In an earlier post, on John Dryden's "Marriage a-la-Mode", I mentioned Dryden's and William Blake's use of specific metric devices to convey meaning. It is a sort of meta-onomatopoeia.
I mentioned that in the fifth line of "Marriage a-la-Mode", Dryden alternated between iambs and anapests because starting as two and adding a third syllable to the foot echoed the argument of the poem--that of movement from a married couple on to a relationship with a third person.
And I mentioned that in Blake's "The Tyger", he employed a line that was a catalectic trochaic tetrameter. The point of the end-catalexis was to impose a sudden brevity on the line. The famous first line, "Tyger, tyger, burning bright", would be more grammatically correct as "Tyger, tyger, burning brightly", but see how different the line becomes. The double trochees set us up to expect the third foot to be a trochee, but lopping off that last syllable causes the last word to be intensely emphasized in the meter's abrupt truncation. It sears the final word, "bright", into the mind. It conveys a drumbeat of menace cut off in the wilderness, like a cry of fear that suddenly stops. The contrast is sharp and violent. The missing syllable is a silent shout of present absence. Blake chose the meter of the poem because it suits the content and the atmosphere of the poem. The word "bright" is not fraught. It can be a very positive word. But a "tyger" is a fierce creature, a symbol of power and menace. The repetition enforces the syncopation of the rhythm and emphasizes the tyger's presence. The word "burning" is another menace. The reader is threatened by tooth and talon, fang and claw, then immolation; "bright" refers back to the burning flames, high and hot and all-consuming, and to the orange of the tyger's coat. Peril is what we feel. But as T.S. Eliot said of the season that we are departing even now: "In the juvescence of the year / Came Christ the tiger." ["Gerontion", lines 19 and 20.] The tiger, in its power and beauty and danger, is an age-old symbol of Christ. And the Bible says of god, "for he is like a refiner's fire", an ancient metaphor in Abrahamic tradition (Malachi 3:2).
As Shakespeare's Polonius says, "brevity is the soul of wit". The limerick's short line supports a focus of attention and a feeling of quickness. If one can convey an idea complete in trimetric and dimetric lines, the very brevity seems to manifest wit. But galloping along with the brief dimeter/trimeter lines is a foot that is longer than the common two-syllable feet--dot-dot-daaash, dot-dot-daaash....It is a rollicking, rolling, waltzing rhythm. The limerick conveys a sense of wit and precipitous movement; the use of rhyme ties ideas together compactly. (That is the purpose of rhyme.) In extreme brevity, an idea is tied off and cut. The limerick with its dancing brevity is an ideal vehicle for ironic humor. It most easily conveys jocularity, but the close juxtaposition of ideas make it a play of thoughts or of puns. The strictness of the structure is closed and rigid, but the rhythm is the opposite, creating a formal internal dissonance. The packing of the component ideas so tightly together makes the verse pop like a kernel of corn in the mind of the listener/reader.
Form is not arbitrary. A serious poet weighs form before embarking on the work. Form, whether sonnet or limerick, blank verse or heroic couplet or free verse, must suit the poem, just as a fashion designer selects a fabric that will drape correctly for the design of a dress. This is one of the points I hope to explore in this blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment