I've been reading and thoroughly enjoying Michael Schmidt's LIVES OF THE POETS, and came across a passage about George Herbert (love his stuff) that I wish I'd written. In my responses to various poems, I often find myself desiring less metaphor, and I've urged many writers to do without it. In Schmidt's words on Herbert, here's why:
"The colloquial tone of the best poems is sustained by an undecorated diction. "Jordan (i)" advocates plainness, though in itself it is so complex that it is at odds with its statement. In general Herbert rejects verses that 'burnish, sprout and swell,/Curling with metaphors.' His imagery includes stars, trees, food, wine--each with symbolic value but a firm literal sense. Object begin as themselves, then cast a shadow beyond themselves, tracing a pattern of grace."
This is an excellent statement of how literal detail acquires larger, metaphorical significance, and why I prefer poems and poets whose attentions focus on literal expression, even when in a lyric mode.
"In The Desert" by Stephen Crane shows precise, unadorned literal depiction as it develops a single, symbolic image.
In The Desert
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter--bitter," he answered,
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
This poem has three adjectives, one of them repeated three times. Every noun/verb phrase portrays literal action, though clearly the scenario is imaginative. Each line moves the expression forward in an essential and suprising increment. The result is something quite strange, a truly monstrous revelation whose truth is not a comfort, whose beauty is unsparing, ruthless.
In some of his greatest short poems, Wallace Stevens takes an even more austere approach. In "Crude Foyer" he begins by eschewing image as well as metaphor, so as a concrete noun or figurative phrase arises, the rhetoric amplifies the task of depiction in language as one based in thought--in a way of thinking about the world.
Crude Foyer
Thought is false happiness: the idea
That merely by thinking one can,
Or may, penetrate, not may,
But can, that one is sure to be able--
That there lies at the end of thought
A foyer of the spirit in a landscape
Of the mind, in which we sit
And wear humanity's bleak crown;
In which we read the critique of paradise
And say it is the work
Of a comedian, this critique;
In which we sit and breath
An innocence of an absolute,
False happiness, since we know that we use
Only the eye as faculty, that the mind
Is the eye, and that this landscape of the mind
Is a landscape only of the eye; and that
We are ignorant men incapable
Of the least, minor, vital metaphor, content,
At last, there, when it turns out to be here.
As I understand Stevens, he is asking for something similar to William Blake, seeing "through the eye, not with it." His poem is a meditation on the limits of meditation itself "in which we sit and breath//An innocence of an absolute,/False, happiness..." His terms are simple and directly composed within each phrase but arranged in a slowly accumulating grammatical complex, as the poem moves through its argument that poetry is a kind of "new knowledge of reality"--a recognitition of being, rather than a florid expression of personal cleverness. The deep, unwilled metaphor surrounds us, rendering our own contrivances puny.
The examples of Stevens and Crane are both free verse poems, while Herbert as a 17th century poet wrote formal, metrical poems, and the issue of austerity isn't limited to a particular form or verse style. In any mode of writing, the quality of attention to language, bringing that language to bear upon human experience as directly and deeply as possible, makes a poem.
|
Threaded Mode
