Deep structures

One of the joys of reading a modern poet in extenso is that the idiosyncrasies become the norm, and you can concentrate on the meaning they convey or, sometimes, hide.  After a while, you find you can go further than that; you can begin to see the underlying bones of the poetry, the 'deep structures', over which the surface detail is draped.

A case in point is Auden.  His poetry manages to combine a sense of complete translucency of surface with a centre which can be irritatingly obscure.  The best antidote to this is, as it should be, reading plenty of his verses. Certain structures begin to emerge.

For example, many verses, or even groups of verses, consists of one long sentence.  Holding on to the sense and subsidiary details makes Proust read like a Sun editorial.  Yet among the lapidary clauses, the loping rhythms, the unexpected conjunction, the sudden homely image, there lie a few basic rhetorical tricks, of which variation is the most important.

Take the opening of the poem In Transit.  The first sentence runs across the first stanza and halfway into the second.  Most of it is redundant grammatically, though not, of course, poetically.  So the first line could be reduced in essence to: “(Let out where two fears intersect)x5  I stand, (pale)x4, but not for long: a professional friend is at hand who smiling leads us indoors; we follow in file, obeying that fond peremptory tone reserved for (those nervously sick)x3”. Many of the phrases condensed to brackets are themselves extended by repetition.  Within this expanded space, Auden uses some characteristic dabs of colour which need precisely this room to work.  Thus we have engineers, Caesar, Cartesian doubt; toil and gender; ponds and ragamuffins.

The poem Plains from the same collection uses identical techniques, but takes them further. The second verse runs: “It's horrible to think what peaks come down to, that (pecking rain)x2 defeat(s) tall pomps of stone where goddesses lay (sleeping)x2, that what those blind brutes leave when they are through is (nothing but a mere substance)x3”. Again, there are the knowingly disconcerting juxtapositions, the potter's cuff and the concrete which unsexes.

The fact that Auden uses these techniques is interesting; but whether it is anything more can be tested by trying to construct an Auden poem using them. The effect is likely to be more ordinary than Audenary.  Which goes to show that his achievement is to use these fairly crude devices as a springboard for his personal poetry.

Another example helps to elucidate the difference between having and being such structures.  Recently Glen Baxter has attained a little notoriety for his drole cartoons with wacky captions.  The drawing looks like something out of a Boy Scout's manual of 1938; attached to it is a line which is totally 1983. The humour lies in the disjunction between image and text, and particularly between the two sensibilities implicit in them.  However, I suggest that unlike Auden's poetry, Baxter's humour is repeatable, even if not strictly predictable. Not such deep structures in his case, then.

(28.12.86)

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