What Comes Out in the Pieces

Some awarenesses rise to the surface in the process I’ve run thru a few times now.

Last year I took a Lampman sonnet, cut it up, put it back together in a new arrangement of the words. What struck me is that although the meter seemed stiff, the word combinations he had were stellar. When broken down to the level of word, there was a balanced mix of parts of speech. There was enough internal rhyme that I could pick new end rhymes for another piece from his selections. He used figurative language but the words were all concrete, common and simple to great effect.

In contrast while trying the same process of cutting down to word level Pauline E Johnson’s The Train Dogs, the results were quite different. There was no internal rhyme to speak of. Each rhyme was for the end point and only couplets. There was a spate of consonance but not running thru as a thread of sound. Hers is not a sonnet. Each stanza has 39 beats and with one refrain line per stanza. A certain amount of repetition is expected in a lyrics like. It uses a strict dactyl. (Dactyl the same meter used in Longfellow’s Evangeline.) When I took the poem into word lists by part of speech, it was quite different than Lampman’s set. “The”, “and” and “of” were a much heavier proportion. What remained had a lot of slanted language adjectives, the pronoun selection was only “they”. On the word level the poem revealed its nature of emotionalism. Reading the right margin gave some content words but felt generic and gave little away. To try to put it back together and keep all the 20 odd 18 instances of “the” was an anathema. The meter made a vigorous feel but taken apart felt padded.

In taking apart Charles G Robert’s The Furrow I was surprised to find the horse and fog missing. Where was the central image? Explicitly he had used words that built images of the plough and horse and man at dawn but had not used the word light and I had seen the sweat of his back and on the withers but there were only the harnesses and nostril to represent the whole horse. The mood words, out of context, became as much mood laden as a dictionary. Almost the entire right margin are slant rhymes yet reading it I hadn’t felt bashed over the head. Words he chose have become, or were then, archaic. A pity really. Griding as the sound of grinding is a lovely idea. Glebe is the earth belonging to a parish, presumably where the local place name comes from. His use of whence marked his time, perhaps why his poems have less currency now.

In deconstructing Yevtushenko’s Monologue of a Polar Fox On An Alaskan Fur Farm I found, reading the right margin, gave a plot and mood synopsis. It runs as a Cole’s note. The poem in translation without end rhymes yet proportionally I was surprised to find how much words with o ran thru. It is a lamenting poem and, as with Johnson’s sample, the language is stilted to explicit emotionalism. The story didn’t entirely fall apart when in word set. The word I is heavily represented in a poem from the pov of a fox, as political allegory.

It is not the words alone but how they are arrange. Interesting to find how much a poem is a poem down to the word choices alone as well.