A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
a context of a continuance of older ways of cultivation and planting.
Jenny Joseph, “Warning” (1974) (Joseph 1992, 42)
The title of this very popular poem (according to a BBC poll in 1996) is paradoxically threatening. It points to a future of bad behavior and imperiling of social norms. However, it must—like much of the poem—be seen as ironic and humorous. The speaker's misconduct will scarcely shift the social order.
The poem is lucid in its organization. In the first stanza, the speaker indicates the forms her delinquencies will take. Stanza 1 brings in the addressee, or at least a more general “you,” suggesting how one could further behave badly. But stanza 3 sets out all the conforming things that “we” all must do now. The last stanza, however, briefly suggests that the malfeasance could start now, for the sake of practice. This semantic lucidity is coupled with a rhetoric of syntactic parallelism that shapes the first three stanzas: “I shall,” “you can,” and “now we must.” Stanza 4 breaks the pattern: it asks the only question in the poem, and has no syntactic parallelism. However, it does neatly tie the poem up by its echoing of the first words of the poem in “When,” “I am,” and “old.”
The regularity and coherent organization of the poem are further marked rhythmically. Iambic feet clearly dominate the piece, clustering especially in stanza three, that is, in the stanza that is about the force of norms. Although there is a variation in line length—from 4 to 14 syllables—most lines vary only from 11 to 13 syllables. With very few exceptions, lines have four to five main stresses. This cohesive regularity is challenged in places, however. Amphibrachs (x/x) are scattered throughout the text, and several feet of four to five syllables (long by English versification norms) can be identified. In addition, 10 out of 22 lines end in an unstressed syllable. All this makes the poem less controlled and coherent, and perhaps less decisive and certain. But predominantly, this is a poem about disorderly behavior that is extremely orderly, and that within very traditional parameters of rhetoric and rhythm. Just as the speaker's proposed misdeeds are ultimately quite modest in their scope (and are proposed, not implemented), so the text remains within the traditional parameters of a well‐made and lucid piece of verse. Its challenges to the social and cultural order are finally, at best, comic.
Anne Stevenson, “A Love Letter: Ruth Arbeiter to Major Paul Maxwell” (from Correspondences [1974]) (Stevenson 2005, 237–238)
Although this text is part of a longer sequence of poems, it is relatively free‐standing, and can be read on its own. It would be a shame not to discuss it, as it is a fine and moving love lyric. The title, in keeping with the convention of Correspondences: A Family History in Letters, presents the piece as a letter (and, in fact, the poem is so laid out), but it is, of course, not a letter, strictly speaking, but a poem. However, the opening, “Dearest,” and the closing, “Ruth,” along with place and date do give it the appearance of a letter. The body of the text is, however, a five‐stanza love poem, from a married woman to her absent lover. The piece is an extraordinary mixture of the quotidian and the ecstatic. When thinking of her lover, the speaker (writer) enters rapturous states of consciousness (a “brighter isolate planet” [line 3], “these incredible perspectives / openings entirely ours” [lines 45 and 46]), which are contrasted with worlds of children, husband, and chores. These dizzying and electric moments and spaces are, indeed, embedded in a context of others and duty. But the speaker seems so entwined in the everyday that there is no escape. She abides in a “damaging anguish” attenuated by memories, visions, intuitions.
The piece is relatively disorderly, as one might expect with such unassuaged and incurable mental pain. The five stanzas are of varying lengths (as paragraphs of a letter might be). Lines, too, vary in length—from 13 or 14 syllables to 4 or 5. Numbers of main stresses per line are also variable, from 2 or 3 through 5 or 6. There are no obvious rhymes. Enjambment is rife—for example, lines 7–9, 16–19, 21–23, 30, 31, 33, 34, 37, and 38. Only the relatively hopeless last stanza is devoid of them.
But there is phonological patterning, although it is of an astringent sort. Thus, there are hints of end rhyme: in stanza 1, “continually” (which occurs twice) and “unexpectedly,” “live / love,” and “eat / articulate”; in stanza 2, “home / them,” and “habit of / pain of”; in stanza 3, “ago / shadow,” “distance / intensity / miss,” and “stone / sun”; in stanza 5, “say / continually,” “children / friends,” and “perspectives / numbness.” But these are at best hints, half echoes, and far from full rhymes. There is some local alliteration: /d/ in lines 10, 11, and 16–19; /k/ in lines 25 and 26; /s/ in lines 26–34; and /tʃ/ in lines 43 and 44. The most marked patterning device is the prevalence of lines that end on an unstressed syllable: in stanza 1, lines 1, 2, and 6–9; in stanza 2, lines 2, 6 (perhaps), and 7–10; in stanza 3, lines 2, 4–7, 10, and 12; in stanza 4, lines 1–4 and 5–7; and in stanza 5, lines 4–7. That makes 30 lines out of a 48‐line poem.
The function of all the preceding is surely to create an intensely moving but peculiarly astringent and hopeless love poem. The emotion is there in the lexis and in the technical disorder, but rhyme is weak and dissonant (if it is there at all, as more than a shadow of rhyme), and the unstressed line endings conjure a tentativeness, a longing that will not be satisfied ever (as we know from the rest of the sequence it was not).
Tony Harrison, “Turns” (1978) (Harrison 1984, 149)
“Turns” has 16 lines, but is usually seen as a species of deviant sonnet. It certainly maintains a fundamentally iambic, 10‐syllable line throughout. It also has a variation on the complex rhyme scheme one associates with the sonnet. The paradox in the choice of genre—as in the case of Heaney's “Requiem for the Croppies”—lies in the way in which a traditional and established form is used to attack and subvert traditional and established order.
On the one hand, the text is marked by extreme regularity and in accord with tradition. Iambic feet (including diambs and even a triamb [“in purple Indian ink”]) dominate the poem. Lines are of a consistent 10‐syllable length, although line 2 has 12 syllables (and is an alexandrine), and line 7 has 9 syllables. There is a rhyme scheme, and it is, to a degree, regular. The first four lines run abab; lines 9–12 are effe; and lines 13–16 are ghgh. Deviance occurs to some extent in the second quatrain, which is not, in fact, a quatrain, but two pairs of rhyming lines attached to other sections. Thus, lines 5 and 6 set up a cd pattern that is taken up in lines 7 and 8, but the rhyming lines are separated by a section break, enacting a break between son and father, which is far from absolute.
Despite its closely ordered echoes of the sonnet, the poem is riven by technical tensions (and, thus, enacts its subject matter of generational and social strain). There is very little phonological patterning in the poem (no sonic regularity), except in the conclusive and rhetorically powerful last two lines, with their resounding /b/, /s/, and /k/ sounds. The lines may almost all have 10 syllables, but stress placement is not regular and is often unresolved. For example, line 1 can have five or six main stresses, depending on a choice to accent “more” and “class.” Line 10 must surely have seven main stresses, including the irreducible “H A H” of the father's initials, which must be scanned /// (a molossus). In line 8, there is a tension between a metronomic scansion and one more in accord with natural speech; it could be seen as consisting of a single main stress followed by five iambic feet, or as /x/|x/|x/x|/// (although even other scansions are possible). Line 14 is barely iambic and could be scanned in at least two ways: /x/|x/|x/xx|x/ or ///|x/|//x|//. This irresolution contests orderliness and control. Linguistically, the formal sonnet is permeated by informal lexis: “so folk might think” (line 11), “nowt” (line 13), “trap” (line 14), and “busk” (especially as a transitive verb) (line 15). Finally, too, it must be stressed that this is a 16‐line sonnet, and by definition deviant and contestatory. It enacts a defiance of tradition and established order, while practicing tradition and order, and employing them for its dissenting purposes.