Is what you've written intended to be about meaning? It doesn't seem so to me. I wrote earlier in this thread and elsewhere that I don't think poems mean anything beyond the experience of the person reading or listening to it. Your post seems more like an explanation of how the poet has used language to help us share that experience. — T Clark
Meaning tends to influence rhythm as much as the other way round, and different people might emphasise different words. A short Poem:
Danielle Hope, "The Mist at Night" (from The Poet's Voice, 1994):
Perhaps it's the trees, look -
on sentry parade by the lake,
October weighting their branches,
a flotilla of shadows
casting nets over the water.
Perhaps it's the black-out under the trees -
terse chestnuts crack underfoot.
The water-rat snores from dumb roots,
the hawthorn racked red with doubt.
Perhaps it's the mist - wide awake
like a child before Christmas -
or that you think the air weeps
and you don't want it to stop.
So you tug up a tough ugly stump
to wake the lynx that sleeps
just under your heart.
To chase the sleepy lynx out of its lair.
To run wild in the mist in the night. — Dawnstorm
The most striking means of subdivision is the repetition of "Perhaps it's the...", which gives the poem its structure, until the final five lines are introduced with "So," initiating a conclusion [...]
On the semantic level, the "perhaps" refuses to make a definite statement, and the "it" is indeterminate, never telling you what it's talking about. So you have a sort of vague, dreamy feel just from non-sensual words.
The mist from the title doesn't come in until the start of the second stanza. The first stanza gives the setting, but does smuggle in impressionistic figurative language. — Dawnstorm
One way to think about poetry is that it foregrounds elements bedsides the words that shape our understanding of an utterance...Hugh Kenner tells a story about Eliot, that returning to England on the ferry, someone called his attention to the white cliffs of Dover and remarked that they didn't look real, to which Eliot responded, "Oh they're real enough," a sentence Kenner takes to have four different meanings depending on which of its four words you emphasize — Srap Tasmaner
It's a change in the mood (and the "blackout" foreshadows this, actually). Semantically, the chestnuts being terse fit well with a "crack", but the word is a little odd. The water-rat line feels a little more relaxed again, but not quite as much as the trees-line, and the hawthorn line ends on the plosive of "doubt". — Dawnstorm
Perhaps it's the mist - wide awake
like a child before Christmas -
or that you think the air weeps
and you don't want it to stop. — Dawnstorm
There's the vivid imagery, and the mix up of inner and outer world. (For example, if you tug up a tough ugly stump to wake the lynx that sleeps just under your heart, where was the stump, and did it hurt? — Dawnstorm
I end the poem at its slowest (even though semantically, the poem's adressee is supposed to run wild). — Dawnstorm
A poem, read aloud, is always already an interpretation (though not necessarily consciously so). And I don't think the differences in reading are random. — Dawnstorm
una casa apparì sparì d’un tratto;
a house appeared disappeared in the blink of an eye; — Amity
I wonder why you say the word 'crack' is odd. — Amity
I meant the word "terse" is odd — Dawnstorm
This Be The Verse
By Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself. — Tom Storm
So I basically can't even trust my initial take anymore. — Dawnstorm
I haven't read The Wasteland, have to admit I'd never even heard of it.
I'm interested in 'the sound of the poem', so I searched Librivox:
There are quite a few readings but this one sounds good to my ears. It is last in a selection of 60.
(I was delighted to find 'The Owl and the Pussycat', a childhood favourite, easy to remember and recite.)
https://librivox.org/poetic-duets-by-various/ — Amity
Well, I'm not sure that you can make a general claim about 'modern poets' from a single, stand out example of 'Modernism':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land
But I don't really understand what point you are trying to make.
Meaning is there, no matter the form. — Amity
Previously, I posted poetry about current Ukranian war by female poets. Who read or responded?
I was trying to move beyond English male-dominated, traditional poems. — Amity
Where are you finding them? The short form suits me well :flower:
So, a simple couplet. Clever; reflecting title and theme.
What do you think/feel when you read it? — Amity
The translator made some decisions that seem odd to me. — T Clark
THE TOMB SAID TO THE ROSE
AFTER THE FRENCH OF VICTOR HUGO
THE tomb said to the rose:
—"With the tears thy leaves enclose,
What makest thou, love's flower?"
The rose said to the tomb:
—"Tell me of all those whom
Death gives into thy power!"
The rose said:—"Tomb, 't is strange,
But these tears of love I change
Into perfumes amber sweet."
The tomb said:—"Plaintive flower,
Of these souls, I make each hour
Angels, for heaven meet!" — Wikisource
The grave says to the rose:
- Tears with which the dawn waters you
What are you doing, flower of love?
The rose says to the grave:
- What do you do with what falls
In your still open abyss?
The rose says: - Dark tomb,
Of these tears I make in the shadows
A scent of amber and honey.
The tomb says: - Plaintive flower,
Of every soul that comes to me
I make an angel from heaven! — All Poetry
All in all, I think I like the English version better. Part of that is that I like the way English sounds better than I do French. I like harder, squared off edges better than the rounding over. — T Clark
Sorry, while this pursuit is noble, I found them really hard to read is all. The Ukrainian war being so... now. And USians cheering on the whole affair like it's a football match... it's just hard for me to comment on stuff like that. (there's a reason I avoid the Ukraine thread) — Moliere
She is great at putting loose conversational speech into strict traditional verse form - here's another one, rules mentioned again, rules of prosody:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1031860-nine-line-triolet-here-s-a-fine-mess-we-got-ourselves-into — Cuthbert
Sorry, while this pursuit is noble, I found them really hard to read is all. The Ukrainian war being so... now. And USians cheering on the whole affair like it's a football match... it's just hard for me to comment on stuff like that. (there's a reason I avoid the Ukraine thread) — Moliere
Yes, I feel the same thing. I keep thinking something really bad is going to happen that will affect the whole world. — T Clark
I would like to hear this poem rather than just read it. — Amity
Next, "phrase" is also a word used in music theory: a phrase is built from lower level stuff, too, like, say, motifs, but I'm not that knowledgable here. In any case, if you riff of this term, you might consider a phrase a compositional unit that somehow completes a rhythm. A phrase might co-incide with a line, with half a line, with a couplet... depending on the poem. You can then compare the rhythmic units with units of meaning: Do they co-incide? Do they overlap? And so on. — Dawnstorm
Calling Dawnstorm - would you agree? — Amity
I'd be interested to hear how well the music, song and singer interpret the poem and the phrasing.
Any ideas? — Amity
I'm not sure with what? — Dawnstorm
[...] I don't feel confident to say much here. — Dawnstorm
While browsing for poems -- I have never before ventured down the path of The Wasteland until now. And I really did love it. I read an essay beforehand, knowing that the poem is notoriously difficult, and she suggested to sit at home with the sound of the poem rather than starting out with the analytic approach of trying to understand all the references, or even all the images! I can feel the cohesive mood in the poem, but the ending mystifies me. — Moliere
With your inspiration, I just read "The Wasteland" too. To paraphrase Charles Montgomery Burns - I don't know poetry, but I know what I hate, and I don't hate that. — T Clark
:smile: :cool:YouTube has some good recordings of people like Alec Guinness reading it out. For me it helped get into the rhythm of Eliot. — Tom Storm
I remember you enjoyed him as le Carré's George Smiley in 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'.Thanks. I'll take a look. — T Clark
I started out using Kindle to look up references and foreign phrases, but I quit after a couple of stanzas. I figured I would just plow through without trying too hard. If I read it again I'll dig in more. — T Clark
No, it's a jingly kind of pop. — Amity
loose conversational speech into strict traditional verse form — Cuthbert
I started out using Kindle to look up references and foreign phrases, but I quit after a couple of stanzas. — T Clark
Eliot provided his own notes, which are not always published in full text online versions but here they are:
https://wasteland.windingway.org/endnotes
Unfortunately the notes themselves assume a knowledge of Italian, German and Latin. So for what it's worth. — Cuthbert
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