Freda Downie, "Moon"

non-sequiturs and the composition

 

So I have been reading the British writer Freda Downie's Collected Poems. She only had three verse books in her writing career, but they were (and are) highly regarded. And, I will add my voice to that in saying they are quite a pleasure to read. In the general, I would say the average British versifier seems better at the art than the average U.S. versifier; but then it very much seems they take the aural and verbal aspects of verse much more seriously over there than over here. Over here writers seem more concerned with their politics, or their diary.

Thus, in going through Downie, it is not unknown to come upon a stanza like this, the close of "The Lesson," about a boy not so good at his piano lessons, wishing he were elsewhere:

And when she turned away to mark his music, He sighed and looked to the window to see His bicycle gleaming in the early dusk Against the rain-wet trunk of the apple tree.

Just to point out, note she does not – here or elsewhere in the verse – say, overtly, he wishes he were elsewhere. She puts the idea in the image of the bicycle against the tree, of the boy's focus being on the bicycle, not upon his lessons. Good imagist practice; which is on that point to say good poetic practice. But also, the language, though formal, simply glides. The formality works toward the overall sound rather than putting strictures on it. It creates an aural effect out of the stanza, not just the sound of some short string of words (as with throwing in some consonance in a verse that otherwise ignores sound).

 

But, what I really want to talk about is a question raised by one of her verses. And it is, I repeat at the beginning, a question, something you must debate for yourself. We can speak of the issues that the question raises, but I leave any particular answer up to you.

I am speaking of the verse "Moon." In toto:

Let alone the moon Preserving her pocked face. I have been over familiar With her pitiless stare and know She uses arsenic to whiten her hands.   How she eats my flesh. How she disregards my bones While bleaching them.

The moment in question is the fifth line, which perhaps you guessed, as reading it that fifth line has something of a isolated feel to it within the verse. It is disconnected, to a great degree, from the other lines. If the idea presented were simply that she has white hands it would fit with "pocked face" in that the moon is cratered and the moon is (or appears) white. But the central thought of the line is not merely that: it is that she intentionally whitens her hands with arsenic. There is nothing in the verse elsewhere that connects with that idea of the intentional act; thus the line sticks out as something of a speed bump. If I may, something of a non-sequitur.

Which poses the question: Does it work in the verse, does it hold within the unity of the verse, or does it pop out of that unity? Does it stick out from the flow and create a bump in the road of the reading? In terms of ideation, are you reading idea A, then suddenly jumping into idea B, then jumping right back into idea A?

Or, the other side of the question, does the fifth line successfully expand the ideation of the verse without breaking out of it?

There are two, related thoughts to bring in here.

First: parataxis, the conjoining of language elements without using a conjunction or other such means of signaling the relationship between them. In poetry it is used a little more grandly, to designate abutting two passages together that do not on the surface seem related to each other. Of course, the most famous parataxic verse is The Waste Land, my favorite moment of it right at the front:

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

The poem is filled with parataxis, moving from one scene to the next. Though, I have always most enjoyed this one, moving from drinking coffee as an adult in the Hofgarten too, suddenly, a scene from youth of riding a sled. The paratactic aspect is magnified by the first part ending with a spoken statement that fits the context of a conversation but has nothing to do, on the surface, with "when we were children."

But, just because you can attach the label parataxis does not mean it works. As I was just saying elsewhere, Blondie's The Best of Blondie might be full of good songs, but combined they make for a not-so-good album. They don't, as is necessary in poetry, combine to make a whole greater than its parts.

Which leads to the second thought, an aesthetic principle, as it were; an extension of the fundamental understanding that Composition Is Everything:

Every element of a making must work toward and within that overall, uniting composition.

That is, even non-sequiturs must work toward the overall composition. You can paint in oil a lunar landscape and set within it the ruins of a castle. Even though logically there are no castles on the moon and so the castle is something of a non-sequitur. they are still united within the idea of landscape painting, and can combine to a whole greater than the parts. (Thus also one of the core and too little used elements of fantasy.) However, what you cannot do is have a kangaroo to one side colored in crayons – not unless you are going for humor. Because something that out of place can only end up in humor, intended or not. (And, in such an example, even if intended I would say it did not work, because the rest of the painting would not be participating in the joke. As it were, "it might be funny, but not for the reasons you intend.")

Now, one might think here of collage, if not, more specifically, surrealist collage, if not the greater part of the surrealist project, which is all but cornerstoned by the effect parataxis has on the unconscious mind. But, once again, just because you attach the word collage to the work does not mean the work succeeds; and, in the end, the success of a collage lies in whether, with all its strangeness, the whole unifies into something greater than its parts. Indeed, this is the lesson that the Surrealists had to learn: the strangeness of parataxis that activates the unconscious may be inherent to the idea of the aesthetic, but it is not art on its own. Consideration must still be made for the poem or painting as a whole. Composition is everything.

Which leads us back to "Moon," which I'll present again so you don't have to scroll.

Let alone the moon Preserving her pocked face. I have been over familiar With her pitiless stare and know She uses arsenic to whiten her hands.   How she eats my flesh. How she disregards my bones While bleaching them.

If you are a good reader you notice that that fifth line is a sudden shift in ideation. And if you are a good reader you are confronted with the question: Does the line nonetheless add to and work within the composition as a whole? or does it break from it and shatter it? A good reader, after all, does not merely read the moment, those words in the immediate focus of their eyes, they read across lines, across stanzas, they read wholes. So is "Moon" a unified whole? Or is it an otherwise interesting verse with one curious but ill-fitting line?

What is important, perhaps, is not where you come down on the question, but that you see that the question can – indeed, should – be asked; most essentially, that you can see that the question is there to be asked.