It has been quite a while since I sullied this blog with something other than a poem, but the itch has come again and will not be denied. In today's edition, I will ponder an aspect of rhyme that I have come to reconsider since this blog began: the feminine rhyme in the style of John Fletcher.
For those of you who are looking at the page very blankly, John Fletcher is a playwright - or was a playwright, as far as I am aware he is dead, buried, and gone, sans Zombie Fletcher, though that would be cool but I digress - from the late Elizabethan, Jacobean, and even Caroline periods of the English Renaissance. He was a major force in his day, especially in collaboration with Francis Beaumont (so much so that after Fletcher's death {he outlived Beaumont} a large number of his solo works were bundled into a Beaumont and Fletcher joint folio), Philip Massinger, and William Shakespeare, among others. He is supposed to have had a hand in many of Shakespeare's later works, including the lost Cardenio, but his reputation has faded with the years as the kind of showy, mixed genre theater he primarily wrote has waned in popularity and critical acclaim.
For those of you looking a little less blankly, or who just read that, Fletcher had a somewhat distinctive writing style, characterized for our purpose by a particular verbal tic: the tendency towards feminine rhyme (or at least feminine endings of lines) with a monosyllablic word at the end of the line. That is, "I am a poet though I did not know it": 11 syllables, iambic, and therefore with the stress on the penultimate rather than the ultimate syllable, despite the last syllable being a word in and of itself.
Now, as far as I know Fletcher published no sonnets (he was big a little after the late 1500s sonnet craze) but that does not in any way reduce how associated he is with that style. I have no doubt he would have used it in sonnets had he published them, and the question still remains of what to do about the style within the sonnet. Are these rhymes useful or appropriate to the sonnet?
I have for years disliked this choice and considered it inartistic and ugly, especially in rhyme (I have fewer reservations about blank verse in the style, though I still try to avoid it). This is because I have always felt that rhyme should use new words each time as much as possible (I am not of the Homer Simpson bowling episode position that rhyming Homer and homer deserves applause), and this style results in rhymes like "know it" and "blow it" which use the same rhyme word at the end. I am less troubled by "poet" and "know it," assuming your dialect makes it a true and not slant rhyme, because they are different words.
However, recently I have come to a greater comfort with this style, as I have reasoned that certain words are almost unrhymeable without it, as they have difficult stress patterns to match or complicated internal assonance or consonance. Also, I have had to confront the fact that my idea that the restrictions on form should be pared down to the minimum necessary in order to highlight the chosen restrictions more brilliantly conflicts with this prejudice. As such, I am now much more open to this style, which I hope in the fullness of time will be a good thing, artistically and critically.
Showing posts with label aesthetics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aesthetics. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
On Stretching Meanings
Poetry has some flexibility with the language, naturally, in the service of art. Just how much can be a question though, obviously. For example, if you look one post before this, the sonnet there rhymes "ruth" with "truth." This in itself is not objectionable: they rhyme. But is "ruth" really the emotion demanded by, or even an emotion permitted by, the rest of the poem? Ruth means pity, compassion, sorrow, grief, the emotions felt by Ruth the Moabite towards her mother-in-law Naomi in the Biblical Book of Ruth after their mutual widowhood. The poem is about romantic love. How far can one stretch "ruth," with all its sorrowful, pitying connotations (and even direct definitions!) to fit that mold?
The first cast in that direction is grammatical: "ruth" is joined with "And tenderness" in the following line, which means that we must take a form of ruth that can join with tenderness. But all of the definitions I've placed above can do so: grief and tenderness may be the furthest apart, but they are by no means absurd when joined. Rather, the absurdity in all these cases arises from the sense that the poem wants "ruth" to mean something like a synonym for tenderness, not just a complement. So this move does not help, although in other contexts it might.
Building on that, though, we can ask if there is a fringe definition - archaic, obsolete, historical-linguistic - that is allowable but unintuitive and might make sense of "ruth." This is for instance how one most often deals with John Milton's excessive Latinism: go back to his Latin roots and define the parts until you see how it works beyond ordinary English usage. Here we are on firmer ground: if we take "ruth" in its formative sense as related to the sympathetic and self-effacing love Ruth felt for Naomi, we could make that work.
This, however, brings us close to the borderline of complete redefinition: taking the word Humpty-Dumpty-style and making it mean what you say it means. This should generally be avoided except when coining the word for the first time, and even then it ought to be a meaning suggested by the sound or component parts of the word. It is a real stretch, which can easily break a poem, to go too far out on the redefinition limb.
As for "ruth," you tell me: did it go too far? I am personally just barely satisfied with it: the difficulty of that rhyme compensates somewhat for the effort needed to define it (if the rhyme were something ending in an -ee sound, there would be no excuse since there are so many rhymes), and the root meaning is there, if somewhat faintly. Ruth's love for Naomi is the central motivator of the word, and it is that sort of overwhelming, non-self-oriented love - which sometimes seems like pity and can in fact be called compassion in one sense of that word - that the poem wanted and needed from the word. But I am not the arbiter of my own poetry: the reader is. So what do you think?
The first cast in that direction is grammatical: "ruth" is joined with "And tenderness" in the following line, which means that we must take a form of ruth that can join with tenderness. But all of the definitions I've placed above can do so: grief and tenderness may be the furthest apart, but they are by no means absurd when joined. Rather, the absurdity in all these cases arises from the sense that the poem wants "ruth" to mean something like a synonym for tenderness, not just a complement. So this move does not help, although in other contexts it might.
Building on that, though, we can ask if there is a fringe definition - archaic, obsolete, historical-linguistic - that is allowable but unintuitive and might make sense of "ruth." This is for instance how one most often deals with John Milton's excessive Latinism: go back to his Latin roots and define the parts until you see how it works beyond ordinary English usage. Here we are on firmer ground: if we take "ruth" in its formative sense as related to the sympathetic and self-effacing love Ruth felt for Naomi, we could make that work.
This, however, brings us close to the borderline of complete redefinition: taking the word Humpty-Dumpty-style and making it mean what you say it means. This should generally be avoided except when coining the word for the first time, and even then it ought to be a meaning suggested by the sound or component parts of the word. It is a real stretch, which can easily break a poem, to go too far out on the redefinition limb.
As for "ruth," you tell me: did it go too far? I am personally just barely satisfied with it: the difficulty of that rhyme compensates somewhat for the effort needed to define it (if the rhyme were something ending in an -ee sound, there would be no excuse since there are so many rhymes), and the root meaning is there, if somewhat faintly. Ruth's love for Naomi is the central motivator of the word, and it is that sort of overwhelming, non-self-oriented love - which sometimes seems like pity and can in fact be called compassion in one sense of that word - that the poem wanted and needed from the word. But I am not the arbiter of my own poetry: the reader is. So what do you think?
Monday, November 15, 2010
On Aesthetics and Fictional Poetry
I have mentioned before the difficulty in writing fictional sonnets. At that time I suggested that aesthetics might present an acceptable reason and model for deviating from reality. I will now expound on this subject at slightly greater length.
A sonnet - or any poem - can be understood on more levels than I wish to engage with at the moment. But for the present discussion it is important to pay attention to two of these ways: aesthetically and narratively. Both of these ways affect the ultimate goal of our understanding here, namely the emotional pull of the poem on the reader.
To understand a poem narratively is to enter into it through the path presented, unsurprisingly, by its narrative: what does the poem say, what does it say happened, how does it feel about what happened? The poem is interpreted through these questions, and the emotional impact of the poem relies on the interaction between the narrator, the narrative, and the reader. A sad tale will (hopefully) produce sadness in the reader, a happy one happiness, an eerie one a sense of eeriness; and the poem is sad, happy, or eerie depending on how the narrator presents the narrative to the reader. This is a useful, valuable, and important method of interpretation, and, in a broad sense, my own primary one. Under this method, a fictional poem can easily fall flat because the poet has difficulty negotiating the narrator/narrative interaction due to the distance set up between the poet and the narrator. This will not necessarily happen, and most of the other methods of writing fictional poetry mentioned earlier attempt to finesse this difficulty.
But an aesthetic understanding of the poem can avoid this difficulty entirely. Aesthetic interpretation enters the poem not through the narrative, but through the feel, sound, and appearance of the words. This does not mean that aesthetic poetry ignores the creation of a narrative any more than a narrative interpretation requires the abandonment of good aesthetics. But, aesthetically understood, poetry cares not about how the poet negotiates his relationship with the narrator or narrative, only about how the music, the taste, and the beauty of the words come across; effects that may even be made easier by the use of invention, as the possible ideal of accuracy is no longer present as a bar to aesthetic word choice.
I think it is clear from the foregoing that understanding poetry through aesthetics removes, or at least lowers, a potential barrier to the creation of fictional poetry. A poet may easily range beyond his or her own experience and emotions when the focus is on the beauty of the poem rather than the relatability of the narrative. Poetry understood as fine art in the sense of music or the visual arts rather than drama is substantially freer from the chains of reality - and such an understanding can lead to delightful, beautiful poetry.
A sonnet - or any poem - can be understood on more levels than I wish to engage with at the moment. But for the present discussion it is important to pay attention to two of these ways: aesthetically and narratively. Both of these ways affect the ultimate goal of our understanding here, namely the emotional pull of the poem on the reader.
To understand a poem narratively is to enter into it through the path presented, unsurprisingly, by its narrative: what does the poem say, what does it say happened, how does it feel about what happened? The poem is interpreted through these questions, and the emotional impact of the poem relies on the interaction between the narrator, the narrative, and the reader. A sad tale will (hopefully) produce sadness in the reader, a happy one happiness, an eerie one a sense of eeriness; and the poem is sad, happy, or eerie depending on how the narrator presents the narrative to the reader. This is a useful, valuable, and important method of interpretation, and, in a broad sense, my own primary one. Under this method, a fictional poem can easily fall flat because the poet has difficulty negotiating the narrator/narrative interaction due to the distance set up between the poet and the narrator. This will not necessarily happen, and most of the other methods of writing fictional poetry mentioned earlier attempt to finesse this difficulty.
But an aesthetic understanding of the poem can avoid this difficulty entirely. Aesthetic interpretation enters the poem not through the narrative, but through the feel, sound, and appearance of the words. This does not mean that aesthetic poetry ignores the creation of a narrative any more than a narrative interpretation requires the abandonment of good aesthetics. But, aesthetically understood, poetry cares not about how the poet negotiates his relationship with the narrator or narrative, only about how the music, the taste, and the beauty of the words come across; effects that may even be made easier by the use of invention, as the possible ideal of accuracy is no longer present as a bar to aesthetic word choice.
I think it is clear from the foregoing that understanding poetry through aesthetics removes, or at least lowers, a potential barrier to the creation of fictional poetry. A poet may easily range beyond his or her own experience and emotions when the focus is on the beauty of the poem rather than the relatability of the narrative. Poetry understood as fine art in the sense of music or the visual arts rather than drama is substantially freer from the chains of reality - and such an understanding can lead to delightful, beautiful poetry.
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