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NEW AUTHORS SHOWCASE

 

05-03-10

6M

p9

Aspects of Poetry

by

David Stark

 SYNOPSIS

    My book consists of two parts; the first is made of extended notes of eight talks, given to various groups, from students to the Retired. It is written for the everyday, general, ‘common readers’, as Dr. Johnson called them when publishing his Dictionary.

    The talks range from ‘The Poetry of the Sonnet’, ‘The Poetry of Love’, to ‘Rhythm & Structure in poetry’. Each talk is given in plain language - very few technical terms - and is illustrated by many excerpts from the best, well-known poets, so that the listener/reader can feel at ease and not feel ‘lectured’. The main purpose is to show that poets write to give pleasure to their readers and achieve this by appealing to emotions of love, fear, ideas of grandeur, appreciation of beauty, and stimulating the imagination through the senses of sight, sound and colour. The way that poets have used words and rhythms in so many diverse ways is explored in the talks.

 

Excerpt from the INTRODUCTION

    In these talks, I trust that I have acted as a spark to ignite greater interest and enthusiasm for poetry. Quoting from the poet and novelist, L.A.G. Strong writing in the 1950s, ‘We have, none of us, a duty to like poetry. . . We can perfectly well go through life without ever looking at a poem. . . The person who is completely ignorant of poetry misses one of the greatest sources of strength, happiness (and pleasure) to be found in the world’. 1 hope that my enthusiasm and delight in poetry will be transferred to my audiences so that they may share and rejoice in the knowledge that English writers have given to the world some of the greatest poetry ever written, ‘for the enlightenment, the solace and the glory of mankind’.

 

Searching for poetry, we shall find poetry;

A tiny inner spark will lead us,

The moon’s tender beams - leaves of grass,

So common, but from the poet’s imagination

                                      And understanding, is made glorious verse.

                                                                   (dfs - from the Chinese)

 

Excerpt from ‘The Poetry of the Sonnet’ (Talk 7)

    Traditionally, the Sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines and written in the characteristic rhythm of the English language - the iambic pentameter, ten syllables of five feet, (accented words). There are two main types of sonnet form, namely, the Italian or Petrarchan and the Shakespearean form. They are distinguished by the way the number of lines are split, and secondly the rhyming scheme.

     Briefly, the Petrarchan form, named after the C l4th. poet, Petrarch, the father of Italian humanism. He wrote some three hundred sonnets to his lady-love ‘Laura’. These poems are split into an octave (eight lines), followed by a sestet, (six lines). This is structurally suited to a statement of eight lines, followed by a counterstatement, as in Milton’s:

 

When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide…...    

 

     This sonnet perfectly illustrates the term ‘volta’, or ‘turn’, which refers to a change in the ‘argument’ or statement in the first octave. This is characteristic of the sonnet form. As Leigh Hunt, who was a friend and mentor of Keats, Shelley and Romantic poets of the early C l9th. wrote of the sonnet: ‘Every mood of mind can be indulged in a sonnet; every kind of reader appealed to. You can make love in a sonnet, you can laugh in a sonnet, you can lament in it, can nattate or describe, can rebuke, admire, can pray’.

 

 ********

 

     Coming to the late C l8th., early C 19th, we have one of the great innovators of our poetry -Wordsworth. He is the greatest exponent of the idea of divine immanence in man and Nature. He had great social vision and can be regarded as one of our profoundest thinking poets. In his earlier years, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution but became disillusioned when seeing the savage deeds perpetrated by the revolutionaries - Robspierre et al. Underneath all politics, he saw that ‘by love subsists all lasting grandeur; that gone we are as dust’. We may say of him, as he wrote about ‘The Reaper’ in that poem:

 

No sweeter voice was ever heard

In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides.

 

    Of the many wonderful sonnets that he composed, I have chosen ‘Surprised by Joy’, which I feel is as appropriate to our present day as when it was written:

 

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

                                                                    ………..

                                                                                - Great God! I’d rather be

                                                  A Pagan suckled in a creed out-word;

                                                  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

                                                  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn…..

 

ESSENTIAL POETRY

   This is a small selection of poems from some two dozen of the finest poets, in my opinion. Many poems will no doubt be known to my readers, but I take council from Coleridge when he wrote:

‘Not the poem we have read, but that to which we return with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power and claims the name of essential poetry’.

    One further quote to show the way I have tackled this selection. This was written by the Roman poet Horace - he of the many Odes:

 

‘Mediocribus esse poetis, non homines, non del,, non concessere columnae’

 

(To poets to be second-rate is a privilege which neither men, nor gods nor booksellers ever allowed).

 

    I trust that you will find in this small anthology, in the words of Shelley, lifting ‘the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, making ‘familiar objects to be as if they were not familiar’ and, conversely, making the unfamiliar, familiar. So I begin with Geoffrey Chaucer and the Prologue from the Canterbury Tales.

    I have chosen ‘The Prologue’ as it sets out the form of the Tales and lists descriptions of the characters who will be telling their stories during their pilgrimage to Canterbury.! think these tales are finer than those told in Boccaccio’s  Decameron, which places friends of the same class and type in a castle, hoping to avoid the plague. Chaucer instead introduces his story-tellers from every social class and walk of life, giving the element of dramatisation that not only tells the story but reveals the character of the teller at the same time. As the poet Dryden observed - ‘Here is God’s plenty’.

                                                                               

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Extract from Introduction to a Poem

 

    William Butler Yeats, when a student at the School of Art in Dublin, developed an interest in mystic religion and the supernatural. When he was age 21, he abandoned Art in favour of literature. He was a keen admirer of William Blake, editing his poems and, when he was in his seventies, edited the Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

    He was an ardent Irish nationalist and, in his early years, wrote poems and verse drama on Irish history, folklore and contemporary politics. His greatest achievement lay in his ability to create poems of wonderful lyricism and dramatic intensity from the idiom and syntax of ordinary, everyday speech.

 

    The poem I am quoting coming from his vast output, is ‘The Second Coming’. He saw the cycle of Greco-Roman civilisation brought to a close by the advent of Christianity and the violence of his own times.

In the second stanza, he refers to ‘Spriritus Mundi’, (the Great Memory).

‘Before the mind’s eye, whether in sleep or waking, came images.. I came to believe in a great memory passing on from generation to generation . . . Our daily thought was certainly but the line of foam at the shallow end of a vast, luminous sea’.