Poetry Today -- Some Thoughts

Recently I posted about medieval Chinese poetry, and I attempted to produce a poem of my own in one particular mode. However successful that endeavor was, it did start me to think about the state of poetry today.  In former times, poetry was read, recited, memorized, and exchanged.  It formed communal bonds, and it shaped society's worldviews and mores.  What is the state of poetry today?

New Eyes Seeing: Appreciating Chinese Poetry

The regulated verse that characterized Chinese poetry in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) can be simply elegant in its complexity and complex in its elegant simplicity.  I decided to try my hand.

There are at least two basic modes, or forms, of regulated verse.  

Mode One 

First couplet: introduces time, space, and theme (free)
Second couplet: elaborates theme of the poem (parallel)
Third couplet: turns the theme towards an unexpected direction (parallel)
Fourth couplet: the poet’s resolution or conclusion (free)

Mode Two 

First couplet: line one introduces one theme, line two introduces a second theme (free)
Second couplet: elaboration of theme one (parallel)
Third couplet: elaboration of theme two (parallel)
Fourth couplet: tie the two themes together (free)

One of the master poets was Du Fu (712-770 CE).  Another was his contemporary, Li Bai (701-762).  The following is an example of Du Fu's poetry in mode one, above, of regulated verse.

Minus the alternating tones of the lines, and end rhymes, immediately below is my initial attempt to pay homage at least to the beautiful successes of medieval Chinese verse.

New Eyes Seeing

The wise path has never yet been perfected;
The daughter now for the first time understands.

Phronesis peeks mysteriously from around the fence,
Kongzi wonders curiously even at age seventy.

As the light streams through the window she eyes the diamond's facets,
When darkness descends at sun’s setting the girl perceives the gray shades.

Through his teary eyes the aging man smiles approvingly, knowingly,
Searching still to convey earlier to her what a lifetime only partial gave him.

Lear: The "Abused Nature" "Of This Child-Changed Father"

One of the great pleasures in reading literature is to discover a few sentences or lines that are so rich with significance that they simultaneously do two things.  On the one hand, they deepen the narrative, play, or poem as it advances, and, on the other hand, radiate, and encapsulate, the work’s broader meaning and concerns.

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act 4, scene 7, lines 16-19, Lear’s youngest daughter Cordelia meets her father and becomes overwhelmed by his state of affairs:  his dementia and his abandonment -- more than that, his abuse and rejection -- by his other two elder daughters Goneril and Regan.  Cordelia interrupts her speech with an apostrophe to the “kind gods,” and she prays that Lear may be healed.

CORDELIA                                           O, you kind gods,
Cure this great breach in his abusèd nature!
Th’ untuned and jarring senses, O, wind up,
Of this child-changèd father!

-- King Lear, IV.vii.16-19

The short passage is pregnant with significance, especially double meanings.

First, “abused nature” refers most immediately to his madness (i.e., insanity).  Cordelia finds his unmooring from reality to be particularly pitied.  These are his “untuned and jarring senses.” At the same time, the “abused nature” signifies the natural relationship of father and daughter that Goneril and Regan have “abused” in not patiently caring for their aging, ailing father and in their acute hostility toward him. This is also, as much as the dementia, the “breach” in his natural constitution:  as a person of sound mind and as a father of (falsely) doting daughters.  Ironically, it was Cordelia who in Act 1 affirmed her love for Lear “as are right fit” (1.1.107) and “according to my [natural filial] bond” (1.1.102), yet whom Lear rejected, abused, by disowning and banishing from the kingdom. 

"Lear and Cordelia," Ford Madox Brown, 1848

Second, the other petition in Cordelia’s prayer is for the gods to “wind up,” or to mend or fix, the senses (the mental, perceptual, and emotional capacities) of this “child-changed father.”  The image may be one of a chiming clock, “untuned and jarring,” imprecise in reflection of reality (as a clock that needs to be wound) and jarring in the sound it makes as a result of its chiming at the wrong time. Lear himself variously lashes out and speaks nonsense because of the two factors that so plague him:  his failing mental capacities and his shattered family relationships with his children.  He is, both because of his own banishment of Cordelia and because of Goneril’s and Regan’s essential “banishment” of him, a “child-changed father.”

This passage, then, echoes succinctly a key, overarching, tragic irony of the play. Lear himself, because of his combined natural, hasty, manic disposition and his increasing dementia, rejects genuine affection where it was to be found (Cordelia) and is himself rejected by false affection where he chose, in his foolish pursuit of public professions, to believe it was true (Goneril and Regan).  Cordelia perceives and feels deeply the tragedy of Lear’s losing himself and his ties to his daughters, both of which are abuses to his nature.