A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
of the same length: the tomb is described (stanzas 1 and 2); the speaker's response and direct reflection are given (stanzas 2–5); general reflection on time, change, and endurance follows (stanzas 6–7). An act of observation and reflection on the part of the speaker is recorded, but that act is consistently impersonal (line 8: “the eye”; line 11: “one sees”; line 42: “us”). Order and consistency are embodied in technical aspects of the text. Each stanza contains six lines. All lines are eight syllables in length. The rhyme scheme is largely consistent (abbcac). Iambs and diambs dominate in the poem. All such features are appropriate in a text that celebrates traditional married love, unity in death, and the survival of a feudal and aristocratic past.
However, this poem is also a technically disordered piece. For example, while iambs and diambs dominate stanza 1, several other feet are prominent (amphibrachs and amphimacers). Lines 5 and 6 both end in four beat feet that can only be construed as diambs with some difficulty, and are best understood as fourth paeons (xxx/). In addition, foot divisions are uncertain at the ends of lines 2, 3, and 4. Are these amphimacers or in line 2 a single‐stress foot followed by an iamb, and in lines 3 and 4 trochees followed by single‐stressed feet? In a poem about unity, isolated single stresses carry a contestatory semantic weight, while in a poem about tradition and order, metrical irresolution is surely disruptive. In fact, several lines can only be scanned as iambic if the reader places the values of the metronome over natural speech, for example, stanza 3, line 5 and stanza 7, line 5. Further, the first lines of stanzas 6 and 7 both contain metrically monstrous feet: “at their identity” (xxx/xx) and “has transfigured them into” (xx/xxxx)—although other scansions are possible.
Further disorder can be seen in phonological patterning, which in this poem is always local, and in a rhyme scheme that does fracture on occasion, for example, the anisobaric rhymes in lines 10 and 12, and in lines 14 and 15. This is particularly clear in the last, seemingly triumphant stanza: lines 37 and 41 (“into / true”) and lines 38 and 39 (“fidelity / to be”). It is surely important that the concluding “love” does not actually rhyme fully with the preceding “prove.” In addition, in a poem celebrating unity, the persistent recurrence of enjambment (11 examples, plus the radical enjambment between stanzas 4 and 5) must disturb. One can also notice a further degree of uncertainty in the poem's puns: inter alia “proper habits” (line 3), “faithfulness in effigy” (line 14), and “blazon” (line 40). Paronomasia disrupts as much as enjambment: things are not what they seem.
Attention to technique reveals a much more ambiguous poem than a superficial reading brings. “Untruth” and disorder become as important as the survival of tradition and “love.” What appears as a celebration of tradition becomes something much more questioning and fragmentary. Are there other such monuments, English history incarnate, seemingly solid and unambiguous, that reveal themselves as complex and ambiguous?
Lee Harwood, “The Sinking Colony” (1968–1969) (Harwood 2004, 153–155)
Ambiguity in history is central to Harwood's poem. Title and epigraph enact the equivoque of the rest of the poem. What is the sinking colony? Is the end and insubstantial nature of empire announced by it? Why is the epigraph a quotation from a translation of André Gide's Les Faux‐monnayeurs? Is the factitious nature of any account signaled from the very start?
The poem itself is a designedly broken thing, the meaning of which—apart from brokenness—must remain unclear. It is divided into six sections. Sections 1, 2, 3, and 5 are in prose, without any obvious phonological or rhythmic patterning. A majority of sentences are without terminal punctuation (12 out of 21). Section 2 also contains three lines of broken verse (six noncohesive phrases, with a space between each of the first pair and the second pair). Section 4 consists of verse, but the lines are irregular in length (from 14 to 4 syllables) and in numbers of main stresses per line (from 7 to 2). It is very hard to see any traditional metrical patterning. The same is the case with the verse in section 6.
The speaker in the six sections is unstable: an “I” and a “we.” Although all sections have narrative elements, there is no coherent narrative over the whole poem, and any narrative in any single section is elliptical and incomplete. Section 1 is set in British India. Section 2 refers to mountains and foothills, but whether these are those of section 1 is not clear. Similarly, the rains mentioned in section 3 may or may not be Indian rains. Are mansion, crops, and rain in section 4 those of earlier sections? Are they Indian or English? Old or modern? Section 5 shifts unambiguously to another part of the Empire, to Canada, and to another kind of weather. Section 6 with its violence may follow on from section 5, although one cannot be sure. The gate recurs here, although it is hard to see why there is a gate in a Canadian clearing.
However, there are elements of coherence in the text. The verse is not quite as disordered as it seems. The last four lines of section 4 contain two quasi‐end rhymes (“alternating / skipping,” “days / face”), and other lines end in echoes (“grounds / storms,” “machinery / dry”). The same intermittent semi‐rhyme is notable in section 6: (“shot / knots / padlock,” “all this / in this”). A certain framework is offered by the recurrent motifs of rain, gate, crops, and mansion. Action, too, occurs in central parts of the British Empire (India and Canada). Two expeditions are referred to, in sections 1 and 5.
Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that fragmentariness and a concomitant obscurity mark the poem. History (events, accounts) is a matter of incomplete and inconclusive narratives, impressions (section 4), and reflections (section 3). Unease is recurrent: the speaker in section 1 has limited possibilities; the speaker in section 2 is “unnerved”; section 3 is entitled “The ache?”; there is a “sigh” and “pain” in section 4; there is violence and “little comfort” in section 6. There are hints of coherence (mentioned earlier), but mostly “There were complexities” (section 3) and, as the speaker has it in section 5, “I cannot work it out.” Empire—England?—is fragmented; the colonial power is sinking.
Seamus Heaney, “Requiem for the Croppies” (1966) (Heaney 1990, 12)
The title of the poem unambiguously announces a defiance of empire, and goes on to offer precisely what the title announces—a laudatory dirge for Irish rebels. Strikingly, this threnody for insurrection is enacted within a metropolitan and traditional English‐language genre, for the requiem is a sonnet, albeit one that deviates from traditional established models.
Such deviation occurs on several levels. This sonnet is a narrative sonnet, not a lyric expression of feeling. The speaker is plural, not the traditional singular one. Subject matter does not quite fit the traditional octave/sestet division. Lines 1–4 form a focused quatrain, but the next subject (the Croppies' tactics) runs from line 5 to line 9. The remaining five lines are, thus, a decapitated sestet. Lines are mostly 10 syllables long, although six lines are longer, and lines 9, 10, 11, and 14 are considerably longer. The numbers of main stresses per line are also variable (from three to six), and the last line can legitimately be read as having between four and six main stresses. The poem certainly has iambic elements, and anywhere between six and eight feet can be scanned as iambs or diambs. But six, and possibly seven, feet are trochees or ditrochees. There are several rather long feet: for example, “through reins and rider” (line 7) should probably be scanned x/x/x; “cattle into infantry” (line 8)—/xxx/xx; and “in our broken wave” (line 12)—xx/x/. Six lines end in an unstressed syllable.
Rhyme is disruptive. The rhyme scheme template itself—abab cdcd efe efe—is not that of an established sonnet template. Further, 6 out of 14 lines end in a questionable rhyme: “barley / country” (1, 3), “infantry / day” (6, 8), “cannon / thrown / coffin” (9, 11, 13), and “conclave / wave / grave” (10, 12, 14). In this last sequence, “wave / grave” is a full rhyme, but “conclave” rhymes anisobarically with both.
The poem is an elegy for rebellion and a smack in the face to established authority. The sonnet tradition (high status, metropolitan, relatively rigid) is appropriated and undermined, perhaps by a folk tradition with its narrative celebration of outlaws and rebels and its freedom with