Odling III: Reflections

I thought that I would have to write a reflection essay for the two odes that I had to write, and discovered later that I didn't. I still had at least half of it planned out, though, so I'm bally well writing it anyway. What follows is highly technical and the average reader may find it uninteresting, but the actual poem is very near the top and easy to find (it's in italics).

How It Started I was playing around with the Merry Sweary Lullaby, playing hooky basically, and considering how much fun it was to use words like vermillion, amber, and lapis lazuli in poems - not just for the vivid mental images they give to me, but their associations to far places and the wonderful sounds they make. I decided to write a poem about that.

If I want to write an object into a poem, I can do it in several ways. I can name it: a table. I can describe it by its attributes: brown, four legs, flat top, wooden, varnish-smelling, smooth. That often isn't enough, though, in which case I might describe it by its history: the side table my Dad found crusted in paint at a garage-sale and sanded and varnished until it was gleaming dark wood; or by what it is similar to, which is a whole world of description in itself and is one of the focii of metaphor and simile. I might personify it: O God of Tables, grace me with your stability. Finally, I might describe it by what it reminds me of, which is the other focus of metaphor, and really turns it into an attribute of something else. That's all right - poems are forgiving that way.

To use an abstract, like Colour, I had to use similar techniques. It is no longer possible to write a poem about "Colour - how wonderful you are," without getting lynched. I needed to link it to something more solid. I had initially played with ideas to do with the sky, and the fancier ways of saying "It's blue." This was the mental equivalent of stalking a twitchy little mouse's tail and jumping, all claws out, onto a ferocious Jubjub bird, but I'll get to the details later. My small subject turned into something with two radically different ideas as I thought about it, and trying to squeeze them into one poem was painful. Fortunately, I was supposed to write two: one Pindaric (that is to say, fulsome and over the top praise), and one Homeric (a quiet and wandering contemplation). Relieved, I put my first idea to the side and started writing a Pindaric Ode dedicated to the goddess of the rainbow, Iris, and her cloak, my personification of colours.

Colours I

Of the many-hued mantle of Iris I shall sing,
Her crystal cloak of light through rain, the bow
She bears, that bright-tined arrows arc and go
And graze our eyes, that every common thing
Is garbed and jewelled in glory, like a king.

And all the shades of darkness's sinister hiss,
Mixed with the sober weight of black, and brown,
And warming amber do adorn the gown
Of beauty, as a trilling silver kiss
Or scarlet, purple, glinting gold, and this

I ask of Iris, she whose plumes are light,
And Echo, lady of the unbodied sound -
Take all my naked thoughts, on paper bound
Entwined in tenuous lines of black and white.
Call music from them. Bring feathers for their flight.

To get some nuts and bolts out of the way, the poem is written in loose iambic pentameter. The looseness is mostly because, while a steady rhythm can be very beautiful, I didn't want to sacrifice that much meaning to a strait-jacket. There was a very serious word-choice in the very last line to break the rhythm, however, which I will discuss in more detail later. Originally, I was writing in tetrameter, four beats per line, which is what I usually fall into. Its nature is to have an enormous pause, or caesura in the middle of each line, and I decided that I didn't want that, also, I felt the need for more space between rhyme words so I experimented with pentameters. On reflection, pentameters are a very big change to English poetry: the Anglo-Saxons specialised in four stresses per line, with a weighty caesura. A pentameter has no natural gap: it trips along more smoothly. The rhyme scheme was abbaa because heroic couplets (aabb) and quatrains (usually abab) are boring but it's still nice to end a stanza on a couplet.

That first stanza I dedicated to as many different personifications, metaphors, and fancy ways of describing colours as I could. All in all, I had mantle/cloak/garb, crystal/jewel, the literal process of rain diffracting light, and the rainbow as a bow, casting arrows of colour into our eyes. The arrow metaphor comes from some old poems about Cupid, who is an archer that always aims for our eyes (when he isn't blind), and a half-remembered lecture on Greek scientists and their attempts at analysing sight. 'Common thing' and 'king' is an almost direct steal from an anonymous Elizabeth song: "A thing that stoops not to a king/ And yet is open to the common'st thing/ For she that is most fair/ Is open to the air." I liked the rhyme. I chose 'mantle' because it was a nice way of describing a rainbow covering the sky. Also, it seems to me that colours are essentially an outside attribute of an object - one that can never be removed, but still outside it. I dealt with that idea in the second poem, too, but here I was mostly encouraging the 'mantle' image as one of adornment - something that displays the value of an object. Jewels worked well with that idea, as well as being brightly coloured in their own right.

Stanza two ("And all the shades ...") was designed, simply and brutally, to show off the colours. I was working strongly with the phonetic qualities of the words. Specifically, I was using lots of sibilants (unvoiced fricatives) around "darkness" to match it with the words "sinister" and "hiss", because both of these qualities link strongly with my mental image of "darkness". I managed to evolve the sounds into nice solid stops (t, ck, b) for "weight", "black", and "brown" that warmed into lovely "amber", that I continued with a string of voiced stops (d, g) and nasals (n) in "do adorn the gown". (That was yummy.) "Trilling silver kiss" and so forth were chosen for a preponderance of "l" sounds and gaudiness. In addition, both scarlet and purple are colours associated with the old Roman emperors. As an aside,I had the phrases for "darkness" and "silver" floating in my head well before the rest of the poem hit paper. Also, this stanza was a rare opportunity to actually "show, not tell" what I was on about - in this case the sounds of the words. In many respects, this stanza is the core of the poem.

While I assembled that stanza for sounds, other stuff grew out of it. I had not precisely realised that I had a scale of very dark to very bright until I had almost finished the stanza. In addition one of my flatmates, when hearing it, thought that the stanza continued the sky motif of the first - depicting the darkness of a storm fading and being replaced with a gaudy rainbow. I didn't put it there, but I ain't turning it away, either :-D

The first two stanzas, while hammering out each line for them was difficult, are basically the same as when they started. The last stanza ("I ask of Iris ...") while it was first written in under an hour, went through two major rewrites over the course of a week before I was happy with it.

I did not know what it was about until I wrote it. I had originally planned it around the rhyme word "mask", which I thought went well with "mantle" and "cloak". However, while throwing out whatever images would fill in the gaps, I was struck quite strongly by two of them: all these mental colours coming from black and white lettering, and asking for feathers. I wanted feathers in the first place because they are colourful and the birds' clothing and because I associate a feathered cloak with the mantle of a rangatira - like an emperor's cloak. Also, they hooked in with the sky again. As I wrote them in, I realised that they are also essential flying equipment. The last three lines were originally:

These words in black and white, on paper bound
Bring feathers for their flight - I beg a task
That naked thought may dance in shining mask

It seemed to me that the poem was now pivoting around the dual denotations of "feathers". And this was good, but it left me with a superfluous last line, which was also very weak, that I couldn't just discard like you can in free verse. After a great deal of grumbling, I redrafted the whole thing, using different rhyme words, and again later to include "plumes of light" which I hope is a reasonably subtle way of foreshadowing the concept of feathers without giving the game away.

And why, you ask, was Echo in there at all? Well, as you'll recall, I wanted to celebrate the sounds of amber and vermillion, as well as their images. I went to great effort to celebrate this in the second stanza, and I wanted people to notice this. If they start wondering about Echo, they might take a closer look at the poem's aural elements (um, that sentence made sense before I wrote it). Also, I have a great love of a beautiful-sounding poem, and my request is very sincere.

Finally, what about the bloody caesura? Why did the silly girl use "music" in the last line, which leaves an extra unstressed syllable in the middle that disrupts the iambic pentameter when she could have easily used "songs" which is both more vivid and snappier?

The tea bowl that is too perfect loses its charm.

Ponder that, O my children, and have a nice cup of tea in it. We'll get to the second Ode later (cue evil laughter fading into the distance ...)

That's all for now.