Poetry for Dummies

Bad news, folks . . . writing poetry is more than rhyming emotion-laden words in meter.  Worse news:  17th-century poetry was a craft as much as an art, and I think I probably should learn a lot of the under-the-hood stuff if I’m going to understand Ole Annie, my poet buddy whose life I’m trying to recreate.

I’ve had some helps in this department -- a couple of books, good ones:  Puritan Poets and Poetics, and Sinful Self, Saintly Self:  the Puritan Experience of Poetry.  They have further directed me to a 16-the century book,The Art of English Poesie, which is a great window into the craft of poetry writing.  But . . . sigh.  Constructing a poem is like building a cathedral; it has rules and conventions and its own terminology as well.  And I should know something about all that so I can understand what the heck she was attempting when she sat down to write.  So I have to learn it.  Some of it.  Enough to get along; the poetic equivalent of “Ou est la salle de bain?” for the American in France.  Well, more than that, I guess.

And when I finish that, maybe I can go back to learning about 17th-century ships, a task I happily set aside last spring.  Humph.

I can’t even figure out what a “foot” is.  It’s a poetic term, and it’s related to syllables, but it’s not syllables.  Mr. Poesie Art didn’t make it clear, and I haven’t consulted Dr. Google yet.

But I am learning.  Learning, learning, learning, getting comfy inside Anne Bradstreet’s mental world, and painting it out again in a story that is now at about 30,000 words.

Time For a Poetry Break

Happy Poetry Month, everybody!  I only just realized today, April 18, that that is indeed what it is.  I suppose that a historian writing about a poet should keep up on these things.  But it’s because I’m a historian, You See, and not a poet, that I nearly missed it.  That also must explain why I gave Women’s History Month (March) such loving attention here at Carping Tongues.

But let’s celebrate Poetry Month with a poem.  I don’t know much about poetry, but I recently found that poems are meant to be read aloud.  Last November I taught a class on Anne Bradstreet and I wanted to read some of her poetry to the class.  One poem was to a child who had died, and I had to practice it aloud several times to make sure I wasn’t going to get all choky over it in class, since dying-children poetry wrings my heart every time.

As I read it aloud, over and over, I discovered its craft.  Two verses, each seven lines, with a rhyme structure of ABABCCC, DEDECCC.  The choice to make the last three lines of each stanza rhyming – and to have the same rhyme for the last three lines of both verses – gave a repetition that, to me anyhow, spoke of grief.  It made me think of rocking in a rocking chair, back and forth endlessly, while the heart is aching.  You come down hard on that “ate” – fate, terminate, state, eradicate, date, fate.  “Fate” is the first and the last words in this series.  That can’t be chance, especially since the subject of the final stanza is WHY, GOD.

You try it:  read this aloud.  This poem is about the loss of Anne’s one-year-old granddaughter.  Take it slow, and see where the emphasis seems to fall as you speak it.

Farewell dear babe, my heart's too much content,

Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye,

Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent,

Then ta'en away unto eternity.

Blest babe, why should I once bewail thy fate,

Or sigh thy days so soon were terminate,

Sith thou art settled in an everlasting state.

By nature trees do rot when they are grown,

And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall,

And corn and grass are in their season mown,

And time brings down what is both strong and tall.

But plants new set to be eradicate,

And buds new blown to have so short a date,

Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate.

As I read the second stanza I found myself emphasizing the words of decay, pausing on rot, ripe, mown, and down.  She takes the entire stanza to set up the question – WHY, GOD -- and then answers it in a quick phrase.  What was in her heart?  Did the last line bring her any comfort, or was she speaking out of her anger or bewilderment? 

Celebrate Poetry Month -- read a poem OUT LOUD.

The Quats

How many of you folks read poetry on a more-than-occasional basis?

When was the last time someone recommended a poet to you?

Likely we’d all be reading more of it if we lived in Anne Bradstreet’s time.  Metered lines were everywhere.  But they are now, too, in our pervasive modern music culture.  Yet our values as a culture run more to the  practical, the immediate, and the active, and our music shows it.  Poetry by itself is an acquired taste.

Or maybe I’m the odd one out in my lack of poetry reading.

But I’m writing about a seventeenth-century poet, a woman who sat at her rough kitchen table in the middle of the wilderness and wrote long epic works rich in classical and scientific allusion.  Sure, she wrote love poems too, but she spent years on her “quaternions” -- five poems of four sections each relating each topic of the poem (the four ages of man, for instance, or the four seasons) to four basic divisions in the universe (represented by hot, dry, cold, and moist).  And it’s ponderous stuff to my untrained ear:

When Spring had done, the Summer did begin,

With melted tauny face, and garments thin,

Resembling Fire, Choler, and Middle age,

As Spring did Air, Blood, Youth in's equipage.

Wiping the sweat from of her face that ran,

With hair all wet she puffing thus began;

Bright June, July and August hot are mine,

In th' first Sol doth in crabbed Cancer shine.                   (from Bradstreet’s Four Seasons)

You read the first three lines and skipped the rest, didn’t you?  If you take a trip through the quaternions, you’ll find thousands of lines of this -- academic, densely written, full of metaphors that sound strange on the ear.  But people liked this stuff, and read it for fun.

O good, O bad, O true, O traiterous eyes

What wonderments within your Balls there lyes,

Of all the Senses sight shall be the Queen;

Yet some may wish, O had mine eyes ne're seen.

Mine, likewise is the marrow, of the back,

Which runs through all the Spondles of the rack,

It is the substitute o'th royal brain,

All Nerves, except seven pair, to it retain.                       (from Bradstreet’s Four Humours)

Well, maybe not for fun. This one is like a college lecture on human physiology (did you catch the part about seven nerves?) set to rhyme, and the lessons about the human experience that one might derive from that.  

I’ve picked up, sighed, and put down the quats many times so far, but as I go along in this project they make more sense to me.  I had a delightful experience yesterday.  After I taught a class I hit a Starbuck’s and sat there a spell with Anne’s volume.  At the beginning of her book are poems from her friends that were published alongside hers, there to praise her work and to reassure potential buyers to plunk down their money for it (like glowing quotes on back covers today, but all in rhyme).  One poem was by her brother-in-law.  It was as ponderous (to my ears) as the rest, but for the first time his affection for Anne shone through to me, and I even laughed out loud at something funny that he said that I finally got.  

We still snicker and call her “Spondle Girl” around my house, but I’m developing a taste for this long-dead style of poetry.  Maybe I’ll even -- like -- it someday.

Anne's "Feminism," Part IV

Last time I talked about how Anne expressed some counter-cultural ideas in her poetry, ideas about gender equality that might have been perceived as dangerous, and was not rebuked for them by her authoritarian community. Further, it appears that the men in her life, all prominent community leaders, conspired without her knowledge to get these published. And we have to ask: how did she escape censure?

I haven't really settled on a firm answer for this for myself, but here are some possibilities.

Her high rank and social status protected her. As Thomas Dudley's daughter and Simon Bradstreet's wife, she was the sort that the authorities -- the rest of the authorities, that is -- would think twice about lowering the boom upon.

She wasn't actually doing anything so radical. Maybe she "got away with it" because there was nothing she was really getting away with. Maybe the people of her time did not give a collective, loud gasp when she said hey, folks, women have talent, too. Likely women chiding men was acceptable sport in that day, just as it is in our day; or as those under authority these days chide those who have authority. You've all read "Dilbert" so you know what I'm talking about; we do what the boss-man says, but talk privately about just how pointy-haired s/he can be at times, and that is perfectly acceptable. In the seventeenth century, the lines of authority were much tighter, and something as disrespectful as "Dilbert" would never fly. But whenever we paint an era only in black and white, we get into trouble. English women had an inferior legal and social status at this time, but they were not slaves; they made their will known, and they pushed back.

I think this is the best explanation. It jives nicely with one of my "first principles" of historical interpretation: always assume first that what people in the past are doing is NOT radical or ground-breaking, even if it looks like it at first glance. Often we just don't understand the time or the motivations, and (more important) we have a cultural bias of our own that makes us identify everybody we can as a trailblazer or a radical because we just love superheroes so much. Personally, I don't think Anne had a radical bone in her body. She wasn't made to be a rebel. She may have been spunky or feisty, but rebellious? Not the way I read her.

I think too we need to remember she was not writing to make a public statement. Her poems were for herself and for those in her circle. She didn't plan on The World reading her stuff. And further, let's keep in mind that Englishmen were familiar with the idea that some women were exceptionally talented, the supreme example there being Queen Elizabeth.

The really good question in all of this is, why did her menfolk take such pains to get her work published? This is the part of the story that I will go ahead and say is -- okay -- radical. Sort of. (Thomas Dudley in a Superman suit -- if you knew the man, you'd realize how funny that is.) They would not have done it to bring fame to Anne, never to "get her out there" and "let her talent be seen." Puritans would have regarded such motivations as worldly arrogance and vanity. Instead, they must have seen her poetry as having some role in their life's work, which was to bring the Kingdom of God to earth, and as much as possible, to build a truly godly society in New England.

Hey, I really like that. A woman writing classical-esque poetry based on the science and philosophy of the day, the sort of poetry that usually only men wrote -- and these puritans saw that as, in its own way, having a role in their grand experiment of building a truly godly society. More food for thought in that, eh? But I'm going to leave this particular line of discussion and move on to something else next time.