(Couldn't help thinking of this one)

Me up at does

out of the floor
quietly Stare

a poisoned mouse

still who alive

is asking What
have i done that

You wouldn't have


---e.e. cummings

Although I use the phrase "inverted syntax" now and then, I prefer to think of unusual word order as just another way that we can mine the riches of the language. In ordinary speech we can get by with a teeny tiny vocabulary, for example, as long as we are content to think and express teeny tiny thoughts. But as various words drop away from familiarity, the nuances those words allow us to express do likewise. Same with variations in how we arrange them. Unfamiliar or less-familiar sequences of words allow us to get at ideas in less-familiar ways, and so there's some revitalization. All this, of course, assumes that the unusual word order works.
I read once about a study in which the researchers looked at a group of elderly people, some with dementia in various degrees, and dug up examples of their subjects' writing from decades before. Those whose writing showed what is called "syntactic fluency" in their youth showed far less loss of mental acuity in their old age. The surmise was that the capacity for arranging words in more ways arose from (and apparently contributed to) more complexity and redundancy in the wiring of their brains. People who think complicated things in their youth are more likely to continue to be able to think complicated things throughout their lives. Big surprise!
But meanwhile the culture of haste and superficiaility encourages us to treat language as just another thing to be treated hastily and superficially. What gets stigmatized as inverted syntax is often merely a sentence that slows us down and so seems to cut against grain of our times. And that's a grain that needs cutting against, in my opinion.
RPW

It is not so much that I desire total linguistic liberation, like e.e.c., but enough liberty to tweak syntax, grammar or diction for a specific effect.

For instance, in "The Reply", Theodore Roethke says of a bird-call:


This shivers me; I swear
A tune so bold and bare,
Yet fine as maidenhair.


I believe this little twist of grammar adds something that "This makes me shiver" can't.

And yet, I feel sure that many critters, had this poem been posted on TDE, would have argued it down, believing it to be a glaring flaw which ruins the poem.



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Mark Allinson

Mark, you DO have total linguistic liberation - you can write absolutely any way you wish. Of course you know all this, but don't confuse the right of readers to point out inversions or anything else for that matter and to object to them, with your right to use them.

Roethke's usage of "shivers" is nice, I agree, and it does "make" the line. It is not an inversion, of course, nor is this usage particularly innovative. "Shiver my timbers" was old even when Long John Silver used it in Treasure Island (1883)e.g. (Captain Marryat in "Jacob Faithful" in 1835: “I won’t thrash you Tom. Shiver my timbers if I do”.)

Yes, Oliver, I am free to write whatever I choose, and readers are free to object to my choices. But the question for this thread is: are there some "perversions" of language we should consider as possible poetic improvements, rather than simply outlaw all deviations as sinful?

How "wicked", for instance, would this poem be, if written today?

Love the Monopolist

(Young Lover's Reverie)


The train draws forth from the station-yard,
And with it carries me.
I rise and stretch out, and regard
The platform left, and see
An airy slim blue form there standing,
And know that it is she.

While with strained vision I watch on,
The figure turns round quite
To greet friends gaily; then is gone ...
The import may be slight,
But why remained she not hard gazing
Till I was out of sight?

'O do not chat with others there,'
I brood. 'They are not I.
O strain you thoughts as if they were
Gold bands between us; eye
All neighbour scenes as so much blankness
Till I again am by!

'A troubled soughing in the breeze
And the sky overhead
Let yourself feel; and shadeful trees,
Ripe corn, and apples red,
Read as things barren and distasteful
While we are separated!

'When I come back uncloak your gloom,
And let in lovely day;
Then the long dark as of the tomb
Can well be thrust away
With sweet things I shall have to practise,
And you will have to say!'

- Thomas Hardy

I think THAT question has already been answered, Mark, I was replying to your most recent comment.


In answer to your question about the Hardy poem I would say that to write in the style of nearly a hundred years ago, especially of a poem like this, would hardly be wicked but it WOULD be incredibly pointless, except as a purely private indulgence, without actually being a perversion. This is particularly true in the case of imitating Hardy who, for all his merits, was incredibly old-fashioned in his use of inversions and archaic language even by the standards of his own day.

</QUOTE>

The term "old fashioned" with regard to syntactical inversion is interesting, but it must be admitted that the term is always double-edged: it holds the possibility of both creative nostalgia, and that which is dead or passé. Edmund Spenser, for instance, worked very hard to give The Faerie Queene an "old fashioned" patina of age, using words and expressions, and even spellings, which had slipped into disuse centuries before. So the expression "old fashioned" is not always a negative.

I think it is a thousand pities that a poetically skilful and meaningful employment of inversion has been declared forever unusable, ever since a pandemic of poetasters in the late nineteenth century over-used it. As Alicia says at the top of the thread: "no one wants to see syntax wrenched around clumsily for the sake of a jingly rime." And just because inversions have been used to do just this, by very poor poets, we now decry all instances of the technique, which is damned by association with inferior art. There is nothing intrinsically inferior about inversions, they have merely been tainted by the misuse they have suffered. Consider the Hardy poem above. Is Hardy really only twisting the syntax to get his rhymes into place, and with no other intention? Anyone who thinks so has not read the poem, where every change in the usual word-order makes a strong contribution to meaning. This line, for instance:

But why remained she not hard gazing

virtually coins a new verb: "not-hard-gazing", which gives us more than just saying she didn't look back. To call this mere "old fashioned" indulgence in archaic syntax is to miss the poetic point. It's as if painters in the late nineteenth century had so over-used and abused the colour blue that no "modern" looking painting now dares to use the colour, tainted by association with inferior art.

I say - let us consider the poetic value of a technique in every instance of its use, and not remove vital tools from our po-kits merely because they were abused by weak artists in the past.



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Mark Allinson

Agreed, Mark, but let us also be wary of appearing to recommend rhyme-driven but otherwise pointless inversions like:

"The train draws forth from the station-yard,
And with it carries me."

Oliver:
Your example

"The train draws forth from the station-yard,
And with it carries me."

Reminded me of a favorite bit of unusual syntax in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." (I know it's risky to admit to reading Whitman around here, let alone to liking him, but I plead de gustibus.) The fifth stanza is seven characteristically long Whitmaniacal lines, each beginning with a preposition or a participal:

"Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities..."

and so on, until the seventh, final line:

"Night and day journeys a coffin."

I don't think the effect could have been achieved any other way. It's one of many places where WW's excesses and quirks manage to match up perfectly with his subject. Imagine "fixing" it:

A coffin journeys night and day
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amind citiies,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets
peep'd from the ground, spotting the gray debris...

He's taken a cumulative sentence and flipped it over to make it periodic, I guess, and managed to conclude with the key word. It's as if the long funeral train were passing, passing, passing, finally to reveal its freight.
RPW

Oliver,

I am amazed to hear that you believe Hardy, in this poem at least, was a rhyme-driven poetaster. That would make this poem no better than all the late Victorian horrors that gave inversion a bad name.

I do not believe for a moment that any of Hardy's writing in this poem (or elsewhere) is merely twisting syntax for an easy rhyme. Can you really believe a poet like Hardy capable of such hack-work, that he has to bend the syntax like this to engineer a rhyme on "me/see" ? I don't think so.

There are good poetic reasons for all of the inversions here, especially the one you quote. As Richard has already suggested with his example from Whitman, placing the subject at the very end of that sentence is a powerful way of indicating the reluctance of the speaker, as if being dragged away at the end of a long train, unwilling to leave his girl on the platform.

The inversion in this line also contributes to meaning:

"Till I again am by!"

the twist in the syntax suggesting the convolutions of a jealous mind, trying to secure its anxieties. If Hardy needs to secure his ryhmes by twisting syntax, why aren't all of his poems like this?

This example very much proves my point: we need to get away from the knee-jerk response that all inversions, indeed all variations from the norm, are sinful perversions, not to be tolerated. There are good uses of inversion, just as there are bad uses, and we as readers need to discriminate between them.




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Mark Allinson