Tuesday Evening Inklings: A Meditation on Repetition, Pt. II
Hi all. Hope you’re doing well. Things have calmed down a lot for me recently with my actual (virtual) graduation over. This week, since I haven’t yet started the moving process, I’ve been doing delightfully little. As a result, I’ve had more time to think about things, including this post here, which I have been planning for and thinking about for a while.
As I mentioned in my previous post, there are five ways that I want to talk about repetition functioning in poems. In that post, I addressed the first of those (call/question and response/answer). Here, I hope to address the second of those: repetition as pattern.
Patterns are kind of really important in poems, as they are in so many other forms of writing. This is certainly clear in a number of received poetic forms. In a weak sense, patterns are established by things such as meter and rhyme, which make use of repeated sounds. The whole point of writing in iambic is that it has a repetitive rhythm to it. Such rhythms can be felt bodily. Without repetition, iambic meters don’t exist. Of course, this isn’t true for just iambs — it’s true for any sort of repeated foot, be it trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee, or pyrrhic — iambs are just the most common form of this.
There’s a stronger sort of repetition that many received forms use too: the repetition of words and phrases rather than just sounds. A number of poetic forms also make use of repeated words or sounds. The ghazal uses the same word or phrase at the end of every couplet (and the word prior to that repeated word/phrase is rhymed from stanza to stanza), the sestina has the same six words at the ends of the lines in each sexain (though in different orders, and all six are used in the final, three-line envoy), in pantoums, the second and fourth lines of each quatrain are repeated as the first and third of the next (the first and third lines of the first stanza making their appearance as the second and fourth lines of the final stanza; the lines are also rhymed), in villanelles, the same two lines are used alternatingly ending each of the tercets between the first and the last stanza and are both used in both the first (lines one and three) and the last (lines three and four) stanza (the poem also uses rhyme throughout), etc.
There are plenty of other received forms that make use of this stronger sort of repetition as well, though I’m not going to repeat all of them here. The word ‘form’ is synonymous with ‘pattern’. A received form is a poem pattern. (So there’s repetition on that level as well — the repetition of a given pattern is itself a pattern.) And some of these poem patterns are built on repetition of lines or of individual words. As such, repetition is essential to these forms, and, indeed, is what establishes them in the first place. So there are a few sorts of repetition happening, a few kinds of patterns.
Moving away from received forms, in general, there are overarching patterns of change that are expected in poems. One of the many reasons a poem under revision may not be working yet is because it lacks sufficient change. Such a change can be manifested in numerous ways, but, in general, there needs to be a change. One of these sorts of changes is that of a reversal. (Of course there are plenty of kinds of changes, but this post isn’t really about the kinds of changes, so I won’t go into that too much.)
In Aristotle’s Poetics, the reversal happens when the actor finds out what the audience already knows — that Oedipus is Aristotle’s favorite example is no surprise; the turn of the play is when Oedipus finds out what we already know: that he killed his father and slept with his mother. Because this is not a result of bad intentioned actions, or things done by generally bad people, it is tragic. Because of the audience’s knowledge and the eventual reveal, it is ironic. Both of those terms, of course, for Aristotle, being highly specific technical terms.
We certainly see some sort of this reversal in some poems, though it doesn’t seem to be the predominant sort of change. That, instead, seems to be a different sort of reversal: a subversion, if you will. In this case, the change isn’t an epistemic one in which the narrator of the poem comes to know what we already know, instead, there is some sort of fundamental change in which the rest of the poem is flipped on its head (or at least drastically changed).
These changes, sometimes due to a single word, can take a poem from being calmly beautiful to being tragic or from crushingly tragic to beautiful, and so on. It can manifest itself in a lot of ways. It’s certainly not uncommon for this to happen in the final stanza or the last few lines of a poem when it homes in on some very specific image. Such sorts of reversals/subversions are what bring such power to the ends of poems like Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” or Jack Gilbert’s “A Kind of Courage”.
Such a subversion, however, doesn’t always have to happen in the words themselves — I mean yes, technically, it is in the words, but not in the same way as mentioned above. Rather, a change in form can do the same kind of work. A pattern can be established and then broken. That the pattern has been established allows the breaking of it to be meaningful. This can happen in a movement from lineated form to prose or in a meter being changed. It can also happen in repetition being broken or abandoned.
There’s certainly some overlap here with the poem that I discussed last week. In that Jim Harrison poem, we see the pattern of the word ‘nothing’ being only at the ends of phrases broken, and the word starts intruding into the middles of sentences and phrases and, finally, ‘something’ enters the poem. These are clear examples of a pattern being established and then abandoned. However, to get an even clearer view of this, I want to look at a poem by Ted Hughes from his book Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. There are a number of poems from that book I would love to reference for this reason (much of the book makes heavy use of repetition), but I’m going to stick to the first poem in the book: “Two Legends”. Here it is:
Two Legends
I
Black was the without eye
Black the within tongue
Black was the heart
Black the liver, black the lungs
Unable to suck in light
Black the blood in its loud tunnel
Black the bowels packed in furnace
Black too the muscles
Striving to pull out into the light
Black the nerves, black the brain
With its tombed visions
Black also the soul, the huge stammer
Of the cry that, swelling, could not
Pronounce its sun.
II
Black is the wet otter’s head, lifted.
Black is the rock, plunging in foam.
Black is the gall lying on the bed of the blood.
Black is the earth-globe, one inch under,
And egg of blackness
Where sun and moon alternate their weathers
To hatch a crow, a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
over emptiness
But flying
What a wonderful poem! I so enjoyed this entire book. And, truth be told, I think Crow is a work best enjoyed in full rather than only in excerpts such as this. That said, I think that the poem reproduced above is a strong example of what I mean about a pattern being established and then broken. Through the vast majority of the poem, lines and phrases are begun with the word ‘black’. Sometimes a description of a thing takes two or three lines, but after that thing, the next line comes to another thing and begins again with ‘black’. This is strongly established in the first part of the poem. The second part begins by continuing this for the first four lines. But then the poem deviates from this, and in the last six lines, not a single one of them starts with ‘black’. We see the word repeated twice in the middles of lines, (‘blackness’ and ‘black rainbow’), but not at the beginnings. This is, relative to the rest of the poem, a devastating change. (We could count the growing distance between the uses of ‘black’ in the first part of the poem as deviation/change as well, it’s just not as obvious as what happens in the second part of the poem.)
A lot happens in this poem that I won’t discuss, but, thinking of patterns and the meanings of breaking them, there is something that I think happens in the end of this poem that’s really effective. When the repetition of the poem is broken, we are, in a sense, set free. For most of the poem, we are grounded by the word ‘black’. It acts as a sort of stabilizer — even when the poem tries to stray away from it as it does in the end of the first section, it is pulled right back in the next line. I use the word ‘grounded’ intentionally here. Part of the point of this poem is the birth of Crow. When we see pitiful Crow at the end of the poem “Bent in emptiness / over emptiness,” we also see magnificence: we see Crow flying. This poem seems to emulate the action of flying. In the end of the poem, we are freed from the grounding action of the repetition, the poem experiences breath in the form of white space, and, of course, the ground is seen less and less with the final lines never even using the grounding word, thus setting us free from the ground, implying flight. This flight, however, is only allowed by the grounding which preexists it, by the repetition preceding the break.
On the other hand, in some poems, the maintenance of repetition even when everything else is breaking down is what brings meaning to the pattern. The pattern can bring meaning to what is around it, but its own meaning can also be created by its surroundings. When we look at some of the particularly successful villanelles, this is exactly what is happening. There is stability in repetition and even though death threatens to upset Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” and loss threatens to do the same to Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”, the repetition keeps this from happening. Form is a sort of safe haven. Not to foreshadow a future post too much, but this is where we see the convergence of repetition as (meaningful) pattern and repetition as mantra.
I think that’s all for now. More to follow in my next post. Thanks for reading and take care.
— D.C. Leonhardt
Today’s pen and ink pairing: Pilot E95S (M) and Robert Oster Great Southern Ocean
