Byron’s stanza openings

In Childe Harold, Byron uses iambic pentameter as his poetic metre. He is very versatile in how he varies his poetic line in the opening of each stanza. This gives a particular effect in each particular verse, but also shapes a narrative effect over the course of several stanzas within a canto.

“But my soul wanders; I demand it back” (4, 25) gives a snappy tension to be expanded on in the rest of the stanza.

“The moon is up, and yet it is not night;” (4, 27) is slightly different although the line is also divided into two. The pause in the centre is less abrupt, being a comma instead of a semi colon, so the tone is one of reflective contrast, two balancing clauses, which provoke further lines of reflection.

“Admire, exult, despise, laugh, weep, – for here” (4, 160) is quite different again, broken up, and staccato. Byron has atomised the line into a series of different emotional verbs to indicate variety. The sense is clearly suspended until the next line, the word “here” acting like a platform for further explanation.

He uses this listing technique also in the serial effect of

“Sky, mountains, river, winds, lake, lightnings! ye!” (3, 96). Again it adds lexical variety, and slows down the line adding variety of pace, but at the cost of rhetorical flow. Swelling rhetorical openings work best though against a background of other sorts of line.

Byron uses brilliantly rhetorical openings in a climactic effect towards the end of cantos 3 and 4. In canto 3, he creates the image of a night in the Swiss Alps, and concentrates the moment,

“It is the hush of night, and all between/Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear” (3, 86). The effect is a bit like holding your breath. Byron intensifies the feeling over five stanzas, and then returns to the word “night” which the reader will remember,

“The sky is changed! – and such a change! O night,” (3, 92). This signals a shift from more abstract speculations of night to a tone of personal intimacy. The exclamation marks are attention grabbing and splendidly emphatic, but the final two words of the invocation are quite tender.

Byron continues in the next stanza, using “night” again as a refrain, but again in a slightly different line,

“And this is in the night; – Most glorious night!” (3, 93). The unit of sense, Byron’s complete poetic sentence, here corresponds with the poetic line to give a sense of roundedness to what is partly an explanation and partly an invocation.

Towards the end of canto 4, Byron again uses swelling rhetorical openings. After a variety of initial stanza lines, he begins an invocation to the wilderness and solitude,

“Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling place” (4, 177)

He heightens tension by going for a full rhetorical effect in the consecutive stanza, using anaphora, where unusually, the beginnings of the first three lines of the stanza are the same, sounding incantatory:

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar” (4, 178)

Each of these lines is complete syntactically; there is no suspended sense here.

In the next stanza he moves to a powerful invocation of the ocean, sharpened by the final delayed imperative,

“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll!” (4, 179)

Byron’s conversational style has become declamatory, fitting itself to the iambic pentameter so well that the structure of the line and the fluent expression of his thought are seamless.Four stanzas later, he modulates tone, still praising the sea, but in more confessional mode,

“And I have loved thee Ocean! and my joy

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy” (4, 184)

The conversational opening “And” signals a return to a more personal, less grand and abstract sense. The incomplete meaning of “joy” pushes the narrative of the stanza on into the next few lines, until the buoyant conclusion of bubbles, which occurring not at the end but in the middle of the third line, allows the effect to be repeated.

Rupert Brooke The Dead

Brooke’s sonnet, IV, “The Dead”, illustrates his careful variation of the iambic pentameter line for emotional effect.

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,

Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.

The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,

And sunset, and the colours of the earth.

These had seen movement, and heard music; known

Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;

Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;

Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.

There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter

And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,

Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance

And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white

Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,

A width, a shining peace, under the night.

 

Brooke staggers his sentences so no line of verse contains a complete sentence. Especially interesting are the last four lines of the octave and the transition to the sestet. The list of actions from “These had seen movement” is broken up in a staccato effect with semi colons, so that the sentence does not conclude until the final line of the octave. This breaking up gives a disjointed air, a series of completed actions certainly, but in the past, final, and sealed in by their punctuation, so that they don’t lead out anywhere. The fragmentary phrases also convey a set of disparate or discrete experiences, like personal random sensory events. Semi colons rather than commas or periods allow the actions to hang together in a succession, but are emphatic in closing them off. The final sentence of the octave is itself like a full stop, acting like a punctuating period on the chain of experinces.

Brooke chooses a very contrasting effect as he opens out into the sestet. With a sentence of great expansiveness he runs over the first line into the second. The end of this sentence itself is delayed by a comma, and an emphatic concluding phrase, “all day”. This creates a slight pause before the end of the second line, lingering on the thought and change of pace for a moment. The effect is accentuated by the opening two words of the next sentence, “And after,” which pauses at the end of the line with a comma, lingering again, and whose rhyme links it back to the previous sentence at the end of the previous line. The poem hangs temporarily suspended. Brooke continues on through the sestet using long, flowing sentences that run over the unit which is the poetic line, and whose clauses punctuated with commas, enhance the thoughtful dwelling on the sense.

 

Sorley Maclean on Eimhir/Modernism in Gaelic

My attempt at translating no. 45 from his 1943 collection, Dain do Eimhir, Poems to Eimhir. Below is a scan of the Gaelic poem from my personal copy of the 1943 first edition.

A knife made a cut in my brain on the stone of my love, darling, and the edge probed each single ridge and my eye took its hue.

I turned each gemmed particle under the sharp, cold glass that is my understanding flame, which valued them hundreds of hours.

After the knife, glass, fire and the beam of the sharp edge, gashing, cutting, burning, probing, there was not a change in the hue.

The amulet-stone cut into a thousand particles as whole as ever it was, crushed into powder, but dense, crystalline, sharp-edged.

As it went go into the number of crushed, cut shards, so it would take on the unity of the hard compact oneness.

It swelled to the extent of a thousand oceans and each shard went into a drop, but it was the water that went hard with the swollen crushing of love.

The stone that got the cut was from my own narrow mind, sliced into the majesty which the deep land would deserve.

Pickaxed out of my chest, its expanse was above my alien dimension and like a splinter its mother-rock contracted into Betelgeuse of the stars.

The stone of love came from my brain and it took the brave imagination so that it was the mother-imagination to the mother-brain itself.

It is the love born of the heart that is the love that is fettered free when it is taken in the mind, the loving brain on its love.

And it is the stone that is broken that is the bright, whole jewel when it is crushed by a brain to the topmost hardness of love.

Darling, if the love of my heart on you were not like the hardness of the diamond, I know that it would take cutting by a sharp, hard brain.

This poem is steeped in the world of the Metaphysical poets, with its incongruous likening of love and the brain to a hard gemstone that could be cut up in some Baconian early scientific experiment. Compare John Donne’s opening to “The Damp”,

When I am dead, and doctors know not why,

And my friends’ curiosity

Will have me cut up to survey each part,

When they shall find your picture in my heart”.

You can also see the influence of the Metaphysicals in Maclean’s deliberate employment of paradox, as in “fettered free” or the contrast between multiple, pulverised fragments and their unity. Images of violence, burning, slashing, pickaxing, and radical physical changes of state applied to a personal mental world are also Donnean.

Like Donne’s flipping between the body and the world or the cosomos, Maclean switches easily between different proportions, with the growth of the stone from the brain to a scale measureless beside his body, and the abrupt shift in perspective from a splinter to the star, Betelgeuse. Likewise, the stone grows to the size of an ocean, and then the rocky splinters transform themselves to watery drops.

Not least, the line of thought of the poem, occasionally convoluted, dwells on difficult obscurities, and unsettling analogies, the brain as knife probing the author’s own emotions.

Like T.S. Eliot, Maclean was intrigued by the Metaphysicals, presumably because their thought-world was congenial to the Modernist emphasis on fragments, rapd shifts in vision, and alienation.

For a lateral look at how another modernist writer transfigures passion into an internal geological landscape, here is an interesting comparison from Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah (trans John Sturrock):

It is hard to credit the extent to which his anxiety had disturbed, and by the same token had even momentarily enriched, M. de Charlus’s mind. Love causes these veritable geological upheavals in our thoughts. In those of M. de Charlus, which a few days before, had resembled a plain so smooth that, away into the distance, he would not have been able to spot an idea lying on the surface, there had abruptly arisen, hard as stone, a mountain massif, but of mountains so sculpted it was as if some statuary, instead of carrying the marble away, had carved it where it lay, and where there writhed, in giant, titanic groups, Fury, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Hatred, Suffering, Pride, Terror and Love.

Byron, Childe Harold

To return to the question of of reading extended narration in sinuous verse form, instead of in prose sentences:

The sinuous lines of thought found in extended verse narratives like Shelley’s can also be found in Byron. In “Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage”, Byron either aligns or misaligns the poetic sentence with the line endings of his stanzas. Sometimes this works at the level of the individual stanza, and sometimes he carries his poetic sentence over more than one stanza.

Here is an example from canto three, where Byron starts by referring to the grasshopper,

He is an evening reveller, who makes

His life an infancy, and sings his fill;

At intervals, some bird from out the brakes,

Starts into voice a moment, then is still.

There seems a floating whisper on the hill,

But that is fancy, for the starlight dews

All silently the tears of love instil,

Weeping themselves away, till they infuse

Deep into Nature’s breast the spirit of her hues.

The rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc, which is where the line endings part company from prose. Byron ends one poetic sentence with “then is still”, but the succeeding sentence, by sharing the b rhyme ending, “a floating whisper on the hill”, is pulled closer in sense to the previous one. That is, the imaginary floating whisper is linked with the previous sounds of birdsong and grasshopper, so extending the moment. It is not always possible to encounter a new sentence, without its meaning cascading back into what has just been read; it does this structurally and pointedly.

Byron’s stanzas do not always use this technique, but they often do. Prose might achieve resonance like this by starting or concluding paragraphs or sentences with verbal echoes, but cannot do it so systematically, or else it dissolves into verse and loses its prose character. Verse with a rhyme scheme is habitually, even compulsively, reflective.