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Form
and the Poetess
Poetess
poetry often makes use of poetic forms that were easily imitated
by people without access to much formal education, a group which
included most women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Laura Mandell has pointed out the influence of class and gender
considerations on such stylistic choices. Ballad stanzas and iambic
tetrameters and trimeters were akin to the popular ballad forms
familiar to people of the working classes. Many poetesses did not
have access to the money and time necessary to learn thoroughly
the most prestigious poetic meter, iambic pentameter, whose mastery
involved reading and studying books by canonical male poets. This
fact alone helped until recently to bar poetesses from the canon
of respected writers, a view which John Crowe Ransom made explicit
by claiming, in his essay on Dickinson, that she never achieved
true greatness as a poet because she did not use iambic pentameter.
Though
many poetesses, notably Maria Brooks, Lydia Sigourney, and Phoebe
Cary, did write some poems in iambic pentameter, most favored other
meters, including ballad stanzas, anapests, and trochees. These
meters have had a much longer life in oral poetic tradition than
in written poetry, and they were frequently used in children's and
popular poetry through the mid-twentieth-century. Because of their
association with oral tradition, such meters have often not been
varied as subtly as is iambic pentameter, a fact that added to the
feeling that poetess's poetry was not as metrically complex as Romantic
poetry.
Aside
from its insistent meters, one of the key formal aspects of Sentimentist
poetry is its free use of repetition. Repetition is an oral-based
poetic technique, undermining the primacy of written over heard
language and reminding the eye of the ear’s primacy. It pulls the
reader down from the vicarious bardic literary perch and into the
preliterate, childlike, even nonhuman body. The very same qualities
that make obvious verbal repetition anathema to the post-romantic
twentieth-century reader are the qualities that make it such an
integral part of the successful Sentimentist lyric. Repetition’s
qualities of unself-consciousness, physical pleasure in form, orality,
and slowness of texture are all qualities intrinstic to poetess's
poetry generally. They connect a Sentimentist lyric to its roots
in folk and oral-based poetry.
Repetition
can function at its most effective to render language unfamiliar
and to lend words a totemic power that is not based on their representational
powers. Sara Teasdale's “Let It Be Forgotten,” for example, uses
a subtle texture of repetition to enact the process of forgetting,
giving the very word "forgotten" a reified presence through
insistent repetition and finally covering up the word itself, like
the forgotten thing, in snow:
“Let
It Be Forgotten”
Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten forever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
If anyone asks, say it was forgotten
Long and long ago,
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
In a long forgotten snow.
The
word “forgotten” occurs four times in the first stanza, along with
one forever” and one “fire.” The second stanza has only one “forgotten”
and one “fire.” One “flower” and one “footfall” take the place
of two of the forgotten “forgottens”; one “forgotten” is buried
in snow in the final line; and the final “ forgotten” from the first
stanza has, indeed, disappeared without a trace. Teasdale's poem
shows an achievement on a literal level of linguistic tangibility,
of "opacity," to use experimental poet Charles Bernstein's
term.
Repetition
in Sentimentist poems appeals to the reader's sense of space, being,
and unindividuated consciousness rather than attempting to satisfy
desires for discursiveness and a distinct romantic subjectivity.
In Teasdale's “Night Song at Amalfi,” for instance, the device of
repetition links the speaker viscerally with the sky and the sea,
echoing through the heart of the poem like a vacuum. At the same
time it allows a new mood to enter the poem, as the tone of the
concluding question changes from plaintive to defiant in the echoing
silence following the repetitions. But it does all this without
words, because repetition is, paradoxically, a wordless technique.
Night
Song at Amalfi
I
asked the heaven of stars
What I should give my love—
It answered me with silence,
Silence above.
I asked the darkened sea
Down where the fishers go—
It answered me with silence,
Silence below.
Oh, I could give him weeping,
Or I could give him song—
But how can I give silence
My whole life long?
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