Poetic influences
Poetry that creates a very specific sense of place through the all senses has always attracted me, especially if the poems also have a strong rhythmical and musical quality. Two poems that are particularly evocative in this respect are Dylan Thomas’ prologue to Under Milk Wood and Inversnaid by Gerard Manly Hopkins.
Under Milk Wood opens in a sleepy Welsh town by Llareggub Hill (read it backwards) with a musical play on the sounds and meanings of words. Rhymes and similar meanings are put alongside for rhythmical and imagistic effect, such as “down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.” The comma between “slow” and “black” slows down the whole rhythm of the sentence while the compound words (“sloeblack”, “crowblack”, “fishingboat”) speed it up, allowing Thomas to control exactly how the poem is read. The use of compounds and punctuation in this poem is particularly important as Thomas meant for Under Milk Wood to be read out loud (it was commissioned as a radio play for the BBC) so line-breaks or formatting would have been ambiguous and confusing to the readers, whereas clear indications of how Thomas wanted the poem to be read through the way the words join is far more effective. There are more fantastic compound words in this prologue, such as “jollyrogered sea” and “cobblestreets”, each of which bring together familiar ideas (jolly roger on the sea, yo ho ho and all that… and cobbled streets) in an unusual way, so that they conjure up an exact and fresh image rather than a mere idea dulled by cliché. Also, not all linked ideas have been compounded as only some of the images could work. For example, the hyphen in “bible-black” adds an emphasis and stress to the first syllables that ‘bibleblack’ wouldn’t. Plus it also looks rather silly and tempts the reader to pronounce it as ‘bibbleblack’. Essentially, the sound of each phrase has been carefully chosen for its metrical properties and how it should be read out loud, down the smallest detail.
Hopkins’ Inversnaid is similarly preoccupied with the sound of words when read aloud though it uses slightly different tactics. Again there are some compound words, such as “pitchblack”, “beadbonny” and “rollrock” that take away the extra stress that a space would create, though Hopkins doesn’t seem as fond of them as Thomas. The most noticeable thing about Hopkins’ poem is its use of accents on words that he wants stressed: “A windpuff bonnet of fáwn-fróth” and “Of a pool so pitchblack, féll frówning”. Normally-soft vowels become harder giving the right rhythm to the end of each of these two lines. The poem also uses a lot of alliteration and rhymes within lines to bring about and overall sense of musicality and strengthen the rhythm of the poem. For instance, the repetition of the ‘r’ sound in “rollrock highroad roaring” and alliteration in “Degged with dew, dappled with dew” give the lines a particularly strong, heartbeat-like rhythm, literally rolling the poem along and pulling the reader down the highroad with the words.
The sense I keep getting of both poems, and perhaps what makes them stick in my mind the most, is the feeling of a tumble of words, like music, that gradually paints a picture. In Inversnaid this comes immediately from its fixed AABB rhyming and regular four-line stanzas, giving a ballad-like and singsong quality to the poem. It also introduces the image immediately, as if the reader were standing in front of “This darksome burn” and continues to list in simple images, “horseback brown”, “rollrock highroad roaring down” until the scene is painted. Dylan Thomas sets the scene with similar lists of images in an even more tumble-down fashion, but his style is more like that of an epic narrator, starting with the playful yet somehow sombre “To begin at the beginning”. Next it is like setting the scene in a play as the long list of images coagulate into an idea of the town - I particularly like “the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres and the dogs in the wet-nosed yards.” Every simile is new and fresh, zooming in to a very specific moment: the snuffling wet nose of a dog or the stillness of a sleeping horse.
Dylan Thomas instructs his readers in what they should see, but subtly, uncovering each new sight like a miracle in the second person - “only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.// And you alone can hear the invisible starfall…” Again the wordplay insertion of “and slow” breaks up the clichéd phrase ‘fast asleep’ and evokes in its unexpected rhythm a sense of breathing in deep sleep. After showing, he addresses our sense of hearing, repeating the command “listen” so that gradually the image of the sleeping town also becomes stereophonic: “Listen. It is night moving in the streets”; “Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black…” just what “night moving in the streets” sounds like, if we stop to think about it, isn’t actually clear, but the image somehow comes with the power of the sound of silence. Thomas commands us to listen to the image, and we do.
Hopkins’ instructional moment comes at the end, at where I feel is relatively the weakest part of the poem, with an exclamation about what the world would be like “once bereft/ Of wet and wildness? Let them be left…” Perhaps it’s the moralistic tone I’m not so keen on, though the break from the musical imagery of burn and horses does nonetheless achieve its goal. We are sorry to leave the wet and wild world of Hopkins’ Inversnaid and the final stanza’s sudden jolt out of it reminds us that these parts of the world could be destroyed or lost to us if we forget to value them.
With Under Milk Wood and Inversnaid I have presented two poems that are very much in love with the sound of words, the way they are arranged and the power of rhythm in creating an evocative image. It shows just how sensitive a poem can be to an added hyphen here or alliteration there - how the slightest alteration can change the whole tone or rhythm of a poem. It is also knowledge of this sensitivity, I think, that has influenced me most in my own poetry, exploring the various ways of presenting a clear and powerful image though not just the words themselves, but how, exactly, they’re arranged.
Sonya Hallett
November 2007
______________________________
Bibliography
Hopkins, Gerard M. ‘Inversnaid’. By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber & Faber, 1997: 11.
Thomas, Dylan. Under Milk Wood. London: Penguin, 2000.
Under Milk Wood opens in a sleepy Welsh town by Llareggub Hill (read it backwards) with a musical play on the sounds and meanings of words. Rhymes and similar meanings are put alongside for rhythmical and imagistic effect, such as “down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.” The comma between “slow” and “black” slows down the whole rhythm of the sentence while the compound words (“sloeblack”, “crowblack”, “fishingboat”) speed it up, allowing Thomas to control exactly how the poem is read. The use of compounds and punctuation in this poem is particularly important as Thomas meant for Under Milk Wood to be read out loud (it was commissioned as a radio play for the BBC) so line-breaks or formatting would have been ambiguous and confusing to the readers, whereas clear indications of how Thomas wanted the poem to be read through the way the words join is far more effective. There are more fantastic compound words in this prologue, such as “jollyrogered sea” and “cobblestreets”, each of which bring together familiar ideas (jolly roger on the sea, yo ho ho and all that… and cobbled streets) in an unusual way, so that they conjure up an exact and fresh image rather than a mere idea dulled by cliché. Also, not all linked ideas have been compounded as only some of the images could work. For example, the hyphen in “bible-black” adds an emphasis and stress to the first syllables that ‘bibleblack’ wouldn’t. Plus it also looks rather silly and tempts the reader to pronounce it as ‘bibbleblack’. Essentially, the sound of each phrase has been carefully chosen for its metrical properties and how it should be read out loud, down the smallest detail.
Hopkins’ Inversnaid is similarly preoccupied with the sound of words when read aloud though it uses slightly different tactics. Again there are some compound words, such as “pitchblack”, “beadbonny” and “rollrock” that take away the extra stress that a space would create, though Hopkins doesn’t seem as fond of them as Thomas. The most noticeable thing about Hopkins’ poem is its use of accents on words that he wants stressed: “A windpuff bonnet of fáwn-fróth” and “Of a pool so pitchblack, féll frówning”. Normally-soft vowels become harder giving the right rhythm to the end of each of these two lines. The poem also uses a lot of alliteration and rhymes within lines to bring about and overall sense of musicality and strengthen the rhythm of the poem. For instance, the repetition of the ‘r’ sound in “rollrock highroad roaring” and alliteration in “Degged with dew, dappled with dew” give the lines a particularly strong, heartbeat-like rhythm, literally rolling the poem along and pulling the reader down the highroad with the words.
The sense I keep getting of both poems, and perhaps what makes them stick in my mind the most, is the feeling of a tumble of words, like music, that gradually paints a picture. In Inversnaid this comes immediately from its fixed AABB rhyming and regular four-line stanzas, giving a ballad-like and singsong quality to the poem. It also introduces the image immediately, as if the reader were standing in front of “This darksome burn” and continues to list in simple images, “horseback brown”, “rollrock highroad roaring down” until the scene is painted. Dylan Thomas sets the scene with similar lists of images in an even more tumble-down fashion, but his style is more like that of an epic narrator, starting with the playful yet somehow sombre “To begin at the beginning”. Next it is like setting the scene in a play as the long list of images coagulate into an idea of the town - I particularly like “the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres and the dogs in the wet-nosed yards.” Every simile is new and fresh, zooming in to a very specific moment: the snuffling wet nose of a dog or the stillness of a sleeping horse.
Dylan Thomas instructs his readers in what they should see, but subtly, uncovering each new sight like a miracle in the second person - “only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.// And you alone can hear the invisible starfall…” Again the wordplay insertion of “and slow” breaks up the clichéd phrase ‘fast asleep’ and evokes in its unexpected rhythm a sense of breathing in deep sleep. After showing, he addresses our sense of hearing, repeating the command “listen” so that gradually the image of the sleeping town also becomes stereophonic: “Listen. It is night moving in the streets”; “Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black…” just what “night moving in the streets” sounds like, if we stop to think about it, isn’t actually clear, but the image somehow comes with the power of the sound of silence. Thomas commands us to listen to the image, and we do.
Hopkins’ instructional moment comes at the end, at where I feel is relatively the weakest part of the poem, with an exclamation about what the world would be like “once bereft/ Of wet and wildness? Let them be left…” Perhaps it’s the moralistic tone I’m not so keen on, though the break from the musical imagery of burn and horses does nonetheless achieve its goal. We are sorry to leave the wet and wild world of Hopkins’ Inversnaid and the final stanza’s sudden jolt out of it reminds us that these parts of the world could be destroyed or lost to us if we forget to value them.
With Under Milk Wood and Inversnaid I have presented two poems that are very much in love with the sound of words, the way they are arranged and the power of rhythm in creating an evocative image. It shows just how sensitive a poem can be to an added hyphen here or alliteration there - how the slightest alteration can change the whole tone or rhythm of a poem. It is also knowledge of this sensitivity, I think, that has influenced me most in my own poetry, exploring the various ways of presenting a clear and powerful image though not just the words themselves, but how, exactly, they’re arranged.
Sonya Hallett
November 2007
______________________________
Bibliography
Hopkins, Gerard M. ‘Inversnaid’. By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber & Faber, 1997: 11.
Thomas, Dylan. Under Milk Wood. London: Penguin, 2000.