Patterns of Language in the Poems of Stephen Spender

PATTERNS OF LANGUAGE IN THE POEMS OF STEPHEN SPENDER

Abstract I have attempted, in the present paper, to explore the different shades and colours of Spender’s poetry through his inimitable use of language in all its uniqueness. The poet has ignored the conventional rules of syntax, grammar and normal word order to present his exquisite thoughts and flights of imagination emphatically and with an articulation which is normally impossible to achieve. Ambiguities cloud meanings and abstract images delude, but with Spender it is a different story. My effort all through the paper has been to establish the thesis that Spender uses ambiguities, abstractions and a figurative language to achieve the clarity of meaning that appears, on the face of it, as an impossible task. Where he has used the language of common everyday speech, he has taken extreme care to not to sound facile and mundane. It is for these reasons, among others, that he stands out as a very interesting and remarkable poet writing in an age where ambiguities and abstractions were the golden rules for the penning of a poem.

Just as literary style swings between two extremes – oratory, artifice and rhetoric on the one, and naturalness, simplicity, colloquialism on the other – so does poetry. A study of Stephen Spender’s poems reveals that his work also oscillates between these two extremes. But while a single work and even the same poem may exhibit both veins, the distinction is easily drawn. At one end stands the language of the self-conscious poems, at the other unliterary and familiar speech of the people. To the first category belong some of the early poems such as ‘The Living Values’ which are full of allusions:

Alas for the sad standards In the eyes of the Old Masters Sprouting through glaze of their pictures! . . .

Varnish over paint, and dust over glass! Stares back, remote, the drummer’s static drum; The locked ripeness of the Centaur’s feast; The blowing flags, frozen stiff Under cracked varnish, and the facing Reproach of Rembrandt’s self-Rembrandt. (1)

1 There is nothing in Spender that would approximate the most palpably rhetorical style used by certain poets of today; nor are there passages in his poetry displaying pure glow of the colloquial language that one finds, for instance, in the lighter dialect poems by Burns. Such poems as ‘Empty House’, ‘The Cries of Evening’, ‘That World Who Laughed’, etc are all simple lyrics composed in a light familiar style. ‘To My Daughter’, for example, is as Wordsworthian in style as it is in theme:

Bright clasp of her whole hand around my finger, My daughter, as we walk together now. All m y life I’ll feel a ring invisibly Circle this bone with shining: when she is grown Far from today as her eyes are far already. (2)

Syntax and choice of words reveal the poet’s predilection for the pellucid and the familiar, for the rhythm of the spoken language and the imagery of everyday speech. There is no need to multiply illustrations to show the lyrical and the romantic strain in Spender’s poetry. The last stanza of ‘Missing My Daughter’ will serve as a typical example in that respect:

Opened. In my daughter came. Her eyes were wide as those she has, The round gaze of her childhood was White as the distance in the glass Or on a white page, a white poem. The roses raced around her name. (3)

Here the structure of the sentences, the similes, and the choice of words are all simple and decorous at once, though a loosening of the ideals of literary decorum and a thinning out of the ornament have been increasingly evident in the twentieth century. Expression such as ‘round gaze’ and the metaphor of the roses racing around the daughter’s name appear conventionally decorous and formal. Nevertheless, what essentially permeates through the lines is the inescapably colloquial pulsation manifest in the movement of the lines. It is this aspect of the language of Spender’s poetry that demands to be studied with carefulness and certitude. His poetry combines lyricism with eloquence of the spoken language. The ease and subtlety with which Spender blends the decorous with the articulate reminds of Pope’s observation in ‘An Essay on Criticism’, on excellence in writing:

True ease in writing comes through art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance. (4)

2 Rhetoric lay exhausted and panting at the doorstep of the 20th century and the language of literature of the time had started on a new course by rejecting the high style and embracing the informal and idiomatic language of the man on the street. The great orators who had stirred England and America were either dead or retiring from the centre stage of literary creativity. English verse was more than willing to bid farewell to the age that gave birth to Tennyson, Swinburne, Rossetti, Morrris and Francis Thompson. English poetry, in both England and America, fell into the hands of those poets who felt a vigorous need to naturalize the language of verse. The modern poet was to speak the language of the people – even of the submerged classes surviving, somehow, at the rock bottom level of existence. Spender accepted the new challenges that the language of verse had to face. He shaped his poetry in tune with the mood of his time. But he does so on his own terms and conditions. Even where the language of his poetry wears the cloak of colloquialism and naturalness, it wears a cloak which, beyond doubt, carries the shine and gleam of metaphor and panache. The interesting aspect in this language blending is that the verses do not lose their naturalness and clarity. On the contrary, they become more realistically revealing. Even where Spender’s characters dream, the language does not cease to be straightforward. The following poem adopts the language of common speech without abandoning its natural polish:

‘You dream’, he said, ‘because of the child Asleep in the nest of your body, who dreams . . . ‘

Her lips dreamt, and smiled.

He laid his head, weighed with a thought On the sleep of her lips. Thus locked Within the lens of their embrace They watched the life their lives had wrought,

Watched within her flesh complete The future folded active street Straddling with gold cock-crowing face, Between their cradle bodies rocked. (5)

The poem though entitled ‘The Dream’, does not employ the Joycean technique of the stream of consciousness where language meanders with the dream stricken mind to a haze of abstraction shrouding meaning and articulation. Instead, Spender’s dream awakens the dreamer to a truer, coherent realization of a world unfolding in ‘active street’, crowded with people moving frantically from morning to evening – a picture of the

3 mechanized life of the post-war generation bereft of love and affection. The language pattern that emerges from this poem is evidently divested from any ornate polish of the poetic diction.

There are instances in Spender’s poetry where the poet has appeared to have drawn on the structural pattern evident in the poetry of the metaphysical poets and, much later, in the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the late nineteenth century. In these poems, the poets have flouted the rules of certain conventions of punctuation to an extent that each stanza assumes the form of a diamond or of a geometrical figure. This approach irritates most readers of poetry to such an extent that they look for any excuse to condemn it as obscure. Language rules are again eroded when the lines do not begin with a capital letter, as is the case with a fairly good number of the poems of e.e.cummings. The mere language structure of some poems of Hopkins upset certain of his contemporaries. He himself realized how his abandonment of certain rules of syntax and the marking of stresses in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ weighed against the poem’s chance of acceptance by the literary periodical ‘The Month’, especially, as he admitted, that there were ‘a great many more oddness (which) could not but dismay an editor’s eye’. He was aware that such marks were objectionable, yet held them to be necessary to guard his metre and his grammar from misrepresentation, and hoped that he would not be condemned literally at a glance:

‘When . . . I read some lines (of ‘The Loss of Eurydice’) . . . it stuck me aghast with a kind of raw nakedness and unmitigated violence I was not prepared for; but take breath and read it with ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right’. (6)

In one of his sonnets Hopkins writes,

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there.” (7)

Hopkins has taken the liberty with language by refusing to put sentences in their normal order of parts. He chooses to omit words in order to not to lose meaning but, interestingly, to transmit more than the narrow meaning that appears in print. The word ‘who’ in line 3 cannily suggests the presence of the modifier ‘those’, which with its absence from the line emphasizes on the pitiful depravity of those who never try to understand the unfathomable potentialities of the mind and, therefore, “hold them cheap”.

4 Spender also uses this grammatical device of ellipsis by manipulating his language in such a way that he requires the reader to supply some of the minor familiar words that he purposely chooses to exclude from his sentence structure. One short example is from Spender’s Poem Number 22 (Collected Poems), where the poet condenses the sentence in order to bring the imagery into sharper focus and, therefore, achieve meaning through a compressive force

“Passing men are sorry for the birds in cages And for unrestricted nature, hedged and lined. But what do they say to your pleasant bird Physical dalliance, since years confined?” (8)

The words ‘whose’ and ‘is’ must be understood before and after ‘physical dalliance’ making the line, in prose order, become ‘whose physical dalliance is confined since years’. The omission of these essential connections is a language manipulation through which Spender puts a sharper focus on the captivity and subjugation of the human spirit – a recurrent theme during the ‘thirties in England.

Spender’s ‘One’ is a semi-romantic poem in a sense that it does not display any ecstatic emotion of love or beauty but barely describes event in time which betrays the experience of quietude and serenity in love, coupled with a strong feeling of belonging. This poem bears no punctuation mark whatsoever except at the end of the last line. The lines run on without any regard for the rules of syntax and the last syllable of the word “concentration” appears in another line leaving the preceding line only with a personal pronoun and a half grown adjective. Let us experience the poem directly,

My concentra– tion on her quietness Intensifies like light ringed from this lamp That throws its hallow upward on the ceiling (8)

The poem appears to have been lifted verbatim from e.e.cummings. The broken syntax, the breaking up of words by placing part of the word at the end of a line and the remainder at the beginning of the next line, is an unusual grammatical arrangement that the poet employs to bring out some new aspect of meaning. Spender’s poems rarely suffer from the misty vagueness that accompanies the deviation from the accepted rules and functions of grammar. If a poem by Spender appears difficult or obscure, it is because of the obscure content or of the private allusion so often found in his later poetry, and not because he has flouted the rules of

5 language. In fact, his liberal and flexible use of the language patterns gives a compressive force to the meaning and significance of his poems.

Imaging is at the very height and life of Spender’s exploitation of language in his poetry. His words appear to act as a camera with which he can watch all the features of a scene in a form more pure and perfect than they had been originally presented to his external senses. His images are modified by a predominant passion or by awakened thoughts or images awakened by that passion. A few examples, illustrative and functional, may here be cited to exemplify the nature of the language that informs his images in his lyrics. Images of nature, light and time, death and darkness, and of guns and bullets – a recurring phenomenon in the thirties poetry of the last century – are clothed in a tapestry of simple language with a poignant use of words sparingly found in twentieth century English poetry. But the most significant of all these is Spender’s unique use of words that relate to the movement of time and nature. In one of his poems, Spender, describing the movement of nature, writes

Images we watch through glass Look back on us, intruding on our time: As Nature, spread before the summer mansion Butts through windows in on our dimension. (9)

In ‘Alice in the Wonderland’, Humpty Dumpty says, “When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean,’ to which Alice retorts, “The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Examining Spender’s poetry in this context, it can be discerned that he uses words which are rarely hard to understand or are unfamiliar to us. But at the same time, he uses these familiar words in an abnormal way in a context in which they are not normally expected to be used. The words ‘intruding’ and ‘butt’ in the lines quoted above are employed to evoke a kinaesthetic consciousness of undesired or unwelcome movement. Images intrude and nature butts muscularly to make the poet desperate and hopeless. The kinaesthetic words generate movement which allows the semantic transformation of meaning to occur as the poem moves towards its conclusion.

The language of poetry, as of any other genre of literature, is composed of a structure of words. But our response to poetry is not based merely on what we think of as meaning in the ordinary sense of the word. The total significance of a poem, much more than any other form of literature, can be understood by using our sensibilities and sensitivity to the nuances of the language, the choice of words and the undertones and overtones of these words. It is in this sense that imagery – a figurative use of language

6 through using words that make our senses react to them – acquires a predominant place in the language of poetry. Spender uses imagery both to give form to a particular poem and, as well, to link poem to poem into a complex structure. He displays a dominant image and then uses it to create an internal organization in his poem. This dominant image knits the work together, gives it coherence and order; it supplements the theme of the work and sometimes takes precedence over it. These images awaken the senses to discover meaning and significance through the nuances of the words used as images. Take, for example, the ‘cripple’ image in Spender’s short poem “What I Expected was’:

The wearing Of Time And the watching of cripples pass With limbs shaped like questions In their odd twist, The pulverous grief Melting the bones with pity, The sick falling from earth These I could not foresee. (10)

The imagery of the entire poem is divided between the natural realities – thunder, rocks, earth, time and brightness – and the temporal substance such as body, cripples, limbs, bones and sick. None of these images may, however, be properly identified as obsessive. They are not always dominant images in particular works, but they are tenacious. The predominantly reigning image of the ‘cripples’ binds all the other related images into a web of meaning and gives the poem the total significance and meaning that the poet has intended it to convey.

Elemental simplicity and a narrative style are the hallmarks of Spender’s poetry. His poems are remarkable in their display of speech cadences and language of common speech, in his choice of simple, homely diction and situations, and in his introduction of the narrative element. ‘Boy, Cat, Canary’ is one such poem where we find a unique blend of narration and poetry through a subtle exploitation of language:

Our whistling son called his canary Hector “Why?” I asked. “Because I had always about me More of Hector with his glittering helmet than Achilles with his triple-thewed shield. He let Hector hop Out of his cage, fly up to the ceiling, perch on his chair, Onto his table where the sword lay bright among books While he sat in his jersey, doing his homework

7 Once, hearing a shout, I entered his room, saw what carnage The Siamese cat had worked his tigerish scene. (11)

Although the poem describes a situation, a carnage, the Siamese cat flattening the canary Hector against the sand, the poet gives it three titles, instead of one. It is certainly a dense poem, in terms of verbal felicity, in which all the three elements suggested by the three words preponderate. The central situation is, however, neatly brought out and described with classical control and a masterly vividness of the diction. Spender eschews, while describing this situation, all elements of possible sentimentality and produces what is a remarkably finished work of art characterized by a severe compression of thought and language. The poem’s main theme is thus fairly clear and the accumulation of kaleidoscopic images, rushing past us, admirably conveys his meaning.

Spender gives free hand to the vagaries of language usage by clothing words with meanings that can only be understood in a verbal context. In this respect he draws on ambiguity as a poetical device so that his expressions carry more than one meaning. He uses ambiguity in such a subtle way that it seldom obscures the meaning and vitality of his verses. He does not hesitate to use abstruse intellectual expression and argument in the middle of a war poem, since only by doing so he finds himself capable of conveying the exact quality of his passion:

Only the world changes, and time its tense Against the creeping inches of whose moons He launches his rigid continual present.

The grass will grow its summer beard and beams Of sunlight melt the iron slumber Where soldiers lie locked in their final dreams. (12)

The lines display the subtle philosophy of change and mutability crammed poetically into the verse form, but the final effect is hardly that of obscurity. The poet employs the common language of the average speaker of English and douses this language with archetypal and visual imagery, classical in its taciturnity and objectivity. Time changes its ‘tense’, the moons of time go on creeping inch by inch, the summer glass yellows out and beams of sunlight melt “the iron slumber”, but the dead soldiers will remain alive, constant and changeless in the living memory of the human civilization. The selective use of the visual imagery of launching of the “rigid continual” presence of the soldier, establishes the ultimate meaning of the poem in no uncertain terms.

8 Spender uses language to create verbal objects inseparable from the words used. His words themselves become objects. They do not exist apart from the language. They equip language with patterns of meaning. Our observations of reality are in terms of patterns – organizing the parts into a whole so as to get a complete picture. Poetry is a reflection of reality, of the felt experience. The poet, therefore, makes us observe that reality through his poems, by using different patterns of language. Spender organizes these segregated patterns of language to present his own unique vision of reality.

9 References

1. Spender, Stephen. 1969. Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber. p. 71.

4. Pope, Alexander. 1967. ‘An Essay on Criticism’, Poetical Works, Ed., Herbert Davis, London: Oxford University Press. p. 74 (lines- 362-3)

5. Spender, Stephen. 1969. Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber. p.167.

6. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Letters, Vol. 1. London: Humphrey House. p. 79

7. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. 1981. “SONNETS”, The Penguin Book of English Verse. Edited by John Hayward, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, page. 389

8. Spender, Stephen. 1969. Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber. p.44

11.Spender, Stephen. 1971. The Generous Days. London: Faber & Faber. P. 15

12.Spender, Stephen. 1969. Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber. P. 101