Dancing with Formal Poetry

For the past week or two we've been reading poems from World War I and World War II and the period in between. Many of the poems we've studied combine modern realism with the use of metrical form: Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, Auden's September 1, 1939, and now Gwendolyn Brooks's sonnet sequence, Gay Chaps at the Bar. Alongside the study of these poems we've been reading Mary Oliver's Rules for the Dance, a poet's study of the poetry of sound.

This week we'll be posting on segments of Auden's and Brooks's poetry. As we trace the references and allusions in the poems, and tease out their imagery, let's also apply our study of meter as we try to understand why these poems have moved readers from several generations. Although these are modern poems, their use of formal elements for tough, realistic approaches to traumatic subject matter suggests a desire to re-order the world through language patterns.

Here are some overall questions to consider about the poem "September 1, 1939":

What's the metrical line length of this poem?

What's the meter of "September 1, 1939's" most famous line, "We must love each other or die?"

Although Auden later repudiated "September 1, 1939" (much as T. S. Eliot dismissed "The Wasteland" after writing it), readers have kept it alive. For instance, it was the most frequently quoted poem after 9/11. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them I think lies in its sound patterns, its rhythms, and the feelings that are conveyed through sound.

Class, as you post on the stanza of this poem you were assigned, please make sure to note the meter and speculate on questions of sound, as well as of tone, image, and meaning.

Here's my post on the first stanza:


I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Auden begins this poem from a worldly perch in a bar in New York, giving us the street address--midtown Manhattan--as he meditates on the end of "a low dishonest decade," the 1930s. A sinister international event has happened--Germany's invasion of Poland is inferred by the date of the poem, though it is not mentioned--bringing "waves of anger and fear" and "the unmentionable odour of death." Auden tells us that this event "obsess[es] our private lives," but he also shows us through the speaker of the poem who shares a private moment of his brooding obsession with this event.

Although this is a brooding and contemplative poem, its lines are rather short. Mary Oliver suggests that pentameter lines are the proper length for meditation, but these lines are shorter than pentameter, giving the poem's meditation a sense of agitation. The meter is iambic, but there are numerous anapest sprinkled throughout, rushing the line along, as though intermixing the regular heartbeat of the iamb with a skipping, panicky beat. The most sinister line of the stanza, the 10th--"the unmentionable odour of death"--has a hypersyllabic anapesitc rhythm, with the hypersyllable occuring in the middle to accommodate the 5 syllables of "unmentionable." This irregularity keeps this line from singing and intensifies its panicky heartbeat.

The opening 11-line stanza doesn't have a regular rhyme scheme, but it has several pairs of rhymes: The first and the ninth line (dives, lives), the third and the fifth line (afraid, decade), the seventh and the eleventh line (bright, night), and the ninth and eleventh lines end with a slant rhyme (earth, death). It's as though the poem can't find a regular form because the event it is trying to absorb threatens chaos, even as the mind seeks order.

OK--so let's see what insights you all will add to this in your posts! Looking forward to it;-)