New poem explained

There's a new poem over at frankenstina. I wrote it this morning, after a brief foray to hang out the washing before the next batch of rain arrived (it came on time too). In case anyone is interested/critical/thinks I haven't noticed, I feel the need to explain what I was trying to do - though in fact that's not entirely true: I wrote it, then read it over and recognised what I had done more or less unconsciously as I strove to convey what I had seen and heard - and felt.

The first stanza is deliberately irregular, with erratic enjambement and random rhythms to echo the strangeness of a garden that in the recent warm and sunny weather had blossomed prodigiously and grown calm and lush. This morning it looked decidedly ruffled and awkward - hence the structure. The repetition of "light" and "lights" not an oversight, but is a deliberate play on the different meanings of the word. The reversion to a four-beat regular metre seems to reflect both the calm of other climes and the acceptance of the weather that is more common for us - and came, I suspect, as a by-product of that acceptance.

Must be the real deal then...

Enjambement - again

Thought I'd indulge myself with a post about enjambement. Not much chance of a wide readership for this one, but I must be missing the classroom or something.

The poem referred to in the previous post, R.S.Thomas' "Evans", uses enjambement in what I would recognise as two different modes. The start of the poem tells how the poet recalled his leaving of the sick man's house, and here the enjambement suggests an almost breathless haste, as if the visiting vicar, "appalled" at his failure to help the man in any way, cannot wait to be outside again.
Evans? Yes, many a time
I came down his bare flight
Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen
With its wood fire, where crickets sang
Accompaniment to the black kettle's
Whine, and so into the cold
Dark......

However, there is also the prominence of the words which start the lines: accompaniment, whine, dark - and "dark" is used here as a noun, as Thomas goes on to talk about "the dark/ silting the veins of that sick man", a dark that the light of faith cannot alleviate. A complex poem reflecting on the failure of a complex man to fulfil his secondary calling - that of priest - in the language that Thomas saw as his one refuge from a world "glib with prose."

As he grew older, Thomas used this device even more starkly, as here, from "Launching a Prayer":
The stripling posturing
before the hero;
the mature man
posturing before

God.

Here, the stanza break (this is a three stanza poem) emphasises, builds up to the word "God" - and Thomas always thought of God with awe.

I'd like to look briefly at favourite examples of enjambement from two other poets - my response to sorlil's comment yesterday. The first is from Norman McaCaig's "Visiting Hour". The poet, on his way to visit an apparently dying woman in hospital, writes:
I will not feel, I will not
feel, until
I have to.
Read that aloud and the jaw-clenching self-control is brought out by the marking of the line breaks as much as by the repetition of the words "will not feel".

Similarly, in T.S.Eliot's great poem "Journey of the Magi", one of the "wise men" who sought the infant Christ looks back over his life at that momentous journey so long ago.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?
As the old man dictates to a scribe, his hesitation as he searches for words to express his bafflement are there in the enjambement, along with the repetition that underlines his determination to convey his overwhelming question.

Great. It took me such a long time to realise this, but it was worth the wait. A final thought for the educators out there: it's when you're really fired up by something you teach, as I am by poetry of this calibre, that the magic happens. There is this awesome responsibilty not to let the poet down by your teaching - death by a thousand cuts to the teacher who cares not! I'll give R.S Thomas the last say on such moments:
But here once on an evening like this,
in the darkness that was about
his hearers, a preacher caught fire
and burned steadily before them.....
(The Chapel)

Enjambement and R.S. Thomas

I'm reading Byron Rogers' new (2006) biography of R.S. Thomas, and though I've not quite reached the end and want to say more about the book as a biography, I've just read a fascinating, and to me exciting, section where Thomas is quoted on the development of his writing style during his last ministry in Aberdaron, where, as Thomas said, "My poetry underwent a change of style"..."I broke up the lines..." He mentioned in a letter "some people ...still nit-picking about my so-called lack of form"and goes on :"I wish they'd catch up."

His explanation of what he was about makes an immediate impression on me. "When I write, I'm listening with an inner ear to the way it sounds. I build the poem up like that. And if there's a word too many, it goes into the next line. But the thing is that I never really wrote them to be read out loud. There's a contradiction here: they may look artificial on the page, but they must sound right..."

The reason for my excitement about this? Ever since the Chrismas holiday of 1987, when, charged with making up the Practical Criticism paper for the Higher English Prelim exam, I chose Thomas' poem "Evans" as the text, I have been an avid reader of his poetry. Analysing that one poem in order to set questions on it drew me into a world where I felt at home, and influenced the style in which I would begin to write seriously. I didn't think about it at the time, but if you immerse yourself sufficiently in a poet's work, it obviously has an effect. And years later, when people had begun to read my stuff, I was asked why I used enjambement in the way I did.

My answer reflected, I now learn, the reaction of Byron Rogers to Thomas' poems: the run-overs (as he calls them) allow you to emphasise the words which come at the beginning of a line. Because I had no teacher, no mentor with me to discuss my writing, I felt shaken in this knowledge when others - including Edwin Morgan - asked me if this was something I really wanted to do. The implied answer was usually "no" - and for a while I have dabbled with metre and rhythm in a way which irritates me. Suddenly, I feel liberated.

Why am I writing this now? Because it pleases me to record it. An epiphany on the eve of Epiphany. And I'll be back on R.S.T. later .....