Life Sentences (46 page)

The connections rhymes make are mainly copulative, not in the sense we associate with the copula
is
, which wants to say something factual, such as, “I think therefore I am,” or, “In the fall the leaves are brown”; but in the carnal sense implied by the grounds for their conjunction, since they often have no other relation to boast of and are not, in their referents, very much alike (are
moon, spoon, loony
,
tune
?), but who are joined by the strength of their physical attraction. They are most frequently found in the company of the line break, where they tend to enlarge that breach by creating a sense of closure, snapping the purse shut. Nevertheless, a poem’s sentences are folded back to a secondary beginning when the rhyme sends meaning in search of its twin.

In a masterfully awkward Thomas Hardy poem this very function of rhyme is the hidden subject. The scheme is insistent: a, a, a, a, b, b, a, a, a.

It is rarely observed how rhyme limits the poet’s vocabulary, just as meter controls the choice of words and their order. Suppose the poet wrote, “If there are other summer days … summer days … 
with the hay baled in its ripest phase …” Indeed, the
prime, time
anachronism is unfortunate, but in this poem it is essential. These lyrics, if written straight out as prose, would damp the drama of
Down’
s position, since everything in the line must splash upon the receiving hen—“Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen …”—in their amorous entanglement indifferent to height, to water, or to the poet’s presence. The poem tells us, perhaps inadvertently, that neither the girl, held in the poem by the poet’s arm, nor the hen, tacked to the line by a barely adhesive
and
, are of any great significance, though in summer-time the relationship, according to the pair of cuckoos, appears to have equalized.

The great stroke in this poem is the so-called awkward line with its inverted word order—“I shall go where went I when”—partly because it makes getting where it’s going difficult (the stumble) and pointless (as if only to reach the rhyme), and partly because the
when
takes us to the edge of the poem, where we might fall into an endless wondering of, “What next?” if it weren’t for the powerful upward pull of its rhyme with
again
and the tightness of the trio “where went when.” In short, this line shouldn’t have a strong closure, but it actually has a quite vigorous one, enough to help suspend
hen
as if in midair. Indeed,
Down
does the plummeting for the moorcock, as well as the hen, though her plunge is rather an afterthought, as I’ve suggested.

Lines that are wrenched suggest a powerful emotion has wrenched them, such as Hopkins’s, “My own heart let me more have pity on; let / Me live to my sad self hereafter kind”; but even the slightest displacement of customary acts or values will do it. For instance, “We once were in love, made love and kissed without a harmful history,” puts kissing after love and last in an amorous past blessed by brevity. “We had children, married, and met,” has a similar, though more emphatic, backwardness. In the Hardy poem, the double rhyme (
around her
), by returning us to its previous partner (
flounder
), compares the tumultuous behavior of the fowls with the socially more acceptable gesture of possessive affection.

Which brings us, perhaps with the relief of surprise, and the stimulus of suspicion, to the juncture of René Descartes with Samuel Beckett, with Beckett’s riders and their bicycles, bicycles that are always breaking down, breakdowns that imperil the smooth machines we are supposed to be, minds riding around like ghosts (the critic’s complaint was) steering only bits of wire, steel, and rubber wheels; for when the cuckoos chime they pop out of a chalet to do it at an appointed time; and so very similarly does the poetic—even prosy—line go quark, because even one word, standing alone in one of Beckett’s barren chambers, replicates the philosopher’s problem: the interaction of marks with minds, and minds with cries of
coo-coo
, of concepts riding about on meaningless and arbitrary sounds, something like Beckett’s own chorus of frogs: “Krak! Krek! Krik! Krak!” for two unmelodious pages of
Watt
. If meaning, for the philosopher, tends to fly off into abstraction like steam, for the poet it tends to condense the way moisture bathes a cold glass. Although Beckett, following Descartes’ lead, lets the body be a machine, the odd thing is that nowadays it is the computer that tries to behave like a mind, although in the absence of a body it remains more mindless than a monkey.

In the aesthetically interesting sentence, in any case, every materiality of language is employed to build a body for the meaning that will realize the union of thought and thing that paradise apparently forgot to promise us, and give consciousness the solid presence it constantly yearns for and will never quite realize. Over and over, we think that in the word we shall find the place where mind and matter meet. As Wallace Stevens writes:

Stevens is constantly endeavoring to “find the vital music [that] formulates the words,” either rather blatantly, as if we were as dense-eared as a carving—“the miff-muff of water, the vocables / Of the wind, the glassily-sparkling particles / Of the mind”—or more smoothly, uniting a rhythm with a passage of thought, fashioning sweetmeat music to surround a phrase and its figure like cream poured over berries:

Here, as often in Stevens, music leads meaning by several meters, but who could resist the lure of a line like, “The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,” since it (cadence and image) suggests a sense that’s at the same time secret, melodious, imperial, and sexy. The demands of sound and the impediments, apparently so arbitrary, that poets force themselves to hurdle also compel them to explore the meanings they had in mind, and enable them to discover in what they thought, more than they thought.

“The shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman.” The rhythm of the sentence not only propels the sentence forward, it helps to organize its significant units—its phrases and clauses. The reader is made not merely to see the sentence, but to sound it, because it is now a small mouthful. These sounds are usually not those of ordinary speech, but the spectral mimicry of things that are said to the mind, heard only by the mind, in the arena of the mind—in the subvocal consciousness that exists during reading.

This salesman’s sentence seems quite sure of itself. It is direct; it is definite; it has no room for reservations. Yet without altering a word, its epistemological and ontological status can be radically altered. That is why I call these verbal instruments
transformative operators
. For instance, we could lower the sentence’s degree of assurance. “[I thought that] the fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman.” “[I guessed that] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman [but Gertrude was of quite a different opinion].” Amphibolously: “[Harold said that if] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman [he was a monkey’s uncle].” Or change tone and attitude: “[I certainly hoped] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman [otherwise I’ve just now bought a cat’s brush to comb my beard].” “The shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman [but what if he were also the exhibitionist who has been frightening the neighborhood?]” More radically, we can put it in another realm of being. “[While seated before the fire in my dressing gown reading Descartes’
Meditations
, I dreamed I heard a knocking. Then a cuckoo popped out of its clockhouse to announce that] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman. [I realized, when I was awakened by my desire to answer his knocking, that I had been dreaming inside a dream not altogether mine.]”

Layers of reality, degrees of uncertainty, ranges of attitude, levels of society, depth of contextual connection, modulations of tone, the ramifications and complexities of concept, and, above all, the vocabulary of the denoted world must be taken into account, managed, and made the best of. As here, in this partially realized spindle diagram which displays the sound patterns around which the rhetorical center of these sentences turn:

There is no dimension of the sentence that is not operative here, from the upper class Latinate word choice, the steady interruption of qualifying phrases, the carefully constructed climax, the shocked tone, both dismayed and outraged, the repetitive encircling of
and
and
so
, and the helpful disclosure, as if for use in this essay, of the language—both in its syntax and lexicon—of the world of human things: the single teacup that speaks of former wealth and dashed hopes; for Henry James is as much a master of that language as he is of the urbane style of verbal social exchange with which he was daily engaged. There is no more attentive prose than one of the Master’s
sentences. The quality of what any one of them sees or feels is not only meticulously depicted, but placed in its proper sphere, and hefted for its proper weight, and seen through, realized, and measured as though each object were a little scene inside a glass globe, with snow that will obediently fall when its world is turned upside down.

I have suggested in other places that such sentences as these are containers of consciousness: a verbal consciousness, of course, one built of symbols, not sensations, yet one of perceptions all the same: perceptions followed by thoughts like tracking hounds, and infused throughout by the energies of memory and desire, the moods emotions foster, and the reach, through imagery and other juxtapositions, of imagination: six elements that I would substitute for Blair’s selection (though our choices overlap and never negate); and also properties that the forms I have been discussing are designed to bring into being or enhance; above all, to unify, as our awareness is unified when full and sharp and contemplative, despite the fact that this awareness is, at the same time, being urgently driven, like the scientific eye that searches greedily for clues to the nature of what it sees, yet, for just that reason, dares not miss, however microscopically tiny or cosmically distant, anything that might be significant.

The sentence must shelter its sense in sounds and arrange the furniture of that dwelling in an appealing pattern; but understanding how this is done is made difficult by the amorphous and variable term
form
, which, like so many words philosophers are fond of, is one moment firm and sharp and shining as a blade, while in the next helter-skelter in its applications, soon dull and tarnished and worn thin.