[A. E. Stallings]

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.

[Tim Love]

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?

[Henry Quince]

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).]

[Roger Slater]

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.

[oliver murray]

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

[Mark Allinson]

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?




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Mark Allinson

[Svein Olav Nyberg]

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 )

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Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )

[Gregory Dowling]

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.

[Janet Kenny]

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.

[Julie Steiner]

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

Julie Stoner