Poetry Postscript

kw: continuation reviews, nonfiction, poems, poetry, reading

Speak of a mental block! In yesterday's review I utterly forgot to mention a most valuable bit of the author's advice. First among several points he makes is one I was taught when a child: Read a poem the first time, aloud, as if it were not a poem. Do not sing-song the rhythm, but read it sentence by sentence. Indeed, the author of How to Read Poetry Like a Professor (Thomas C. Foster) says in a few places that the unit of thought and feeling in a poem is not the line, but the sentence. For some poems, it can be hard to determine where a sentence ends, but it is usually no problem. Try it out with this, presented not in poetic lines, but as though it were prose:

If you must love me, let it be for nought except for love's sake only. Do not say, "I love her for her smile—her look—her way of speaking gently; for a trick of thought that falls in well with mine, and doubtless brought a sense of pleasant ease on such a day." For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may be changed, or change for you; and love, so wrought, may be unwrought so. Neither love me for your own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry; a creature might forget to weep, who bore your comfort long, and lose your love thereby! But love me for love's sake, that evermore you may love on, through love's eternity.

There you go, five sentences, though if you replace the semicolons with full stops it comes to seven. I took slight liberties with this, to update certain grammar elements and punctuation marks, for the poet preferred a comma-dash (,—) to a semicolon, for example. Doing so, I did not disturb the meter.

Perhaps you know enough of poetry to recognize the meter when read aloud, that it is iambic pentameter, the rhythm de rigueur for sonnets. Can you then tease out the fourteen lines? Yet there are not fourteen thoughts here, just five. The discipline of putting such emotions into sonnet form induce the poet to compress the expression. Here is a scan of the page I 'translated':

A very few people might recognize this as one of the Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The book is the 1902 edition. The 44 sonnets therein are among the great classics of English-language literature. I daresay, if you've never read them before, that reading this sonnet first in the sentence-by-sentence way, you will enjoy it more than you might have had you first read the scan, and you may find it enjoyable to get a copy of the book (it is still reprinted). Or, if you like lighter fare, perhaps you could instead get When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne, who is best known for Winnie-The-Pooh. Milne wrote some of the most recitable poems I know (also still in print; my copy is the 1945 edition, my very first book).