Eratosphere - Pleasant Perversions

Eratosphere (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/index.php)

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- - Pleasant Perversions (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=639)

Henry:
Point nicely made, Jan! Janet, would I get a frosty retort if I were to say “Wake up”?

Yes ;)

I was joking.

But I have just discovered it's a poem by Frost. Frosty reception DADA.

At least I know music when I hear it.

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sounds the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

______
I would have recognised the last stanza.
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 12, 2005).]

It's a real education to work with a poem like "Stopping by Woods" or "Mending Wall" in a classroom of first or second year college students and discover how baffling many of them find the seemingly mild inversions of those first lines. Although my policy has always been that learning poetry is good for its own sake, the experience is a reminder that some of the most expressive and suble resources of the language go unused in daily life -- and that daily life is poorer for their absence. I always hope that a few students discover that an idea or feeling can be approached from various directions and that the destination is always a little different for our having reached it in a different way. Part of being anywhere, maybe the biggest part, is how we got there.
RPW

Richard,
Your last entry sent me scampering to your wonderful website. I don't want to sound like a flatterer but I did genuinely love what I found there.

Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 13, 2005).]

Thanks, Alicia. A stimulating thread.

As someone else has doubtless commented, we should keep an ear open to rhetorical variations of the spoken word associated with heightened emotion.

I recall the Scottish-born mother of sixteen (!)I interviewed at her remote County Derry smallholding a few decades ago when researching home-school relations in rural areas. (She would have left her own elementary school at 14.)

She commented thus on her school-age children: 'Blockheads they go down to the school and blockheads they come up again.'

Best,

Margaret.

Margaret, your "Blockheads" quote is a wonderful example of how the speech of daily life can be more poetic than poetry. Maybe the urge to be colloquial in our verse assumes a stereotype of ordinary language as weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable; if we really listened, we'd find that living speech throws off sparks and flames, and we'd be endlessly busy trying to capture the fireworks in ink, no need for fiddle-faddle.
(Aside to Janet: a couple of people have commented on my website, but I'm not aware of having one. Still, if there's something out there under my name and people like it, I'll not argue.)

It's a matter of fluency, isn't it? If you can craft elegant, complex sentences and not sound labored, pretentious or just desperate to meet the requirements of your poem's form, go for it. The problem is when people point to successful uses of inversion to justify their own tortured style.

Inversions in which whole phrases are rearranged seem much less jarring to me than those in which two adjacent words are swapped. For example:

"Upon the brimming water among the stones / are nine and fifty swans"

vs.

"roses red" or "speak you"

I'm not sure exactly what the rules are, but what some critics call inversions don't seem like inversions to me. E.g., putting the adverb before the verb. (The sentence in question was one of mine, and goes: "His impish grin / more eloquently states the case than Yeats.")

Writing in form using "natural-sounding" language is very difficult, and in some cases I suspect the grumbling about it has more to do with that than the grumblers like to admit. I've heard it referred to, sort of disdainfully, as "hiding the form," as if the poet were ashamed to be writing in form. But I think Rhina Espaillat uses pretty natural-sounding language in her formal poems, and she certainly isn't hiding the form out of shame. I think of it more as making it look easy, a time-honored artistic tradition.

Like Rose and other posters to this thread, I have occasionally found myself wondering if those for whom particular examples of word-order seem odd have a rather narrow sense of the rich and expressive possibilities of normal syntax.

Rose makes another good point when she remarks that “Inversions in which whole phrases are rearranged seem much less jarring to me than those in which two adjacent words are swapped.”

On the other hand, the line she quotes from Yeats is, I think, not an instance of inversion at all, but of ellipsis, something very common in Yeats; for surely the “normal” phrasing here would have been this: “Upon the brimming water among the stones there are nine and fifty swans". I take it that the fact that the sentence begins with two adverbial phrases of place does not constitute an inversion (i.e. should not be remarked on as “odd”): it is merely a case of simple periodic syntax.

Clive Watkins

I have pasted in below a page from a Shakespeare site which gives some interesting background to the advent of inversion in English poetry.

Quote:

The most common simple sentence in modern English follows a familiar pattern: Subject (S), Verb (V), Object (O). To illustrate this, we'll devise a subject (John), a verb (caught), and an object (the ball). Thus, we have an easily understood sentence, "John caught the ball." This is as perfectly an understood sentence in modern English as it was in Shakespeare's day. However, Shakespeare was much more at liberty to switch these three basic components—and did, quite frequently. Shakespeare used a great deal of SOV inversion, which renders the sentence as "John the ball caught." This order is commonly found in Germanic languages (moreso in subordinate clauses), from which English derives much of its syntactical foundation.1

Another reason for Shakespeare's utilization of this order may be more practical. The romance languages of Italian and French introduced rhymed verse; Anglo-Saxon poetry was based on rhythm, metrical stresses, and alliteration within lines rather than rhymed couplets. With the introduction of rhymed poetic forms into English literature (and, since the Norman invasion, an injection of French to boot), there was a subsequent shift in English poetry. To quote John Porter Houston, "Verbs in Old French and Italian make handy rimes, and they make even better ones in English because so many English verbs are monosyllabic. The verse line or couplet containing a subject near the beginning and a verb at the end is a natural development."2

Of course, Shakespeare wrote a great deal of work in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter); when he wasn't rhyming, what was he thinking? Frankly, Elizabethans allowed for a lot more leeway in word order, and Shakespeare not only realized that, he took advantage of it. By utilizing inverted word orders, Shakespeare could effectively place the metrical stress wherever he needed it most—and English is heavily dependent on vocal inflection, which is not so easily translated into writing, to suggest emphasis and meaning. In his usage of order inversion, however, Shakespeare could compensate for this literary shortcoming.

Shakespeare also throws in many examples of OSV construction ("The ball John caught."). Shakespeare seems to use this colloquially in many places as a transitory device, bridging two sentences, to provide continuity. Shakespeare (and many other writers) may also have used this as a device to shift end emphasis to the verb of a clause. Also, another prevalent usage of inversion was the VS order shift ("caught John" instead of "John caught"), which seems primarily a stylistic choice that further belies the Germanic root of modern English.

In the end, Houston points to "the effort to make language more memorable by deviation from spoken habits."3 This is the essence of poetry: a heightening of language (even colloquial) above that of prose, a heightening that produces an idealized, imaginative conception of the subject.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 There is no argument that English contains less than a fair share of French and Latinate words in its vocabulary; of course it does, which one would expect given the 1066 invasion of William the Conqueror (from Normandy, in France). But, as a linguistics professor once put it, "Think of the English language like a house: the decor is French, but the foundation and frame is Germanic." Fortunately, we decided to drop a couple of pronoun cases and the gender-specific articles by the time we get to modern English.

2 John Porter Houston, Shakespearean Sentences: A Study in Style and Syntax (LSU Press, Baton Rouge, 1988), 2

3 Ibid, 20. The fine line of dramatic poetry is that ability to deviate from spoken habits enough to make it memorable, yet still keep the language within the constraints imposed by story, plot, and character. A play, even done in verse, is a different animal from the art of poetry.

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Mark--

Thanks for the info, but there is another major factor influencing inversion in English, since word order effectively replaces inflections in creating meaning. In English, "John killed the bear" and "The bear killed John" are radically different in meaning, though in Latin and its immediately derivative languages parallels to this word order might well be synonymous, inflections indicating subject and object regardless of word order, which might well be varied for reasons of emphasis, sound, or meter.

I'd guess that most readers or listeners would assume that "The ball John caught" meant "The ball [that] John caught" and would be waiting for a predicate: "...was headed for the left field bleachers."

Similarly, "The bear John killed..." But "John the bear killed" is at best awkward and ambiguous. Of course English can and does exploit such ambiguities effectively.

Vive l'Anglais!

Cheers,
Jan

Thanks, Clive. I guess I'm even more confused than I thought about what exactly constitutes an inversion. It seems to me the usual order would be to put the swans at the beginning of the sentence, the verb in the middle, and the prepositional phrases at the end. Whether or not the sentence is inverted, though, I don't find it odd, or at least not odd in a bad way, yet I sense there are many who would disagree. Then there are those who think "roses red" is just fine and that those who find it awkward or archaic have "...a narrow sense of the rich and expressive possibilities of normal syntax."

[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited June 15, 2005).]