Form in poetry

People nowadays who speak of form in poetry almost always mean such externals as regular measure and rhyme, and most often they mean to get rid of these in favour of the freedom they suppose must follow upon the absence of form in this limited sense. But in fact a poem having only one form would be of doubtful interest even if it could exist. In this connection, the poet J.V. Cunningham speaks of “a convergence of forms, and forms of disparate orders,” adding: “It is the coincidence of forms that locks in the poem.” For a poem is composed of internal and intellectual forms as well as forms externally imposed and preexisting any particular instance, and these may be sufficient without regular measure and rhyme; if the intellectual forms are absent, as in greeting-card verse and advertising jingles, no amount of thumping and banging will supply the want.

Form, in effect, is like the doughnut that may be said to be nothing in a circle of something or something around nothing; it is either the outside of an inside, as when people speak of “good form” or “bourgeois formalism,” or the inside of an outside, as in the scholastic saying that “the soul is the form of the body.” Taking this principle, together with what Cunningham says of the matter, one may now look at a very short and very powerful poem with a view to distinguishing the forms, or schemes, of which it is made. It was written by Rudyard Kipling—a great English poet somewhat sunken in reputation, probably on account of misinterpretations having to do more with his imputed politics than with his poetry—and its subject, one of a series of epitaphs for the dead of World War I, is a soldier shot by his comrades for cowardice in battle.

I could not look on Death, which being known,
Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.

The aim of the following observations and reflections is to distinguish as clearly as possible—distinguish without dividing—the feelings evoked by the subject, so grim, horrifying, tending to helpless sorrow and despair, from the feelings, which might better be thought of as meanings, evoked by careful contemplation of the poem in its manifold and somewhat subtle ways of handling the subject, leading the reader on to a view of the strange delight intrinsic to art, whose mirroring and shielding power allows him to contemplate the world’s horrible realities without being turned to stone.

There is, first, the obvious external form of a rhymed, closed couplet in iambic pentameter (that is, five poetic “feet,” each consisting of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable, per line). There is, second, the obvious external form of a single sentence balanced in four grammatical units with and in counterpoint with the metrical form. There is, third, the conventional form belonging to the epitaph and reflecting back to antiquity; it is terse enough to be cut in stone and tight-lipped also, perhaps for other reasons, such as the speaker’s shame. There is, fourth, the fictional form belonging to the epitaph, according to which the dead man is supposed to be saying the words himself. There is, fifth, especially poignant in this instance, the real form behind or within the fictional one, for the reader is aware that in reality it is not the dead man speaking, nor are his feelings the only ones the reader is receiving, but that the comrades who were forced to execute him may themselves have made up these two lines with their incalculably complex and exquisite balance of scorn, awe, guilt, and consideration even to tenderness for the dead soldier. There is, sixth, the metaphorical form, with its many resonances ranging from the tragic through the pathetic to irony and apology: dying in battle is spoken of in language relating it to a social occasion in drawing room or court; the coward’s fear is implicitly represented as merely the timorousness and embarrassment one might feel about being introduced to a somewhat superior and majestic person, so that the soldiers responsible for killing him are seen as sympathetically helping him through a difficult moment in the realm of manners. In addition, there is, seventh, a linguistic or syntactical form, with at least a couple of tricks to it: the second clause, with its reminiscence of Latin construction, participates in the meaning by conferring a Roman stoicism and archaic gravity on the saying; remembering that the soldiers in the poem had been British schoolboys not long before, the reader might hear the remote resonance of a whole lost world built upon Greek and Roman models; and the last epithets, “blindfold and alone,” while in the literal acceptation they clearly refer to the coward, show a distinct tendency to waver over and apply mysteriously to Death as well, sitting there waiting “blindfold and alone.” One might add another form, the eighth, composed of the balance of sounds, from the obvious likeness in the rhyme down to subtleties and refinements beneath the ability of coarse analysis to discriminate. And even there one would not be quite at an end; an overall principle remains, the compression of what might have been epic or five-act tragedy into two lines, or the poet’s precise election of a single instant to carry what the novelist, if he did his business properly, would have been hundreds of pages arriving at.

It is not at all to be inferred that the poet composed his poem in the manner of the above laborious analysis of its strands. The whole insistence, rather, is that he did not catalog 8 or 10 forms and assemble them into a poem; more likely it “just came to him.” But the example may serve to indicate how many modes of the mind go together in this articulation of an implied drama and the tension among many possible sentiments that might arise in response to it.

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Emily Dickinson

In this way, by the coincidence of forms that locks in the poem, one may see how to answer a question that often arises about poems: though their thoughts are commonplace, they themselves mysteriously are not. One may answer on the basis of the example and the inferences produced from it that a poem is not so much a thought as it is a mind: talk with it, and it will talk back, telling you many things that you might have thought for yourself but somehow didn’t until it brought them together. Doubtless a poem is a much simplified model for the mind. But it might still be one of the best models available. On this great theme, however, it will be best to proceed not by definition but by parable and interpretation.