The Fourth Dimension of a Poem Read online

  —oppose the pluck . . .

  —after the suck-

  ing surf. . . .

  By this device Auden makes us aware that in uttering words we perform oral gestures, and that such gestures can be meaningful. In this instance, he breaks the word in order to emphasize a change of direction in the gesture of enunciating its speech-sounds, from the front to the back of the mouth in “suck-”, then from the back to the front of the mouth, to end far forward, with the labiodental f: “the suck- / ing surf.” In these lines, therefore, even as the speech-sounds—the s’s and f’s and k’s—reproduce the diverse sounds we hear at the margin of the sea, the reversal of motion in enunciating the speech-sounds enacts the reversal in motion of the surf that the words signify, as the wavelets reach up on the shore, stop, and then, reluctantly, revert to the open sea: “suck / ing surf.”

  One more comment, to show how Auden exploits all the dimensions of his poem, including its visual appearance on the page. Each of the three stanzas contains a remarkable variety of line lengths, consisting of two, three, four, and five iambic units, or feet; but in nonnumerical order. In the first two stanzas, for example, the order of the line lengths is four, five, two, two, four, three, and three metric units. When you read these lines aloud, the varying lengths of their uttered sound mimic the irregularity in the sounds made by the varied reach of the individual waves as they impinge on the shore. But Auden knows also that we ordinarily encounter a poem visually, in a printed text. Accordingly, he uses the irregular pattern of this visual aspect of the poem, as you see it on the page before you, to replicate the irregular visual pattern that is etched on the sandy shore by the advancing and retreating waves.

  I must emphasize that Auden’s poem is a great deal more than a linguistic tour de force. Note what he says in lines 5 and following:

  That through the channels of the ear

  May wander like a river

  The swaying sound of the sea.

  In this passage Auden attributes to the consciousness of you, the perceiver, a spatial dimension, into which the oscillating water-sounds enter, as though the sounds were themselves water that flows through your ear canal (the “channels of the ear”) into your conscious mind. And even more remarkably, in the third line of the last stanza:

  And the full view

  Indeed may enter

  And move in memory as now these clouds do,

  That pass the harbour mirror

  And all the summer through the water saunter.

  As the moving clouds are reflected in the water, so “the full view”—full, because it includes both the water and the moving clouds that are reflected in the water—is in turn reflected in the perceiver’s consciousness, where the clouds continue to move, but now in the perceiver’s memory. In both these intricate metaphoric figures, the outer is fused with the inner, so that the scene and the seer, the human perceiver and the natural things that are perceived, are assimilated into a single perceptual whole.

  A final comment about this remarkable little poem. In the third line from the end, Auden introduces five sequential stresses—“And move in memory ás nów thése clóuds dó”; he then lengthens the concluding line from three feet (as in the two preceding stanzas) to five feet: “And áll the súmmer thróugh the wáter sáunter.” He does so in order to make both the length and the metric pace of these descriptive lines accord with what they denote—that is, with the sustained, unhurried pace of the moving clouds that are reflected in the water. But beyond this: the last two lines are, surely, among the loveliest in English poetry. In part what we perceive as the beauty of their sound is in fact a projection, from the act of utterance onto the resulting sounds, of the pleasurable ease with which we are able to enunciate the succession in these lines of their frontal consonants. More important to the effect, however, is that these two lines contain a sequence of no less than five two-syllable trochaic words, all of which rhyme, but on the off beat only: “hárbŏur,” “mírrŏr,” “súmmĕr,” “wátĕr,” “sáuntĕr.” The oral act of producing these recurrent half-rhymes—the fourth dimension of these lines—is the more delightful, because Auden makes us sense also the feel of enunciating the nasal continuant m’s in “mirror” and “summer,” then to move to the contrasting plosive t in “water,” and to conclude with the combination of both nasal and plosive in the nt of that perfectly apt word, in its utterance, its sound, and its sense: the artfully delayed, indolent verb, “saunter.” May I ask you to read these last two lines of the poem aloud with me, in order to savor the evolution of their contrasting speech-units?

  That pass the harbour mirror

  And all the summer through the water saunter.

  Did you taste those consonants?

  Well, you’re standing on the top of a chalk cliff when the poet turns to you:

  Look, stranger, at this island now

  The leaping light for your delight discovers,

  Stand stable here

  And silent be,

  5 That through the channels of the ear

  May wander like a river

  The swaying sound of the sea.

  Here at the small field’s ending pause

  Where the chalk wall falls to the foam, and its tall ledges

  10 Oppose the pluck

  And knock of the tide,

  And the shingle scrambles after the suck-

  ing surf, and the gull lodges

  A moment on its sheer side.

  15 Far off like floating seeds the ships

  Diverge on urgent voluntary errands;

  And the full view

  Indeed may enter

  And move in memory as now these clouds do,

  20 That pass the harbour mirror

  And all the summer through the water saunter.1

  2.

  Emily Dickinson, “A Bird Came Down the Walk” (1862)

  We turn to Emily Dickinson’s poem, which, in contrast to Auden’s extensive seascape, is an exquisite piece of minute description. “My Business,” Dickinson wrote in a letter, “is Circumference”; by which cryptic statement I take her to mean that she circumscribes a small area of observation, then explores its minutiae.

  In this poem, a robin dispatches a worm, hops about, and then, when offered a crumb, flies off. That’s all. Dickinson makes of the robin’s negotiation with the worm, and of its actions after that, a comic pantomime in miniature; while of the bird’s final flight—well, how is one to describe what she does in this astonishing passage of verbal impressionism? The act of the bird unfurling its wings and taking off, and of an oarsman rowing so gently as to leave no trace in the still water, and of butterflies launching themselves silently in order to float through the air, are so interfused, and the elements of air and water so commingled, that the bemused reader ceases to know—or to care—which words are literal and which are metaphorical.

  In part, what we sense as the delicate adaptation of Dickinson’s words to what they describe is the result of their fourth dimension—the actions of enunciating them. In the last two lines of the fourth stanza, for example—

  And he unrolled his feathers

  And rowed him softer home—

  eight of the ten words have prominent components—denoted by the letters h, th, w, and f—in which the sound is produced by applying a soft pressure that forces the air through constricted oral passages—

  And he unrolled his feathers

  And rowed him softer home

  These oral actions accord with, and so enhance, the actions they describe; and that is, the soft pressure on the air by the robin’s wings as he unrolls his feathers and flies—or rows, or swims—away.

  Within this floating suspension of equated utterances and actions, butterflies are said to leap from banks.
We expect, in this watery context, that these are the banks of a stream. But no; they turn out to be the banks of an abstraction, a time of day—“Noon.” In this dislocation of concentrated reference, I can compare Dickinson to only one prior lyric poet, William Blake, at his audacious best.

  A Bird came down the Walk—

  He did not know I saw—

  He bit an Angleworm in halves

  And ate the fellow, raw,

  5 And then he drank a Dew

  From a convenient Grass—

  And then hopped sidewise to the Wall

  To let a Beetle pass—

  He glanced with rapid eyes

  10 That hurried all around—

  They looked like frightened Beads, I thought—

  He stirred his Velvet Head

  Like one in danger, Cautious,

  I offered him a Crumb

  15 And he unrolled his feathers

  And rowed him softer home—

  Than Oars divide the Ocean,

  Too silver for a seam—

  Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon

  20 Leap, plashless as they swim.2

  If it were all we had, this one poem would be enough to establish Emily Dickinson’s genius. Fortunately, we have many hundreds of her writings. To be precise, she left in manuscript at her death seventeen hundred and seventy-five poems. Of these, an astonishing number are comparable in excellence to the one before us.

  3.

  William Wordsworth, “Surprised by Joy” (1815)

  In a note Wordsworth tells us that “Surprised by Joy” has reference to his daughter Catherine, who had died a year earlier at the age of four. It was written when Wordsworth was in his mid-forties, in the demanding form of the Petrarchan sonnet, and its language has something of the stiff formality that deadens much of the poetry Wordsworth wrote in his middle and later age. But what makes this poem the more moving is that the speaker’s spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings breaks into and disrupts the formality both of its language and of its intricately rhymed stanza.

  Surprised by a circumstance that gives him joy, the poet instinctively turns (and we turn with him) to share his feelings with his little daughter. But the second line is interrupted by the interjection “Oh!” and the word “whom” at the end of the line forebodes its rhyme-word, “tomb.” In a stab of pain, he remembers that she is dead. He consoles himself that his habitual act of turning to her to share his joy attests the fidelity of his love. Then the anguished outcry: “But—how could I forget thee?” What these broken lines convey is a deeply human paradox about grieving. Time is a healer; but the dimming of grief in the passage of time can make us feel guilty, as though it impugned the depth of our love. In the sharpness of his self-blame, the poet (in the fourth dimension of his language) belabors himself with a barrage of blunt, bilabial b’s—how “have I been so beguiled as to be blind / To my most grievous loss!” To realize that he has momentarily forgotten the pain of his loss is the greatest pain he’s ever known. But no; once more he has to correct himself—the worst pain, diminishing with the passing of time, was that he suffered when he first knew that his daughter was gone, forever.

  Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

  I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom

  But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,

  That spot which no vicissitude can find?

  5 Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—

  But how could I forget thee? Through what power,

  Even for the least division of an hour,

  Have I been so beguiled as to be blind

  To my most grievous loss!—That thought’s return

  10 Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,

  Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,

  Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;

  That neither present time, nor years unborn

  Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

  In a poem written to memorialize Wordsworth’s death in 1850, Matthew Arnold said that the unique quality of Wordsworth’s poetry was its “healing power.”

  But where will Europe’s latter hour

  Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?

  In our present critical climate, that is not the kind of thing one is apt to say about poems. But surely, Arnold’s claim comports with our response to “Surprised by Joy” and with our response to Wordsworth’s great narrative poems about suffering, The Ruined Cottage and Michael. In his sonnet, Wordsworth confronts the most terrible of bereavements, the death of a beloved child, yet transmutes it for his readers into an experience of comfort—of comfort and even a kind of joy; the kind we call aesthetic delight. He does so because he achieves—and enables us to do so too—a mode of mastery over grief, by finding language greatly adequate to its occasion. He does so also by reassuring us that we are not alone, that we share with this insightful poet the perplexities of our human condition.

  4.

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” (1847)

  In lyric poetry the most frequent topic is, of course, love. But in the two thousand-plus years of recorded amatory poems, I know none that quite matches Tennyson’s “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal.” Tennyson’s popularity with the Victorian middle class is unexampled in the history of poetry; but the truth is, proper Victorians had nothing against amatory poems. To the contrary—provided the poem is discreet in its language, and lacks overt physical references. Tennyson’s poem qualifies on both these counts, but barely.

  “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” is, in its unobtrusive way, a poem of total, unmitigated, suspenseful sexual longing. Its setting, we learn, is an opulent palace garden, which contains red and white rose bushes, cypress trees, and goldfish in a rich stone bowl. The garden adjoins a lake in which grow day-blooming water lilies, and (the ultimate exotic touch) it harbors a white peacock. Night has at long last descended, lit only by fireflies and the luminous track of a shooting star. The lyric speaker is waiting for his beloved to waken and join him in this rich, fragrant, breezeless darkness. As we are told in the sixth line of the poem, the beloved keeps this rendezvous: “And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.” The pronoun “she” in that line can’t refer to the peacock, which is a male peafowl; what the line conveys, then, is that the loved one herself appears, her white dress glimmering, ghostlike, in the darkness. All the while, the lyric speaker’s perfervid imagination transforms every detail that he perceives into an analogue of his desire.

  Though lacking rhyme, the lyric is divided into stanzas, made up of an opening and closing quatrain (four lines) and four intervening couplets. Each stanza is demarcated by opening with the temporal adverb “now” and ending with the personal pronoun “me.” The cumulative effect is of the sustained urgency of a desire so intense that it induces in the lover a physical languor: “Now, now, now, now, now”; “with me,” “to me”; “unto me,” and then twice: “in me,” “in me.”

  The second of the insistent couplets contains what I would nominate as, in a discreetly indirect way, the most explosively concentrated erotic image in all poetry: “Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars.” In Greek mythology Danaë is a young woman whose father, to ward off her suitors, has locked her behind bars; but the amatory Zeus, chief of the gods, in the standard euphemism “visits” her in a shower of gold. Just unfold Tennyson’s compressed allusion, and it turns out to convey something like this: by the tensely expectant lover, all the earth is perceived as though it were an enamored female, lying receptive to the multitudinous silver showers of the visiting stars. “Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars.”

  Note now the first line of the concluding quatrain. The normal word order would be “Now the lily folds up all her sweetness
.” By inverting the subject and predicate and postponing the preposition “up” until the end, Tennyson suspends the syntactical closure so as to replicate the suspense of the waiting lover: “Now folds the lily all her sweetness up.” By delaying the closure, Tennyson also heightens our awareness of what it feels like to terminate the clause by enunciating the plosive p in the word “up”; and that in turn makes us aware of the repetition of that speech-sound in the following verb “slips,” and then of the repetition of that word, in the final request to his loved one: “slip / Into my bosom. . . .”

  I draw your attention to another, and very important, aspect of an expressive utterance of a poem. Tennyson’s verse quickly establishes as its basic meter five iambic feet per line, with each foot taking up an approximately equal segment of time. “Nŏw sléeps thĕ crímsŏn pétăl, nów thĕ whíte.” If the utterance reproduced metronomically these stresses and time intervals, it would be lethal to the poem. Instead, a sensitive reading plays counterpoint to the normative meter, so that its intonation—that is, the expressive changes, in uttering the poem, of pitch, pace, pause, and rhetorical stress—sometimes deviates from, sometimes coincides with the pulse of the underlying meter. This dynamic of tension and resolution between the normative meter and an expressive rendering is what gives vitality to a poem when it is uttered aloud.

  As example, take the opening line. When reading it, I at one time stressed rhetorically the opposing adjectives “crimson” and “white”: “Now sleeps the crímson petal, now the whíte.” But that was clearly a mistake. The difference between white and red roses is not functional to the import of the poem. The keynote term is “now,” which, in consequence, though it lacks a metrical stress, invites an intonational stress, “Nów sleeps. . . .” Equally important, however, is the verb “sleeps”—“Now, at last, at last, the darkness falls, so that the red rose sleeps.” Here the intonational stress conjoins with, so as to reinforce, the metrical stress on “sleeps.” In this longed-for darkness, when the rose finally sleeps, the firefly wakens. And now at last, at last, it’s time for my love also to waken, to keep her rendezvous, in the still darkness of this garden, with me.