Eratosphere - Pleasant Perversions

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Just coming in here in my pedagogical and pedantic role as one who, among other things, teaches English as a foreign language. The Yeats line is an example of a standard inversion in English, whereby an adverbial expression of location can be followed by an intransitive verb and then the subject: "On top of the hill stands a church", "Down the road came a procession" - or even just "Down came the snow", "Off went the runners". It's fairly common in descriptive passages end is even used for emphasis in conversational English at times; it's certainly not confined to poetry.
Gregory

[This message has been edited by Gregory Dowling (edited June 16, 2005).]

Dear Gregory

About those two lines from Yeats…

What your alternative and persuasive paradigm hints at is perhaps not so much a matter of syntax as of diction – a slight strangeness in Yeats’s use of the verb “to be”. Your four illustrations – “On top of the hill stands a church”, “Down the road came a procession”, “Down came the snow”, “Off went the runners” – differ from Yeats’s sentence in having what might be called verbs of action at their heart. But Yeats, who might have written “Upon the brimming water among the stones / Swim nine and fifty swans”, eschews such verbs and adopts instead a verb that asserts, plainly yet unobtrusively, the mere fact of the existence of the swans, a theme which lies at the heart of the poem. That he organizes his sentence so that this little verb appears at the start of the last line of the stanza seems not unconnected with the overall effect of these two lines.

Whether I am correct in this speculation, you and I (and Rose) appear to agree that there is nothing especially odd in the word-order here. For a number of reasons, Yeats has come to be regarded as a dangerous model for aspiring poets; but his management of the sentence – and of the sentence in relation to the line – still repays careful study.

Kind regards…

Clive

Clive,

Beautifully observed and expressed. Mine was just a piece of grammatical pedantry, yours a fine piece of poetry criticism.

To shift the topic slightly, can anybody remember who it was that said that he had never been able to take this poem seriously because of the precise figure given, swans in great number being in fact almost impossible to count?

Gregory

Why not title this thread "Perversions Pleasant"?

-Peter

Quote:

Originally posted by Gregory Dowling:
Clive,

To shift the topic slightly, can anybody remember who it was that said that he had never been able to take this poem seriously because of the precise figure given, swans in great number being in fact almost impossible to count?

Gregory

Gregory,

Whoever he was, he was wrong - swans are very easy to count. One does tend to count them, for some reason, and the speaker in the poem claims to have been counting them for twenty years, doesn't he? I counted nineteen on Loch Lomond two days ago. Anyway, Lady Gregory would have known, which is not to say the number in the poem IS correct. I have also read a critic say that fifty nine was supposed to be the speaker's age, in the poem, which would suggest the number was made up, although Yeats was younger than this (46) when "The Wild Swans at Coole" was first published in book form.

Oliver,

I do in fact agree with you. I just wish I could remember who said it; I have the feeling that it was a rather good and well-known critic, which was why the odd observation stuck in my mind. It had struck me too that Lady Gregory would presumably have known, in any case.

So if anyone can refresh my memory, I'd be grateful. (Of course it might turn out that it was a remark tossed out by my local butcher or postman.)

Gregory

(Editing in five years later to say that I've discovered it was Anthony Hecht, in his book-length interview with Philip Hoy.)

[This message has been edited by Gregory Dowling (edited June 16, 2005).]

I have always thought that the odd number of swans, given that they swim "lover by lover", points up the fact that one of them is unpaired and alone.

------------------
Mark Allinson

The first stanza of "The Wild Sawns at Coole' is the most beautiful description of a peak autumn day I've read. So (seemingly) simple, so complete a picture of so much in that scene in so few words. And so much fun to say.

Thanks for bumping up this interesting thread, Eugene.

This passage, from post #22, especially strikes me:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alder Ellis (Post 9124)

Re. Oliver's very pertinent point: "Poetry goes through periods of artificiality and periodic readjustments to contemporary speech"

I wonder about this. One thinks of Wordsworth's "rebellion" against the artificiality of the Augustans, but then, much more drastically, Modernism's demolition of traditional form, poetic diction, poetic devices such as syntactical inversion, etc. One might think of Wordsworth as a "periodic readjustment" but Modernism seems like a much more violent break, & one that we are still living with almost a century later. Hardy is interesting in this regard in that, coming slightly before Modernism but subject to pretty much the same cultural dilemma, he chose a kind of "knowing anachronism," bravely carrying on the tradition in reduced circumstances, instead of turning against it as Modernism did. A certain poignancy in this. But it can't be emulated now insofar as one cannot honestly pretend that Modernism never happened.

Consider Modernism's defining moment, "The Waste Land": full of traditional forms, but strictly & devastatingly in the vein of parody. Traditional forms (including syntactical inversion) suddenly became available, not as robust means of expression, but as rich grounds for parody. A destructive though initially exhilarating move; & no doubt necessary.

So how do you get away with using something seriously that has been triumphantly made fun of? The "New Formalism" itself inevitably struggles with this, if not usually very consciously. How do you not sound naive? or, if not naive, exactly, then limited, private, parochial, "special" in the pejorative sense?

"So how do you get away with using something seriously that has been triumphantly made fun of?" How would this apply, for instance, to a contemporary poet who wrote "are nine-and-fifty swans" in a line of poetry? The same question applies for examples in this thread from Hardy and Whitman.

Posters in the other thread about inversions have said that poets use inversions still, but I don't think the examples above would cut muster with contemporary poetry editors, readers, or critters at poetry boards.

Any exceptions that people know of?

It was four and twenty virgins who came down from Aviemore. I'm sure someone else must have made this observation.