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Activity
parallel drawn between the words opens up a
conceptual metaphor
(A11), where the
concept of death is represented in terms of a journey. In fact, we commonly invoke
this
DEATH IS A JOURNEY
metaphor in everyday interaction when we talk of the ‘dearly
departed’, or of someone ‘passing away’ or ‘going to a final resting place’. The point
about Auden’s technique, though, is that this is a novel metaphor (B11), suggesting
the sense of being lost or of straying from a journey, and this is brought about subtly
by the implied connection between the process of disappearing, and the references to
death and the seasons elsewhere in the same line. In sum, the way Auden uses language
is a good illustration of Jakobson’s poetic function at work: the particular lan-
guage patterns he develops work to establish connections (
a principle of equivalence
)
between the words he chooses from the pool of possible words (
the axis of selection
)
and the words that are combined across the poetic line (
the axis of combination
.)
Summary
It is important to footnote the foregoing discussion with a rider. Whereas many of
the precepts of both the Formalist and Prague School movements have had a signif-
icant bearing on the way stylistics has developed, this is not for a moment to say that
stylisticians have embraced these ideas unequivocally, unanimously or without
debate. We have already touched upon some of the theoretical problems associated
with the theory of foregrounding, and in this context, stylisticians like van Peer (1986)
and Cook (1994) have made advances in solidifying the foundations of this gener-
ally useful concept. Amongst other things, their work has incorporated cognitive and
psychological models of analysis to explain how text-processors perceive fore-
grounding in texts (see further B10).
Application of the concept of the poetic function in language also brings with it
an important caveat. Although not articulated especially clearly by Jakobson, it is
essential to view the poetic function not as an exclusive property of literature but
rather as a more generally creative use of language that can pop up, as it were, in a
range of discourse contexts. One consequence of seeing the poetic function as an
exclusively literary device is that it tends to separate off literature from other uses of
language, and this is not a desired outcome in stylistic analysis. This latter issue will
come more to the fore in the next unit along this strand, C3, while the unit below
provides an opportunity, through the analysis of a short poem, to investigate and
illustrate further the concept of foregrounding.
LEVELS OF LANGUAGE AT WORK: AN EXAMPLE
FROM POETRY
This unit, which investigates patterns of language in a single short text, forms a useful
intersection between the two areas of interest raised in units B1 and A2. On the one
hand it offers a chance to illustrate some basic principles of foregrounding in the
11
111
11
111
L E V E L S O F L A N G U A G E A T W O R K
53
B2
context of literary discourse; on the other it develops further the main remit of this
thread by exploring how different levels of language can be pressed into service in
stylistically significant ways. These themes will be worked through jointly as the unit
progresses.
On e e cummings’s ‘love is more thicker than forget’
The following untitled poem was published in 1939 by the American poet e e
cummings:
love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail
it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea
love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive
it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky
(cummings 1954 [1939]: 381)
This text – a love poem, of sorts – shall in the absence of a formal title be referred
to from now on as ‘love is more thicker’. It certainly bears many of the familiar
stylistic imprints of its author, notable among which is the conspicuous spelling
and orthography resulting from the removal of standard punctuation devices such
as commas, full stops and capital letters. It also contains a number of invented
words,
neologisms
, such as the adjectives ‘sunly’ and ‘moonly’, as well as the verb
‘unbe’ which suggests a kind of reversal in sense from ‘being’ to ‘not being’. Perhaps
even more markedly, the poem treats existing words in the English lexicon, espe-
cially adjectives and adverbs, in a striking and colourful way. In counterpoint to
this more ‘deviant’ strand of textual structure, there is nonetheless a high degree of
regularity in the way other aspects of the poem are crafted. Observe, for example,
the almost mathematical symmetry of the stanzaic organisation, where key words
and phrasal patterns are repeated across the four verses. Indeed, all of the poem’s
constituent clauses are connected grammatically to the very first word of the
poem, ‘love’.
54
D E V E L O P M E N T
Choosing models for analysis
In order for a solid basis for interpretation to be built, we need to be both clear and
precise about what resources of language cummings uses, so the preceding rather
informal description needs to give way to a more rigorous account of linguistic tech-
nique. To do this requires that we step back from the text for a moment in order to
pinpoint more narrowly which aspects of language, in particular, the poet is manip-
ulating.
Adjectives
, for a start, have already been highlighted as one of the main sites
for stylistic experimentation in the poem. Constituting a major word class in the
vocabulary of English, adjectives ascribe qualities to entities, objects and concepts,
familiar examples of which are words like
large
,
bright
,
good
,
bad
,
difficult
and
regular
.
A notable grammatical feature of adjectives, and one which cummings exploits with
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