Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Activity
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Activity
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Referring where possible to the grammatical information provided in units A3
and B3, now try to reassemble the poem into some form of coherent unit. What kind
of grammatical steps are necessary for such a reconstruction? What aspects of
language are responsible for the difficulties (if any) that you encounter? Before
proceeding to the next sub-unit, write your reconstruction in the box below the text.
in the crowd
the apparition
in a station
petals
of these faces
of the metro
on a wet black bough
Grammar and literary genre
On the basis of some give-away lexical items like ‘station’ and ‘metro’ in the scram-
bled poem, you may indeed have begun to suspect some connection between this
text and the letter writer from earlier. But before we explore that connection, let us
reflect for a moment on your reconstruction work. There are indeed many ways of
bolting together the phrases that comprise this poem, resulting in a number of
possible permutations. This comes about largely because of the absence in the orig-
inal of one crucial grammatical feature, which we shall consider shortly. Here first
of all is the unadulterated text. And in the commentary that follows, consider how
it compares to both your own poem and your rearrangement.
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In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
(Pound 1969 [1912])
One important aspect of the grammar of this short couplet, which is based loosely
on the seventeen syllable Japanese 
haiku
poem, is that it contains no verbs. With that
go many contingent structures such as finiteness, tense (and time reference) and
propositional value (which means that you cannot ‘argue’ with the ideas expressed
here) (see units A3 and B3). From this, other aspects of clause structure collapse: a
grammatical Subject cannot be formed, nor can Complement elements be positioned
relative to a verb. What remains is pared down to its stylistic ‘bare bones’, so to
speak, encoding a sequence of phrases to do with things and their locations. Gone,
for instance, are the self-referential pronouns (‘I’) which so characterised the letter;
gone also are the explicit references to time which were signalled through finite verb
forms (eg. ‘I 
have been trying
’; ‘I 
think
’; ‘I 
got out
’) and temporal Adjuncts (‘over a
year’; ‘that night’; ‘all that day’). Notice also how the repetitions (‘a beautiful face’)
and parallel formations (‘another and another’) of the letter give way to the most
minimal and sparsest of lexis in the poem. Yet this is not to say, in terms of the ideas
discussed in unit A6, that the absence of verbs means that there are no 
processes
in
the poem. There is one clear example of 
nominalisation
, where a noun embodies a
process of action. As in unit A6, you can test a text for nominalisation by asking the
question ‘what happened?’ and seeing if, in the reply, any nouns slot into the frame
‘there was a(n) ________’. Here, that question would be answered by the word
‘apparition’, so it is not the case that nothing happens, it is just that the happening
has been made a ‘thing’ and has been cut adrift from any agency and from any locus
in time. It is interesting also that even the deictic word ‘these’ (unit A2) suggests
proximity to a speaking source even though explicit reference to that speaker has
been erased.
What remains, in the light of these grammatical operations, is the sparest juxta-
position of a statement of experience and a statement of interpretation. The
relationship between the two is a metaphorical one (see unit A11) in that it involves
a conceptual mapping between two domains: the perceived experience encoded in
the first line, and its mapping in the second onto a metaphorical plane. The result
is a frozen crystallised moment, cut adrift from time but very much an instantiation
of things and place. An ‘image’, rather than a proposition.
In stylistic terms, this short poem does indeed appear to embrace the credentials of
the Imagist movement in poetry, which flourished for a few years from 1910 and 
of which Ezra Pound was a preeminent figure. Pound described an image as ‘an intel-
lectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’ and characterised Imagist poetry
by its exactitude of vocabulary, its hard and clear images presented ‘instantaneously’,
and its direct treatment of the ‘thing’. To what extent did your own poem, based on
the experience in the Metro, embody (if at all) any of these features? Did you put a
personal subject into your poem, and was that subject a speaking or narrating voice?
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G R A M M A R A N D G E N R E : A S H O R T S T U D Y I N I M A G I S M
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Was your own poem more contemplative and meditative, more ‘lyrical’ in the sense
of a single speaker reflecting on thoughts and emotions? And finally, if your own poem
had none of the stylistic markers of of Imagism, what literary genre 
did
it embody?
In this unit, our principal aim has been to examine the connection between 
stylistic technique, as it translates to grammatical experimentation, and literary genre.
That is one of the themes that will be resumed across the book in the reading in D3.
In the next unit, C4, the focus will shift to exploring patterns of sound and metre in
poetry.
STYLES IN A SINGLE POEM: AN EXPLORATION
This unit offers a set of framing questions designed to help organise the exploration
of a single literary text from multiple stylistic perspectives. The text selected for
analysis is Michael Longley’s short poem ‘The Comber’, which appears in his collec-
tion 
The Weather in Japan
(2000). The questions asked of the text cover a range of
stylistic models, which include, but are not restricted to, the material on sound and
rhythm which was developed along this strand. They also bring in grammar (thread
3) and other levels of language (thread 2), although later threads in the book will no
doubt offer yet further models of analysis. The set of questions posed in the following
sub-unit are picked up in the web material which accompanies this book, where some
advice and commentary is offered on the various activities suggested.
Going to work on a poem
First of all, read the poem closely:
The Comber
A moment before the comber turns into
A breaker – sea-spray, raggedy rainbows –
Water and sunlight contain all the colours
And suspend between Inishbofin and me,
The otter, and thus we meet, without my scent
In her nostrils, the uproar of my presence,
My unforgivable shadow on the sand –
Even if this is the only sound I make.
(Longley 2000)
Now work through the questions, and if you have to, double-check their terms of
reference by looking again at the other units to which they relate. For the most part,
you can deal with the questions in any order, although it is important to recognise
that a particular feature of language targeted in one activity will always intersect with
features of language covered in the other activities.
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