to d1st111 •tw.h thl' d1.1111 ,1t1 monologue from the I ht\ 'rn I t1I 11 ill111g'! ven had you skill
dramatic lyric, but there is clearly a varyin • a111ou11t ol overlap between pecific ln sp ·ch (which I have not) to make your will
~xamples of. the two sub-genres. Browning is the poet who has become most closely Quite clear to such an one, and say, 'Jut this
'Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
1dent1fied with the development of this genre, though he was anticipated by Felicia
'Or there exceed the mark' - and if she let
Hemans, Charlotte Bronte and Tennyson, among others. 19 Browning's 'My Last 40
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Duchess ' (1842) has become the genre's model poem: Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
- E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
My Last Duchess
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
FERRARA Much the same smile? This grew ; I gave commands; 4'i
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
Looking as if she were alive. I call The company below, then. I repeat,
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands The Count your master's known munificence
Worked busily a day, and there she stands. Is ample warrant that no just pretence ~()

Will't please you sit and look at her? I said 5 Of mine for dowry will be disallowed ;
'Fra Pandolf' by design, for never read Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
Strangers like you that pictured countenance, At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
The depth and passion of its earnest glance, Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, 55
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) 10 Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
One of the reasons why this poem might seem initially inaccessible is that it only
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ' twas not
Her husband 's presence only, called that spot
•radually releases the clues which allow us to work out who the speaker is, what his
Of joy into the Duchess ' cheek: perhaps 15 situation is, and whom he seems to be addressing. Piecing together the clues, we can
Fra Pandolf chanced to say 'Her mantle laps infer that the speaker is showing a stranger around his house, and has drawn back
' Over my lady 's wrist too much,' or' Paint 11 curtain before a picture of his 'last duchess' painted by a certain Fra Pandolf. Thl'
'Must never hope to reproduce the faint stranger seems to have been struck by the look on the woman's face (the 'glance' 01
'Half-flush that dies along her throat': such stuff 's pot of joy'), which must have been quite striking, since everyone who secs 11
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough 20 tpparently wishes to know how it 'came there' (6- 12). The Duke answers at so1m
For calling up that spot of joy. She had I ·ngth that such a look was always on her face because she was always flirting with
A heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad, itll the men she encountered - including the artist on the day he painted her. Not
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
wi lling to lower himself ('to stoop') in order to correct her in this, the Duke tell his
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
1uditor: 'I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together' (45-46). Thi is a
Sir, ' twas all one! My favour at her breast, 25
l hilling moment in the poem because the Duke seems to have revealed - whether
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool 111advertently or not - that he had his wife killed because of her behaviour. This
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule 111oment of horror is compounded by the way he reverts to polite affability with th·
She rode with round the terrace - all and each tranger, and returns to a topic of conversation which they have evidently been
Would draw from her alike the approving speech, 30 pursuing:
Or blush, at least. She thanked men, - good! but thanked
Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked
Will't please you rise? We'll meet
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name Th · •t1111p;111y h ·tow, then . I repeat,
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame 'I lw <' 011111 yo 111 111.i \ ll' I \ J..nown munificence
1''
h ,1111ph 11.111,1111 111.11 111> lthl pretence
1,ulwl /\11m1mng d111111' that the dramatic mo nologue was invented hy '"rnwn 1>11r1 111 lh•• cuily nineteenth <>I 1111111 1111 tl11 1 ill h1 d1 ,1 ll nwcd:
<1'nl111y (/\11m11unv. ll/'11, PP 125 (\) I he sta ndnrd discussion or till' fl"llll' I llnl II I ·11 ~ h.111m (19~7) 1111'
/•,,,.,,r,1/ / / lfr/1· 1111 l lt1111 Ii 111 I 111"tit 111 I 'II .. I . IVtl\\I ·d
 of lhl' cven111g Sl'ClllS utterl y lkvo1d ol .in
/\t sta11111g, is my object. Nay, we 'll go 1111 Wl·st' (. Ci). 1'11111 Ill k " dcsc11pt1on
Together down, sir. (47- 54) 1111 , t.dgta for Ro1n.i 111K1s111

We infer from this that the stranger is the representative of a Count, that the two of
them arc negotiating a marriage settlement between the Duke and the Count's t hallenges to the Understanding of Poetry as Speech: Modernism
daughter, and that the Count and his daughter are waiting 'below'. This gives a 1 ind lntertextuality
horrifying twist to the monologue, since it offers a whole new perspective o~ what
. . d . the story we are telling in this
has gone before. lndern ist poetry constitutes a c;u~ialh;~~s~a~n1~oetic genres - narrative, dramatic
In the course of this conversation about the painting of his previous wife, then, , h.1pter. We have seen that each o t et "th the understanding of poetry as ·pccch .
11111 lyric is fun.da!11entally bou~n~~1;~2) and Ezra Pound's The Cantos ( 1921 6?)
the Duke does indeed reveal his character. An inevitable question is whether he does
it deliberately or whether it is accidental. On the one hand, it would seem a terrible l'111·ms such as Ehot s The Waste k" ing with each genre in
blunder to reveal, in the midst of marriage negotiations, that he had his last wife 11 l11se to conform to any of these genres, brea mg up! with ur habitual desire to
murdered because she enjoyed the attentions of other men. On the other hand, ,1ys which result in a poetry that refuseLas tod ~ompp~em made up of a multiplicity
however, such a hint might well serve as a warning to his wife-to-be about what she .. . eech The Waste n is a f
111111slate wntmg mto sp .. . . d allusions from all kinds o texts.
can expect if she behaves in a similar way. Whichever way we answer this question, , · ' n 111 with quotations an .
iii ,111o nymous v01ces wove fi d .t. ossible to construct a coherent narrative
Ihe Duke emerges as a terrifyingly powerful and callous man, sexually jealous and I ill' overall effect is that the reader n s I imp Id omehow represent the speech
possessive, able to use his power and wealth to commit murder with impunity, and " lyric experience, or to imagine that the ~oem. cou s
kcling a certain 'disgust' for women and sexuality. Although he seems to be a lover ' · ker or poetic v01ce.
111 " si ngle narrator, 1ync spea '. k t tremes especially in Pound's frequent
of art, the objects he collects seem designed merely to demonstrate his power and I11 the later Cantos this process is .t~ en o e.x f .d'eograms which are not based,
wealth. Having had his wife murdered because he was unable to control her and keep .· Ch. se wntmg consists o 1 .
11-.1· of Chinese wntmg. me . I h b t This means that the Chmcse
hL·r from responding to the looks of other men, he now controls the display of her ·· · on a phonetic a P a e · ·
i inost Western wntmg is, h "tt n representation of speech, but is
portrait by unveiling it to selected guests. And in a revealing ambiguity, he tells the n as merely t e wn e · .
ull•ogram cannot. be see . . For En lish-speaking readers, such ideog1;an1 s
<'o unt 's representative that his 'object' (the material thing which is his aim) is the 111 t•ducibly graphic and ev~~ p1ctonal. n the fi~st cantos of Pound's huge 'poem can
11 t· litcrally unre~dable wntmg. Ye~e~ f t that they are made up of writin~s wlmh
<. 'ou nt 's ' fair daughter's self' (52- 53).
This rather disturbing poem, then, seems a long way from the Romantic lyric. It 111 seen to play with and foregroun t e a~ . . . s·ngle human consc1ous11cs'
is hard to imagine that the speaker is representative of any aspect of the poet's own , h en as ongmatmg Ill a I
i 1111not be reduced to speec or se . f hat could almost be undcrsto11d
self. And even the way the poem's knotty syntax is locked within the rhymed iambic · 1· fC tol(l92l)cons1sto w ,
1h · Ii rst sixty-seven mes o an ( t that other characters spc:1"'
pentameter seems to prevent any feeling of spontaneous flowing verse. Thus even . k n by Odysseus excep . .
i II dramatic mono 1ogue spo e . ' ·g1·nal' poem which 1mag11ws
though the Victorian period as a whole was heavily influenced by the Romantic poets, , B th than bemg an on
111 him towards the end). ut ra ~r , 'Ul es' 21 Pound's text consists
we can trace a significant strand of ambivalent revolt in Browning's exploration of . · ( hke Tennyson s yss ' f
I l111ncr's hero Ill a new situ~ ion, L tin translation of part of Book XI o
the possibilities of the dramatic monologue. 20 It was this attempt to develop a poetic 111 his own translation of a s1xteenth-centudry a d to the underworld. In this way
form which broke with Victorian Romanticism which attracted the Modernist poets . h. h Odysseus escen s . 11
I lomcr's Greek text m w ic h Id be an author's original creation. c
of the early twentieth century to the dramatic monologue. We have already looked l'ound breaks with our idea that a poem sf ?h~ , em by referring to the translator
at the best-known and most influential Modernist dramatic monologue- Eliot's 'The · h "tten textual nature o is po , , k .•
11 .. 11 hmts at t e wn ' I . f the translation, a new spea Ct
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (1917). The poem's opening lines signal both their 111 l I1c poem l ·tself· At the end . of the trans . at10n o
ge nre and their Modernist anti-lyricism: 111.1kcs the following enigmatic comment.
Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
Let us go then, you and I,
In officina Wecheli, 1538 out of Horner. (68- 69)
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table. d I his 'source' - Andreas Divus being th.
111 these lines, Pound addresses an rde;efa s d Wechel being a famous ixtccnth
f h t h has 'borrowe rom, an
If Browning's Duke of Ferrara alludes scathingly to a nexus of Renaissance and 11.111slator o t c te_x . e ' ffi . ') The canto then ends as follows:
i 111l111y French pnntmg-house ( o cma .
Romantic lyrics in dismissing his wife's response to 'The dropping of the daylight in
( ,, • f 1 Ulysses 11c I ' i'"·1 ••'1•1 ,,1 l <'<lllY"'" '' il1111111111c rnonoll>l,\ UC 'Uly"'c>' .
Jn 1·111 11111n1crcs11ng discuss ion of the way Browning's drama tr<' n1111111l11y111·H1111<1 11u1c un ambivnlenl rc"''""ce l >•IV'"''" " 1111 uhl'rrrnl1vc n 111m c' • • • . '1'11111c1 \1• 1111
l1tly\\1·11• I 1iyS>1"'" thl' l'l' lll rttl (11111.1<tcr Ill '
I"'""' I'" II.Ir ,..,
111 lt11111111111c lyrrcosm, , cc fucker in lloSek and Pnrkc1 { l'IK\) / 11/1I'""'''" pp '26 W.

And h • s11tlcd. by Siren~ and thl'lll'I' 1111t\\ 111d 111d ,1way
And unto Circe.
Vencrandam,
In the Cretan 's phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden
G1rdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that: (70-76)
Ending on a colon like this, the poem seems to be torn from a large(written text.
!ts mtertextu~I nature is exemplified in that word 'Venerandam', which the poem
itself tells us 1s a 'Cretan 's phrase'. The editors of the Nor ton Anthology of Poetry
present the following information in a footnote:
'Worthy of worship,' applied to Aphrodite. This, like the Latin words and
phrases _in the next lines, derives from a Latin translation of two hymns to
Aphrodite (among the so-called Homeric Hymns, dating from the 8th to
6th ce~tury BC, anciently believed to be by Homer), a translation made by
Georg1us Dartona Cretensis, contained, Pound tells us, in the volume in
which he had found Divus's translation of the Odyssey. (Norton, p. 978)
Pound and Eliot, then, developed a collage technique of assembling poems which
effectively breaks the association between literature and speech that had held since
Homer. Appropriately enough, this is done through recycling bits and pieces of text
taken_ from_ the whole written_ tradition, from Homer to the early twentieth century.
In do mg t_h1s,_ they worked agamst the grain of a tradition of Western thought exhibited
not only m literature but throughout the history of Western culture.
Pound's and Eliot's avant-garde experiment with poetry has been continued in
son:e _recent 'postmodern' poetry but, for reasons we have already suggested, the
maJ~nty of poets, critics, teachers, students and readers in the late twentieth century
contmue to hol_d wh~t are effectively late- Romantic views about poetry as the precious
speec? of special bemgs. In doing so, such readers not only ignore the Modernist
expenment and the huge body of non-lyrical poetry in the tradition since Homer
b~t also refuse to think coherently about the kinds of questions with which we bega~
this chapter. Although there are poems in the tradition which announce themselves
as written - such as Anne Bradstreet's 'A Letter Written to Her Husband Absent
Upon Public Employment' (1678) or Shelley's 'Lines Written in Dejecti;n, Near
Naple_s' (1~18) - most poems silently ignore their own written status, and we usually
conspire with them.
In announcing the 'death' of the' Author' in 1968, Barthes was partly summarizing
the consequences of the Modernist trends we have traced in writers such as Pound
and Eliot. Drawing together ideas from Saussurian linguistics and the notion of
' intertextuality' developed by Julia Kristeva (which we will examine further in Chapter
13), Bar~hes and ot~ers produced a 'Post-structuralist' literary theory appropriate
for th~ literary practices of European Modernism. Barthes argues that tc ask who is
~peakmg_ t~e wo~ds of a literary text is an undecidable question, since any statement
111 a text t 111extncably shaped by the innumerable 'voices' which inhabit our culture
_Nothing that we say or write can be wholly original, because the whole of languag~
is ceaselessly recycled throughout our text-saturated c1ilt111l' l hi' mt•:i ns that 'a text
181
, wlti dimens1o11id ' l'·H 1 111 which a variety of wntings, none of them \_111 •111t1l, hi •ml
1 1 11
. d clash'. The w11t ·1 dm·s 11ot originate writing out of the depths of his or her so ul ,
111
hilt si mply mixe pre· exist 111 •writings, as we have een in Pound' .c~ntos. F~rthe1mo1 e,
t mg entails the absence or loss of the speaking voice: when wn_ttng beg~ns, B~11·th 'S
1 11
posits, 't he voice loses its origin' (1977, pp. 146, 142). As we saw m our discussion of
1 ·hborne's Elegy', writing entails and presupposes the ' death ' of the author.
The advent of such post-structuralist theory in France in the late l 9_60s _a nd ~ar~y
1
I'l 70s, and its absorption thereafter by many literary critics and theonsts m Bnta111
d the USA has meant that a theoretical gap has opened up between what many
,ichers assu~e in their own published research and whats
111
en ts entering university
11
uid college assume about literature. In a nutshell: wh· many teachers a~sume th~t
llll'rature is an intertextual field of writing, many s dents assume that ltterature is
discourse in which authors communicate their inner selves to the inner self of the
1
1· der in what is effectively an intersubjective process. .
1 11
Modernist poetry such as Pound's and Eliot 's foregrounds the wntten nature of
th ·ir texts and undermines our attempt to translate this writing into the speech of a
·t or poetic speaker by making the patchw?'.king of _their intert_extual. nature
1111
istakable. Post-structuralist accounts of wntmg and mtertextuahty claim that
1111111
thl~sc techniques are not confined to Modernism but actually foreground the nat~rc
1 all writing. In this way, Pound's and Eliot's poetry exposes the pro?lems w1t_h
11
itt i.: mpting to read any poetry as speech. But this is not to say t~at t_h elf poet~y ~s
lwttcr' than poetry which seeks to maintain and exploit the 1llu~10n that it is
mediated speech. Nor are we suggesting that you must abandon readmg first-person
1111
ly c poetry as the unmediated voice of the poet. We do thin~, however, t~at you
11
µht to be aware of the problems involved with this assumption, and real!ze that
1111
ti ,, simply one reading strategy among others. And we are also not sugg~st1~g thal
t hl' textual experiments of Pound and Eliot, reinforced by post-~t:uctural~st htera ry
tht•ory, mean that we should abandon altogether the N~w Cnt1cal_ not10n of the.
peaker' as a naive attempt to rescue poetry from the 1mpersonaltty and _lo s ol
111 11
trol entailed by writing. The notion of the 'speaker' is one of the strategies and
i lll'Cts available to poetry, and it helps to account for our sense that poetry can be
.1 11 mtersubjective experience or process. . .
Yet the assumption that poetry is intersubjective does not sit ea~1ly alongside_ the
11kt1 that it is an intertextual discourse which apparently problemat1zes the very ~dea
11 1 ·voice' in texts. This leaves theoretically inclined university teachers (and wnter
111 books about poetry such as the present one) with a problem. When w~ teach
t dents do we have to abandon the theoretical ideas which we find productive a~d
11
l'lt ing? Herbert Tucker believes that it only seems incumbent on critics and university
1
ll ilt:hcrs that they
choose between intersubjective and intertextual modes of reading, between
vrndica tin g the self and saving the text . . . [or to become] by turns intertextual
1cadcrs in the study and intersubjcctivc reade rs in the classroom.
22
 iii ,
1 2 I1 Ille ll '1lr111! 11t

Tucker believe· that we do not have to ·hom1 111 1' 1·111 I hl'S · option · b ·'tilts· a
recognition of the textuality (written nature) of pm·1m l'lll.iil~ rec gnizing that the
l ( 1) I low man dilh 1 111 1111, 111 fl 1~11 ;111 you d1scovc1 111 th· po ·111' 1 I al ·I ·al h
notion of the speaker is one of the effects of that tcxtualtty. /\s he puts it:
while texts do not absolutely lack speakers, they do not simply have them
either; they invent them instead as they go. Texts do not come from speakers,
speakers come from texts .... To assume in advance that a poetic text
,_J proceeds from a speaker is to risk missing the play of verbal implication-
whereby character is engendered in the first place .... At the same time, ...
the ghost conjured by the textual machine . . . remains the articulate
phenomenon we call character: a literary effect we ignore at our peril. (p. 243)
We hear voices in written poems, then, not only because we have been trained to do
so, but because such ghostly voices are one of the most powerful effects which poems
create. 23
voice I, 2. 1. :111d 111111 ,111d 111.111\ wh ·re each voice begins and c11ds.
(h) l'ry to say why 1n1 1111111\ th ·1 arc different speakers in the p cm. (What is 1t
about the lan gua 1c which makes you think there are different peakers?)
(1) l'ry to define each speaker more exactly. For example, is the speaker fir tor third
per on? Try to say who you think each speaker is. Does the poem have a narrator?
If so, what kind? Give textual evidence for each decision.
td) What is the attitude of each speaker to the drowning man (serious, ironic,
sympathetic, and so on)? Give textual evidence to support your decision.
(1) What does 'drowning' mean in this poem? l
ti) Try to sum up what you think this poem is sayi\lg. What contribution does th·
use of different voices make to this? ~

Exercises

Read the following poem several times, then answer the questions that follow:

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said,

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
(Stevie Smith, 1957).

23
This claim that the voices in poems are textual effects rather than the voices which produce those poems
remains true even for confessional poetry such as that of Sylvia Plath. While we should no( ignore the
anguish Plath experienced, nor try to claim that her poetry is not informed by that anguish, we do need to
retain the sense that dislurbing poems such as 'Elm' (1962/65) or 'Daddy' (1962/65) necessarily construcl
voices ralher than giving us an unmediated access to the dead poet's own voice. This point also touches on
the way some recent feminist criticism has sought to direct attention to neglected 01 11111krvalucd poetry by
women by arguing that such poetry represents a storehouse of recorded w111111·11 · '"" r .11111 experience.