350
FRANK BIDART
ROBERT'S RULES
THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. Holt,
Rinehart and Winston. $10.95.
Obviously "punctuation" doesn't exist in isolation: it
is
only part of
the difficult process of trying to put the poem on the page, of trying
to make written lines correspond to the complex rhythms and accents
in the poet's head. When it succeeds, usually it is invisible; one doesn't
notice commas and semicolons, but hears pauses and accents. In order
to do this, poets are often pushed into radical solutions.
For example, in
The Waste Land,
the final "burning" at the end
of Part III ("The Fire Sermon") is the
only
word that begins a line
at the margin that isn't also capitalized. One isn't aware of the absence
of capitalization; the word simply seems to have an extraordinary spare
starkness and intensity.
And in "La Jeune Parque," a section begins: "Harrnonieuse MOl,
differente d'un songe...." And later: "Mysterieuse MOl, pourtant, tu
vis encore!" Capitalization makes "MOl" an object, a dense thing; it
almost becomes in itself a metaphor for the heavy clotted impenetrability
of the self. Jackson Mathews, in his translation for the New Directions
Selected Writings of Valery,
misses this entirely: "Harmonious Self, but
different from a vision...."
Nevertheless, punctuation is often less abundant, and less necessarily
flamboyant, when a traditional metric controls emphases and pauses. In
Wordsworth's blank verse, for example, punctuation is at times quite
spare. It becomes more dense the closer he comes to the twists and
thrusts of ordinary common speech - when, that is, the poem seems less
straightforwardly metrical. And in the sections of the "Immortality Ode"
that join different meters (particularly in the transitions between them),
Wordsworth punctuates with great freshness and bravado:
...
the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:–
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
- But there's a Tree, of many, one .
..
Wordsworth wrote: "The composition of verse is infinitely more of an
art than men are prepared to believe; and absolute success in it depends
on innumerable
minutiae."
For anyone who cares about Frost or poetry
The Poetry of Robert
Frost
is an infuriating book. Its editor, Edward Lathem, has
repunctuated
I
II
(
