In the way you’ve put the question “formal” suggests regular metrics, regular stanzas and, usually, rhyme. But it also suggests some absolute form that doesn’t have those more evident features; it suggests any form governed by a strong, inflexible inner law that the writer finds himself having to obey, that he can’t just play around with as he can play around with, say, the wording of a letter.
(Hughes is addressing a question about poetry progressing from regular metrics etc, but says that there is always some form detectable through an inflexible inner law that the writer still has ti obey almost as if he is writing in strict metrical form)
That kind of deeper, hidden form, though it doesn’t show regular metrical or stanzaic patterning or end rhyme, can’t in any way be called “free.” Take any passage of “The Waste Land,” or maybe a better example is Eliot’s poem “Marina.” Every word in those poems is as formally fixed, as locked into flexible inner laws, as words can be. The music of those words, the musical inevitability of the pitch, the pacing, the combination of inflections—all that is in some way absolute, unalterable, the ultimate perfect containment of unusually powerful poetic forces. You could say the same of many other examples: Smart’s “Jubilate Agno,” any passages in Shakespeare’s blank verse, Shakespeare’s prose.
(Its not free verse when it truly works as a poem because the words are chosen so carefully. )
To my mind, the best of the kind of verse usually called free always aspires towards that kind of formal inevitability—a fixed, unalterable, musical, and yet hidden dramatic shape. One difference between this kind of verse and regular, metrical, rhymed stanzas is the problem it sets the reader at first reading. Regular formal features give the reader immediate bearings, the A-B-C directions for reading or performing the piece being nursery simple; the poem has a familiar, friendly look from that very first encounter. But when these are missing—no regular meter, no stanza shape, no obvious rhyme—the reader has to grope, searching for that less obvious, deeper set of musical dramatic laws. That takes time, more than one or two readings. And it takes poetic imagination—or some talent for rhythmical, expressive speech. But if those laws are actually there, as they are in the Eliot, the Smart, and the Shakespeare, sooner or later they assert their inevitability in the reader’s mind, and the reader begins to recognize the presence of some absolute, inner form. Of course if those laws aren’t there, they can never assert themselves. The piece never gets a grip on the reader. It might be interesting and even exciting to read at first encounter, but then it will slowly fall to bits. The reader will begin to recognize the absence of any law that makes it go one way rather than another . . . the absence of any deeper pattern of hidden forces. So the thing ceases to be read.
(The laws of form in terms of words chosen for pitch and musicality really do have to be there - so Hughes seems to against free verse per se its just a question of: what is free verse against what follows a complex structure that defies easy analysis)
In the long run, the same fate—to be rejected and forgotten—overtakes most formally shaped verse too, no matter how strict its meter or how accurate and dexterous its rhymes. Good metrical rhymed verse, if it’s to grip the imagination and stay readable, has to have, as well as those external formal features, the same dynamo of hidden musical dramatic laws as the apparently free verse.
(If in strict metrical form - for it to work it needs the same attention to musical dramatic laws to work - so there's much more than slavishly following iambic pentameter for example, otherwise we'd invest too much respect in say: nursery rhymes or limericks and dismiss classics like Eliot's Waste Land. )
Having said that, I think you are then left with the pro and contra arguments for using or not using those features of regular meter, stanza, rhyme. The main argument, to my mind, for not using them is to gain access to the huge variety of musical patterns that they shut out. Imagine if Shakespeare had stuck to sonnets and long-rhymed poems and had never got onto the explorations of his blank verse and those wonderful musical flights of dialogue or onto his prose. Imagine what might have come out of the eighteenth century in England if the regime of the couplet hadn’t been so absolute. How could Whitman ever have happened if he’d stuck to his crabby rhymes? That seems to me a strong argument.
(Too much constraint too often is not a good thing)
But the main argument for using meter, rhyme, stanza also seems strong. It’s not just that rhymes and the requirement of meter actually stimulate invention—which they obviously do, at certain levels—but it’s the strange satisfaction of making that square treasure chest and packing it. Or making that locket with its jewel or its portrait. Or making that periscope box of precisely arranged lenses. There’s mystery to it, I’m quite sure. Maybe a mathematical satisfaction. Take the ballad stanza, which is basically just an old English couplet. The best of those quatrains have a kind of primal force, not just musical finality but an inner force, a weight of paid-for experience that most people can recognize. Yet when you break the meter, lose or disarray the rhymes, everything’s gone. Then there’s Primo Levi’s remark. He found that in the death camps, where it became very important to dig poems out of the memory, the poems of regular meter and rhyme proved more loyal, and I’m not sure he didn’t say that they were more consoling. You don’t forget his remark.
(But its absolutely vital that it continues as a major poetic device and must never ever stand aside and allow itself to be washed away by a tidal wave of freer verse)
No comments:
Post a Comment