Imagery

Imagery is at the heart of all human language: whether we are writing a poem or describing something to a friend our language is suffused with metaphor and loaded with symbolism (did you see what I did there?) Of course in spoken language much of that imagery is "dead" (itself a metaphor of course). As you plough through traffic this morning the idea might strike you that the road is not a farmer's field and that the idea in your head has not physically hit anything.

It seems as though the part of our brain that manages language is hard-wired (another metaphor) to use imagery. To digress a little, it seems the same is not so powerfully true of the areas of our brain that process vision and sound directly, as can be seen by comparing the prevalence of imagery in the visual arts and music as opposed to literature. Visual imagery does exist of course: architects are fond of visual metaphors, particularly since the apartment-block-as-ocean-liners of the Art Deco era and religious art has always contained visual symbols. The pre-Raphaelites were fond of imagery, but perhaps that was because they were so immersed in poetry. One of the purest examples of visual imagery in art is Man Ray's le Violon d'Ingres and it is striking because it is so unusual. However the visual form that uses imagery to by far the greatest extent is cartoons- think of Tom and Jerry- and this I think emphasises its slightly transgressive effect. Similarly imagery exists in music- Vaghan William's The Lark Ascending or Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf are examples- but these are often just evocations of the real world through sounds that echo real sounds. In popular discourse we do actually use imagery in sound, but chiefly for humorous effect. Think of the ironic "ta-da" trumpet fanfare we use to comment on a friend's achievement or the conclusion of a bad joke, or the rasping "uh-uh" (taken from Family Fortunes) we use for an even worse joke.

To return to the main theme of this entry though, in literature imagery is often key, and in great literature at least very much alive. However that does not make it easy to analyse and write about. Students are generally good at spotting metaphors and similes (or have had them pointed out to them) but beyond saying that "the poet uses a lot of imagery" or "this image is really strong/powerful/meaningful" they often struggle to make anything of them.

For me it helps to understand better what imagery actually is and how it works. An image consists of three parts: the tenor (or what is being described); the vehicle (or what the reader is being asked to imagine); and the grounds (or what connects the two) as in the following diagram.

To take an example from above "As you plough through traffic this morning..."

Of course this is pretty much a dead metaphor and you may not be explicitly aware of the grounds, but they are there and I would argue they give that phrase a little extra strength.

This diagram describes the fundamental structure of imagery of all types, though the balance can shift depending on the type. So in similes the focus is very much on the tenor. We are made aware of the fact that imagery is being deployed (through "like" or "as") and the vehicle exists simply to give a fuller description of the tenor. In metaphor the balance is more even. Tenor and vehicle exist concurrently and we are invited rather than instructed to consider them together. In symbols the emphasis is on the vehicle and the tenor is (or tenors are) sometimes not even stated: we have to work out what it is/they are for ourselves. So in the quote from the philosophical Glaswegian that heads this blog, the vehicle in the image is the train and the passengers on it- some with tickets and some without. I was being invited to compare that with the condition of society and our respective places in it.

Fundamental to the power of imagery of all sorts is the almost miraculous power of connotations in our language. I have touched on this in a previous post and may expand on it later. Words can have a huge range of connotations (or ideas, thoughts and feelings we associate with them) and imagery can untap that power and make us see (and more important, feel) connections between ideas and thoughts. Often the grounds are obvious, though in great poetry they always make us in some way look afresh at the relationship between tenor and vehicle. In Tennyson's the Eagle the vehicle of a thunderbolt falling is used for the dive of the eagle. The grounds that spring immediately to mind are around the speed and direction of movement, but tenor and vehicle also share connotations of power and majesty (think Jove's thunderbolts) and a certain ruthless and destructive potency. In other images the grounds are less apparent, but all the more powerful for that. Owen's Mental Cases contains the horrific line "Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh." You have to work at the grounds a bit, but think about the image. The strengthening line of deep red at the horizon is visually horribly reminiscent of the blood oozing from a reopened wound. Also, whilst for us the tenor (dawn) and vehicle (a reopened wound) might not share much more in the way of grounds, Owen is writing about soldiers traumatised by war. For them dawn signalled another day of fighting, pain, fear, bloodshed and death. The grounds are rich and deep after all.

Another Owen poem, Exposure takes a different and less usual approach, where tenor and vehicle deliberately have very little in common and it is the act of forcing a connection between them that gives the image its power. In the last stanza Owen describes the burying party looking at the faces of the soldiers they are about to bury. The line "All their eyes are ice" forces us to consider the grounds of comparison between eyes, with their connotations of life, beauty, character, being a window to the soul and ice with its connotations of hardness, coldness and lifelessness. Of course, to the burying party the dead soldiers' eyes have simply become ice; their bodies indistinguishable in any important way from the mud in which they lie frozen. That is the point that this image forces onto us.

Poets' use of imagery can go beyond this too, particularly when they work with symbols rather than just metaphors and similes, enabling them to unleash the full power of the connotations of the words and phrases they use. To demonstrate the range and subtlety of that power consider the following two images, which use the same vehicle: waves softly breaking on the sea shore. Before looking at the poems think of the connotations of that image.

Now see how Keats (in Bright Star) and Arnold (in Dover Beach) have used the image. For Keats the tenor is an idea of purification and religiosity, which he applies to his love for the subject of the poem:
"And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores"
The grounds here concern ideas of cleansing, but also the repetitive patience of both priests and waves and the way both stand aside from and seem unsullied by the messy human world.

For Arnold the image of the waves on the shore evokes very different, indeed almost opposite, ideas:
"The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world"
Here, the grounds concern the sadness of the sound of the waves and of the poets feelings about the world, the sense of something withdrawing and feelings of loneliness and abandonment.

These uses of the same image are utterly different, yet both illustrate another aspect of imagery- the way it can operate at a level below our conscious perception. What is striking is that both poets associate the sea in their image with religion. This is not a "grounds" we would readily identify nowadays. However water has always had deep symbolic power that has put it often at the heart of religious worship (think of holy water, baptism, ritual bathing etc.) and I think the sense of power and depth is still there as we read the poems.

Reading Bright Star also reminds me how much their choice of vehicle can reveal about the poet's attitude to and feelings about the tenor. Compare Keat's image for his loved one, as a bright star with Marvell's in To His Coy Mistress as an amorous bird of prey:
"And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power."
The grounds in both images are clear, but very different. Keats' image is about purity, beauty, the idea of guiding and providing a focal point and (poor Keats) unattainability. Marvell's on the other hand is about physicality, impatience with the slow passing of time, the desire and ability to take what you want and an insatiable and almost violent appetite. Tellingly, Keats in his poem is a sleepless Eremite (or hermit) worshipping the star, whereas Marvell is another bird of prey, sporting with its mate.

The willing suspension of disbelief

The willing suspension of disbelief is a central element of all narrative fiction and has been since time immemorial. It worried Aristotle, who believed there must be strict limits to how far an audience could suspend its disbelief, so came up with the notion of the unities of time, place and action. So long as these unities were maintained in a tragedy, he argued, it ought to be possible for the audience to suspend its disbelief and “go along”with the story. On the face of it, the movement of narrative fiction since then has been to test the limits of audience’s abilities in this respect: certainly the three unities were abandoned long ago (though curiously the unity of time re-emerges in projects such as High Noon and 24 and all three in Twelve Angry Men and The Phone Box).

However on closer examination it seems clear that, in film at least, we are actually getting more and more tentative and conservative in requiring audiences to suspend their disbelief. Producers spend millions in set and costume design and hundreds of hours in post-production to eliminate any tiny detail that might disrupt the suspension of disbelief and undermine the“authenticity” of the experience of watching the film. Anal-retentive bloggers pore minutely over every frame of new releases, apparently incredulous at the notion that anyone could accept this portrayal of wartime Europe as authentic when an actor can be CLEARLY SEEN wearing a wristwatch that was FIRST MANUFACTURED IN 1946!!!!

Of course in comedy the disruption of our suspension of disbelief is allowed, for comic effect. Lazy comedies (and some very good ones) get their laughs by parodying scenes from recent blockbusters and Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety contained some marvellous moments, including one where, as the camera pulls back from the unconscious body in the shower (following the Psycho shower scene parody) there is a crash, accompanied by a muttered “Carry on, carry on. No one will notice”. The camera pulls back further to reveal a ragged hole in the bathroom wall.

Serious films do have their moments of intertextuality too, but they are called “hommages” and are knowing asides between film bores. They are intended to be too subtle for the general audience to notice consciously, so the willing suspension of disbelief is safe. It is not just in the details of what is seen that film makers assist the suspension of disbelief either, but in how it is seen. The Blair Witch Project exemplified a vogue for a “cinéma verité” style that allows viewers to pretend that this has all been filmed without the benefit of a crew of thousands (though the end credits often remind us of that reality) and the rise of 3D is all about creating an even more immersive, convincingly “real” experience. Pretty soon, it seems, we won’t have to suspend our disbelief at all: what we watch will be indistinguishable from reality itself.

Of course it hasn’t always been like that. In the 17th Century equivalent of modern blockbusters (the Histories and Tragedies) Shakespeare had no qualms in reminding his audience that this was a play. The prologue to Henry V refers to the theatre itself as “this wooden O” and concludes
“Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.”

In Hamlet he revels in reminding us throughout the play, and even at the tensest and most profound moments, that this is indeed just a play: that we are suspending our disbelief. I have touched on this in a previous post and the references to the theatre and to acting are throughout the play. As well as those though, think of the times when characters become the audience for other characters- reminding us of our own role. It is often forgotten that Hamlet’s most famous apparent soliloquy (“To be or not to be…”) is actually performed in front of an audience, of Claudius and Polonius.

Novels have always been a little more equivocal over the question of suspension of disbelief. Early novels veered widely between the absolute insistence on verisimilitude of the epistolary novel (such as Clarissa) and the playfully self-referential demolition of verisimilitude in Tom Jones. Perhaps the most radical and accomplished example of the latter form is Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It is full of asides to the reader such as “Imagine to yourself;—but this had better begin a new chapter” that constantly remind us of the interaction between the reader and the text. He even includes a blank page to allow us to contribute our own description of Widow Wadman, with the words “To conceive this right,—call for pen and ink—here's paper ready to your hand.—Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind—as like your mistress as you can—as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you—'tis all one to me—please but your own fancy in it.”

This sort of playfulness is very unusual today. I can only think of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, although Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story is a fascinating exploration for children of the relationship between the reader and the text. It is as though, as with films, we no longer want to be reminded that what we are reading is fiction. The novelists’ habit of directly addressing their “Dear reader” is now seen as hopelessly old-fashioned.

For me though, the most fascinating exploration ever of the notion of the willing suspension of disbelief is that disregarded classic of Scottish Gothic The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. On the face of it this is in the Clarissa tradition of verisimilitude, apparently consisting of a series of “found” texts. The first section is an account by“the Editor” of events in the life of a paranoid, delusional religious fanatic (the “Justified Sinner”) of the title. This account seeks to establish its authenticity by repeated reference to “tradition”. This, we are led to believe, is the unvarnished history of what actually happened.

The second section consists of the “Memoirs” of the “Justified Sinner” himself. This recounts the same events but in the language of religious fanaticism (“she was married to one of the wicked; a man all over spotted with the leprosy of sin”) and from the point of view of someone who is clearly descending rapidly into a state of extreme paranoid schizophrenia.

The novel then concludes with an account of how this “memoir” came into the hands of the “editor”, who then comments on the text directly, as follows:
“With regard to the work itself, I dare not venture a judgment, for I do not understand it. I believe no person, man or woman, will ever peruse it with the same attention that I have done, and yet I confess that I do not comprehend the writer's drift. It is certainly impossible that these scenes could ever have occurred that he describes as having himself transacted. I think it may be possible that he had some hand in the death of his brother, and yet I am disposed greatly to doubt it; and the numerous traditions, etc. which remain of that event may be attributable to the work having been printed and burnt, and of course the story known to all the printers, with their families and gossips.”

Of course, when you strip away his sanctimonious, judgmental tone what he is saying is that the "memoir" is total nonsense and not worth reading and that the “tradition” on which he has based his entire account is no more than the utterly unreliable memoir itself, distorted by the Chinese whispers of oral transmission by generations of “gossips.” At which point you want to scream at him “Stop! Wait a minute! So is none of it true then? What am I supposed to believe?” but you can’t, because the novel ends.

After all, it is only a novel. We knew all along we were suspending our disbelief, didn’t we?
Didn’t we?

The best Hamlet of all time

In the Autumn term 1989 my wife and I (we were both English teachers with A level classes) took a group of students to see Hamlet at the Olivier. To be honest, neither of us was particularly enthusiastic at the prospect: when you have studied and taught a great play several times it is very rare that any production can come close to delivering on all of the power and subtlety of the text itself. However we recognised the importance for the students of engaging with the play in performance, so off we went. The actor billed to play the title role was Daniel Day-Lewis, which explained the high takeup rate amongst the female members of our classes, but did not fill us with unalloyed joy: the prospect of his taking the method acting approach he used in My Left Foot to this part was not a pleasant one.

We arrived at the theatre and somehow got the students to their seats (like herding cats, as usual). Someone had seen a notice that Day-Lewis was indisposed, but they hadn't seen who was taking the lead role. Our spirits sank further.

However, from Hamlet's first soliloquy in Act 1 scene 2 something electric happened. I cannot abide the "classic actorrr" approach of declaiming Shakespearean soliloquies and this was nothing like that. The actor playing Hamlet spoke the lines "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt/Thaw and resolve itself into a dew" as if for the first time, and as if he was simply voicing aloud the tortured thoughts running through his brain. When he said "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,/Seem to me all the uses of this world" the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. Neither of us recognised him- he looked as if he had been handsome but his face was puffy and he moved as if beyond exhaustion.

There were other parts of the production that captivated me, though it is the performance of the title role that left the strongest impression. One other detail does stick in the mind though, as it revealed a hitherto unsuspected (at least by me) gem of Shakespeare's brilliance. In Act 2 scene 1 as Polonius is instructing Reynaldo to go and spy on Laertes the following exchange took place:
POLONIUS: …He closes with you in this consequence;
'Good sir,' or so, or 'friend,' or 'gentleman,'
According to the phrase or the addition
Of man and country.
REYNALDO: Very good, my lord.
POLONIUS: And then, sir, does he this--he does ...

and then the actor playing Polonius stopped. There was silence. Which went on. That terrible, embarrassed silence of a theatre audience when an actor has forgotten his lines. And then he resumed with:
"what was I
about to say? By the mass, I was about to say
something: where did I leave?
REYNALDO: At 'closes in the consequence,' at 'friend or so,'
and 'gentleman.'"

and I suddenly realised that Reynaldo's lines were those of a prompter. The long, embarrassing pause was there in the text after all. Yet again, Shakespeare had played with the willing suspension of disbelief and reminded us that this was a play. I had delighted in these elements of Hamlet before (the way Polonius and Claudius play the role of audience in the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia; the way Hamlet greets the actors for the play within the play; Hamlet's mentioning of the "roof fretted with golden fire"- a reference to the newly reguilded stage canopy in the Globe, etc.) but until that production I had never noticed this one.

At the interval I went and bought a programme (virtually unheard of for me) and discovered that the actor playing the Hamlet role was Ian Charleson, he of Chariots of Fire. That surprised us, as he was virtually unrecognisable as the handsome archetype of male athleticism of that film. However the second half was as powerful as the first and even the potentially farcical last scene was profoundly moving.

Later we found out more. The change in lead caused some notoriety at the time- Daniel Day-Lewis had walked out mid-performance claiming that he had seen the ghost of his dead father (method acting, see?) and citing exhaustion. No explanation was given at the time for Ian Charleson's changed appearance, but eight weeks later he died of AIDs, having requested that that fact be made public. He was the first high profile figure to be acknowledged as having died of the disease.

Now we understood, and now if anything the hairs stood up even more on the back of the neck in memory. Sir Ian McKellen said of the performance that we had seen that "Charleson played Hamlet so well it was as if he had rehearsed the role all his life." When we thought we were hearing him not declaiming the soliloquies but voicing the tortured thoughts running through his brain maybe we were not far off the mark. Hamlet is a play about sex and death, about disgust with the physicality of the body, about "the flattering unction [that] /will but skin and film the ulcerous place,/ Whilst rank corruption, mining all within,/ Infects unseen." Imagine playing that part whilst dying of AIDs- a disease at that time still shrouded in shame and hypocrisy and disgust.

I feel privileged to have witnessed this performance, but glad that I knew nothing about Ian Charleson's condition at the time. Had I known I don't think I could have beared to watch, and then I would have missed the best Hamlet of all time.

Alliteration and assonance

Students learn early, and often very successfully, how to spot alliteration (repetition of the same or similar initial consonant sounds) and assonance (repetition of the same or similar vowel sounds) and when analysing poetry the keener ones often spend considerable time doing just that. So, having spotted these phenomena what to say about them? Ah, there’s the rub. Some resort to that old standby “the alliteration/assonance helps the poem to flow”. Others, sensing (rightly) that that really says nothing, set about assigning meaning to the sounds themselves: “the repeated sibilant ‘s’ sounds create an atmosphere of menace.” Unfortunately of course the sounds themselves have no intrinsic meaning, and you would be as likely to find (possibly even in the same essay) “the repeated ‘s’ sounds create a soft and soothing atmosphere”(it is actually striking how often, in seeking to explain the effect of alliteration students unconsciously resort to alliteration themselves).

So what is there to say about these phenomena? More to the point, why do poets use them in the first place? To answer the second question first I am sure that poets are not always directly conscious at the time of writing of using techniques such as alliteration and assonance, or many other ‘poetic’techniques: good poets just know when their poetry ‘sounds right’ and these techniques are what gives their writing its power. They just work.

So why and how do alliteration and assonance work? Quite simply, as we listen to language our ear and unconscious brain seem attuned to patterns of sound. Where sounds are repeated, forming patterns, we unconsciously notice those words more and, crucially, notice the links between them more. When Keats describes the personified Autumn sitting in the grain store, “Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;” the repetition of the short “i” sounds, intertwined with the repetition of the “w” sounds does a number of things. First the pattern of sound makes the line liltingly beautiful, and we notice it more as a result. Second, we hear slightly more strongly the words “lifted”, “winnowing” and “wind” and think slightly more about the links between them. Third, since the three words have a lot in common we form a slightly stronger idea of the way the soft, light chaff on a threshing floor is like the soft, light hair of a young woman, gently lifted by the gentle breeze of an autumn afternoon.

In working this way alliteration and assonance tap into the enormous power that is contained in the connotations of words. All words have connotations (the ideas , feelings and images we associate with them) and sometimes a vast range of them. Think of all the connotations of the word “heart”-better still, experience them in these two sentences: “Her heart sang with joy at the sight of his face” and “The heart was still twitching as he sank his teeth into its glistening surface.” What alliteration and assonance do, like other techniques that link words together, is to guide us to which of the many connotations of each word come to the surface as we read the lines. In the line from Autumn we are aware of the gentle, soothing connotations of the word “wind” but of course the word has a very different set of connotations too. Take this line from Hopkins’ Wreck of the Deutschland describing a storm:“the wind;/ Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow/Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.” Here, as in the Keats line, an intertwined pattern of alliteration (the “w” sounds) and assonance (the long “i” sounds) picks out and links “wind”, “wiry” and “white-fiery”. Depending on your pronunciation this is more or less strongly linked with “whirlwind”, leading on to the assonance of the short “i” sounds that links “Spins” and “widow-making” that anyway links back with the “w” sound again. Here, the emphasis and linking bring to the surface a wholly different set of connotations of the word “wind”to those Keats used. Such is the power of poetry.

Of course Gerard Manley Hopkins is a supreme master of language, glorying in the power and beauty of alliteration, assonance and the connected phenomenon consonance (repetition of the same or similar consonant sound at any place in a word). He was acutely aware of the connotations of words, and coined the term “inscape”, partly at least, to describe the inner landscape of words that these connotations produce. At his best, he uses bewilderingly beautiful patterns of sound, that coax out every detail of his words’ inscape, such as in the beautifully sensuous description in Wreck of the Deutschland of eating a sloe by letting it burst in the mouth (like the grape in Keats’ Ode on Melancholy): “How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe/ Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,/Gush!—flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,/Brim, in a flash, full!”.

I would like to end this entry by focusing on another master of this area of poetic technique- and admirer of Keats- Wilfrid Owen. His poem Exposure contains what is possibly the most quoted example of alliteration in English literature: “Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.” This is of course an immensely powerful line. Most students get the onomatopoeic quality of the hard sibilant “s” sounds, but there is more. Look at the way the alliteration (and consonance) links the words “Sudden”, “successive”, “streak”and “silence”. In some ways surely this linkage is counter-intuitive. Does not “silence”have a totally different set of connotations from the other words? Well initially, perhaps yes, but that is the power of Owen at his best. To the soldier in the trenches, silence is far from benign. To him, silence does have connotations of menace, and even of extreme, sudden and potentially fatal action. Apart from anything else, the bombardment that preceded any major offensive would often end suddenly just before the soldiers went over the top- the blast of the whistle cutting through the unaccustomed silence was a haunting aural image to many.

At his best Owen, like Hopkins, uses the complex beauty and interlinking of meaning that alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rhyme and in his case half-rhyme can bring to immerse us in the complexity of ideas, feelings and images that a full exploration of the connotations of words can bring. I will not analyse the following stanza. Read it yourself, aloud and with an ear and a mind open to the complex interplay of sounds and ideas. It is the central stanza of Exposure. In it the soldiers, who are close to death in the icy front line trenches of the winter war and drifting in and out of consciousness, dream themselves back in England in Spring:
“Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces -
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,
Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses,
- Is it that we are dying?"

Rhythm

Generations of students have struggled with the analysis of rhythm in poetry. They are aware of it and can sense its effect, but can they think of anything meaningful to write about it? Not usually, no. I don't know how many times I have heard students (and teachers come to that) say "the rhythm really helps the poem to flow", as if that actually told anyone anything useful.

In fact I believe there are quite simple but effective ways students can understand and analyse rhythm if they first understand more about the structure of language. English is a stress-timed language. This means that, unlike in a syllable-timed language such as French, syllables are pronounced differently depending on whether they are stressed or unstressed (this is called vowel reduction) and the interval between the stressed syllables is roughly regular, however many (or few) unstressed syllables there are in between. You can hear this fairly clearly when you compare two simple sentences:
"Jóhn hít mé" and "Jónathan hít mé". The accents above the vowels indicate the stressed syllables and you can clearly hear that they are reasonably evenly spaced in both sentences. However in the second, the two unstressed syllables that complete Jonathan's name have to be crammed into the time between the stressed "o" and the stressed "i", so we (completely unconsciously) say them faster. You can also clearly hear that those two syllables are not pronounced as written. The "a" is reduced to "ə" or schwa- the phoneticians' name for the unstressed English vowel sound- so Jonathan is actually pronounced Jonəthən.

Before getting on to the analysis of rhythm in poetry it is worth pointing out the role of this feature of English in creating errors in spelling. Take one of the most commonly misspelt words: "definite." The problem is that pronunciation gives no clue to the spelling of the final syllable. The word is actually pronounced defənət, so it is not surprising that so many spell the last syllable "-ate", presumably unconsciously echoing aurally very similar words like "detonate" (where the final syllable is stressed, and therefore not reduced). The odd thing is that the misspellers actually DO know which vowel is in the third syllable- I have yet to hear anyone mispronounce "definition" as "defination". The problem is that when writing they forget the clear structural connection between the words and hence the spelling of the third syllable. This is, I believe, another illustration of the fact that the more subconscious functions of our brains are actually far more reliable and capable of processing complex structures and interactions than the "higher order", more conscious functions. Speech is clearly a more instinctive and "lower order" function than writing, yet here as elsewhere the part of our brain that processes speech is more accurately able to process the complexities of language than the part that processes writing.

So what has all this got to do with analysing rhythm in poetry? Well, in a general sense, the regular pattern of stressed syllables is what creates the rhythm in all spoken English, and it is through playing (whether consciously or unconsciously) with that rhythm that poets create many of their effects. I have always believed that great poetry can only be truly appreciated when read aloud and we become subliminally aware of the beautiful rhythmic structures of its sound.

All of the above paragraph is of course utterly useless to the average student analysing rhythm in poetry (though it does not stop plenty of them putting in an equally pretentious paragraph into an essay on Keats to cover up their inability to say anything specific). Thankfully though, understanding the stress-timed nature of English can enable us to make very specific and meaningful points about rhythm in poetry. Take the central line in one of the most powerful poems ever written, Dulce et Decorum Est:
"Gas! Gas! Quick boys! An ecstasy of fumbling. Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time."
I have often read essays that confidently stated that the rhythm speeds up on this line, after the slow "trudging" rhythm of the previous lines. Well, yes and no. Listen carefully to which are the stressed syllables:
"Gás! Gás! Quíck, boys! An écstasy of fúmbling, Fítting the clúmsy hélmets júst in tíme"

The line actually starts with three stressed syllables, with no unstressed syllables between. Automatically this slows the rhythm. However between the stressed syllables "Quick" and "ecst..." there are two unstressed syllables, and between "ecst..." and "fumb..." there are three, all having to be packed into the same period as that between "Gas!" and "Gas!" at the start of the line. So the rhythm actually slows almost to a standstill with the dropping of the shells, only then immediately to accelerate as the weary soldiers try to react. The line also demonstrates another of the subtle effects poets can use with rhythm, namely the internal rhyme between "fumbling" and "clumsy". This serves further to stress the stressed syllables of those words, which slightly reduces the stressed syllable in "Fitting" in between. It is almost as though you have to fit all of "-ling. Fitting the " (four syllables) in between the two stresses.

As in many areas, perhaps the greatest master of rhythm in poetry is Shakespeare. Take Macbeth’s justly famous "Tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy. English blank verse at Shakespeare's time was forced into a rhythmic pattern (the iambic pentameter) taken from Classical Latin. In less skilled hands this becomes a straight-jacket that forces the reader into the dreadful sing-song of "The boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled". However Shakespeare has the confidence and skill to let the stress-timed rhythms of English shine through. He uses a similar technique to Owen's to slow up the rhythm (though typically of Shakespeare goes that little bit further) with the four stressed syllables of “Oút, oút, bríef cándle…” in contrast to the almost doggerel-like alternation of stressed and unstressed in“this pétty páce from dáy to dáy.”

However, effectively as he uses rhythm to reinforce meaning the real artistry of Shakespeare is the way he plays with the rhythms of speech, creating beautiful syncopated music. The base rhythm of blank verse, the iambic pentameter, consists of five “bars” of an unstressed and a stressed syllable. It is vocalised with the classic “de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum.” This is the base rhythm of Shakespeare’s verse too- unsurprisingly as it is the rhythm of a lot of our natural speech. However, especially in his later plays, sometimes he disrupts it with almost strident syncopation. One example is the audacious line from the end of King Lear (act 5 scene 3, line 365) where he reverses the order of stressed and unstressed, forcing this syncopated rhythm on us through the extraordinary device of repeating one word five times: “Néver, néver, néver, néver, néver.” However perhaps my favourite example is from the Macbeth soliloquy, and another audacious piece of repetition. The line is so familiar that we barely notice its radical rhythmic brilliance:
Tomórrow and tomórrow and tomórrow”

On paper it’s an iambic pentameter, and if you (unnaturally) stress the “and”s then that is how it sounds too. Yet read well, the line has three stresses, not five. Read well, the three unstressed syllables between the stressed “..mó..” syllables (“..rrow and to..”) have to be rushed through, so you get to the end of the line quicker than the normal line length would allow you to. So what happens then? Without being conscious of doing so, you pause to let the normal iambic pentameter line length catch up. So time rushes on, through tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and then it stops. That’s what I mean by brilliance.

Shakespeare and sleep

As an English teacher I have always been dismissive of the biographically deterministic approach to literary criticism that often results from students' attempts to contextualise the literature they study. Any work of literature, I tell them, is a construct. Even when studying an autobiography you cannot draw an entirely simplistic equation between events in the author's life and elements of the work of literature. How pointless it is therefore to explain or dismiss characters, themes or fields of imagery in a work of fiction by reference to biographical details about the author. When Hamlet says he can "tell a hawk from a handsaw" he is not Shakespeare, he is a character created by Shakespeare. Yes, that shows that the author was familiar with the tools of the craftsman's trade (or according to another reading, the falconer's) but that is all it shows. Shakespeare's choice of those words could have been influenced by any number of things, from their alliteration to some specific contemporary reference of which we now know nothing.

Yet to every rule there is at least one exception. There is one element of Shakespeare's life that I am absolutely convinced comes through in his work: he was an insomniac. The references to difficulties sleeping are too widespread and too powerful not to have their origin in deeply personal experience.
I recognise of course that as a great poet Shakespeare uses the image of sleep and its uncomfortable similarity to death as a powerful symbol in a number of places. Prospero says that "We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep." echoing Macbeth's lament that " in that sleep of death what dreams may come/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil." Macbeth expands the image in the cry "shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit/And look on death itself."

However what I am talking about is something different. Time after time what I hear is the plaintive and deeply personal cry of an individual who has suffered and is suffering real insomnia. You can see it in the envy implicit in Brutus'Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies/Which busy care draws in the brains of men;/Therefore thou sleep’st so sound." or Friar Laurence's "But where unbruised youth with unstuff’d brain/Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign" You can see it in the sadness of Henry IV's "O sleep! O gentle sleep! /Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,/That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down/And steep my senses in forgetfulness?...Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown", but most clearly you can see it in the desperation in Macbeth's frequent laments about his inability to sleep. What more passionate statement could there be about the value of sleep than his "the innocent sleep,/Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,/The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,/Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,/Chief nourisher in life’s feast"? Surely here we see Shakespeare slipping out of his role as author and speaking with his own voice- a voice tortured by his inability to sleep.

If you are not yet convinced, why not read the following Shakespeare sonnet in its entirety. Then tell me: was this or was this not written by an insomniac?

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expir’d:
For then my thoughts—from far where I abide—
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see:
Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.
Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee, and for myself no quiet find.
Sonnet 27