Up here, with June, the sycamore throwsAcross the window a whispering screen;I shall miss the sycamore more, I suppose,Than anything else on this earth that is out in green.CHARLOTTE MEW
Twohundred
September 10, 2017
|In Daily Post
Up here, with June, the sycamore throwsAcross the window a whispering screen;I shall miss the sycamore more, I suppose,Than anything else on this earth that is out in green.CHARLOTTE MEW
Congratulations on reaching the 200-photo milestone, Dev. This is a fine and worthy image with which to commemorate; I love the feeling it evokes.
I also like the poetry snippet. Charlotte Mew hasn’t been high on my radar, for some reason. (Perhaps she should have been…) The only question I have about the poem has to do with the words “out in”, in the closing line. Doesn’t this disrupt the rhythm and meter? Not sure what purpose those words serve. Perhaps I’m not reading it as it was meant to be read. What is your take?
Thank you Gary. Appreciate your kind words.
You can find some of Charlotte Mew’s work on the Poetry Foundation website. You can read the full poem at this URL https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55327/from-a-window-56d236cf6e332
I personally don’t find it disrupting the rhythm, but then as you’ll see the poem has an irregular rhythm to begin with anyway. I rather like verses that behave that way. The rhyme and meter disappears all of a sudden and then reappears out of nowhere to surprise you, as if playing hide and seek. I quite like that.
As far as the purpose of the words, I think “out in” here means “out about dressed in”. I have one interpretation of the poem in my head but I’ll let you read it first before we discuss that, in order to not predispose you.
I see what you mean about the hide-and-seek meter. My first reaction apparently arose from a sense that the poet was coloring outside the lines. But that, in itself, isn’t a reasonable criticism. All the great poets know exactly where the lines are — the often choose to color outside them. Calculatedly. Once we’ve savored enough poetry, we can discern which ones do this with deliberate and consummate skill, and which ones just don’t know any better.
Emily Dickenson comes to mind here: She scandalized her contemporaries by having the infernal gall to use imperfect, imprecise rhymes. Her critics assumed she just didn’t have the smarts to rhyme things correctly. Nowadays, of course, no decent poets consider themselves bound by precise rhymes. In fact, a slavish adherence to that outmoded convention is sometimes a hallmark of doggerel! (And sometimes not — depends on the process, the intent, and the outcome.)
It’s a beautiful poem. I like the internal rhymes, and the spirited wordplay wherein she’ll “miss the sycamore more”. Among other things. At the moment, I’m more in the mood to savor than to analyze, But we await your owl!
I like that analogy “coloring outside the lines”. But as you said yourself, isn’t that what poets are supposed to do? I haven’t gone into detail about poetry but in this post http://www.devsamaddar.com/art-outside-comfort/ I explored the role of art. I mentioned something about poets in passing because although the post is more about art/photography I think the ideas there apply to poetry as well. Poets, like artists and scientists and philosophers are explorers and it is their job to go outside the borders (lines?) and make us see what we otherwise wouldn’t.
Irregular rhythm and rhyme is my favorite. Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” is a short but excellent example of it. Or T S Eliot’s “Preludes”. Both of these examples have influenced me a lot and the stuff I write and call my “poetry” is a silly attempt to imitate this.
awesome shadowplay Dev !
Thank you Victor. I love this photo.