B) Lexical and Syntactical Features of Verse

The phonetic features of the language of poetry constitute what we have called its external aspect. These features immediately strike the ear and the eye and therefore are easily discernible; but the characteristics of this substyle are by no means confined to these external features. Lexical and syntactical peculiarities, together with those just analysed, will present the substyle as a stylistic entity.

These properties and features of poetry assume a compressed form: they are rich in associative power, they are frequent in occurrence, they (particularly imagery) become part and parcel of the substyle because they are the media through which the idea and feeling are conveyed to the reader. That is why they may be called internal features.

The image, as a purely linguistic notion, is something that must be decoded by the reader. So are the subtle inner relations between the parts of an utterance and between the utterances themselves. These relations are not so easily discernible as they are in logically arranged utterances. Instances of detached construction, asyndeton, etc. must also be interpreted.

An image can be decoded through a fine analysis of the meanings of the given word or word combination. In decoding a given image, the dictionary meanings, the contextual meanings, the emotional colouring and, last but not least, the associations which are awakened by the image should all be used. The easier the images are decoded, the more intelligible the poetic utterance becomes to the reader. If the image is difficult to decode, then it follows that either the ideas are not quite clear to the poet himself or the acquired experience of the reader is not sufficient to grasp the vague or remote associations hidden in the given image.

Ivan Fonagy, a Hungarian linguist, says:

"Interpreters of certain lines written by Mallarrne often differ a great deal in their explanations. ‘It must be acknowledged, 'writes Guy Michaud on Mallarme's poetry, that despite their sharp wit, commentators are still very far from being able to provide a satisfactory explanation for poems written in the "latest style" (derniere maniere)."

Images from a linguistic point of view are mostly built on metaphors, metonymy and simile. These are direct semantic ways of coining images. Images may be divided into three categories: two concrete (visual, aural), and one abstract (relational).

Visual images are the easiest of perception, inasmuch as they are readily caught by what is called the mental eye. In other words, visual images are shaped through concrete pictures of objects, the impression of which is present in our mind. Thus in:

"... and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth..." (Shakespeare)

the simile has called up a visual image, that of a lark rising.

Onomatopoeia will build an aural image in our mind, that is, it will make us hear the actual sounds of nature or things (See, for example: "How the water comes down at Ladore").

A relational image is one that shows the relation between objects through another kind of relation, and the two kinds of relations will secure a more exact realization of the inner connections between things or phenomena. This in:

"Men of England, Heirs of Glory,

Heroes of unwritten story. •

Nurslings of one mighty mother,

Hopes of her, and one another." (Shelley)

Such notions as 'heirs of glory', 'heroes of unwritten story', 'nurslings of... mother', 'hopes of her...' all create relational images, inasmuch as they aim at showing the relations between the constituents of the metaphors but not the actual (visual) images of, in this case, 'heir', 'hero', 'nursling', 'hope'.

A striking instance of building up an image by means other than metaphor, metonymy and simile is to be seen in the following passage of emotive prose from "The Man of Property." Galsworthy has created in this particular case an atmosphere of extreme tension at a dinner table. This is only part of the passage.

"Dinner began in silence; the women facing one another, and the men.

In silence the soup was finished — excellent, if a little thick; and fish was brought. In silence it was handed.

Bosinney ventured: "It's the first spring day."

Irene echoed softly: "Yes — the first spring day."

"Spring!" said June: "There isn't a breath of air!" No one replied.

The fish was taken away, a fine fresh sole from Dover. And Bilson brought champagne, a bottle swathed around the neck with white.

Soames said: "You'll find it dry."

Cutlets were handed, each pink-frilled about the legs. They were refused by June, and silence fell. "

The first thing that strikes the close observer is the insistent repetition of words, constructions, phrases. The word 'silence' is repeated four times in a short stretch of text. The idea of silence by means of synonymous expressions is repeated: 'There was a lengthy pause', 'no one replied' ('answered') is repeated several times. A long silence followed! Then the passive constructions ('fish was brought', 'it was handed', 'the fish was taken away', 'cutlets were handed', 'They were refused', 'they were borne away', 'chicken was removed', 'sugar was handed her', 'the charlotte was removed', 'olives... caviare were placed', 'the olives were removed', 'a silver tray was brought', and so on) together with parallel construction and asyndeton depict in a few bald phrases the progress of the dinner, thus revealing the strained atmosphere of which all those present were aware.

Another feature of the poetical substyle is its volume of emotional colouring. Here again the problem of quantity comes up. The emotional element is characteristic of the belles-lettres style in general. But poetry has it in full measure. This is to some extent due to the rhythmic foundation of verse, but more particularly to the great number of emotionally coloured words. True, the degree of emotiveness in works of belles-lettres depends also on the idiosyncrasy of the writer, on the content, and on the purport. But emotiveness remains an essential property of the style in general and it becomes more compressed and substantial in the poetic substyle. This feature of the poetic substyle has won formal expression in poetic words which have been regarded as conventional symbols of poetic language.

In the history of poetic language there are several important stages of development. At every stage the rhythmic and phonetic arrangement, which is the most characteristic feature of the substyle, remains its essence. As regards the vocabulary, it can be described as noticeably literary. The colloquial elements, though they have elbowed their way into poetry at some stages in its development, still remain essentially unimportant and, at certain periods, were quite alien to the style. But even common literary words become conspicuous in poetry because of the new significance they acquire in a poetic line.

"Words completely colourless in a purely intellectual setting," writes S. Ullmann, "may suddenly disclose unexpected resources of expressiveness in emotive or poetic discourse. Poets may rejuvenate and revitilize faded images by tracing them back to their etymological roots. When T. S. Eliot says 'a thousand visions and revisions', 'revision' is suddenly illuminated and becomes transparent."¹ Poetry has long been regarded as "the domain of the few" and the choice of vocabulary has always been in accord with this motto. The words, their forms, and also certain syntactical patterns were chosen to meet the refined tastes of admirers of poetry.

In the chapter on poetic words, we have pointed out the character of these words and the role they have played in preserving the socalled "purity" of poetic language. The struggle against the conventionalities of the poetic language found its expression in the famous "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" written by Wordsworth and Coleridge which undoubtedly bore some fruitful results in liberalizing poetic language. They tried to institute a reform in poetic diction which would employ "a selection of language really used by men" as they put it in their Preface. However their protest against poetical words and phrases was doomed to failure. The transition from refined poetical language, select and polished, to a language of colloquial plainness with even ludicrous images and associations was too violent to be successful. Shelley and Byron saw the reactionary aspect of the "reform" and criticized the poetic language of the Lake poets, regarding many of the words they used as new "poeticisms."

However the protest raised by Wordsworth and Coleridge reflected the growing dissatisfaction with the conventionalities of poetic diction. Some of the morphological categories of the English language, as for instance, the Present Continuous tense, the use of nouns as adjectives and other kinds of conversion had long been banned from poetical language. The Quarterly Review, a literary journal of the 19th century, blamed Keats for using new words coined by means of conversion. After the manifesto of Wordsworth and Coleridge the "democratization" of poetic language was accelerated. In Byron's "Beppo" and "Don Juan" we already find a great number of colloquial expressions and even slang and cant. But whenever Byron uses nonpoetic words or expressions, he shows that he is well aware of their stylistic value. He does this either by footnotes or by making a comment in the text itself as, for example, such phrases as:

"He was 'free to confess' — (whence comes this phrase?

Is't English? No — t'is only parliamentary)"

or:

"..........to use a phrase

By which such things are settled nowadays."

See also his foot-note to the word tact.

But poetical language remains and will always remain a specific mode of communication differing from prose. This specific mode of communication uses specific means. The poetic words and phrases, peculiar syntactical arrangement, orderly phonetic and rhythmical patterns have long been the signals of poetic language. But the most important of all is the power of the words used in poetry to express more than they usually signify in ordinary language.

A. A. Potebnja expresses this idea in the following words:

"What is called 'common' language can at best be only a technical language, because it presupposes a ready-made thought, but does not serve as a means of shaping the thought. It (the common) is essentially a prose language."

The sequence of words in an utterance is hardly, if at all, predictable in poetry. 'Word-pairs', writes Ivan Fonagy,

"often used together because of the pleasing, often rhyming combination of sounds, stand opposed to free combinations. For modern poetry they often tend to acquire a startingly new meaning through slight modification or appear in the shape of highly improbable combinations."

Semantic entropy is therefore an inherent property of poetic language. But sometimes this entropy grows so large that it stuns and stupefies the reader, preventing him from decoding the message, or it makes him exert his mental powers to the utmost in order to discover the significance given by the poet to ordinary words. This is the case with some of the modern English and American poetry. Significant in this respect is the confession of Kenneth Allott, compiler of "The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse," who in his introductory note on William Empson's poetry writes: "I have chosen poems I understand, or think I understand, and therefore can admire... There are some poems I cannot understand at all."

Poetry of this kind will always remain "the domain of the few." Instead of poetic precision we find a deliberate plunge into semantic entropy which renders the message incomprehensible. The increase of entropy in poetic language is mainly achieved by queer word combinations, fragmentary syntax — almost without logical connections.

An illustrative example is part of T. S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock."

"And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

....................................

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the

skirts that trail along the floor —

And this, and so much more? —

It is impossible to say just what I mean!"

The last sentence in the passage quoted discloses the fact that the poet's idea is not clearly shaped. Dissatisfaction with the hackneyed phrases reflecting the acknowledged routine of life; disappointment in the most common and long cherished evaluations of the phenomena of life, fatigue caused by the monotonous rhythm of the social environment of the poet — all these force him to seek the essence of things, new and only vaguely conceived relations between seemingly unconnected facts. And as a result there appear these strange disconnected combinations of words and phrases and new meanings of words.

We have already pointed out that in the history of the development of the literary language, a prominent role was played by men-of-letters. There was a constant struggle between those who were dissatisfied with the established laws which regulated the functioning of literary English and those who tried to restrain its progressive march.

The same struggle is evident in the development of poetic language. In ascertaining the norms of the 19th century poetic language, a most significant part was played by Byron and Shelley, Byron mocked at the efforts of Wordsworth and the other Lake poets to reform poetical language. In his critical remarks in the polemic poem "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" and in his other works, he showed that the true progress of poetic language lies not in the denial of the previous stylistic norms but in the creative reshaping and recasting of the values of the past, their adaptation to the requirements of the present and a healthy continuity of long-established tradition. Language by its very nature will not tolerate sudden unexpected and quick changes. It is evolutionary in essence. Poetry likewise will revolt against forcible impositions of strange forms and will either reject them or mould them in the furnace of recognized traditional patterns. Shelley in his preface to "The Chenchi" writes:

"I have written more carelessly; that is, without an over-fastidious and learned choice of words. In this respect I entirely agree with those modern critics who assert that in order to move men to true sympathy we must use the familiar language of men, and that our great ancestors the ancient English poets are the writers, a study of whom might incite us to do that for our own age which they have done for theirs. But it must be the real language of men in general and not that of any particular class to whose society the writer happens to belong."

In Shelley's works we find the materialization of these principles. Revolutionary content and the progress of science laid new demands on poetic diction and as a result scientific and political terms and imagery based on new scientific data, together with lively colloquial words, poured into poetic language. Syntax also underwent noticeable changes but hardly ever to the extent of making the utterance unintelligible. The liberalization of poetic language reflects the general struggle for a freer development of the literary language, in contrast to the rigorous restrictions imposed on it by the language law givers of the 18th century.

In poetry words become more conspicuous, as if they were attired in some mysterious manner, and mean more than they mean in ordinary neutral communications. Words in poetic language live a longer life than ordinary words. They are intended to last. This is, of course, achieved mainly by the connections the words have with one another and to some extent, to the rhythmical design which makes the words stand out in a more isolated manner so that they seem to possess a greater degree of independence and significance.

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