Perfect Lyrics
Even without music certain lyrics sing. What is this quality? Yeats doesn’t have it; Blake does. Well, of course this needs to be qualified, of course it does: so, better to say that Yeats has a rather self-conscious lyricism, that the singing doesn’t often feel fully spontaneous, that it’s a little bit arch, a little bit art song.
But Blake! Blake is something else again! Blake’s lyricism is entirely innocent, organic, Visionary. Football crowds, Rugby crowds, cricket crowds in Britain burst spontaneously into song and the song is usually Blake’s Jerusalem.
OK, Blake didn’t call it that, and OK, it wasn’t until it was set to music in 1916, as the First World War was raging, and the world seemed turned to nothing but horror and grief, that it became so totemic – but you could argue, thinks the Raven, that Sir Hubert Parry, the composer, was responding to the powerful lyric quality of Blake’s poem.
Except that there’s no one to have this argument with; for the Raven driving home is out in the country, having taken on a building job for a couple of months. No voice but his own is sounding in his ears, though he hears the tyres singing as the car swings swiftly along the smooth dark roads, rounding corners where white posts bearing warning yellow lights sing out about danger and the deaths of the past. Sonnets by Gerard Manley Hopkins try to sing, but they are so mannered that it ruins the effect, he thinks, swerving to dodge the eyes of some animal caught in his lights. Because true lyrics, the true lyric is simple, almost effortless (how much poetic intelligence it takes to create that artless effect), a breath on the wind.
He’s been in town for four days; he just downed tools and lit out (he’s his own boss and he’s well ahead of schedule). It’s May. The summer has passed and the threat of bushfires has gone with it; now it is a strangely warm and wet autumn; the trees still have their leaves; the nights are dark and balmy. The insides of houses are colder than the world of the night.
A breath on the wind, he says. (He’s thinking about the songs and music of his friend Ned Collette, master lyricist, musician, composer).
Reaching the last major crossroad before the highway takes a sudden turn to the west, the Raven slows down. He almost turns back - even now, while he is driving further and further away his friends are out in the city celebrating, the music is playing; the lights are on all over town.
The essence of the lyric, he thinks, as he picks up speed again (but now the car seems slow, reluctant even, to traverse the country night) is that the singer is alone. He sings from within his own isolated heart. He sings to someone absent; his song sings to itself. Only one other person is there, as far as the song is concerned (irrespective of whether it is being sung in or to a crowd). It’s that quality of unbreakable isolation that makes a song sing.
In particular the Raven is thinking of one of Ned Collette’s songs from a 2010 release, The Pool is Full of Hats. It’s flawless, a melody that has to be heard to be believed. It moves
quite quickly, as if a wind is blowing through the words and music. It plays through his head as the corner posts tick by.
The wind is so peaceful
The trees are so green
The grass whispers softly
What you mean, mean to me
The Raven is not greatly given to singing but because he loves the sound of this track so much he puts the CD in the player and sings along with it. Thus he arrives at the house in the country, singing in the dark. And the next morning when he wakes up he finds he has dreamed the song all night.
And standing outside at the beginning of the day’s hard toil, on this hot breathless inland morning, he reminds himself as he picks up his crowbar, that most of his favourite lyrics have to do with the wind blowing or the movement of the sea. And as he goes to work on the last bit of the demolition he thinks of a sliver of poetry, one of his favourites. It’s not a lyric text. That is, it’s not song as such, but it’s what he likes to call a lyric view of existence. He pretty much remembers it, but later goes inside to check.
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
These lines from East Coker by T.S.Eliot have all the marks of the lyric vision, a rhyming of the solitary self and the unimpeded natural world, which takes place before your eyes and in your mind, and of which the next example, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 8-line poem, Heaven-Haven is perhaps one of the most perfect in the canon.
Heaven–Haven
A nun takes the veil
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail.
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
So here it is, a poem so brief and so musical that you can almost remember it without even trying to memorise it – to ‘learn it off by heart’, as kids and their teachers used to say, back in the good old days when you started doing this when you were six or seven.
It is almost instantly memorable, and it is amazingly calm, an unimpeded beauty created by a marvellous combination of poetic effects: first, the vocabulary – it is composed almost entirely of monosyllables, one- syllable words, with only five exceptions and you might argue that ‘asked’ as it’s normally spoken is a monosyllable).
Combining with this: the effects created by metre and line -length, an unvarying steadiness that mimes the speaker’s steady, unperturbed decision to abandon the world for a state of uninterrupted peace and seclusion, where springs not fail, where a few lilies blow, and where no storms come – in short the world of an enclosed religious order, ideally imagined.
To put it succinctly: techniques and meaning are perfectly co-ordinated, so that we feel the spell of seclusion in these fields where flies no sharp and sided hail.
Next: the variation of line length in each verse, with the third line (use your scansion and sound it out) a perfect five-foot line in iambic pentameter: the classic cadence of English. Even the instructions on the back of some bus tickets is in iambic pentameter -you must look up this term yourselves, if you’re not already familiar with it. It is, in brief, the natural rhythm and metre of spoken as well as written English; it is our instinctive rhythm. It is organic to the English tongue.
Here then we have the 2 shorter lines 1 and 2 followed by the expansion of line 3 into five feet of iambic pentameter. Interestingly the very first line of the poem is less regular than line 2, or any of the other shorter lines. Is this devised to suggest that there is some tension or difficulty for the speaker here as she begins to enunciate her choice? That in starting to express her decision to withdraw from the world her thought and feeling are not quite calm, even though, of course, you couldn’t describe them as agitated. In fact the irregularity is so slight as to be almost negligible. But it’s worth thinking about this: it is dramatic verse, after all, presenting the singular voice of a singular character making a very unusual choice. And presumably she is young, at a time when the charms of active life lie all before her; maybe the slight opening irregularity of this opening line indicates the hesitancy we would expect from one so young deciding to leave the living world of action behind?
After this the voice of the poem steadies, and the rhythms, the line lengths and scansion patterns, the effect of diction and the calming and musical qualities of the rhyme scheme all combine to make the verse sing. To make the choice to take the veil seem effortless and unimpeded.
So we note, as above, that the first 2 lines of each verse are short, suggesting calm and decisiveness; then the expanded third line with its opening into full iambic pentameter dramatises the expansion of the speaker’s imagination as she commits herself to this vision of her future days withdrawn from the normal world of action and change. And then in each verse we have the short 4th line – its brevity suggesting her resolution, the finality of decision, the exclusion of doubt. In brief – suggesting commitment and peace of mind.
And these effects – rhythm, metre, line length and diction are further reinforced by the calm of the rhyme scheme -abab, cdcd. Note too that all the rhyming words are monosyllables.
It’s this kind of mastery of formal effects that makes this poem sing. It’s the matching of formal effects to meanings and feelings that makes it perfect.
Formally, then, all is secure. Except…except, something surprising happens in the language, the diction, of verse 2 – even though the repetition of all these formal effects of versification which have been described above continue seamlessly on. In verse 2 a change takes place – in verse (or stanza) 2 the poem seems to turn back upon itself, to make the decision to withdraw from the world less fixed and more porous than it is in Stanza 1.
Look what happens in line 7 – though lines 5 & 6 seem to carry on the meanings, effects and feelings of stanza 1 and though line 7 almost does – something radical changes, without interrupting the calm tenor of the versification.
The change takes place because of the image and the musical evocation of ‘the green swell’ – which is, of course, the action of the sea. The sea in its great movement swells through the line and enlarges it in an unexpected way. When the movement and the vastness of the open sea is here contrasted with ‘the havens dumb’ – suddenly these havens feel like places of enclosure and monotony – rather a contrast with the fields where flies no sharp and sided hail of verse 1. A change is coming over the temper of the poem and this is totally what happens in the last line:
And out of the swing of the sea.
What is happening here is astonishing because while the apparent argument of the second stanza is that it’s good to take the veil and withdraw from life into sanctity, peace and enclosure – the final effect is to return us to a love of the open world beyond the walls of the enclosed order.
The poem turns back upon itself; it reverses the movement of withdrawal and takes us, in the last line, back out into the world of movement and action again. How brilliant is this – and all managed without deranging the lyric effects.
This is how to read and annotate a poem, to perform the art of what used to becalled practical criticism, or Prac. Crit. The effort of these commentaries or close readings is to help you get inwards with a poem or an excerpt from a longer poem. And while the Raven is off the scene (he’s got a big week ahead laying the new foundations, supervising the concrete pour, getting down to the pub before too late), we’re going to be looking at a series of short poems, starting with the brilliant In my craft or sullen art by Dylan Thomas.
And because it may not fit into the category of perfect lyrics, I’m going to expand the terms and set up a slightly different topic – perfect, or nearly perfect short poems, ranging from Edmund Waller’s Go Lovely Rose to Wallace Stevens’ Nomad Exquisite – lots of Wallace Stevens, in fact, excerpts from longer poems. All with the aim of showing you how to think about poetry – how to discuss the organic connexion between meanings and poetic qualities that I have tried to exemplify here.
But for now it’s time to get away because
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence
And the Raven will soon be up and on the warpath if he finds me interfering with his topic and altering his terms of engagement. So, it’s sneaking off time, or as the lyricist sings:
Steal away, steal away, steal away….