Nailing my colours to the mast

Poetry not prose, Monsieur Jourdain!

The next group of poems deals with the nature of poetry and I will post the first two today.  

The linguist, David Nunan, said that learning a language is more like growing a garden than building a wall. This image of the garden works for poetry equally well.  Once a poem is written, you may go back to it and prune a dead branch here and there or tidy up some dead leaves.  But the poem is growing.  It is alive.  A wall, too, lives in its own way, but it does not grow flowers or give fruit.

Monsieur Jourdain, by the way, is from Molière’s ‘Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme’. Like Mr Bott of Bott’s Digestive Sauce in the William stories, he has plenty of money and now he wants to take his place in society. He pays a teacher to tell him about poetry and discovers that all language is either poetry or prose, and, even better, that he has been speaking prose all his life. What a pleasant discovery! Like Monsieur Jourdain we must distinguish between poetry and prose, and, above all, we must not write prose when we think we are writing poetry.

It is as well to nail my colours to the mast, and say what I believe poetry to be but first let us start with what it is not.

‘Polissez-le sans cesse et le repolissez.’ This was Boileau’s advice.

No, Monsieur Boileau, poetry is not a piece of furniture.   

While on my soap box, and I carry on because, like the speakers at Hyde Park corner, I know my listeners can walk away at any time they wish, let me say a word or two in defence of rhyme. Rhyme is much maligned and much abused.  If there is a fault, then it is not rhyme but inadequate rhymers who are to blame. Rhyme has added stem and flower, structure and ornament to poetry. It makes the point and it is part of the music.

Take Wordsworth’s:

The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose…

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where’er I go

That there has passed away a glory from the earth

Let’s remove the rhymes.  How does this strike you?

The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the lily…

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where’er I walk

That there has passed away a glory from the world.

Or take the lines of his friend describing the time the Ancient Mariner’s ship was becalmed:

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

What about this?

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted sea.

Why malign rhyme? Why not enjoy it?

Poetry is music.  It should run as well as walk.  It should rise and fall.  It should be read aloud or perhaps even sung.  It should be understood by the listener at the same time as it is read for it is not ‘The Times’ crossword.  It should touch the feelings rather than stimulate the mind.  It should lift the heart.  If it does not do these things, it is not a garden but a wall.

If it does not lift the heart, then it may be another type of poetry but it is not the poetry that people will recite to themselves over and over again and return to for enjoyment in good times and for solace in bad. It will not be the poem which they learnt at school and which becomes part of them for the rest of their lives.