Verse as Synthesis
In science and mathematics, we admire simplicity and elegance. Think of all the considerations involved in Einstein’s theory of relativity (E= mc2) or in Pythagoras’ explanation of the area covered by the sides of a right triangle (c2 = a2 + b2). And that’s because so much information is captured in these apparently succinct syntheses.
Is it the same thing in language, (or in other forms of expression?) At first blush, it may appear not. Words, phrases, sentences appear to be so simple, so matter of fact. Accordingly, when I first began to think about syntheses as they appear in the linguistic arts, I thought of novels such as Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (link) and the plays of Tom Stoppard (link), such as The Right Thing or Travesties. And I sought to foreground the multiple strands of personalities, experiences, and events captured across several scores of pages.
But what of poetry? As with physics and geometry, can there be succinct but powerful syntheses? Can a word or phrase in a poem contain multitudes? Or is that a bridge too far?
The poems of the 19th century American, Emily Dickinson, can serve as test case because of their apparent directness and simplicity. And for a tutor, there is no one better than Helen Vendler, a cherished colleague and friend.
In her “Commentaries” on 150 of the nearly 1800 Dickinson poems that have been preserved, Vendler demonstrates how much can be captured and synthesized in a few lines. In what follows, I lean heavily on her analyses of two poems. The first is brief and relatively simple. The second, more challenging, provides a richer example of the many strands that may be intertwined in a representative Dickinson poem.
In the name of the Bee —
And of the Butterfly —
And of the Breeze — Amen!
At a superficial reading, Dickinson is simply invoking two air-bound animals, along with the wind—and closing with the canonical ending of a prayer. In prose: Here are three items, set into a religious frame.
But as one probes, one discerns far more at work. This is not simply a list—it is a “play” on one of the most sacred religious expressions—the Trinity— “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost” followed by the closing phrase “let it be so”. But to toy in this manner with this prayer is apparently—even defiantly—sacrilegious. The three items mentioned are scarcely random: they all begin with the letter B—and the list starts with the most prosaic and gives way to a natural force—the wind. All three of these nouns have a spiritual quality: Bee for Being, Butterfly for the Psyche, Breeze for the Spirit—and of course they are linked alliteratively—with the Sting coming first, the most ethereal last.
Moreover, Dickinson puts these words into the mouth of an authoritative minister—who speaks in the name of the Trinity—and yet he appears to value Nature over the Church and its holiest representatives. A staunch critic of organized religion and religious convictions, this poet casts her lot decisively with the natural world.
That’s the apparently easy example! Here’s a more typical and typically more challenging poem:
I would not paint — a pictur e—
I’d rather be the One
It’s bright impossibility
To dwell — delicious — on —
And wonder how the fingers feel
Whose rare — celestial — stir—
Evokes so sweet a torment —
So sumptuous —Despair —
I would not talk, like Cornets —
I’d rather be the One
Raised softly to the Ceilings —
And out, and easy on —
Through Villages of Ether —
Myself endued Balloon
By but a lip of Metal —
The pier to my Pontoon —
Nor would I be a Poet —
It’s finer — Own the ear —
Enamored — impotent — content —
The License to revere,
A privilege so awful
What would the Dower be,
Had I the Art to stun myself
With Bolts — of Melody!
While the surface message of the first poem seems straightforward (a play on the trinity), it’s more challenging to figure out what’s going on the second one.
Once again, with appreciation, I lean heavily on Helen Vendler’s exposition. But rather than an “Explication de Texte”, my goal is to display how many strands of thought and feeling can be captured in three short stanzas—indeed, barely one hundred words, even if one counts the marks of punctuation.
We begin with the voice—this is the author of the poem, who might be Dickinson (not, presumably, a minister!) but perhaps one other voice or even three other voices- one per stanza.
Next there is the mode—an apparently negative one. In each stanza, the speaker announces what he or she would not like to do or to be… even though (in the process) may actually be demonstrating what the speaker is apparently denying.
Further, in each stanza, the speaker is taking on a separate art form: first visual arts (painting a picture), then music (playing the cornet); then poetry (writing verse). But in each case, the tone is apparently dismissive of the practicing artist (rather be a picture, or a sound, or the ear that hears the poem). And yet, of course, the speaker is actually practicing one of the arts, and demonstrating its potential, its effects—and in the powerful last stanza, combining the melodic and the lyrical.
Vendler points out that this poem—sometimes anthologized as “Bolts of Melody”—represents a tradition that dates back to John Keats, and his paeans to music (Ode to a Nightingale) and to sculpture (Ode on a Grecian Urn). And in each case Dickinson prefers to place herself explicitly in the guise of the audience or the work itself rather than as the creator. One can see this stance as one of modesty, or, alternatively, of hubristic oxymoron—denying what one is in fact doing.
Further, Vendler discerns a different atmosphere in each stanza: an active one in the first; a passive on in the second; and a deliberate mixture in the third—for example contrasting “enamored”, “impotent”, “content” and juxtaposing “privilege and awful” along with “Art, stun, bolts”. The final stanza is the most daring—the speaker becomes Jove, with bolts of melody, even as the speaker is stunned with bolts of melody. One is left confused as to where the speaker, as well as the poet who writes those lines, stands—which seems integral to the paradoxes that pervade this reflection on the arts and artistry.
Stepping back from the Dickinsonian enterprise, Vendler concludes “one can distinguish Dickinson from her imitators by her unmatched capacity for concentrating into a small poem, an unqualified passion, an intricate and often counterintuitive logic, a keen analytical penetration, and an unpredictable vision”.
Needless to say, one can go on—as Vendler does, with characteristic insight—and those of us with less knowledge and less sophistication may well have a different “take” on these and other Dickinson poems. And I have not said anything about the sounds of the words, the meter within and across stanzas, the metaphors, alliteration, oxymoron and other figures of speech.
But the task—the tack—I’ve taken for myself is to indicate how much knowledge, experience, emotion, insight can be captured in a few words, artfully (and sometimes challengingly) juxtaposed. Just as scientists and mathematicians can sometimes capture an enormous terrain in a few symbols, so, too, the poet—or more generally, the poetic writer (and I would include O’Farrell and Stoppard in that characterization)—is almost always dealing with shades, layers, of meaning, literal and allusive.
In his preface to The Lyrical Ballads the English poet Williams Wordsworth wrote “poetry is the history and science of feeling.” Expanding on this powerful assertion, Vendler explains: “it has to be also a ‘science’ of the felt Soul, which involves all the thousand analytical decisions of composition, on every level—phonetic, graphic, lexical , syntactic, imagistic, dialectic, psychological, physiological, and philosophic, not to speak of formal. The enormous effort of focus and concentration it takes to make the conclusive ‘click’ that it has to create when all the elements are in synergy is hardly imaginable to others who use speech only instrumentally” (personal communication, July 2021)—which of course includes most of us, most of the time.
In the late 1960s, I was privileged to sit in on a course on writing poetry, given by the eminent American poet, Robert Lowell. Each week, aspiring student poets submitted drafts of poems and Lowell critiqued them sympathetically and in detail. As I listened to Lowell over the weeks, I came to appreciate that his mind was a remarkable amalgam between Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, on the one hand, and The Norton Anthology of Poetry, on the other.*
Poetry dates back to the oral verse of Homer and the psalms in the Bible, and now encompasses the rap of singers and story tellers of our time, including (for better or worse) the jingles, advertisements, and tweets of social media and mass media. The ones that endure, in my view, are those that synthesize a vast amount of information from many spheres of life, and do so in a way that is effective—even if their methods remain hidden from most of us.
* When first writing these words, I had forgotten that Vendler had once sat in as well on the class and had written that Lowell’s linguistic facility “made one feel like a rather backward evolutionary form confronted by an unknown but superior species”.
Reference:
Vendler, H. (2010). Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press.