Reading poetry

By Peter Barry

Witty, direct and articulate, Peter Barry illustrates the key elements of poetry at work, covering many different kinds of verse, from traditional forms to innovative versions of the art, such as ‘concrete’ poetry, minimalism and word-free poems. The emphasis is on meanings rather than words, looking beyond technical devices like alliteration and assonance so that poems are understood as dynamic structures creating specific ends and effects.

The three sections cover progressively expanding areas – ‘Reading the lines’ deals with such basics as imagery, diction and metre; ‘Reading between the lines’ concerns broader matters, such as poetry and context, and the reading of sequences of poems, while ‘Reading beyond the lines’ looks at ‘theorised’ readings and the ‘textual genesis’ of poems from manuscript to print.

Reading poetry is for students, lecturers and teachers looking for new ways of discussing poetry, and all those seriously interested in poetry, whether as readers or writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526111760

Peter Barry

Peter Barry serves as principal engineer in the Intel Embedded & Communications Group. He has worked in the development of embedded systems for over twenty years in Intel, Basic Communications, Nortel Networks and Tellabs, working with processors from Z80, 68K, PowerPC, ARM, XScale and Intel architecture systems. He is an expert in embedded operating systems and embedded platforms, and has developed board support packages for proprietary RTOS, pSOS, VxWorks, WinCE and Linux. He has developed protocol stacks and applications primarily for data communications and telecommunications and industrial applications.

Book preview

Introduction: ‘One small step’

The words spoken, or at least popularly supposed to have been spoken, by the first person to set foot on the surface of the moon were ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’. The utterance is a vivid encapsulation of a significant moment, and its simple yet powerful language is made memorable by the arrangement of the words into a strong pattern of contrast and emphasis. Further, the formal tone seems to match the solemnity and significance of the occasion. If Neil Armstrong had simply punched the air (or whatever is up there) and shouted ‘Made it!’, or something similar, we would surely not feel that this significant moment had been given its definitive expression. In other words, what Armstrong said, brief though it was, was a poem.

If we try to spell out exactly how it works as a poem, we will touch upon five fundamental aspects of poetry which are considered in the five chapters in Part I of this book. The first chapter is called ‘Meaning’, and perhaps the meaning of Armstrong’s words seems obvious at first, but not quite so obvious when pondered with the close attention that poetry demands. For instance, the speaker modestly effaces himself from the utterance – he doesn’t say ‘One small step for me’, but ‘One small step for man’, because the step was made by the many thousands of people who contributed to the enterprise, even though it had to be taken by a single individual. So the meaning expressed isn’t quite so simple after all, as it combines a due sense of personal humility with an understandable feeling of personal and collective pride. The second chapter is called ‘Imagery’, and Armstrong’s use of the image of leaping allows him to say a good deal in a brief sentence. Instead of having to spell out the difference between a small individual achievement and a huge collective advance, the utterance merely contrasts the taking of a (small) step and the making of a (large) leap. The image couldn’t be simpler or more familiar, but it is lifted out of the commonplace by the balance and precision of the language – that is, by the nature of the diction, which is the subject of the third chapter. We note that the ‘step’ in question is literally the act of stepping onto the surface of the moon, but the ‘leap’ is metaphorical, and the choice of this word is a way of emphasising how the moon-landing is a major advance of the technological kind. Further, the rhythm of the utterance seems to strengthen and enhance it, which brings us to ‘Metre’, the subject of the fourth chapter. Thus, we notice that the stress pattern of ‘one giant leap’ seems to reproduce that of ‘One small step’, with three fully stressed words being used in each case. Likewise, the endings of each half of the utterance (that is, ‘for man’, in the first half, and ‘for mankind’ in the second) contain a rhythmic echoing of the first phrase by the second. But this time we notice also that the echo is not exact, since ‘for mankind’ has three syllables whereas ‘for man’ has only two. However, this lack of total acoustic symmetry is not a defect – rather the opposite, in fact, for if the first echo (of ‘One small step’ by ‘one giant leap’) is perfect, it is better that the second (of ‘for man’ by ‘for mankind’) should not quite be so. This is because ‘performed language’ (such as poems, or speeches, or proclamations) needs elements of surprise and variation as well as elements of predictability. The last chapter in the first part of the book is entitled ‘Form’, and this too is a crucial element in the Armstrong example. What is said is carefully shaped into a symmetrical, mirror-like pattern, so that each word in the first half is paralleled or contrasted with a word in the corresponding position in the second half, like this:

Thus, ‘small’ contrasts with ‘giant’, ‘step’ with ‘leap’ and ‘man’ with ‘mankind’, and the second item in each of these pairings suggests, not the just the next stage of progression, but several stages beyond the first. So, ‘small’ is not contrasted merely with ‘large’, but with ‘giant’, and ‘step’ isn’t followed by (for instance) a mere ‘stride’, but by a ‘leap’. Overall, then, the whole utterance is tightly bound together into a satisfying whole by its skilful use of a range of poetic devices, and these are the devices that are explored in detail in Part I of the book.

When we consider the context of the moonwalk utterance, some intriguing issues are raised. For instance, we know that Neil Armstrong was the speaker of the words, but were they composed and scripted in advance (by himself or others), or spoken spontaneously under the inspiration and excitement of the moment? If the former is the case (as seems likely), it leaves open the question of whether Armstrong wrote the script himself, or was speaking words composed for him by somebody else. In fact, what Armstrong said and didn’t say on that memorable occasion was heavily influenced by a highly specific set of circumstances. It is surprising, for instance, that though he was a deeply religious man, his moonwalk statement is broadly humanist rather than Christian. To understand why, we have to know something about the context of the moonwalk broadcast. In 1961, when Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first person to travel into outer space, he reportedly said ‘I don’t see any God up here’ (according to a speech made by the Soviet President of the day, Nikita Krushchev). American astronauts were keen to counter this anti-religious pronouncement, so in a TV broadcast from Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968, three of them read aloud from the Book of Genesis. As a consequence, the US government was sued for an alleged violation of the First Amendment, on the grounds that astronauts were government employees and should not be promulgating religion in the workplace. The Supreme Court declined to rule, on the modest grounds that its jurisdiction did not extend to outer space, but the case caused widespread controversy, and NASA did not want a repetition. So at least one aspect of Armstrong’s actual feelings are repressed rather than expressed in his statement, as a study of the context makes clear. Knowing about this item of contextual information certainly affects our sense of the ultimate significance of the ‘poem’, as is often the case.

A poem usually passes through various stages of development as it evolves towards its final form during the composition process. In the case of Armstrong’s ‘poem’, there is no known manuscript source, so the surviving audio-tapes of the event must be taken as its equivalent moment of origin. Listening to these might suggest that the more correct wording would be ‘One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind’.¹ The supporting evidence includes the fact that this version of the text actually makes better sense than the well known official version, for, strictly speaking, the text in its familiar form seems to contradict itself. It doesn’t really make sense to say that the moon landing is a small step for ‘man’, without the indefinite article, since ‘man’ in the first half of the statement often means (or meant then) ‘humans in general’, which is the same thing as ‘mankind’ in the second half. With the ‘a’ inserted, ‘a man’ just means the individual who is speaking the words, as he takes the small step from the space capsule onto the lunar surface. Studying the audio-tape of the utterance, then, closely parallels the way a scrutiny of the manuscript of a familiar poem will often reveal details which are difficult to square with the ‘received’ or established view of a poem. Going back to the manuscript is like going back to the generative moment of the poem, to the poem-before-the-poem, as we might call it.

This discussion may have made Armstrong’s words a little more difficult to understand fully than is usually assumed to be the case, but I hope that it has also made them seem more interesting. A great deal of discussion about poetry is almost exclusively preoccupied with the question of difficulty, and I should say something on this matter at the start. One of the aims of this book is to show that the meanings of poems (in spite of what some poets sometimes say) are hardly ever deliberately or deviously hidden, nor are they usually encrypted in poetic devices like assonance or alliteration. Of course, the full meaning is not usually apparent on first reading, and is more likely to emerge only gradually, as we read and re-read the poem, and begin to perceive an overall shape and pattern. Thus, the discussion of Armstrong’s words required meticulous attention to the details of the language, but no arcane concepts were used, and nothing was cited as evidence which could not be seen in the patterns of the words by any fully attentive reader. But the pattern may well be missed if we have developed over-ingenious habits of mind and interpretation, perhaps in response to pressure from teachers or tutors.

For poetic meaning is, more often than not, placed in full view, like the missing letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneering 1844 detective story ‘The Purloined Letter’. In the story, the letter is not actually hidden at all, but is openly displayed on the mantelpiece. Because the ‘lost’ letter has been placed, as if carelessly, exactly where you would expect a letter to be, it cannot be found by those who are desperately searching for it. They have assumed that something so precious must have been elaborately concealed, so they do not think to open the apparently unimportant letter which the occupant of the room has not even bothered to hide. In Poe’s tale, the recovery of the stolen letter is a matter of the highest priority, because dire consequences for the state will follow from the disclosure of its contents. So the police make a highly methodical and elaborate search of the entire apartment during the occupant’s absence, dismantling furniture, tapping and feeling for disguised cavities in the walls, and so on. In the same way as the letter in the story remains invisible because it is not hidden, so the meanings and effects of poems may be rendered invisible to readers if they assume that all clues about poetic significance must have been ingeniously hidden somewhere deep within the grammatical patterns, phonetic structures, or metrical devices of the text. So readers will set about such arcane activities as dismantling the metrical feet (just as all the chair legs are unscrewed and examined in ‘The Purloined Letter’) to see if any important fragments of signification have by any chance been concealed inside them. Poe himself said quite clearly in his exemplary tale what was wrong with this approach to the detection of meaning – he said that it is pretty well incapacitated by its over-ingenuity.

I can best illustrate the misguided nature of this kind of poetry interpretation by using a second non-poetic example. In April 2010 the Belgian insurance company ‘Fortis’ changed its name to ‘ageas’. ‘Ageas’ is not an acronym, nor is it a word in any European language, so the firm issued a press statement explaining the meaning of its new name. The ‘a’ and the ‘g’ in ‘ageas’, it said, ‘celebrate the roots’ of the company, which was founded as AG Leven in 1824; the ‘e’ and the ‘a’ in the middle refer to its two key markets, Europe and Asia; the ‘as’ at the end stands for ‘assurance’; and the absence of capital letters in the new name ‘heightens the sense of unity within our group’ and shows that ‘we don’t want to force our opinions on anyone’.² The statement adds that ‘like our group, the name ageas is more than the sum of its parts: it derives from the Latin word "agere", meaning action, drive, and a conviction to forge ahead’. So, understanding the meaning of this new brand-name requires the word to be broken up into its constituent letters of the alphabet, to which various meanings are then assigned. It seems a bizarre way of reading a word, and an even more bizarre way of composing a communication.

And yet, is it any more bizarre than the practices which are routinely recommended in books about how to read poetry? Many years ago, in a piece called ‘The Enactment Fallacy’, I noted a recurrent tendency in criticism to assume that, in poetry, ‘elements of the sound patterning (especially alliteration and assonance, rhyme and rhythm) are directly related to meaning, to which, ideally, they offer implicit support by enacting or miming or embodying the sense’.³ Thus, a critic writing of a poem by Thomas Hardy cited as evidence for a particular way of reading it ‘the limitless freedom of the vowel in sky’. I quite agreed, then as now, that mentioning the sky could be a way of suggesting the notion of ‘limitless freedom’, but I think it silly to believe that the vowel sound has anything to do with it.

It was a relief, therefore, to discover that the issue of these supposed poetic ‘enactments’ of sense by sound has been hotly debated since at least the eighteenth century. In a passage in his literary-critical essay in verse entitled An Essay on Criticism (1711), Alexander Pope declares that, in poetry, ‘The sound must seem an echo to the sense’ (line 365). Pope, it should be noted, merely says that the sound must ‘seem an echo to the sense’, not ‘be an echo to the sense’, a concession which the modern critics I quoted in the article never make. All the same, Dr Samuel Johnson, the most eminent critic of his day, took issue with Pope in his journal The Rambler (no. 92, from 1751), disputing the reality of these supposed sound-sense effects. He returns to the matter in issue 94, with the conclusion that ‘it is scarcely to be doubted, that on many occasions we make the music which we imagine ourselves to hear, that we modulate the poem by our own disposition, and ascribe to the numbers [that is, the rhythm and the metrical devices] the effects of the sense’.⁴ I believe that he is right, and that the main effect of recommending this approach in teaching poetry is to convince most people that they can never be poetry readers. One aim of this book, then, is to show that we do not have to tune into phonetic bat-squeaks from the hinterlands of language in order to read and appreciate a poem. Poetry readers do not have to acquire the techniques of the Bletchley Park code-breakers of the Second World War, because poets do not encode their meanings in that way.

I would not wish to give the impression that my own teachers encouraged such over-ingenious methods of interpretation and response to poetry, and that I am now rebelling against them. On the contrary, I am trying in this book to do as the best of them did. I remember prompts and interventions which helped me a great deal, but were light in touch. For example, one teacher would merely suggest that we might want to look again at a particular line, or would advise us to think about whether any other possible meanings might have existed, at the time the poem was written, for a particular word or phrase we had picked out as significant. And, to be honest, I don’t recall any good teacher or lecturer ever saying much at all about alliteration or assonance, or even metrical feet. They were perfectly informative when a specific question about such technical matters was put to them, but they never foregrounded those things, and, above all, they never gave the impression that that was where the true worth or essence of poetry lay. A limited amount of such knowledge, I concluded, will go quite a long way.

Another received and long-embedded view about poetry is the notion that its language is always characterised by precision and exactness, in contrast to the language of everyday usage, which is regarded as merely vague or approximate. It is said that amateur poets are fond of the word ‘shard’, and that judges of poetry competitions can expect to encounter it frequently. The same object might be described in a more round-about way as a broken bit of pottery, or a splinter of glass, or (if metaphorical) as the shattered remnants of, for example, a dream or an illusion. But shard is more compressed, and has an air of technical precision about it, giving the impression (which many seem to want to create) that the user is someone who chooses words with finicky exactness. My own feeling is usually that if a word in a poem draws unique attention to itself for any reason (including its precision, or its dazzling aptness), then there may well be something wrong with it, because all the words in a poem should be working together to produce an integrated effect, not (so to speak) putting on an individual display. In practice, vagueness and precision in poetry are friends, not enemies, and the words of a poem are just a means, not an end in themselves. When a poem achieves what Houston calls lift-off, we should hardly be conscious at all of the words as words – they should seem to fall away, like the launch-gantry as a rocket takes off. Words are simply the devices which enable the poem to enter the stratosphere of meaning and effect. It isn’t necessary for poetry readers to feel emotional about words as such, to ‘love words’, as it is often put. Actually, I never quite know what people mean when they say this. It seems rather like professing to love wheels or engines, rather than just enjoying cars and where they can take us. This book is not a manual for poem-mechanics – it is about enjoying poems and where they can take us.

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1 See James R. Hansen’s First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (Simon and Schuster, 2005). Armstrong told Hansen that others have pointed out that he can often be heard dropping vowels from his speech in his radio transmissions.

2 Independent, Business Diary, 11 March 2010; and Observer, 14 March 2010, p. 46, www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/14/fortis-rebranding-ageas-insurancebusiness.

3 Peter Barry, ‘The Enactment Fallacy’, Essays in Criticism, 30 / 2, April 1980, pp. 95–104.

4 For further discussion, see Richard Terry, ‘The Sound Must Seem an Eccho to the Sense: An Eighteenth-Century Controversy Revisited’, Modern Language Review, 94 / 4, October 1999, pp. 940–54.

Part I. Reading the lines

1. Meaning

Ironing

I used to iron everything:

my iron flying over sheets and towels

like a sledge chased by wolves over snow,

the flex twisting and crinking

until the sheath frayed, exposing

wires like nerves. I stood like a horse

with a smoking hoof,

inviting anyone who dared

to lie on my silver padded board,

to be pressed to the thinness

of dolls cut from paper.

I’d have commandeered a crane

if I could, got the welders at Jarrow

to heat me an iron the size of a tug

to flatten the house.

Then for years I ironed nothing.

I put the iron in a high cupboard.

I converted to crumpledness.

And now I iron again: shaking

dark spots of water onto wrinkled

silk, nosing into sleeves, round

buttons, breathing the sweet heated smell

hot metal draws from newly-washed

cloth, until my blouse dries

to a shining, creaseless blue,

an airy shape with room to push

my arms, breasts, lungs, heart into.

Vicki Feaver

As we read this poem, we probably sense immediately that it can’t just be about ironing. Without the feeling that poems often mean more than they seem at first to say, there would not be very much in poetry to ponder and enjoy. But what is it that creates in the reader’s mind the feeling that a poem is also, and often even primarily, about something other than its stated or foregrounded subject? Sometimes it will be a conviction that develops only gradually as the poem goes on, but in the case of this one, we already seem to be beyond ironing by the end of the first stanza. The two opening lines are a literal comment on doing the ironing – they could be dropped into casual conversation without sounding too odd – but the third line would sound strange in a chat with a friend about domestic routines. For the line ‘like a sledge chased by wolves over snow’ is fundamentally different in vividness and intensity from any formulation which might be used in casual conversation – yes, we can still see in that phrase the ironing board with a white sheet on it, and the iron sliding up and down along it, but it has been metaphorically transformed, the sliding iron into a sledge, and the white sheet into a snowy landscape. In many poems, the transformative use of metaphor marks the transition point, the moment when the act or object being described gathers new associations or connotations and starts to mean something else, or, more often, something else as well.

For instance, there are added elements, such as the chasing wolves, which don’t seem to be the metaphorical equivalent of anything we can immediately see in the simple domestic scene of the iron and the ironing board. But with the mention of wolves, the hint of an alien, feral world has broken into the domestic calm, and the ironing begins to seem linked into some kind of compulsive obsession. The implication is that the familiar domestic activity is driven by fear of some imagined (perhaps even imaginary) external force. So now it is impossible to iron fast enough to stay ahead of the baying wolf-pack, no matter how desperately the sledge-pulling huskies are whipped in an effort to make them go faster. We are so frantic now that the harnesses are twisted and frayed, like the flex of the iron, and the nerves exposed and jangling. Then the ironing seems to become even more fraught, and the iron becomes the iron-shod hoof of a snorting horse which will trample anyone who gets in its way – now everything is going to be flattened, the whole house, even, if there is an iron as big as a tug boat to do it. So this seems now a ‘macho’ form of ironing, ironing on an industrial scale, which amounts to a kind of frenzied climax in which the whole world is to be steam-ironed into submission. And then the grip of the addictive compulsion is suddenly broken, and now the only way to stay sane is to do no ironing at all – to iron nothing, to put the very implement beyond use in a high cupboard, and to convert ‘to crumpledness’, as the only cure for the opposing addiction to flattenedness. But the obsessive ironer, who now irons nothing, rather than just ironing a few selected things, fearful that the mere taste of ironing will be enough to bring back the addiction, must still be an obsessive ironer at heart. So evidence that the addiction is cured arrives only at the final stage, when the speaker comes back to ironing, but now in a different mood – relaxed, sensuous, appreciative – with the external, alien, pressurising force gone. Rather than being driven and frantic, the activity is now enjoyed for what it is, and the result is fulfilling, giving a sense of air, space and self-realisation.

So have we ‘paraphrased’ the poem here? In a way, yes, of course, for the frequently encountered view that poems are by nature unparaphrasable is a poetry-reading shibboleth which needs to be broken. But it’s not exactly paraphrasing, of course, for what we have been doing is more like a process of talking to oneself about the poem, talking oneself through the poem, or alongside it, and putting it into ‘our own’ words as we go. I don’t know of any substitute for this, and I often start doing it before I’m sure I understand the poem. Then I find that, as I do, I am drifting into understanding as the ‘talk back’ process goes on. It is valuable, and recommended, because it makes the reader active rather than passive in the reading process, as poetry readers need to be. Here, we have certainly ‘re-said’ the