There is a lot of emphasis on these boards on putting sentences into verse more or less exactly as they would be spoken. "Would you actually say that?" is the cornerstone of much criticism. Yes, we do get newbies who want to write in archaisms that would have seemed fusty to Pope, and no one wants to see syntax wrenched around clumsily for the sake of a jingly rime. Still, I sometimes think the "plain style" is taken too far.

Inversions are not without their pleasures or purposes. I thought we might share some examples we found pleasing and effective.

I know I have brought up Larkin's "At Grass" at least a couple of times--it is among my favorite poems--but I do find the closing stanzas exquisite. Here is the last sentence:

Almanacked, their names live; they

Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,
Or gallop for what must be joy,
And not a fieldglass sees them home,
Or curious stop-watch prophesies:
Only the groom, and the groom's boy,
With bridles in the evening come.


I love how the verb is held off to the very end of the poem, almost as if it were a Latin sentence. Yet this does not feel particularly stiff or artificial. There is something about the groom and the groom's boy that give us an inkling of death--as if they were mythological figures almost. And even though "come" goes with the groom and the groom's boy, somehow situating it next to "evening" also feels sad. And by holding off the verb until the very end it is as if the horses are staying out in the field until the last possible moment, when they are led off into the night. There is also something rather somber in its slight off-rhyme with home. And yet that the last word is "come" instead of say, "go" or "leave" or something, is also gentle, and welcoming. Well, I just think it is a marvellous effect and wonder if others cherish similar moments in poems.

I sometimes think the "plain style" is taken too far - I think so. I recently grabbed this quote from somewhere

'Why imitate "speech"?' since we have less awareness of the impositions of speech patterns, [Robert Grenier] argues that they form a constraint less obvious and so more confining than, say, an iambic pentameter.

To me it's part of the game, like hiding your rhymes or your learning. Fear of being considered a show-off, an elitist, a 'Poet'? A belief that understatement is sophisticated, that "Natural" is better?

Yes, Alicia, there are some who seem to enjoy the knee-jerk sport of inversion-hunting. One sniff of the quarry and off they go — or should I say they go off? The assumption seems to be that the word order must always be the most usual one if a stilted effect is to be avoided. But the most usual word order is no more than that. To depart from that most usual order is not necessarily a “poeticism” — we quite often do it in prose (and in speech), usually to give emphasis to a given word or phrase.

At Grass has long been my personal favourite among Larkin’s poems. And I agree that the ending is particularly effective.

Ernest Dowson in the short piece below uses a particular and rather colloquial type of inversion, if that’s the right word, in the first line of each of the two quatrains. This is the type of construction frequently heard in sentences like “He was an odd fellow, my old Uncle Godfey.” The early pronoun is a kind of placeholder for the subject, which is then spelt out after the predicate. The subject gains extra emphasis by being mentioned twice, once in its full form at the end of the phrase or sentence where it reverberates in the mind.

Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
....Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
....We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
....Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
....Within a dream.



[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited May 30, 2005).]

I've always admired the Yeats poem that begings, "Others because you did not keep/ that deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine," in particular for the "unnatural" way that "others" is separated from its verb.

The best known example in Yeats might be:
“And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made” - written around 1890.
I agree with Alicia that inversion, and word fragments too, though much objected to, can be wonderful devices, particularly towards the end of poems where the rhetorical ante is being raised

Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt,
Bid me strike a match and blow.

Yeats – In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz.

And how about this: inversion in free verse:

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hack her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing
Often, he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

John Berryman – Dreamsong #29

Yeats and Larkin used relatively little inversion, in their mature poems, so far as I can see, although I have no statistics for this, and they always used them with purpose. There was never any doubt of their control of syntax and we can be confident their use of inversion is deliberate and justified. This has rarely been the case with the most of the inversions we see in Eratosphere, often lazily wrenched to fit the rhyme or meter, and I think the caution should stand

Alicia,

what a wonderful idea for a "mastery" thread. Thank you.

This topic has preoccupied me since I first started posting, when I discovered to my horror that any expression which did not conform precisely with spoken custom was likely to be judged not only a perversion, but a most unsavoury one.

And still, any variation in standard prose syntax or diction on TDE will invariably draws negative comment from most responders.

Of course such variations are a danger, especially for novices. But what we seem to have at present is an almost global feeling on the board that all "perversions" are wicked, and must not be allowed. And so poetical puritanism reigns, where nothing but the cleanest phrases and most proper grammar are permitted. As you say, the catch-phrase of opprobrium is: "would we say it like that in everyday speech?"

There is nothing at all wrong with the "plain style", as you say, and I use it mostly myself; but when it becomes the only "correct" mode, a great deal of poetic potential is lost.

It drives me loopy; but I ask you, given this situation, why should not this old man be mad?




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

Alicia, I am probably one of the most insistent "natural language, please!" type of critics. This was a much needed correction, for I see that slight inversions may serve a purpose. But the purpose it serves should still - in my never so humble eyes - never be that of riming. It should rather be to follow Strunk&White 's dictum that, within the larger syntacical unit, the most important word, phrase and sentence should always come last. ( rule 22 )

------------------
Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )

Meanwhile had spread in the village the tidings of ill, and on all sides
Wandered, wailing, from house to house the women and children.

This is a couplet from Longfellow's Evangeline. He uses a great deal of inversion in this poem and it always seems appropriate because essentially it's a poem about homelessness and helplessness, about people who are have no control over their destinies. So here first the tidings spread, and then, haphazardly and aimlessly, the women and children follow. Putting the verb before the subject seems to emphasise the fact that they are not performers in any active sense.

There's another interesting example at the very beginning of the poem:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

There's a curious ambiguity in the last two lines here: "… and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest." The poet could be using inversion, in which case it is the ocean that speaks and the forest that answers; or he could be adopting standard syntax, in which case the ocean answers the wail of the forest. It may not be a deliberate ambiguity but it does seem to contribute to the mood of uncertainty in the poem as a whole. It raises the question whether there's a genuine dialogue between the ocean and forest, or whether there's just a meaningless exchange of echoes. And the poem as a whole is full of echoes - it's no accident that the most famous lines in it are a description of the mocking-bird's song.

Dylan Thomas skirts inversion--nearly but not quite:
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

"When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good, you will not." —Yoda, Return of the Jedi

Julie Stoner

(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.



------------------
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.



------------------
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.




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

Richard,

De gustibus indeed. One would hardly object to inversions in Whitman – if one takes him one takes the whole kit and caboodle , the sensation of being carried away, as by a tornado or a flood tide, either inspired or inflated, but we are unlikely to find him a useful model for all sorts of reasons. It is probably pointless to try to justify (or otherwise) the past, particularly the very much past, use of inversions in otherwise successful poems as a guide to current practice. In my view there is a case to be made for NEVER using them, and also a case for their occasional use (my position, more or less) if done really well, but NO case to be made for their wholesale and unconsidered use. So far as I know most if not all of us contributing to this discussion are more or less agreed on that.

Mark,

Quote:

“This example very much proves my point: “

Which example? The one I gave? This seems to me a classic case of begging the question, Mark, as you haven’t justified that line at all. It proves the opposite, so far as I am concerned.

Quote:

“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.”

“Perversions” was perhaps an unfortunate phrase, in that you may have taken it literally and it has now given rise to your claim that inversions are thought “wicked” and “sinful” and accuse anyone who objects to them of intolerance and “knee-jerk reactions.” Quasi-religious terms like this are inappropriate for what is really a matter on which readers will make up their minds whatever you or I say. In general, even with the ordinary reader (or should that be non-reader nowadays?) Poetry goes through periods of artificiality and periodic readjustments to contemporary speech. Perhaps it needs more artificiality now, but not the tired inversions of the past. Regarding criticism of poems using inversions on the boards here, it is common for such pieces to contain other faults as well, an allover whiff of the fustian, so it would be difficult to give any sort of general absolution to their use.

Quote:

“If Hardy needs to secure his rhymes by twisting syntax, why aren't all of his poems like this?”

Who knows? Can we use his other poems to justify this one? In fact, what has Hardy got to do with this discussion at all? Is even Larkin’s poem, "At Grass" quoted above and written fifty-four years ago, particularly relevant to the use of inversion in the year 2005? It is very much to Larkin’s credit as a poet that we still think of him as contemporary, and I am sure nobody would object to his use of inversion here, but care must be taken in using the past as precedent. How far are you prepared to go?

Yes, Whitman is kind of like Milton, sui generis & not a useful model for others. Still, taken as a line of tetrameter,

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed

is such a strong, musical line, it would be hard to object to on "inversion" grounds in any poem, contemporary or ancient. (RPW did not present the title as an instance of inversion, but it serves my purpose.) Quality trumps fashion. It's when they show up in weak lines (i.e., usually) that inversions seem repugnantly "poetical" & perhaps a contributing cause of weakness & therefore to be eschewed.

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?

Who knows -- but if the answer were obvious, the struggle wouldn't be very interesting.

AE said:
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?

AE,
I think the answer is obvious. Musicians (classical) suffer no pangs about drawing on all periods of creativity. Performers move effortlessly through various centuries and forms and composers too make use of anything within their experience, regardless of time, nationality or original purpose.

I find poets are amazingly inhibited and self conscious and too ready to complain about something that breaks some piece of early toilet training. I actually believe that a true poet is driven by need and that the rest is a technical exercise.

In other words I advocate a little less talk and a lot more writing and reading for most poets who emerge from the factory-farms of our various education systems.
best wishes,
Janet

Janet –

Do musicians (classical) “draw on” all periods?. Surely they simply perform music of different periods – they are not creative artists but performing ones. – It is true that performers move through all centuries and forms, or some of them do. We still wish to hear the great composers of the past performed , but we would not find much necessity for a contemporary composer who wrote in the style of Bach, even if he seemed almost as good. This is not to say that poets or composers of music cannot constantly seek inspiration in the past, but this does not mean tacking on antique mannerisms or “twiddley bits” to give a “graceful” air. Why should we, when we have the creative and brilliant originals? Musicians (jazz) certainly play music from the past (and the distant past for them was more or less the 1920s) but in a completely different style, and they do not improvise in the same way, harmonically or rhythmically. If they do it is simply regarded as “tourist” stuff to be performed in waistcoats and straw boaters. We don’t need “heritage centre” poetry. AE makes a very good point (among many) that we cannot behave as if modernism never existed and that it is difficult to use forms that have been extensively mocked.

Back later Oliver but composers like John Tavener and Australia's Ross Edwards manage to take what they need from whenever and don't crouch in fear of fashion.
And performers are channellers who often also compose or write. Many good playwrights were actors etc.
Jazz is there for those who live it and take from it as Stravinsky did.
The barriers are as great as our own intimacy with various forms and our need to use them.
Each one of us has arrived at this point via a different route and we make our own judgements.
IMHO;)

I have to do the dishes and it's nearly midnight but I didn't advocate twiddly bits or shallowness. I don't think that writing for expression through sound is necessarily that although many would disagree. Honest use of gestures that come naturally is all I advocate and some readers are too keen to judge the motives of those who experience poetry via sound. Originality takes many guises. An inversion for instance can be like a lunge of the heart. Expressive effects depend on the skill of the user I'm sure you'd agree.
Modern work will always sound of its time no matter what it tries to do. We are who we are and we live now. A pale imitation will be that whether it's imitating Marvell or Jorie Graham.
Janet
PS Oliver,
Cinderella has done the dishes and has missed her pumpkin (it's 12:39am)

There are various honest ways to treat the past in music--Prokofiev did it and Richard Strauss's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Ravel did it beautifully without being arch or pompous or unspontaneous. because of recent poverty and marginalisation I'm not as up with things as I used to be. Jazz players tend to be rather old nowadays but I heard a superb Norwegian group of cool jazz artists (radio broadcast) and they were completely modern and sparse and beautiful and could easily call themselves classical. I can't remember their name alas.

I don't know quite how I would use older models in poetry except as a memory of what can be achieved. A sense of lightness or largeness. Structure that can embody content. So much modern poetry seems to add on structure or content rather than fuse them.

I'm not advocating imitation, but rather a use of their essence when it seems right. As for "extensively mocked". That never stopped me before ;) I would have to feel a great deal of respect for the mockers and even then I might ignore them.
And now I must stagger to bed.
g'night.
Janet


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 09, 2005).]

I think I know whose woods these are,
But his house is in the village.

Jan,
I like that. What's it from?
Janet

Janet, read:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;

Would you like this better?


Cheers,

------------------
Ralph

Ralph
I know whose woods these are, I think.
His house is in the village, but.

(Australian idiom tacks "but" instead of "though" onto the end of sentences.)
cheers indeed,
Janet

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

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.


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Source

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).]