Chapter One
The Art of Reading Poetry
Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so
that its form is both expressive and evocative. Figuration is
a departure from the literal, and the form of a great poem
itself can be a trope ("turning") or figure. A common
dictionary equivalent for "figurative language" is
"metaphorical," but a metaphor actually is a highly specific
figure, or turning from the literal. Kenneth Burke, a profound
student of rhetoric, or the language of figures, distinguished
four fundamental tropes: irony, synecdoche, metonymy, and
metaphor. As Burke tells us, irony commits those who employ it
to issues of presence and absence, since they are saying one
thing while meaning something so different that it can be the
precise opposite. We learn to wince when Hamlet says: "I
humbly thank you" or its equivalent, since the prince
generally is neither humble nor grateful.
We now commonly call synecdoche "symbol," since the figurative
substitution of a part for a whole also suggests that
incompletion in which something within the poem stands for
something outside it. Poets frequently identify more with one
trope than with the others. Among major American poets, Robert
Frost (despite his mass reputation) favors irony, while Walt
Whitman is the great master of synecdoche.
In metonymy, contiguity replaces resemblance, since the name
or prime aspect of anything is sufficient to indicate it,
provided it is near in space to what serves as substitute.
Childe Roland, in Browning's remarkable monologue, is
represented at the very end by the "slug-horn" or trumpet upon
which he dauntlessly blows: "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
came."
Metaphor proper transfers the ordinary associations of one
word to another, as when Hart Crane beautifully writes
"peonies with pony manes," enhancing his metaphor by the pun
between "peonies" and "pony." Or again Crane, most intensely
metaphorical of poets, refers to the Brooklyn Bridge's curve
as its "leap," and then goes on to call the bridge both harp
and altar.
Figurations or tropes create meaning, which could not exist
without them, and this making of meaning is largest in
authentic poetry, where an excess or overflow emanates from
figurative language, and brings about a condition of newness.
Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning is one of
the best guides to this process, when he traces part of the
poetic history of the English word "ruin."
The Latin verb ruo, meaning "rush" or "collapse," led to the
substantive ruina for what had fallen. Chaucer, equally at
home in French and English, helped to domesticate "ruin" as "a
falling":
Min is the ruine of the highe halles,
The falling of the towers and of the walles.
One feels the chill of that, the voice being Saturn's or
time's in "The Knight's Tale." Chaucer's disciple Edmund
Spenser, has the haunting line:
The old ruines of a broken tower
My last selection in this book is Hart Crane's magnificent
death ode, "The Broken Tower," in which Spenser's line
reverberates. Barfield emphasizes Shakespeare's magnificence
in the employment of "ruin," citing "Bare ruin'd choirs where
late the sweet birds sang" from Sonnet 73, and the description
of Cleopatra's effect upon her lover: "The noble ruin of her
magic, Antony." I myself find even stronger the blind
Gloucester's piercing outcry when he confronts the mad King
Lear (IV, VI, 134–135):
O ruin'd piece of nature! This great world
Shall so wear out to nought.
Once Barfield sets one searching, the figurative power of
"ruined" seems endless. Worthy of Shakespeare himself is John
Donne, in his "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day," where love
resurrects the poet to his ruin:
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
Barfield invokes what he rightly calls Milton's "terrific
phrase": "Hell saw / Heaven ruining from Heaven," and then
traces Wordsworth's allusive return to Milton. Rather than add
further instances, I note Barfield's insight, that the
figurative power of "ruin" depends upon restoring its original
sense of movement, of rushing toward a collapse. One of the
secrets of poetic rhetoric in English is to romance the etonym
(as it were), to renew what Walter Pater called the "finer
edges" of words.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Best Poems of the English Language
by Harold Bloom Excerpted by permission.
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The Best Poems of the English Language
