A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
1974, 13–14)
Like all the texts in Crow, this poem has a savage subject matter, the slaughter‐permeated pulse of “Creation.” Crow is a brutish part of this, an avian tyrannosaurus rex. The text is appropriately marked by a violent irregularity. Line length varies—from 3 syllables to 13. The numbers of main stresses per line vary greatly too—from one to five—although, in fact, lines with similar numbers of stresses do cluster in places: for example, in stanza 6 where three‐stress lines enclose a two‐stress one. There is no rhyme, and no metrical regularity. Indeed, beyond noting the numbers of main stresses per line and their variability, there is probably no point in attempting a traditional metrical analysis of the poem. Stanzas 8 and 9 are set out to emphasize fracture. Fixed form has been rejected. It seems a “shapeless cry” (line 12).
But, for all that, there is a surprising degree of regularity in the text. All the first seven stanzas have four lines, and stanzas 8–10 can be seen as retaining something of a four‐based shape: stanzas 8 and 9 together make up four lines, and stanza 10 consists of four phrasal units set out separately. Although the text does not rhyme, there is at least local phonological orchestration. Note the recurrence of /k/ sounds in stanza 1, and of /d/ and /b/ sounds in stanza 4. Note, too, the recurrence of related vowel sounds—/æ/, /ɛ:/, /&ip.iscp;/, and /&ip.iscp;:/—in the last line in stanza 2. There is extensive lexical repetition—“sorrow,” “body,” “weeping,” “Alas,” “grubs,” “stabbed.” There is certainly syntactic parallelism: for example, stanzas 2 and 3. Stanza 7 adopts a parallel “And” structure. Stanzas 8 and 9 are syntactically parallel, and also repeat the same lexis (“weeping” and “stabbed”). Further, order is created by the marked presence of homeoteleuton in the poem: “ing” endings are everywhere in the text, and stanza 10 comes near to rhyming with its repeated “ness” suffix.
The logical coherence and cohesion of the poem is also an orderly element in it. Stanza 1 introduces creation and Crow. Stanzas 2–5 show animal life and human life as death‐bringing. In stanza 6, Crow reflects on all the elements mentioned earlier. Stanza 7 begins with a contradictory “But,” and stanza 10 opens with a consequential “Thus.”
The shapeless “blort” (line 16) that the poem seems at first sight, and, at a certain level, is, is modified by a strong ordering and coherence, by kinds of traditional shaping. The echoes of biblical free verse also give the text a somewhat ordered and traditional quality. But it is the order of savagery, the coherence of stabbing. However, the tensions in the poem's technique might alert the reader to the irony in the text's title. A crow is not a tyrannosaurus. Hyperbole is at play here (as it is in so many of Hughes's beast poems).
Geoffrey Hill, “Mercian Hymns XXV” (1971) (Hill 2006, 85)
Mercian Hymns consists of 30 short prose poems. They center on the person and deeds of the historical, but almost legendary, Anglo‐Saxon king Offa, on the childhood of the modern speaker, and on the experiences of his relatives in the semi‐industrial past. These are connected by motifs of digging and lost and recovered artifacts, by physical history, by memory, and by cruelty and suffering. Hymn xxv contains no reference to Offa, but it belongs wholly within the collection because it involves a recovery of the fragmented past.
The poem is neatly ordered into an opening and a closing stanza (which are precisely the same text), which bracket two stanzas amplifying the material in the first and last. The opening and closing stanzas have a liturgical and solemn, declamatory quality: “I speak this in memory.” It has an appropriate formality of lexis—“childhood and prime womanhood”—although this is, to some extent, offset by the dialect (but also archaic) word “darg.” It is also spoken in the present, in memory of the speaker's grandmother, and by someone who is able to brood on Ruskin's Fors Clavigera (although the letters therein were directed to working men).
The two central stanzas expand on the “nailer's darg” mentioned in lines 1 and 4. Although the grandmother is not directly present, the “nailshop” is, with its smell and its dust. The workshop is strangely static; in view are the effects of labor, oddly pretty (“damson‐bloom”) and fatal and terrible (“hare‐lipped by the searing wire”). An elliptical narrative is embedded in these stanzas, implying an accident during work there. One assumes the grandmother is involved, most likely as someone attempting to care for a mutilated family member or fellow worker. The “posthumous clamour” suggests a fatal accident. As in the enfolding stanzas, language is mixed: “back of the cottage” is informal and regional; “posthumous clamour” is formal and Latinate. Ruskin, too—and hence an educated and metropolitan world—is present in the “quick forge” in stanza 3.
As with all the hymns, stanzas are interwoven by patterns of phonology: /m/ and /s/ sounds in stanzas 1 and 4, /s/ structures stanzas 2 and 3 also, as do a harsh /k/ and softer /d/, /t/, and /e&ip.iscp; / in “cradle a face hare‐lipped.”
The point of the text is to revise a metropolitan and intellectual (if well‐meaning) view of the world of manual labor. “Darg” is a harsh word for unremitting work. In a miracle of elliptical coherence, Hill brings together the present and the past, and an intellectual world and a world of labor. The hidden savagery of a West Midlands (Offa's kingdom lay there), small‐scale, semi‐industrial nailshop is linked to the cruelties of an Anglo‐Saxon kingdom. Both must be excavated. Memory and artifact are similarly fragments of a vital but vanished past. There is a stubborn insistence on their value. All this is woven together by recurrent motif and a web of sound effects.
John Montague, “The Rough Field” (1972) (Montague 1989, 12–13)
The third section of Chapter 1 of The Rough Field (“Between small whin‐tough fields”) begins with a marginal note (as many sections of the collection do). The prose paratext contextualizes the account of the speaker's grandfather that follows, and gives the poem a rooting in a documented history and reality. It consists of three verse paragraphs of approximately the same length, organized in a perspicuous manner. First, there is a situation, captured in a daguerreotype of the speaker's grandparents; second, there is the origin of that situation, a post‐Famine Ireland in which some Catholics achieve some measure of advancement. Third, the poem shifts to 60 years later, the dispersal of the patriarchal Montague's family and the changes that time has wrought on his farm.
The text is on the border of speech and verse. Lines are of a wide variety of lengths. A line is usually made of a coherent phrase (there are only 6 examples of enjambment in the poem's 43 lines). There is a relaxed rhythmic patterning, for most lines have three or four main stresses, and even the two broken lines at the paragraph breaks, when taken together, follow this pattern. Three lines are more densely stressed with five main stresses: line 16, emphasizing post‐Famine mobility; line 20, embodying that mobility; and line 36, pointing to the endurance of agriculture despite the decline of the Montague farmhouse. The same kind of unobtrusive patterning can be seen in phonological aspects of the text: paragraphs 1 and 3 are governed by /s/ sounds, and even in the much less phonologically organized second paragraph, lines 16–18 are woven with /r/ sounds, and lines 19 and 20 with /p/ sounds, while /s/ runs through the paragraph up to line 24. Lines 25–29 (semantically and historically crucial) evade the prevailing /s/ patterning of the rest of the text.
The poem does drift into rhyme of sorts on occasion: lines 26 and 29—“Puritan / gentleman”; lines 30 and 31—“broken / Brooklyn”; and lines 42 and 43—“stove / stone.” Such rhymes have an ironizing effect: “rustic gentleman” is nearly an oxymoron, even without the odd rhyme; pride is brought low and broken in Brooklyn; the assonance of “stove / stone” makes clear the point about the reduction of the heroic past. Similarly, the poem slips from a prosaic literalness in the double meanings of “spirit” (line 11)—vitality and alcohol; “conceit” (line 16)—arrogance and a cunning image; and “Tagues” (line 25)—both a family name and an abusive term for Catholics. But these slippages are rare. The poem says precisely what it means on the surface. It offers an account of a patriarch, his personal rise in the context of social change,