An old poetry essay

When he arrived at Oxford as an undergraduate,
W. H. Auden went to see his tutor in literature,
who asked the young man what he meant to do later in life.
“I am going to be a poet,” Auden answered.
“Ah, yes,” replied the tutor,
and began a small lecture on verse exercises improving one's prose.
Auden scowled. “You don't understand at all,” he interrupted.
“I mean a great poet.”

Through the use of prose, I intend to prove that poetry does indeed exist. To start with, I would like to look at a few of my favourite poems, to examine what makes them poetry, and then explain why and how poetry is different from prose and that this difference also establishes that poetry does undeniably exist.

I will begin with a much-loved poem from my favourite poet; William Butler Yeats.

An Irish Airman foresees his own death.

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

To me this poem stands out among the hundreds I’ve read in my time, it manages to outstandingly capture the raw emotion and tragedy of war. It seems to encapsulate not only the opinion of the Irish airman in the poem, but also his fear and his feeling. It gives a sense to the reader of the impending doom awaiting the airman. That is one of the main aspects of poetry that sets it apart from prose, the ability to condense meaning and metaphors together and give the reader an image. When I close my eyes and think of this poem, I am that airman awaiting my death. Yes, prose can transport a reader to another place. That’s why it is so popular, that imaginative sojourn can be undertaken in any length of prose, but only a poem can transport a reader to a far off distant place in such a short passage of words.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of powerful and ambiguous metaphors I would like to examine another poem by another favoured poet of mine; William Blake (and I apologise if this is an overused example of a great poem).

The Sick Rose

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

This poem is genius at work for several reasons. First, it packs several metaphors in the two four line stanzas. So that you can read into the intended meaning of the poem in a variety of ways: It could be about love, death, desire, decay, fear, etc... This then has the effect of making the poem ambiguous and interesting to the reader. It doesn’t really matter what Blake had intended us to think about this poem, what matters is that the reader enjoys the meaning that they derive from this poem. That is the beauty of metaphor, an art once mastered that will separate the average poet from the great poet. Without such a poem would have to rely on other devices to set it apart from prose. The second reason why “The Sick Rose” is an exceptional poem is that it’s a very tight poem, thirty four words; no more are needed for Blake to show us the many themes I have listed above. And in my opinion, it doesn’t mean that all the poems that are short are any better than the sagas and epics. But, it does give the poem greater appeal to a wider audience which helps it endure through history as a famous poem.

Next, I would like to use one of my own poems to exhibit another device that separates poetry from prose and aids the poet indefinitely; rhyme.

Rhyme is perhaps one of the oldest literary devices in the poet’s toolbox. It gives poetry its beat, a rhythm to entice the reader and enliven their own imagination.

The seeming victory

Our enemies now fall to our hand,

The seeming victory

mere fair grains of sand,

We’re all losing… slowly dying

something’s wrong

but we’re all denying

the cost and the loss

the time we can’t find,

Memories smoulder

this life undermined,

Our enemies now die by our hand,

This eternal victory

austere grains of sand,

We’re all lying… while they’ve been dying

it’s all gone now

and there’s no denying

the cost is the loss

The time we won’t find,

The future is something

we conceal with lies.

Without getting into too much technical terminology, the poem is two stanzas of ten lines, the beats for each line change without any regular metre except that both stanzas have the same layout. The main reason I picked this poem is because of the rhyming pattern within. The first line on both stanzas rhymes with the third, while the second rhymes with the first, and so forth with slight variation throughout the poem. Another reason I chose this poem is because without rhyming verse this poem would lose both it’s flow and impact on the reader, and while this is excepted in a few of my poems and the poems of others, without a good rhyming verse poems like this are condemned to languish in the darker depths of my journal.

It’s with rhyme that a poem can set itself uniquely apart from prose. Just use this prose as an example of this fact- how many lines in this prose rhyme? – None –

Why? Because prose doesn’t operate with the same rules as poetry, prose doesn’t have to rely on rhyme to flow, it sets its pace according to the subject matter or the writer’s own tempo.

Does a poem then need metaphor and rhyme to remain poetry? Not necessarily, poetry also relies on other wordplay to set itself apart from prose, and although metaphor and rhyme are two of the major tools of poetry there are other contrivances in the art that is poetry. Alliteration is yet another effect used by the poet. This is achieved by using several words that begin with the same or similar consonants; my example for this is another poem by me.

To the one of few qualities, whom I loved dearly

Such was my life with her:

Contrived, Controlled, Complete,

Things will never be the same I know,

But does this give me the reason to go?

For never will I have these feelings

in the same order again;

Contrived, Controlled, Complete,

Never again will this complex life

seem so orderly

so neat,

Its forgotten love that drives me on now,

It’s forgetting the love that helps me

pass the days,

But it’s not for the same

and its naught for I shame,

When all else keeps me moving,

When all else keeps me sane,

And it’s not for my love, nor money, nor fame,

That helps me live life

just another contrived, Controlled, Incomplete

being like everyone else.

As you can see the second and seventh lines both contain alliteration. This was intended by me to give the poem added meaning, and also to cap the poem off at the end on line 20 with; “just another contrived, Controlled, Incomplete”. The result of this makes the two lines of alliteration and the subsequent ending a powerful theme within the poem.

The last device that I will speak of can be used in both poetry and prose, but it is in poetry that I find it more in its depth, this being the language itself, or wordplay; a contrivance used to its fullest extent by W.H. Auden, a man who was both a great poet and writer of prose as we can see here:

The Wanderer

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.

Upon what man it fall

In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing,

Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face,

That he should leave his house,

No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;

But ever that man goes

Through place-keepers, through forest trees,

A stranger to strangers over undried sea,

Houses for fishes, suffocating water,

Or lonely on fell as chat,

By pot-holed becks

A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.

There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,

And dreams of home,

Waving from window, spread of welcome,

Kissing of wife under single sheet;

But waking sees

Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices

Of new men making another love.

Save him from hostile capture,

From sudden tiger's leap at corner;

Protect his house,

His anxious house where days are counted

From thunderbolt protect,

From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;

Converting number from vague to certain,

Bring joy, bring day of his returning,

Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.

The wordplay in this poem serves to heighten the drama and blur the lines of meaning. Like all great poets W.H. Auden leaves this poem open to the personal interpretation of the reader. The meaning is partially shared but, through the use of wordplay, Auden has managed to shroud parts of this poem with mystery. And this is one of the major factors that sets poetry apart from prose, as prose will almost always have an intended meaning from writer to reader, the more understood the better. Poetry does not need intended meaning to be enjoyed; it is the reader’s interpretation that makes the poem special to that person. Just because a poet may enjoy one of his particular poems, this will not dictate that anyone who reads it will enjoy it as well.

An example for this is a poem I wrote recently, the intended meaning in this poem (without my explanation) would most likely be lost on anyone who reads it. This doesn’t make it a bad poem (it might to the eyes of another reader), but it does make it ambiguous and in some cases pretentious.

A man

As this time in all

I roam as the wolf without pack

alone

tense but fluid in the forevermore

the forever gone

forgotten but foretold

silent in the waking hours

music in my dreams

neither heroic warrior

nor demonic beast

just a man.

The intended meaning of this poem is; that in my sleep I see myself as the man I would like to be, alone but satisfied, not seeking to attain more in life, just drifting with the ebb and flow of being.

This poem is a declaration of how I wish to live, feel and experience the things around me that make me human, to draw breath and face the great beyond when it comes. But there are few hints within this poem that would draw the reader to this conclusion; do poets enjoy hiding their meanings within their work? Yes, because this is what makes a poet fundamentally poetic, he is an artist and philosopher, satirist and prophet. The poet exists because there is a gap in between prose and art, a gap that is filled by poetry.

It is therefore my conclusion that poetry does exist. It is alive in the hearts of the poets and the hearts of readers, as poetry cannot exist without either. It can be seen wherever words are seen, it can be condensed to have multiple meanings and metaphors. It can have significance to anyone or no one. It sometimes requires a trust between the poet and reader, and it’s almost always abundant in emotion.

Nothing else can say as much.