"Kitchen Criticism" - A Guide to Practical Matters in Poetry:Frost's "Mending Wall" and Playful Punctuation.

First, a little theory: Frost's principal contribution to prosody is his somewhat elusive idea of "the sound of sense." I won't go into it in detail--any serious Frost scholar has touched on it in some way, shape, or form already. Basically, it relates to the tension between speech and metre, and the creative possibilities for tone therefrom. Poetic metre is an imposition on speech in order to extract tones of voice for dramatic purposes. I might go into detail elsewhere to tidy up the rough edges of that brief explanation.

Regardless of my imprecision, there is one poetic prescription that follows from Frost's idea: we read a poem to the sentence, to the full stop, to get the full sense of the meaning. Tyler Hoffman, whom I will return to a few times, has a neat phrase for Frost's prosody in practice; he calls it "line-sentence counterpointing." I have always been taken with Frost's theory of the sound of sense--also called the theory of sentence-sounds (Frost couldn't make up his mind), hence Hoffman's useful coinage. 

So, we read the poem not to the line, but to the sentence. There's both a prosodic reason for this prescription, but also a conceptual one, and Frost manages to tease out a little play with both. Despite his claims, Frost most certainly relied, as most poets do, on punctuation to manage the pace of his poems, to manipulate the meaning, just as we see in "Stopping by Woods." He also had tremendous fun with the little dots and squiggles on the page; and it's to one such case I wish to briefly turn before I get too serious. 

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In "Mending Wall," one of Frost's most famous poems, and for a time my favourite, Frost leaves what gamers today might be call an "Easter egg," a little reward for those who know where to find it. There's a lot to say about the poem, but I want to focus on this little Easter egg. The poem is forty-five lines long, unrhymed, written in iambic pentameter, Frost's preferred narrative form. "Mending Wall" is more lyrical, but it does tell a little story. Like "The Road Not Taken" there is a deception, or a trick, at the heart of the tale the speaker tells. More on that poem another time. The Easter egg comes in line 23: 

There where it is we do not need the wall

But you won't see it if I just quote the line. You need the lines surrounding it; in fact, you need a few sentences: 

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

Do you see it yet? There's a tone of gentle mocking in this excerpt, as there is throughout the poem; the speaker finds his neighbour somewhat simple, and makes fun of him, both to his neighbour's face and to us, the reader. 

But there's a little grammatical play being had here, too. Let's look at the middle sentence as a sentence to see: "it comes to little more: there where it is we do not need the wall: he is all pine and I am apple orchard." Surely you see it now: two colons in the one sentence--a very unusual arrangement. Not ungrammatical, but certainly unorthodox. There's no real need to use it in any circumstance. What does it mean? 

The middle most line of the poem, asserting the redundancy of the wall, is bookended by two colons:

: There where it is we do not need the wall: 

Do you get it? The colon makes the line look like a little wall! Specifically, a wall of stones shaped like "loaves and some so nearly balls" that the wall-menders must use "a spell" to keep them in place. 

Unconvinced? There's more. 

The two colons are grammatically unnecessary. They could be replaced by semicolons or full stops. But Frost used two colons instead. The grammar is important here. Colons signify a subordinate relationship. Under normal circumstances, the second half of a sentence with a colon in it is dependent on, or subordinated to, the first half. By contrast, a semicolon is used to divide two independent clauses, or sets of clauses, each with at least one independent clause. 

Two semicolons wouldn't look like loaves and balls of stone stacked on top of each other, but they would indicate parallel clauses. Instead, Frost uses a subordinating grammatical structure to produce an image of a parallel construct: a wall separating two neighbours. But what he is really pointing to is the dependent relationship between the two neighbours, specifically speaker dependent upon his neighbour. 

The speaker mocks his neighbour, about the pine cones and apples, about "elves," and about his (the neighbour's) overreliance on his father's saying, that "good fences make good neighbours." But who called to whom about mending the fence? This from the speaker (my italics):

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line 

And set the wall between us once again.

It is the speaker who lets his neighbour know about the wall. The line is slipped in there and overshadowed by the later joke-making. It's a similar misdirection to the more famous one in "The Road Not Taken." Why does the speaker let his neighbour know about the wall? To make fun of him? Perhaps. That's a question beyond our purposes here; nevertheless, we can say that the speaker is dependent on his neighbour, regardless of how he views his neighbour's dependence on his father's words of wisdom. There are, we might say, parallels of dependency in this poem, and Frost's subtle play with punctuation and grammar is just one layer of the meaning in this poem. 

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That'll do for now. Frost is a meticulous craftsman, right down to the logical implications that follow from carefully selected punctuation marks. This level of grammatical intrigue is common to all poets, but especially formalists I find. Where formal metre is employed, high standards of punctuation tend to be there managing the prosodic tension. In the next blog, I'll look at some more Frost, but I'll bring in some Aussie poets as well. In particular, I'll be looking at silence... 

The Physiology of Poetry

The first thing you must know about reading poetry is that it is unlike reading any other kind of text; not an essay; not a novel; not a newspaper article. Poetry is read as if it were read aloud. When it is read aloud - recited - it is, in essence, performed. The sound of the spoken word is as important as the content. Poetry resides at the primitive intersection of expression and meaning, vocalisation and intention. Language emerges from the body's capacity to produce sounds and to gesticulate (with hand gestures, body language, and facial expressions). When language takes the written form, we often neglect this essential embodied foundation. When reading poetry it is important to remember that it is grounded in the body: the lungs; the heart; the throat; the tongue; the lips; even the neck and back muscles. Posture matters in the recital of poetry - both real and silent - and the understanding that follows from this embodying of the poem.

The act of reciting silently to oneself I call "self-recital." The name, however, implies more than just reciting to oneself; it entails a recital of oneself. In reciting a poem, the reader is imitating or mimicking the poem and the creative processes that constitutes the making of the poem. Following this line of thinking, one might more appropriately say the reader recites the "self" of the poem through this imitation. I must stop here on this point, however, before it gets too abstract. Two things have been asserted thus far that need reiterating: first, reading poetry entails an act of recital; second, and related to the first, reading a poem entails imitation, or mimesis. When we read or recite the poem, out loud or to ourselves, we mimic it. 

So far, this won't help your understanding of poetry; what I have said is very abstract. Persevere: it will make sense shortly. What i have posited doesn't answer the most common complaints about poetry from novices. "I don't get it!" "I don't understand poetic metre." "Why does poetry rhyme?" "Why doesn't this poem rhyme!?" There are different issues at play here, but all these issues revolve around how poetry makes the meaning that it expresses. As I said above, poetry derives from a primal site of human meaning-making: the body. This is why poetry is performed, or acted out, even in self-recital. 

Rhyme and metre are merely devices that help the poet to shape and contort the language (meaning and expression) he or she uses. To the reader, these devices, if and when they are used, are like stage directions; the reader shapes and contorts himself as he or she tries to mimic the poem. By contortion, I am making a physiognomic connection: the mouth, the face, the tongue, the lungs, the eyes, even the neck and back muscles of the reader take a different shape to mirror or mimic the poem in order to reproduce the meaning-making process of the poem. These contortions in the act of self-recital are not obvious, of course. Nobody twists their features so dramatically in a way we would recognise as physical "contortions." The contortions I mean are neurophysiological. The imitation of poetry is subtle and internal. 

The devices that are used to contort and compress the words and sounds of the poem are often misunderstood, and because they are misunderstood the reader's mimetic relationship with poetry is greatly diminished. Here, I will address rhyme and metre, arguably the two most commonly misunderstood elements of poetry. Rhyme, in particular, has an insidious effect on our experience and understanding of poetry. Rhyme is often seen as a basic poetic device, when nothing is further from the truth. Rhyme misused destroys poetry and our understanding of it. 

End-rhyme, for instance, can give the impression that poetry must be read "to the end of the line"; that is, poetry should be read to "hit" the rhyme so that the rhyme is emphasised. This is not the case, certainly not with blank verse or free verse, not even with all rhyming poems. Poems do not have to rhyme, but plenty of good poems do. "Reading to the end of the line" is entirely the wrong message to take from the effect of end-rhyme. Metre, for example blank verse, is used, in part, to subvert acquired reading habits. More specifically, however, metre is used to compress the speech pattern of the poem in order to achieve rhythm. Importantly, rhythm is established so that it, too, can be subverted, changed, altered. A rhythm that does not change is monotonous, and poetry written as such doggerel.

Rhythm from line to line tends to remain consistent, albeit with variations, called hypermetric features. Simply because the rhythm is largely consistent doesn't mean you stop at the end of the line and start again at the beginning of the next. The rhythm wraps around from one line to the next based on the sentence structure. As such, you don't read to the end of the line, you read to the end of the sentence. The compression caused by the metre emphasises the rhythm of reading, but you still read for the logical unit of thought: the sentence. This raises the further question of grammar - while we have considerable flexibility with grammar in poetry, we cannot wholly ignore it (although some have tried). Punctuation, for example, plays an important role in signifying rhythm. In primary school, we are often taught that the comma signifies a "short" pause or breath, while a full stop signifies a "long" breath. This description, while questionable in the teaching of technical grammar, is useful for reading poetry. 

Where the metre provides the tension and compression required to produce a consistent rhythm, and rhyme can help to enforce that rhythm, punctuation and grammar help to structure and signify, or flag, the rhythm to the reader. When reading a poem, imitating it in the act of self-recital, we read in "parcels" of two to three words. The metre, specifically the basic unit of metre the foot (2-3 syllables), at a fundamental level, and punctuation and grammar at a level higher (and rhyme at a level higher still) all contribute to the way we perceive and subsequently comprehend the poem. The poem is a dynamic of these (and other) elements. Reducing the poetic experience to any one element is counterproductive. 

There are a few points to take out of this discussion:

1) Reading poetry is a form of performance, a recital or self-recital, which is predicated on an act of imitation. 

2) This act of imitation is an embodied act. Poetry acts upon the body in subtle but significant ways. 

3) Poetry employs a number of devices, including metre, rhyme, and grammar and punctuation, to compress and contort language for effect.

4) The reader mimics these contortions in order reproduce the meaning-making process of the poem. 

5) In imitating the poem, the reader must take a couple of things into account:

5i) Not all poems will feature all the possible elements of poetry. Not all poems rhyme for example.

5ii) In order to experience the rhythm of the poem, we don't read to the end of the line, but to the end of the sentence.

5iii) Punctuation and grammar helps to provide "stage directions": a comma indicates a short breath, a full stop a long breath, semicolons and colons somewhere in between. When they are used, question and exclamation marks indicate the appropriate inflection. 

One last point is worth reiterating, and it relates to the process of reading itself. There is a disparity between the way we perceive words on the page and the way we speak them. When we read, our eyes dart rapidly from side to side, movements called saccades. Because of this, we don't actually read word by word, we read in parcels of words, two or three at a time. When we speak, however, we speak in syllabic progression; to be understood, we have to enunciate our words clearly (speed of enunciation differs with familiar, mature native speakers). 

Poetry, as an act of imitation and recital, requires that we read at a pace that allows us to enunciate the words in syllabic progression; but because of our faster reading habit (saccadic rhythms are the reason we can skim read) we have to resist the urge to skim or scan quickly. If this happens, the effect of the poem is lost. This is one aspect of poetry's subversion of acquired language habits. Importantly, the saccadic rhythm of eye movements helps us find the beat of the poem. A metrical foot is 2-3 syllables long. We can, in fact, perceive the metre of half a line quite easily, with a little practice. The punctuation on the page helps to slow us down even further, because a foot usually does not cross punctuation marks. 

Hopefully, I have conveyed the complexity of the poetic experience, but I have not overwhelmed you with it. There are simple things to keep in mind in order to come to grips with poetry. It is only through accumulating an admittedly imperfect arsenal of hints, tips, and rules of thumb over time, as well as plenty of practice, that you will reconstruct the poetic experience for yourself and come to understand poetry at its most fundamental level.