Hayley Caldwell
Final Blog Post
Fusion of Contrasting
Elements
As I reread
all of my own blog posts from this semester, let alone everyone else’s, I
noticed that apparently I have a fascination with interpreting juxtaposition of
themes and/or imagery in each poem—no matter how subtle. Stemming off of this,
I am also interested in strategic poetic structure that challenges or contrasts
with the content of the poem in order to offer more perspectival depth to the
reader. With a poet’s incorporation of these techniques, the final product
results in a single poem that contains clashing ideas, images, and notions—an
intricately composed text that complexly fuses differing concepts into one
snapshot. Poems that successfully employ such juxtaposition and contrasting
elements (both thematic and structural) remind me of an ecosystem in which
various living and non-living beings exist or survive in the same space, feed
off of each other, and create a thriving community that involves a kind of “give
and take”— instincts from opposite ends of a spectrum that ultimately support
both life and death. Having presented this analogy, I think poetry that melds together
such conceptual opposites mimics the natural unity of the opposing forces in
life. As the fusion of contrasting elements has been a frequent subject of my
own blog posts, it has been a delight to reread similar themes of contrast and
irony discussed in others’ posts. The
stand-out texts that represent these features are John Donne’s “The Funeral,”
John Keats’s “On the Sonnet,” and Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Orchard,” particularly
her poem “Garden of the Trumpet Tree.”
Donne’s “The
Funeral” represents the most subtle themes of contrast out of this selection; nevertheless,
“The Funeral” combines a series of conflicting emotions expressed by the
speaker as if he experiences them all at once. After receiving a lock of hair
as a memento from his former lover, he contemplates his appreciation for such a
token, as well as the pain and confusion evoked from having such a personal
relic that he intends to keep eternally close to him (“bury it with me” (17))
whereas his former lover has nothing of his to lie next to in death. As the
speaker stews over his chaotic emotions, he sees the lock of hair as a
representation of love, their relationship and life together, his protective “outward
soul” (5), but also imprisonment and heartache, as evidenced in the lines “By
this should know my pain, / As prisoners then are manacled…” (15-16).
The word “manacle” stands out as a
central image of duality in this poem. “Manacle” is commonly defined as a
braided chain or a binding tool in which to handcuff someone; however, a more
specific meaning is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, which states that
it has been referred to as “a tether or shackle for a horse” in the 16th
and 17th centuries, around the time in which this poem was written.
The speaker’s choice to use this word not only conjures the combinative image
of the beautiful braided lock being congruent with a restrictive braided chain,
but also suggests that the speaker feels dehumanized by a token supposedly
intended for the protection of his human soul. At the same time, the speaker
goes on to describe himself as “love’s martyr” (19), which is a noble and
romanticized identity. The presence of the speaker’s clashing feelings, or as G
M Danielson (Matthew?) wrote in his post titled “Vacillation and Irony in Funeral,”
his “vacillation between the hair comforting and frustrating him,” gives the
reader a view of the chaotic jumble of emotions within his inner self—which, if
you zoom out and look at the elements of this poem more generally, comments on
the nature of emotions within all humans and how conflicting sentiments are
consistently unified within us.
Keats
presents a much more overt theme of contradiction than that of “The Funeral” in
his poem “On the Sonnet.” This poem is written in iambic pentameter, upholds a
rhyme scheme (though it is loose), and structurally abides by classic 14-line
sonnet form; however, the entire poem criticizes traditional, rigid poetic structure
and rhyme and asserts that poets should not always conform to such restrictive construction.
This is evidenced in the first line, “If by dull rhymes our English must be
chain’d” (1), which is later rhymed with the line “Let us find out, if we must
be constrain’d” (4). The meaning of the poem is openly antithetical to its
structure to give more ironic attention to the “dullness” of tradition, and
thus this technique pushes his intent further in almost a humorous manner. He
includes several elisions to maintain the poem’s rhythm and meter, such as “chain’d,
“fetter’d,” “constrain’d,” and “gain’d,” yet he criticizes poets (particularly
those who write sonnets, the most popular and appreciated form of poetry during
this time) for being “misers of sound and syllable” (10). Hypocritical? Sure.
Effective? Definitely. Hypocrisy, or asserting one issue via an opposing form,
is transformed into a more sympathetic device by the turn of the poem in the
final couplet: “So, if we may not let the Muse be free,” (13). I see this as
the speaker resigning himself to structural tradition after asserting that
poets should have more creative freedom because by the end of the poem he
realizes that poetry must have some
kind of supportive structure or pattern, thus the poet cannot be completely
free. The unusual rhyme scheme of ABC ABD CABCDE DE hints at this—though there
is a rhyme scheme present, it is non-traditional. In short, “On the Sonnet” essentially
is what it does not want to be, though its rhyme scheme and overall meaning are
progressive. Keats renders himself a martyr for his values of creative freedom as
he discusses his poetic ideals, though he does not abide by them. This kind of
duality pertains to the idea that while art and life often contain warring
elements or notions, there is still poignancy and meaning in the convergence of
such opposing concepts (perhaps even more so than if an idea is
straightforwardly presented without contrast).
Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poetry,
specifically “Garden of the Trumpet Tree,” displays a similar experimentation
with traditional poetic structure. One could argue that this poem has no
structure or that it should not be considered a poem at all due to it’s lack of
stanzas, line breaks, meter, rhyme scheme, etc. Visually, it is one long block
of prose. Similar duality is found within its content as it describes the
speaker’s realization of the “unlikelihood” within each natural element, both flora
and fauna. Amongst the examples she gives, such as the fishlike nature of a
hummingbird or the garden’s atmosphere of both “sound and silence,” the
overarching image of contrast is the lively red trumpet vine encompassing an
ugly rotting tree. This image fuses life with death, beauty with decay, and
brightness with darkness—the vine and the tree are one, just as the poem
embraces a non-poetic nature. In searching for relevant images of trumpet vines
I could not find anything that portrayed the alliance of vine and tree;
however, I came across several that depicted unions of inanimate objects or
structures with this kind of flora:
The trumpet vine’s mergence with such manmade structures
bestows a new sense of life upon them—that which could not be attained if they
stood alone. The structures have become aesthetically beautiful and intriguing.
Going back to the lack of traditional poetic structure in this text, I think
these images illustrate how Kelly’s choice of prose-like form seems to dull the
poem down. This poem is like one of these manmade structures, for instance the
brick column, stripped of the trumpet vine. The absence of clear stanzas, verse,
and rhythm removes the visual and musical elements that give a poem life, just
as the absence of the trumpet vine would diminish these structures to simply
reveal their plain, lifeless selves. This isn’t to say that Kelly’s poetry is
plain or lifeless—she simply uses a structural technique that applies to her
writing’s themes of duality and antithetical unity.
The idea that contradictions within
nature, art, and life are inherent is supported by the philosophy of “the unity
of opposites” proposed by Heraclitus, as well as Plato’s philosophy of “organic
unity.” Heraclitus’s philosophic belief was that natural opposites depend on
one another and that they cannot exist or be kept alive without the presence of
counterparts. In other words, something cannot have a single purpose or
definition without relying on its antithesis— for example, death cannot be
defined without the existence of life, as death is the absence of life. Similar
to this, Plato’s theory of “organic unity” declares that everything that is
whole, especially in art and science, is made up of varying interdependent and
interconnecting parts. If you take one unique component away, then the thing
that was whole is now completely different, or even dysfunctional. These
philosophical concepts resonate throughout the aforementioned poems, as well as
several other poems we’ve studied this semester, as they require the fusion of
opposites, whether they are thematic, structural, or both, in order to function
as a genuinely emotive, complex, and relatable pieces. These poems portray
seemingly chaotic and contradicting situations, which mirror the natural synthesis
of opposite forces that support the functionality of the world.
References
https://aquileana.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/heraclitus-of-ephesus-the-doctrine-of-flux-and-the-unity-of-opposites/ -"Unity of Opposites"
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