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Subject as Something to Say
An online dictionary defines subject as âa basic matter of thought, discussion, investigation, etc.â This definition is fine for most purposes, but one runs into trouble in applying it to poetry. It works well enough for a poem like, say, Alfred, Lord Tennysonâs little classic âThe Eagle.â
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringâd with the azure world he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
The âbasic matterâ of this poem is, not to put too fine a point on it, an eagle. This subject sits at the poemâs center, where it exerts a kind of gravitational attraction on a set of observations that could be said to orbit it.
But what about something like, say, Hamletâs soliloquy? Is its basic matter suicide? Death? The passage is about both of these thingsâor, to do fuller justice to whatâs going on in it, about the movement in Hamletâs mind from the former to, and through, the latter. If âThe Eagleâ can be figured as an orbit, Hamletâs soliloquy can be figured as a journey, from thought to thought.
The figure of a journey can also be applied to narrative poems. Take Ovidâs account of the King Midas story. You could say that the subject of this poem is the wages of greed, but Iâd call that its theme, not its subject. You could say its subject is King Midas, but where would that leave the Midas story? Mightnât the subject of the poem be the plot of this story? (When weâre asked what a story âis about,â donât we typically respond with a plot summary?) As Hamletâs soliloquy travels from thought to thought, so the Midas story travels from event to event.
In applying the word subject to the attractor in an orbital poem and the path of a journeying one, we may be using the same word for insufficiently similar things. As I ponder this possibility, I think of an observation in Robert Frostâs essay âThe Figure a Poem Makes.â He says that the importance of subjects âleaves us back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say.â âSomething to sayâ: might that serve as a definition of subject? Among other virtues, it would apply to orbiting and journeying poems alike.
A poem can say something in one or more of several ways: by expressing and/or evoking and/or addressing. In this chapter Iâll consider each of these ways-of-saying in turn, first defining it and then looking at some poems in which it predominates. I hope to suggest, in the process, the vast range of possible subjects for poems. It can seem as if half the new poems these days are about the death of the poetâs parent (if they arenât busy botanizingâas William Carlos Williams didnât quite say, âNo ideas but in shrubsâ). Whereas the poems in this chapterâs transhistorical sampler are about all manner of things. As the shaking of a snow globe liberates a flurry of flakes, so a stroll through such a verse gallery may shake up oneâs idea of the sphere of subjects to where itâs milling with possibilities.
SOME POEMS THAT SAY BY EXPRESSING
A poem that says by expressing gives vent to an emotion. Of course, some would say all poems do that. Thereâs even a gold-plated precedent for thinking so: Wordsworthâs famous definition of poetry as âthe spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.â This definition calls to mind a locution in the title of a poem of his: âExtempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg.â Some expressive poems effuse, but others (including some canonical ones) donât.
Expressing is probably the way of saying that first comes to mind when one thinks of poetry, but comparatively few poems purely express. (Though thereâs a huge body of sort-of-poems that do: the lyrics of the countless operatic arias devoted entirely to the expression of emotion, sometimes a very particular emotion, as in ârevenge ariasâ and the like.) Consider, in this connection, one of the oldest known expressive poems, at least in the Western tradition: Sapphoâs fragment 35. (Only one of her poems has survived in its entirety.) Its subject is an access of passion. Here it is in a translation by Diane Rayor:
To me it seems
that man has the fortune of the gods
whoever sits beside you, and close,
who listens to you sweetly speaking
and laughing temptingly;
my heart flutters in my breast,
whenever I look quickly, for a momentâ
I say nothing, my tongue broken,
a delicate fire runs under my skin,
my eyes see nothing, my ears roar,
cold sweat rushes down me,
trembling seizes me,
I turn the color grass,
to myself I seem
needing but little to die.
But all must be endured, since . . .
This passage is almost purely expressive, âalmostâ in that the lines up to the semicolon largely set the scene: how else would we know what triggers the remaining, paradigmatically expressive lines? In the latter, Sapphoâs passion seems to be expressing itself; is so overwhelming itâs as if itâs blowing an exit hole through her chest. True, itâs Sappho, not her passion, who speaks to a âyouââthe woman sheâs on fire forâin the third line. But itâs not as if Sappho actually expects to be heard by this temptress. One might say the poet is speaking to herself, but that doesnât seem quite right either; one doesnât sense the presence of an internal interlocutor as one does in a meditative poem or a soliloquy. The pressure behind Sapphoâs speaking is so strong that it obliterates any sense of a listening. Does this make the expressing in this poem, to invoke Wordsworthâs term, an effusion? Iâd call it more breathless than effusiveâand even in its breathlessness, it manages a sort of clinical objectivity in anatomizing a passion into distinct facets of sensation.
A classical poem of expression thatâs lessâmuch lessâeffusive still is the famous two-liner by Catullus known, per its opening words, as âOdi et Amoâ (I hate and I love). The translations Iâve seen of this poem differ mainly in details. Hereâs the anonymous, straightforward one in Wikipedia:
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you ask.
I do not know, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.
This poem is an atom of expression, the minimal possible bit of it. Yet even an atom has its constituents. The nucleus of the poem is âI hate and I love . . . I am tortured,â but this carries with it the electron cloud of âWhy do I do this, perhaps you ask. / I do not know, but I feel it happening.â As in Sapphoâs poem, a âyouâ is mentioned, but here it refers to us, the reader. And unlike Sapphoâs âyou,â this one is truly, if tangentially, addressed. Iâm tempted to say that âOdi et Amo,â for all its minuteness, both expresses and, in its touch of speech to a âyou,â addresses. If I file the poem as principally expressive, itâs because the helpless bafflement exposed by its addressingââWhy do I do this . . . I do not knowââis itself an emotion, one that supplements (and complicates) the expression of hate cum love to yield a work of feeling in every particle.
Unlike the previous two poems, a poem that unquestionably effuses is Gerard Manley Hopkinsâs sonnet ââThou art indeed just, Lord, if I contendââ (1889). Hopkins takes his Latin epigraph from the biblical Book of Jeremiah. (Itâs translated in the poemâs first three lines.)
Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen
justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinnersâ ways prosper? and why must
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