Much Ado About the Subway: Part 1

 

By Roman Sympos

 

 

“Load every rift of your subject with ore.”

 

                                    --John Keats

 

     "But glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.

     "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what

I choose it to mean---neither more nor less."

     "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

     "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "Which is to be master---that's all."

 

                                    --Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

 

 

When I taught poetry, students sometimes pointed out to me (in case I hadn’t noticed) that interpreting a poem was subjective. By “subjective,” they meant “all in your head.” They were often indignant at this discovery, like Alice taking issue with Humpty Dumpty’s semantic theories. In math or science there are right answers and wrong answers. In poetry you just make things up. Anything floating by on the surface of awareness will do.

 

This observation was typically offered by a student majoring in math or science who was required to take something in the humanities, like my course, to satisfy a breadth requirement. Often, the student was responding to my having suggested that the interpretation they’d just advanced was “interesting” but, um, “in need of support.” For example, that the “King” “witnessed—in the Room” in Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz when I died” was the landlord stopping by for the rent.

 

It was in the hunt for support that most adherents of the Dumpty School of Interpretation began to understand that a poem doesn’t mean just what we choose it to mean. It’s a complete statement in which every word—often, every syllable—counts for something. As the poet John Keats put it in a letter gently chastising the far more renowned (and notorious) Percy Shelley for writing too discursively, a good poet must “load every rift of [their] subject with ore.” The poem should make us dig for its meaning, and the poet is obliged to make the digging worthwhile by insuring that once we’ve discovered what we’re looking for, we need only follow where it leads, like a precious metal running in veins beneath the ground, to discover more of the same.

 

A good reader of poetry starts with the assumption that nothing in a poem is extraneous to what it is trying to say, and everything in it contributes, in some way, to its meaning. That’s not the only rule for interpretating poetry, but it is a good place to start.

 

Following the rules won’t guarantee a valid interpretation, however, any more than it will insure the correct answer to an algebraic equation or a sound experimental result. The true test in all three cases is whether or not what you’ve arrived at makes sense to others who are at least as familiar with the rules as you are. This is why mathematicians and scientists share their discoveries in symposiums and scholarly journals. It’s not just to spread the wealth. It’s to see if they’ve missed something that would invalidate their conclusions. This is also why the repetition of experiments is crucial to the advancement of science.

 

Sharing your interpretation of a poem with others helps everyone, including you, broaden their understanding and appreciation of it, as well as their emotional bandwidth for receiving all the pleasure it can give. It’s also a good way to test your interpretation.

 

In that spirit, I offer this example, by Ezra Pound, and invite your comments.

 

 

     In a Station of the Metro

 

     The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

     Petals on a wet, black bough.

 

 

Let’s begin by asking, “Where’s the verb?” There’s nothing in this poem but juxtapositions: the Paris subway, faces in a crowd, flower petals.

 

Nothing moves.

 

Except the words. Listen and you’ll hear them clicking forward, syllable by syllable: “in a STA-tion of the MET-ro,” “ap-par-I-tion of these FA-ces in the CROWD.” The assigned accents in words of more than one syllable, like “apparition” and “faces,” demand to be stressed. (The prepositions, to my ear, politely request it.)  

 

Motion catches our attention through variations over time, including changes of location, appearance, and sound. The sound of a language in motion may vary in the pitch or duration or assonance and consonance of its syllables, or, as here, in their volume, also known as “stress.” In poetry, when variations in stress assume regular patterns, we call them “meter.”

 

You don’t have to grasp the subtleties of prosody to recognize the metrical pattern dominating the title and first line of Pound’s short poem (yes, it’s a haiku in disguise): groups of four syllables with a mild stress on the first in each group and a stronger one on the third. Their regularity imitates the faint clicking sound made by the wheels of a train in rapid motion.

 

Pound was a close student and admirer of the poet Alexander Pope (1), who wrote that in any good poem “the sound must seem an echo of the sense.” For Pope, this was a source of pleasure. Historically, though, it was simply the best way to make a poem memorable.

 

Poetry was born long before writing came along to fix the facts—of history, of remedies, of laws, of incantations—in visible characters. In the absence of writing, recitation from memory was the only way to pass on the wisdom of a people from one generation to the next, and the greatest aid to memorization in the history of the human race was poetry, with its varying but regular and repeated patterns of sound. The great epics of the ancient history—Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey—were versified for this reason first and foremost.

 

But making sound an echo of the sense not only rendered poems easier to memorize. It also heightened the sheer pleasure of reciting them, providing an added incentive to memorization. Think of a child’s pleasure in reciting nursery rhymes. The infancy of a nation, like that of the individual, delights in the sound of poetry.  

 

I insisted on having my students read poems aloud not only so they could hear how the poem moved, but also to open them up to its power to move them.

 

Nothing has astonished me more in over forty years of teaching than my students’ squeamishness about expressing emotions, except for the emotions they had no control over, which is to say, their own. With few exceptions (generally students from the School of Fine Arts), they lacked empathy—again, for anyone who didn’t resemble them or, as they would say, wasn’t “relatable.” Listening to poetry as it moved, listening to its music, would sometimes help them overcome their self-consciousness, their awareness of the difference between the familiar voice in their head and the stranger’s voice on the page. In recitation—and its repetitive practice—the two voices became, literally, one.

 

Getting my students attuned to the music of Pound’s poem, its “clickety-clack” as it moved forward, helped open them up to the emotional impact of “PET-als,” with its decisively accented first syllable falling off, in the second, into guttural inaudibility, as though it had been swallowed before it could fully emerge. “Petals” is where the regularity of the poem’s “clickety-clack” comes to a sudden halt, like someone arrested by the sight of faces in a crowd swarming underground, in the half-light, here at a “station” (from the Latin stare, “to stand,” to come to a stop) where the movement of trains from from one dark tunnel to another is momentarily interrupted for the egress and ingress of passengers. Perhaps the speaker has been halted by the irrational fear that these faces really are "apparitions." Ghosts. In which case, swallowing a syllable would make an apt analogue to a common symptom of terror: swallowing your tongue.

 

The poem tries to recover from this interruption in its smooth and regular and repetitious movement toward the end of the line. But after the familiar preposition-article push start (“in a,” “of the,” and here, “on a”) it trips over three heavy, starkly individuated monosyllables: “wet, black bough.”

 

The separation between them is emphasized by the back-to-back consonants separating one word from the next. Try saying “wet” and “black” and “bough” with any degree of enunciation and you’ll feel the poem’s train of words jerking to stop before the narrowing mouth of that long, unstopped “ow.”

 

“Petals” marks not only the point where the poem’s regular rhythm breaks down. It also marks the point of transition from civilization to the natural world and from what the poet sees around him—a subway station, other people, their faces—to what’s visible only in his mind. It’s where reality gives way to the imagination.

 

(To be continued)

 

Notes

 

1. Of a passage in “The Fire Sermon” where T. S. Eliot paid homage to Pope by imitating him, Pound wrote, “Pope has done this so well that you cannot do it better; and if you mean this as a burlesque, you has better suppress it, for you cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope — and you can't.”