Sad similitude

In the early poems of Lawrence Durrell we find lines with a rhythmic and syntactic similarity which almost amounts to a tic:

In all the sad seduction of your ways

and

When all the slow destruction of the mind

A short Teutonic word followed by a long Latinate word is a well-used tactic:  “sad seduction,” “slow destruction.”

There is nothing particularly good about these lines; in fact, they both suffer the minor flaw of having the word ‘of’ bear an albeit secondary iambic stress. This is a bit of awkward panel-beating in the line, denting the language a bit out of shape.

But behind these lines lurks the ghost of a line of a far greater craftsman: Alexander Pope.

In sad similitude of griefs to mine.

Here not only is ‘of’ not asked to bear an unnatural stress, but the fine balance of syllabic quantities across the line is expertly done. If we mark the caesura:

In sad similitude | of griefs to mine

We can see that in the first half of the line there are five short quantities and only one long: the -ude of ‘similitude.’ In the second half of the line there are three long quantities and only one short. If you crudely count a long quantity as twice a short, then each half line carries the exact same weight.

The most corrected

Pope remarked, in relation to his heavily corrected and interlined original workbook for his Iliad, "I believe you would find upon examination that those parts which have been the most corrected read the easiest."

Spence comments "What a useful study might it be for a poet to compare in those parts what was written first with the successive alterations; to learn his turns and arts in versification; and to consider the reasons why such and such an alteration was made."And gives the example of the lines

That strew'd with warriors dead the Phrygian plain,
And peopled the dark shades with heroes slain.

which were reworked into this

That wrath which hurled to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain.

Clive James, Glass Globes, and a Sea-eagle of English feather

In a recent TLS (May 16, 2014) Clive James holds up a passage from Chapman's Homer as an example of alliteration done right (which he opposes to Swinburne's alliteration overdone wrong) …

Then took he up his weighty shield, that round about him cast
Defensive shadows; ten bright zones of gold-affecting brass
Were driven about it, and of tin, as full of gloss as glass,
Swelled twenty bosses out of it …

The double use of "gl" must indeed be a temptation for poets wanting to overdo alliterative effects … Burns has "glens gloomy and savage" and "glaikit, gleesome, dainty damies".  Byron has a commonplace book argument which "glibly glides from every tongue". W. E. Henley has "gladdening glass", while Coventry Patmore offers up "glowing gloom" as well as "trackless glories glimpsed in upper sky".  Spenser had his "gloomy glade" and "gold / Whose glistering glosse darkened with filthy dust", and "glistering glory" and a "glassie globe", and "gladsome glee".  John Tranter follows suit with "glassy gloom", and has "a cul-de-sac choked with  / expensive shops towards whose glow and glitter / her soul inclines". Hart Crane's "Pullman breakfasters glide glistening steel".

The "glassie globe" in Spenser (which Merlin made), reappears in Crabbe's The Parish as a fishbowl - "A glassy globe, in frame of ivory press'd; / Where swam two finny creatures", and Oscar Wilde as the earth itself "a brittle globe of glass", and then it surfaces again in a poem by Lynda Hull as a snow-globe in the palm of your hand:

 … Should I say the Mississippi knows
the story of the room left behind, the bad deals?
Like a scene playing out in a glass globe
I might hold in my palm, I can watch them:
oh look at those fools, the cold carving
them up to some version of bewildered miracle.

Pope shows off with three in a row: "Glittering through the gloomy glades", and Shakespeare piles on the effects in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Sweet Moon, I thank thee for thy sunny beams;
I thank thee, Moon, for shining now so bright;
For, by thy gracious, golden, glittering gleams,
I trust to take of truest Thisby sight.

The "gl"s are piled up thickly by Clive's friend Peter Porter in his lines: "the little glowworms/of our wounded childhood glitter, glitter / a square piano pounded by an ugly woman".  I very much like here that the alliteration isn't limited to the beginning of words: the hidden alliteration coming mid-word in "ugly" strongly contributes to the effect but in a subtle way: it gets under your skin, or beneath your analytic defences; it sneaks into the brain directly like perfume, or music with too many things going on at once.  Another line of his with a hidden "gl" alliteration is "a single stick of gladiolus". But back to explicit in-your-face alliteration: in his first collection Porter managed a Pope-like trifecta: "Glancing kingdoms enter, the glasses glow".

And even Clive himself gives us "Great in his glory, glorious in his greatness," and "Out in the sea / No waves, and there below not even ripples turning light / To glitter: just a glow spread evenly / On flawless water."

But Swinburne?  Yes, I am afraid so … "as a gleam that before them glided", and there's stuff like "Deep flowers, with lustre and darkness fraught, / From glass that gleams as the chill still seas" and of course the moon is "Bright with glad mad rapture, fierce with glee."  But returning to the idea of hidden or mid-word alliteration, Swinburne has the line "Sea-eagle of English feather" … that's a much better tuned effect to my mind.

Plagiarism?

I've had several "what do you think?" questions about the current crescendo in revelations of plagiarism in the poetry world, and attempting to set my mixture of thoughts on the matter down is as good a reason as any to revive this long comatose blog.

First it seems that there are a range of 'offences' being brought to our attention: in some cases the perpetrators have simply stolen somebody else's work and, after small alterations, have passed it off as their own. Then there are cases where some greater degree of rework has been done, and lastly there are instances where the accused has made a "mash-up" of as many as 50 other sources.

For me, the only clear-cut case is the first - where someone has passed another's poem off as their own, possibly with minor alterations. This is without any doubt utterly unacceptable.  The other cases are potentially more interesting ... is it conceivable that a piece of writing with many borrowings could be more than the sum of its parts? In rare cases I think the answer might be 'yes', and the implication of this is that we should perhaps look more closely at the final resulting product, and at the same time temper our judgement of the methods of construction.

Borrowings are nothing new. I remember Peter Porter once saying he was dismayed to find that what he considered to be one of the best lines in T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland had been directly lifted from Dante: "I had not thought death had undone so many." Eliot, it must be said, did include an end note with a reference to the original.

I have previously mentioned a wonderful essay by Felicty Rosslyn in an old P. N. Review (No 111 from 1996). At that time I was commenting on a poem by Harry Mathews which was an uncredited reworking of an admittedly famous poem by Thomas Wyatt.

Rosslyn's essay is about Pope's translations of Homer, and I'll reprise a little of it here. Rosslyn demonstrates how the opening of Dryden's Iliad (1700):

The wrath of Peleus' son, O Muse, resound
Whose dire effects the Grecian army found.

was clearly in Pope's mind when he wrote in his 1715 version:

The Wrath of Peleus' Son, the direful Spring
Of all the Grecian Woes, O Goddess sing!

Two days after Pope's Book I appeared, a rival - one Thomas Tickell - brought out his own translation, which began ....

Achilles' fatal Wrath, whence discord rose,
That brought the Sons of Greece unnumber'd Woes,
O Goddess sing.

Pope angrily annotated his copy of this, but admired the clear initial focus on Achilles, and the unnumber'd woes. His 1736 edition has a rewritten opening:

Achilles' Wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heav'nly Goddess, sing!

The modern reader may feel somewhat uncomfortable when it is realised how Pope's translation was built upon the work of his predecessors and contemporaries. Much the same is true for the King James Version of Bible, whose anonymous team of translators relied heavily upon earlier translations. The 'collaborative' nature of Pope's translations based on the work of others and in the end involving the work of a team of assistants, much like a Renaissance master painter with his school, does not sit entirely comfortably with the modern conception of the individual creator. We dwell still in the shadows of Romanticism with its cult of the individual rebel genius ... think Beethoven, think Byron, think Picasso or Stravinsky. Yet Stravinsky understood well the value of constraint in the creative process and this links him back to the pre-Romantic Bach with his heavily constrained fugues.

The recent quote unquote scandal of Andrew Slattery, Graham Nunn, and other Icaruses burnt by their strange rush to the poetic limelight, copying lines and whole works of others, passing them off as their own, and even winning major prizes, has brought news articles speaking of the plague of internet-fuelled plagiarism. But where precisely is the problem? Presumably this is primarily an issue of psychology, perhaps a tragic tale of ambition outstripping talent, or something morr commonplace like carelessness or cheating. Peter Bakowski has suggested it might be akin to the psychology of kleptomania. But some commentary would have us think there is a problem with today's poetry ecosystem. Is it perhaps that poets read too little and forgeries can too easily pass undetected? Full marks, by the way, to Anthony Lawrence for spotting Slattery's reused phrases. Is it that the taste of the day allows an evocative and suggestive surface pastiche of plausible sounding phrases to pass muster as a poem? John Ashbery explicitly championed a Chinese whispers approach to meaning, and has been influential in setting the tone of the times (is 'Zeitstimmung' a word?).

Derek Walcott once remarked: "you know you just ravage and cannibalise anything as a young writer". So is plagiarism a young man's caper? David R Morgan is now 58 but his prolific plagiarism started in his late twenties, thirty years ago. It seems like a bad habit he couldn't kick, and which he returned to in times of stress. If the internet is to be trusted, it seems Nunn (b 1971) is in his early 40s, Slattery (b. 1980) and Christian Ward (b 1980) are both in their early 30s. I can't find any information on C. J. Allen., one of whose victims, Matthew Welton, has finally spoken out here at the Carcanet blog.

I hope it is obvious that no one should pass off the work of others as their own. Someone once, I am told, took some of Peter Bakowski's poems, changed their titles and published them as his own. Sadly, this is the sort of thing that seems to have occurred in many of the recently publicized cases. For instance here is an example, first the original

SAVANNAHS by Eric Ormsby

Acknowledge the savannahs of our origins,
Those smooth, descending pastures to the sea

Then the 'reworking'

WHAT THE HERON KNOWS by Graham Nunn

away from the savannahs
Of our origin
Those smooth, descending
pastures to the sea.

Alexander Pope took words and phrases from others and produced a better version in the end, but here Nunn seems to have simply mucked up the original poem which had sound syntactic and semantic cohesion; the pilfered reworking seems a mess. In this case, if I had been the original writer, I suspect I might be even more upset at the mindless vandalism, than in the outrageous theft and false pretences.

Where do mash ups sit in the spectrum of plagiarism? Having not yet read the prize-winning Slattery poem which is apparently a mash-up of 50 sources, nor seen an account of the borrowings, I can make no comment, other than to say I do find it somewhat surprising that a poem constructed by such means was the best available to the judges of the prize: it feels as if any meaning or sentiment in the poem would have to be external and accidental, but one must remember Stravinsky's game of notes, and understand that we might be equally surprised to learn that a great piece of music could be based on a theme built from the German note names of the composer's name B-A-C-H.  So difficult as it may be, we really should disregard any hype about the method of making, and look to the created work itself. The Wasteland is part mash-up, part parody, yet is still regarded by many as one of the more significant poems of the 20th century.

Rain and Ruin: something recalcitrant

Jane Holland has posted her compressed version of the Exeter Book's The Wife's Lament. It is interesting how much 'resonance' with the language itself is achieved here. In an earlier post I talked of how the language seems to keep saying certain things over and over, and it's this that gives us the building blocks for the musical composition of poems; it gives us the notes to play on the instrument (the instrument that Ed Dorn speaks of when he says re Gunslinger "It's really just an attempt to meditate what there is left of the available instrument. It's not an epic, but it's going to work that kind of trip.") And it's the repetitions and refrains of the language that lend good poems that sort of 'alienated majesty' that Geoffrey Hill mentions (lifting the phrase from Emerson).

In Holland's 'The Wife's Lament' the rain/ruin conjunction appears in her rendering of the line "under stanhliþe / storme behrimed" (under stone slopes / by storms berimed"). Holland's line runs "in ruins under the rain" ... this brings 19th-century associations: Longfellow's "Upon the ground I saw a fallen nest / Ruined and full of rain", or Swinburne's "For winter's rains and ruins are over" or Wilde's "Time hath not spared his ruin,---wind and rain / Have broken down his stronghold", or Stevenson's lines ..

Bursting across the tangled math
A ruin that I called a path,
A Golgotha that, later on,
When rains had watered, and suns shone,

Going back in time, Pope has

So from each side increased the stony rain,
And the white ruin rises o'er the plain

That 'white ruin' also evokes Auden's lines:

Oh dear white children, casual as birds,
Playing amid the ruined languages.

And Pope's 'stony rain' brings into view the stone/storm conjunction present in the Exeter Book, and in Pound's Seafarer: "Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten". Coming forward in time, Rexroth, in his Letter to Auden, juxtaposes "The steel rain // Voices in the old ruin".

Geoffrey Hill, in his 'A Postscript on Modernist Poetics', writes "In the act of creation we alienate ourselves from that which we have created, or conversely, the genius of language alienates us from itself. We are no longer masters of a well-considered curriculum vitae in free verse, or blank-verse sonnets, or whatever; the anecdote is no longer the agency of our self-promotion; something recalcitrant has come between us and our expectant and expected satisfaction."

Between words

Read poetry aloud ... that's the general cry. Because it's in the phonetics. So much doesn't properly live when the words stay on the page. Look at the gaps between words, and how the pace of a line can be slowed or its flow interrupted by the choice of consonants that bracket those white space characters. Listen to this line from Yeats:

In this blind bitter land

'blind' and 'bitter' slow us down; it is not so easy to end one word with 'nd' and start the next with 'b'. The mouth has to take it carefully; put 'bitter blind land' and the line is utterly changed.

Tennyson provides well known examples such as:

On the bald street breaks the blank day.

Of course the alliteration of 'b's plays its part, and of course the monosyllables, but the broken flow caused by bald + street and then street + breaks and finally blank + day is a significant element of the technique. And again of course there's

Break, break, break

which echoes Milton's

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon.

Of course there are other ways to slow a line down, putting long quantities on metrically unstressed syllables ("what dark days seen"), or using monosyllabic words:

Times past, what once I was, and what am now.

But the selection of consonants that end one word and commence the next is a more flexible instrument. Think of Bunting and his repetitions of the same consonant: 'sweet tenor' ... you have to pause if you are to say each word clearly and correctly. In the following excerpt each line contains one such pair of repeated sounds across a word-gap:

Painful lark, labouring to rise!
The solemn mallet says:
In the grave's slot

'Painful lark', 'solemn mallet', & 'grave's slot' ... the repeated consonant serves as a mini caesura to help mark each line.

I can't finish without an example from one of the greatest technical show-offs, Alexander Pope; in one line he includes rs+r, f+v, s+sh, d+l, and k+th, almost now two consecutive words can be said smoothy:

The hoarse, rough verse shou'd like the Torrent roar.

Imitations and Serial Translation

Jane Holland has pointed out that Harry Mathews poem 'The White Wind' in P.N.Review 180 is a paraphrase of Wyatt's 'Whoso list to hunt', and that Petrarch's sonnet which served as Wyatt's model features a 'white hind' (una candida cerva) which has undergone a strange transformation in Mathews' title. It seems a little odd that no credit to Wyatt is given, but I guess poets have been using poems as models from the outset, and generally without explanatory acknowledgments. Even so, here at our 21st-century postmodern terminal moraine, maybe a small note wouldn't have been amiss.

I suspect several poets go in for this sort of thing in the privacy of notebooks - dismantling clocks to see how they work, or trying things to help move them towards a new voice or expand their range.

Derek Walcott, in an interview published in Contemporary Literature, Vol 20. #3 1980, remarked: "you know you just ravage and cannibalise anything as a young writer", and the 40-ish Robert Lowell explained, in his introduction to Imitations, that his loose translations were done from time to time when he was unable to do any work of his own. He said he was trying to write "alive English" and to do what the original authors "might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America."

Peter Porter, in a conversation published in Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop's 1972 book British Poetry Since 1960, said of his translations of Martial: "They're not translations at all but more - in musical terms - realisations ... They are done to give me the pleasure of reading his poems - in a very brutal and egotistical way. The only way I could enjoy his writing was to rewrite it myself." Donald Hall's drastic recasting of Horace's Odes in The Museum of Clear Ideas is another good recent example.

And of course translators typically study other existing translations when available, even build upon them. Alan Jenkins, for example, in his translation of Rimbaud, Drunken Boats (Sylph editions, 2007) states that he has stolen what he needed from Lowell and Beckett.

Indeed serial translation, where one translator builds on the good bits of earlier translations was once the norm. Felicity Rosslyn, back in PNR 111 (1996) wrote a wonderful overview of this important and relatively neglected topic.

She demonstrates how the opening of Dryden's Iliad (1700):

The wrath of Peleus' son, O Muse, resound

Whose dire effects the Grecian army found.

was clearly in Pope's mind when he wrote in his 1715 version:

The Wrath of Peleus' Son, the direful Spring

Of all the Grecian Woes, O Goddess sing!

Two days after Pope's Book I, a rival - one Thomas Tickell - brought out his ...

Achilles' fatal Wrath, whence discord rose,

That brought the Sons of Greece unnumber'd Woes,

O Goddess sing.

Pope angrily annotated his copy of this, but admired the clear initial focus on Achilles, and the unnumber'd woes, and for his 1736 edition rewrote the opening:

Achilles' Wrath, to Greece the direful spring

Of woes unnumber'd, heav'nly Goddess, sing!

Thus the completion of Pope's final Iliad can be seen as the cumulative results of many hands working in the one unified tradition - the tradition of heroic couplet translation - and thus, along with Gothic cathedrals, quantum physics and wikipedia can be seen as the flowering achievement of a dedicated community.