Line breaks

[sheenaghpugh]

So... I've picked up a cold somewhere and am quite incapable of concentrating on writing, or anything much else except feeling sorry for myself. Might as well do that post on line breaks, then!

Which are actually fascinating little beasts, IMO. In formal verse, rhymed and/or metred, line breaks come where they have to - after the rhyme-word or the requisite stress or syllable. Which is not to say that poets don't take care over which word comes on the break, since it inevitably attracts more emphasis, even if the break is a run-on.

But in free verse breaks come into their own. They could, potentially, come anywhere, so they really are the poet's choice and hence say a lot about what he/she is after. They shouldn't, ever, be arbitrary, though they sometimes are.

At the simplest level they can mirror the rhythms and punctuation of speech, coming where one would normally make a pause in speaking. Some poets indeed use them as punctuation - the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert used no conventional punctuation at all except, IIRC, capital letters; otherwise the breaks are the only indication of how to read his sentences and he made this work well, often using it to introduce fruitful ambiguities into the reading. (Made him a bugger to translate, though.)

A good example of the ambiguity that can be gained by punctuating with line breaks is in Edwin Morgan's "Strawberries"

There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon
sitting on the step
of the open french window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates in our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates
laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you
sweet in that air

in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you

let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates
---


Look at the lines

the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you

If they were punctuated conventionally, we could tell whether the phrase "in my memory" belonged with the previous line or the next one. Is it "the taste of strawberries in my memory" or "in my memory, lean back again"? It matters a lot, because in the first case, the love affair is here and now; in the second, it is in the past, only able to be recalled. He wants both possibilities, and can have them by using the breaks as punctuation.

Breaks can also use the fact that poems are read with the eye as well as the ear. Because there is an involuntary pause at the break, they can briefly mislead and then surprise the reader - eg Jack Gilbert in "Looking Away From Longing". This poem is set in the Far East and in it he has

on the stones by the river a woman is beating
an octopus

We'd surely expected clothes, and the surprise of the octopus (presumably she was tenderising it; one can only hope it was dead) emphasises how far away from home we, and the poet, are.

But my favourite creative line breaks are a pair in the poem "A Marriage" by R S Thomas. This poem is about his own 50-year marriage, written after his wife's death, and has the lines

He kissed with his eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.

He could so easily have put the breaks after "closed" and "them", where they would follow the rhythm of the sentence - and indeed when he read aloud, this was how he read it, straight across the breaks. But the breaks were there to make that wonderful visual pun: a line that opens with "closed" and closes with "opened", and, in the process, imitates exactly the "blink of an eye" in which this man and his wife seem to him to have grown old. Brilliant.

Comments

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that. Great post, and the Edwin Morgan poem is beautiful.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Those examples are wonderful illustrations and very evocative, especially the delicious 'Strawberries'.

[sheenaghpugh]

Do you think, btw, that "Strawberries" announces itself as a gay love poem? He wrote it well before the law changed and while he was still deliberately not mentioning genders, but I've seen it suggested that the two crossed forks (rather than fork and knife) signal it. Me, I think why would you want a knife to eat strawberries, but I have a literal mind....

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I did wonder after I read it whether it was a gay love poem, but I'm not sure why. It could be read either way, but I was aware of that for some reason.

[sheenaghpugh]

That's really interesting. I've seen it said before but like you I'm not sure why - I knew about the background before I read it, so it's hard to guess whether I'd have sussed it anyway.

I wonder if it's because neither of them offers to do the washing up:)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

It's hard to say why I thought that, because I started with the image of a man and a woman because of the knees: her smaller ones between his. But by the end I was thinking they could well be two men. Perhaps it's the imagery of the storm, lightning, and heat.