Homer has the catalogue of ships. Whoever wrote the Book of Numbers must have been kicking themselves that the spreadsheet hadn’t yet been invented, so that they could more easily represent just who owned all those oxen, and whose son he was. And the author(s) of The Mahabharata couldn’t just say that Dhritarashtra had a hundred sons without also naming them and nor, later, could they resist telling us all of Vishnu’s one thousand names. Clearly all these authors could have used a creative writing class, where they would have been strictly instructed to show, not tell, while also being assured that the passive voice is to be avoided.1
I’ve been meaning for a while to write about the differences between written poetry, on the one hand, and spoken or sung poetry, on the other. Or, rather, what happens to poetry when it’s sung or spoken. We can start with some cliches: poetry was originally sung, chanted or spoken; most poetry people listen to now is sung (in the form of pop music); we nevertheless think of poetry as being primarily written; but the window in which most people experienced poetry as something on the page has been, historically speaking, very small, really only the time between the beginnings of mass literacy and the widespread adoption of radio.
I don’t think this is very important but it is interesting. Talking about how we define art is an essentially an elite pursuit, and as one of the few people who is capable of accepting that they’re part of the elite, I’m confident in saying that the reason we don’t worry too much about mass perception of poetry is that we think it just doesn’t really matter very much.
Poetry as distinct from prose is defined largely by repetition. This repetition can take place at the level of whole phrases (as in the chorus of a song or the repeated lines of a villanelle), as whole words (Elizabeth Bishop does this wonderfully in ‘The Fish’), clusters of phonemes (rhyme), individual phonemes (alliteration, assonance) or metrically (where the phonemes are of secondary importance and the repetition is a pattern of long/short or stress-unstressed syllables). Written poetry has increasingly done without some or all of these types of repetition, whereas they have, tellingly, remained popular in song.
There are several reasons for this. The first is a type of elitism: writers who write rejecting vernacular forms out of snobbery or boredom. I think we’re all pretty bored of jingle-jangle rhyming couplets of the kind Shakespeare loved to end most scenes of his plays with. But, Pam Ayres is the best-selling poet in Britain, so clearly I’m wrong.
Another reason, beyond my latent snobbery, is that repetition makes things easier to memorise. This is how actors of Shakespeare memorise hudnreds and even thousands of lines of verse and why Judi Dench can go viral by repeating a sonnet she knows by heart on Graham Norton’s chat show. But it’s not just professionally trained actors who can do this kind of thing. You’ve probably had the experience of hearing a song for the first time in years and finding you still know all the words, for example. The music itself helps and, especially in pop, the music is often structured around the metrical qualities of the verse. Do we think any football fan ever made a point of memorising the lyrics to ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’? No, it just sort of happens. Once you’ve sung the first line of the chorus, it’s easy to remember that it’s too late because you’ve already sung that Sally can wait. And from there, you have the assonance between those rhyming words continued in away which leads you straight to say.
Another reason is the effect of these types of repetition on the page: they’re less striking, harder to perceive or just plain weird compared with how they come across when spoken or sung. Consider the Arcade Fire song ‘Rococo’ which features the chorus:
Rococo rococo rococo rococo
With also one variation that goes:
Rococo rococo rococo rococo rococo rococo rococo
Nothing much going on here, right? Even as spoken word this would be unlikely to have much impact but, in a song, it works. Part of the reason that written analyses of sung music don’t work well is that often, as here, the lyric is inseparable from the music. The English classroom (highlighters at the ready!) approach to analysis doesn’t work.
Similarly, the endless mileage that pop songwriters get out of rhymes like fire/desire and calling/falling is largely down to the fact that while they can only be made to rhyme in a couple of ways, they can be sung with near-infinite variation. This is probably also the reason that for most pop singers, fire has two syllables (that and the fact it sometimes/often/always needs to rhyme with ‘higher’).
Even among songwriters who don’t use traditional verse-chorus-verse structures, there’s a marked preference for more rhyme and repetition than is usually seen in contemporary poetry. Joanna Newsom is one of the best lyricists currently writing. Her songs almost always feature end rhyme and also internal rhyme, as in ‘Time, As a Symptom’ from Divers:
But stand brave, life-liver:
bleeding out your days
in the river of time.
Stand brave:
time moves both ways
Here, ‘days’ rhymes with ‘ways’ (while ‘brave’ maintains the assonance) and ‘-liver’ rhymes internally with ‘river’. The rhyme of ‘life-liver ‘ with ‘river’ also links the two thematically. This isn’t rhyme just for rhyme’s sake. It’s not a coincidence that there’s a visual rhyme of ‘-liver’ and ‘river’ with ‘diver’, reflecting the title and a central image of the album. So, the ‘life-liver’ is, in a sense, the ‘river’ and also the ‘diver’ swimming in the river. This is a great example of how the repetition works in a poem: it helps us link together ideas that might not otherwise obviously be linked, without Newsom having to actually say, ‘By the way, the river and the diver? Same guy.’ So – gasp! – she is showing not telling! And she uses rhyme to do it.
I once totally freaked out a 6th-form class by demonstrating that I knew a poem (‘The Second Coming’) off by heart. The funniest reaction was a kid who turned around to look at the back wall, convinced that I’d hidden a copy of the poem somewhere I could see it and he couldn’t. Obviously, I hadn’t. It’s just that I’m very used to iambic pentameter. Once I’ve gotten going with the poem, I don’t need to resort to counting beats to know where I’m going next, anymore than professional dancers have to count the beats in a waltz, because I’ve got the feel for it. Even in a poem that doesn’t have a handy rhyme scheme for me to lean on, I’m relying on repetition, but here the pattern of repetition is one of unstressed and stressed beats.
Now, there was definitely an element of showing off involved. I am a very competitive person and find it difficult to pass up opportunities to show that I’m good at something, whatever it might be. But this is certainly partly why those epic poets loved the long lists so much. So, your bard recited a hundred names of Vishnu, did he? Try FIVE hundred. Hell, let’s make it a thousand. You’ve got some people whose profession relied on an excellent memory, so of course they’re going to stretch it as far as they can. Having a steady beat allowed them to show off even more!
Going more into the realm of speculation, this might be part of the reason Shakespeare gave his actors increasingly long and complex speeches as his career advanced. He was a shareholder in his company, after all, and perhaps this was a way of showing off Richard Burbage, the leading man. Hamlet alone requires the lead actor to memorise some 1,500 lines (3/8ths of the entire play!). Did Shakespeare do this on purpose to challenge Burbage or to show him off? Or did Burbage ask for bigger parts, for his own showy purposes? We’ll never know, of course. But it’s at least possible.
This all plays into my general theory of art. We love a pattern. The great thing about patterns is you can alter them a little bit and end up with a new pattern. This is essentially the history of art in a couple of sentences. We find something we like, we tweak it a little bit and then we have a new thing. Of course, some people prefer the old thing. The next generation makes their own little changes to both new and old, and then we have a new-old thing and a new-new thing. And so we carry on, slouching towards perfection but finding it always another century off, one way or the other.
- Yes, I know. That’s the joke. ↩︎
Frank Podmore 