Sunday, June 13, 2010

The Sensory Pleasures of Poetry

There is no purer way to appreciate the sensory pleasures of poetry than through nonsense verse:

Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gymble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe. –Lewis Carroll

Regardless of the meaning, the repetition of sounds (“toves” and “borogoves,” “gyre and gymble,” “wabe” and “outgrabe”) provides pleasure to the ear. As do “brillig and “slithy,” repeating the liquid “l” and rhyming the two different “i” sounds.

The predominantly iambic (unstressed/stressed syllables) tetrameter (four stressed syllables to a line) broken by two strong spondees (two stressed syllables in a row) in the fourth line offers a combination of regular rhythm and unexpected variation, which avoids both a sleep-inducing sing-songy effect and the jarring cacophony of disordered sounds.

My favorite limerick growing up, partly because I was so skinny as a youth, offers an irresistible combination of mirthful imagery, delightful rhythms, and playful repetition:

There was a young lady from Lynn
Who was so exceedingly thin
That when she assayed
To drink lemonade
She slipped through the straw and fell in.—Anonymous

There’s something about that final “fell in” that is both natural and unexpected at the same time. It is quite a trick to combine both the satisfaction of expectation and the pleasure of surprise.

The image of the skinny lady falling through a straw is entertaining because it is both ridiculous and somehow logical. The lady and the straw have nothing logically in common, except that they are both thin, a comparison that takes a poetic imagination to see.

At the level of imagery, sensory pleasure overlaps with the fun of mental gymnastics.

No greater pleasure in imagery can be found than in Japanese haiku. The vicarious sensory experience, whether it be visual, auditory, or tactile, is characteristically concentrated and intense:

On a withered branch
A crow has settled--
Autumn nightfall.—Basho

A lightening-gleam
Into darkness travels
A night-heron’s scream.—Basho

What piercing cold I feel!
My dead wife’s comb in our bedroom,
Under my heel…--Buson

And each image suggests a story, whether it be of the rhythms of nature or of human drama. Stories provide pleasure by imitating life, expressing human emotion, and presenting them in such a way as to render order and beauty out of raw experience.

The dying branch, the settling crow, the closing year, and the falling night put the universal story of decline into parallel form. The flash of lightening in the dark similarly mirrors the heron’s scream breaking the silence of night, again imaging the universal story of sudden contrast and unexpected surprise. And the physical sensation of a cold comb under a widower’s heel captures the story of a cold marriage bed, as well as of the cold grave.

The chaos of actual experience is tamed and made, not only bearable, but beautiful.

Such are the sensory pleasures of poetry.

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