Writing and Reading Poetry #2 - Meet the Greatest.

go back to part 1

How should English poetry be defined. Aha! English is the most flexible of all languages which, experts acknowledge, makes it overall the best language for poetry (Italian is the best for rhyme of course as so many words end in vowels,) but what gives us our advantage also make English poetry undefinable.

Let's start with that nonsense about iambics first. Iambic meter is that in which a stressed syllable always follows an unstressed syllable. ti - tum ti - tum ti - tum. Recite any serious poem like that and it would just sound ridiculous, poetry should have rhythm but it should also sound natural and not affected when read aloud. Like this:

Shall I compare thee to a summers day? (tum - ti ti - tum tum ti ti tum tum tum)
Thou art more lovely and more temperate, (tum ti tum tum ti ti tum tum ti tum ti etc.)
Cold winds do shake the darling buds of may
and summers lease has all to short a date.

You see what I mean.

Take this piece from Shakespeare's Macbeth, a passage that is surely one on the most powerful in the English language and one that anyone who has seen the movie L.A. story might find familiar - I mention that just to show how great poetry sneaks into our lives when we are not looking.

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

This little soliloquy comes in act five, scene five, almost at the end of the play. Macbeth knows the game is over; his enemies know he murdered King Duncan, his mad wife has gone and the army of Duncan's son Malcolm is closing in.

Macca does not have many options left, he can run and hopefully get to Ireland or England without someone betraying him, but even if he succeeds Malcolm will send assassins to track him down or he can stand and fight, knowing that the witches he met on a blasted heath have predicted his death at the hands of the nobleman Macduff. Shall he run for his life or dree his wyrd (Old Scottish, face his fate)?

Everything having gone pear shaped for him, he asks himself is life worth anything anyway. Existentialism two hundred years before Immanuel Kant huh? I told you there was more to poetry than just writing down our feelings.

It is Shakespeare's peerless poetry that makes the piece great, gives it all its power and portentousness. "Life is a tale told by an idiot;" does that not say something to us all, the religious who believe that everything is just preparation for a glorious resurrection and people like me who believe we live, we die, end of story; so what is the point of all our striving and scheming - unless the point is that everybody has missed the point.

Rewritten in modernist style these lines can be reduced to a whinge of self pity:

Day comes after dreary day,
on and on until the end of time,
and dwelling in the past only seems to bring
the prospect of death nearer.
I wish my life would end,
it's nothing but an illusion anyway.
We all have our fifteen minutes fame,
and then obscurity.
Life is a story told by an idiot,
full of noise and hot air, with no substance.

It is not just Shakespeare's choice of words that makes the lines from Macbeth so powerful though, it is the cadences of the lines and the timing of the delivery, suggested by the creative use of punctuation that adds power. You might call it holistic poetry, everything comes together to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. If I read it first in a Bill Gates monotone and then in a more dramatic style you would hear what I mean.

How does Shakespeare give his work such power? He takes the trouble to make it sound right, and he uses a few simple tricks from drama (he was an actor as well as a writer remember.) Shakespeare does not trouble himself with fussing about long and short syllables or sterssed and unstressed syllables. He just assembles the right words in the right order. If you aim to do that you are well on the way to writing good poetry. If you succeed every time, I'll kiss your feet. So in a way, all English verse is free verse.

Repetition is a good trick, look at the first line;
To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow. Thump, thump, thump, and he has your undivided attention.

In the next line we see what the intellectuals mean when they talk of "parsic phrasing." It is the technique of building a line around strong words and phrases (in bold) so that each line has its own cadence, so:

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

not a trace of iambic, instead there are strong words and light words placed in a way that makes them complement each other, and so it goes on through the poem.

Speech and drama teachers drum into us the importance of "pitch pace and volume" to give a passage "light and shade." In the next line we see that, although the whole passage is dark we go from fairly pale shade to the deepest gloom,

"to the last syllable of recorded time;"

Things don't get more final than that. In my first piece on punctuation people asked about the use of the semi-colon in creative writing. The semi-colon after "time" indicates a longer pause than a comma. Shakespeare wants that to sink in; to emphasise the finality of his phrase, it's the very end, finito benito, in this case of a human life, Macbeth's life, not the end of the world.

It is worth noting here that like many poets before and after him Shakespeare rides roughshod over both creationism and big bang theory; he is a humanist (only a humanist could have had such insight into human nature) and also a beneficiary of the renaissance education. He was familiar with the Zoroastrian creation myth in which the creation is not a conjuring trick with atoms, hormones and a top hat but an era in which the first humans create the universe by becoming aware of it and learning how to map and measure it. Fascinating stuff. but we can't dwell, we must deal with all our yesterdays.

How easy it is to dwell in the past, to illuminate our lives with former glories; "the tales of my glorious victories will inspire my people eternally," or "my chocolate souffle will live on the tastebuds forever." Its all delusional thinking. Such illumination has only guided people to "dusty death." We live in the moment, nothing else is reliable. More deep shade after just a tiny chink of light.

Macbeth has come to terms with the inevitable though,

"Out, out brief candle!"

I told you there was more shade than light, but  note that exclamation mark. Now though MacB gets philosophical.

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that frets and struts his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more…"

The rhythm of these lines is almost overpowering. Again its a question of getting exactly the right heavy and light words. The ebd of the line is like the "little death" after a climax.  Those words can't help but stick in the mind. All that we do, all our achievements and failures are nothing, we are slaves to circumstance. Is that true? Who remembers the real Macbeth? There was a real King Macbeth of Scotland but what do we know of him, was he a good King or an unscrupulous murderer, was his amoral wife the author of his downfall? History is vague. It is the Shakespeare version of Macbeth we know. And so his life is a walking shadow, an illusion. All that remains of any of us is the imperfect memories of people who knew us and later maybe the embellished words of historians and fiction writers will praise or damn us according to the fashion of the day. And don't you love that phrase "Who frets and struts his hour upon the stage." It kind of pre-empts Andy Warhol by around 350 years. Of course the pace of life had increased in Warhol's era and so now we only get fifteen minutes rather than an hour.

Shakespeare wraps it up neatly, all we have done and will do signifies nothing. Now you might think that harsh, but Macbeth is a man consumed by ambition, his goal is always self - glorification. What is significant in our existence to Shakespeare is the sum of human achievement, not the rantings and ravings of attention seekers. It is not shown at the end of this speech but by the end of the scene Macbeth knows he will die and soon be forgotten but Scotland will go on. As the witches predicted earlier Macbeth will be a footnote in history but the descendants of Duncan, from whom Macbeth stole the throne, will help shape the future.

We are all just characters in the dramas the future will make of the present. It is an idea Shakespeare returns to more than once; in As You Like It, "all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players;" in Hamlet we find "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of a King," and in The Tempest "we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little lives are rounded with a sleep."

It is as if the great Bard want to remind us now and again that these plays are fantasies, we should no more believe them than what his contemporaries heard from itinerant jongleurs in the market square and what we read in the tabloids or hear on TV. As I say to people who try to psychoanalyse my poems "its just a poem." I have one posted here called "Beloved Succubus." When I first released it on the net people were writing to me things like "oh Ian, I felt your deep grief and pain, you must have loved that lady so much." Actually it was just a bit of gothic whimsy, a B movie of a poem. So you see, people who think that poetry is all deeply personal lead themselves up the garden path just as do people who take literally Shakespeare's plays or Lord of the Rings or the Da Vinci code or other books that were never intended to be taken literally. Poetry and fiction should be enjoyed, not analysed.

In conclusion then, having called upon the assistance of the greatest writer ever to grace the English language I hope I have shown that in poetry lies the very essence of what makes us human, what sets us aside from the beasts. Whether we are dealing with Macbeth's dark thoughts as death approaches or with the nonsense of Lewis Carroll or Dr. Seuss, poetry is much more than words about our feelings.

Let's read it once more:

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.