Chapter 2
In This Chapter
Understanding the importance of subject in poetry
Determining the speaker’s attitude to the subject and the audience
Paying attention to speaker, situation, setting, plot, and character
When you read poetry, make sure you’re open to what the poem is about and what the poet is communicating to you through his words. Your frame of mind is best when you’re
Alert. Pay close attention to the poem. Look for meaning — all the time, everywhere. Poems have meaning in every rhythm, every phrase.
Analytical. Take poems apart and look at their different elements — this image, that sound, this suggestion.
Comfortable with ambiguities and difficulties. Be open to actually enjoying, as the English poet John Keats once wrote, “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,” without trying to solve them immediately. Who ever “solved” Hamlet? Who can claim they “understand” the Mahabharata? Probably very few people. But many people just love to be in the midst of that poetry, to keep experiencing what’s perplexing, what’s beautiful, what’s true.
Sensual. Allow your mind to look for pleasure. Poetry pleases the mind (in the things it says and means) and the body (in its appeals to the senses and to experience). Pleasure can exist for its own sake, or it may have a crucial role in the poem’s larger meaning.
The more you know about poetry, the more you find to like. A few simple tools — including a sharpened awareness of some of the basics, like subject, tone, and narrative — can enhance the way you read poetry. Paying attention to details makes life, and the person living it (that’s you!), better and richer. Being aware of the details is simply good for you, in the same way poetry is good for you.
In this chapter, we take a look at three things you should always try to determine when you approach a new poem — subject, tone, and narrative — and show you how to identify them.
Understanding Subject and Tone
The subject of a poem is the idea or thing that the poem concerns or represents. The tone of a poem is the attitude you feel in it — the writer’s attitude toward the subject or toward the audience. In a poem of praise, you feel approval. In a satire, you feel irony. In an antiwar poem, you may feel protest or moral indignation. Tone can be playful, humorous, regretful, anything — and it can change as the poem goes along.
Subject: A natural starting-point
Looking for the poem’s subject is natural. Almost all poetry has messages to deliver — lots of them, profound and diverse as stars. But these messages are sometimes hidden, and you have to read attentively to make them out.
Notice that we specifically avoid saying, “The subject is what a poem’s about” — because that implies that what a poem says is all there is to a poem. If that were so, why would people go to the trouble of writing poetry? Instead, people go to the trouble because poems sound a certain way, are built in certain shapes, and have certain beauties in sound and meaning — all of which accompanies the meaning and goes beyond it. (For more on those aspects of poetry, consult Chapters 3 and 4.)
Not all poems have a single subject. Some poems have many subjects, and some have subjects that aren’t clear. Sometimes a poem’s subject is simply itself — the words in it and their relationships to one another. The point is to be alert for the subject (or subjects) of any poem as you read.
Tone: It’s got attitude
When you speak, your tone of voice suggests your attitude. In fact, it suggests two attitudes: one concerning the people you’re addressing (your audience) and one concerning the thing you’re talking about (your subject). That’s what the term tone means when it’s applied to poetry as well. Tonecan also mean the general emotional weather of the poem.
Sometimes tone is fairly obvious. You can, for example, find poems that are absolutely furious. The Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid did not care for mercenary soldiers (men who fight not because they believe in a cause, but because someone is paying them to fight). Here is MacDiarmid’s very angry “Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries”:
It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.
Poetry is already so packed with emotion that seeing a poet swearing right at the start may be a shock, but MacDiarmid does exactly that. He makes the disturbing move of insulting the dead soldiers, calling them “professional murderers.” Usually, people try not to speak ill of the dead, but evidently MacDiarmid thinks so little of the mercenaries that he feels justified in insulting them. In the last two lines, he implies that, with such evil men in existence, human goodness persists only “with difficulty.” These clues lead you to MacDiarmid’s tone and his attitude toward his subject: contempt.
If poems could spit
What was the angriest poem ever written? One contender for that dubious distinction may be “To Edward FitzGerald” by the Victorian poet Robert Browning. FitzGerald (like Browning, a fine poet) had died in 1883, and when some of his unpublished papers were published six years later, Browning read a passage in which FitzGerald spoke of the death of Browning’s beloved wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1831), as “rather a relief to me.”
In one of the strangest of poems, Browning wrote in white-hot anger to the dead poet about Browning’s dead wife. “How to return you thanks would task my wits,” Browning wrote (with heavy irony on thanks). He concluded with four lines that illustrate both the concept of tone and how you determine what a poem’s tone is:
Kicking you seems the common lot of
curs —
While more appropriate greeting lends
you grace,
Surely to spit there glorifies your face —
Spitting from lips once sanctified by hers.
So where is tone in this poem? Well, the poet first wants to kick FitzGerald — but that’s “the common lot of curs,” a punishment that’s too ordinary. FitzGerald is so low he isn’t worth kicking. He’s not even a “cur” (which is a mongrel or a worthless dog). Browning can’t even spit in FitzGerald’s face, because Browning’s lips once kissed his wife’s lips and therefore were “sanctified,” or made holy. FitzGerald doesn’t deserve such a favor. Kicking is too ordinary; and spitting on him would make him holy. There’s no way to thank such a man — by which Browning really means “punish”). That’s irony — saying one thing (“thank”) when you really mean another (“punish”). All these clues lead you to the tone of outrage in this poem. And if Browning is so outraged at FitzGerald, he must really have loved his wife, as the word “sanctified” implies.
Sometimes you can pick up tone from clues in what a person says or writes, as in this untitled poem from the classic Chinese poet Liu Tsung-yüan:
From one thousand mountains the birds’ flights are gone;
From ten thousand byways the human track has vanished.
In a single boat, an aged man, straw cloak and hat,
Fishes alone; snow falls, cold in the river.
This poem conveys a tone of melancholy. How can you tell? The birds have abandoned the mountains, and the footprints of human beings (which are signs of human presence) have “vanished” from thousands of roads. The old fisherman you see at the end is all alone, and the word “single,” used for his boat, conveys loneliness. The last image is wintry indeed, with snow falling all around him. Taken together, all these elements create an atmosphere of melancholy.
Often, poets simply allow their speakers or the stories they tell to imply their attitude. In this poem, “Résumé” by American poet Dorothy Parker, you can determine tone from the speaker:
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
What is this a résumé of? The poem doesn’t tell you, but you can figure it out by filling in the blanks: The speaker is talking about suicide. So you may expect the tone to be tortured or full of fear, but not in this poem. Instead, you get a speaker who rejects each option for fairly trivial reasons. The implication: Suicide isn’t worth it unless it’s easy, painless, and neat. That attitude suggests that both living and suicide are trivial pursuits — and that is ironic.
Irony is a common tone in poetry. Verbal irony is the practice of saying one thing when you mean another. Such forms of irony include understatement, in which the speaker says less than he means, as in these lines from “Mr. Brodsky” by Charles Tomlinson. Tomlinson meets a man who brings him home to have supper — and afterward plays the bagpipe in the living room. Tomlinson writes,
A bagpipe in a dwelling is
a resonant instrument
Bagpipes are loud — and bagpipes indoors are extremely loud. Tomlinson says only “resonant” — which tells the truth with so much restraint that you can guess just how loud Mr. Brodsky’s bagpipes really are. Tomlinson is understating the case — yet still leading his readers to the humorous truth. You could well imagine Tomlinson reading the word resonant with an ironic smile.
Verbal irony also includes overstatement (as in telling someone “Oh, you’re the best poet who ever existed on the face of the earth,” when it’s clear you don’t mean it). The term situational irony refers to events that happen contrary to your expectations, often with a fatal overtone, as when Oedipus Rex declares he will find out who killed his father — only to discover it must have been himself. Sharpen your awareness of tone. You’ll see it in direct statement, to be sure (as when MacDiarmid cries, “They were professional murderers”), but tone can also reside in:
Images and how they are presented, as in Liu Tsung-yüan’s poem.
The implications of a statement or story, as in “Résumé.”
The very music and rhythms of a poem. Think of the singsong rhythms of “Résumé,” grating against the dark topic.
Reading for subject and tone
Two things you want to know right away when you’re reading a poem are what’s being discussed and what the poet thinks about it. Those two concerns translate to subject (the center of discussion; the thing being regarded or portrayed) and tone (the author’s attitude toward the subject or toward the audience). Paying attention to these elements helps familiarize you with the poem in front of you and suggests new ways to explore the poem.
Here is a poem called “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” by Randall Jarrell, based on his observations as a control tower operator for the Army Air Corps in World War II. It contains some shocks, but therein lies its beauty.
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
You can find plenty of metaphors here — the “sleep” of the mother (possibly a metaphor for her contented unawareness of the horrors of war), the “belly” of the State (possibly a metaphor for the way society protects young men, who stay “hunched in its belly” like growing fetuses, until it sends them off to war), the “wet fur” of the young gunner (young mammals have wet fur when they are born, so this may be a metaphor for the youth and naiveté of the speaker), and the “dream of life” on earth (a peaceful dream for civilians far away from the horrors of war). You may also sense an implicit metaphor between the mother’s womb (not directly referred to, but as part of the birth of the gunner) and the ball turret in which the gunner hunches. These lines reveal a series of births and awakenings, transitions between dreams of safety and the perils of reality. The shocks of each line lead us to the final horror of the last.
The subject of the poem is probably pretty clear to you: war and its terrible effects on the people who fight it. But what separates this poem from other war poems is its tone. Much about this poem may make you feel uneasy (after all, how often do you hear a dead person narrating his own death?), fearful, aware of the inevitability of fate. You’re feeling the penetrating irony for which this poem is famous. What makes you feel the irony? The metaphors and their implications. The matter-of-fact language of the last line. The story the poem tells.
Figuring Out a Poem’s Narrative
Many poets are also storytellers, and as storytellers, they, too, use all the elements of narration. These narrative elements include:
Speaker (also known as persona): This is the imaginary person who “speaks” the words in a poem. Some poems feature speakers as full-fledged characters with names and histories. But for the sake of discussion, imagine all poems as having speakers.
Setting: This is the time, location, and physical environment in which a story takes place.
Situation: This word refers to the circumstances or state of affairs at a given moment in a poem or story. It can also refer to the circumstances a character finds himself in at a given moment.
Plot: This term refers to the deeds and events in the story, which are organized toward a particular emotional or moral end.
Character: This word refers to the fictional representation of an imaginary person. A character is really a bunch of words that spurs us to have a mental image of a person.
We cover each of these narrative elements in the following sections, and throughout our discussion we refer to “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (which you can find in the preceding section), so you can see how to identify all these elements in one poem.
Speaker: The person we’re listening to
In “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” the speaker (the imaginary person who “speaks” the words in the poem) is the gunner himself. He’s also the main character in the poem. Another word for the main character’s role is protagonist, the character to whom all the important events happen.
The speaker isn’t a straightforward element of any poem. Some readers make the mistake of assuming that the poet himself is always the speaker of the poem unless otherwise specified. But the speaker is very often different from the poet. So avoid this mistake at all costs. In “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” Randall Jarrell was obviously a living human being when he wrote the poem, and the speaker of the poem is a young man who dies in an air war, illustrating how the speaker is a fictional creation of the poet.
One of the big questions to ponder is, “Who is the speaker and what is he like?” Speakers have personalities. They also have a point of view from which they see the events they narrate.
Speakers are not always perfect. In fact, they’re quite often flawed in interesting ways. They may not know the whole truth, or they may be mistaken, or they may have prejudices that color what they tell you. Be sure to always evaluate what they’re telling you. Consider what the poem tells you about the speaker (his or her background, biographical facts), and what you can see from what the speaker does and says (hints about his or her personality and motivation). Consider the atmosphere the poet weaves around the speaker. And remember: Speakers are like people — most are reliable, but a few aren’t. That’s good reason to pay close attention to what you know about any speaker you encounter in a poem — and you’ll find that attention adds to the richness of your reading experience.
In “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” you can see that:
The speaker is not the poet, Randall Jarrell.
The speaker is narrating his death and events beyond that death. That lends irony and horror to the poem. Such a narration literally could never happen. It has the calm, detached quality of a voice of the dead. Even though he speaks of terrible, ugly things, the things he himself does are passive: He falls, hunches, wakes, and dies — which lends his character a submissive, obedient quality. And he never raises his voice, never protests — anger or pain are absent from his language.
The speaker’s personality has an innocence you may associate with young men caught in the terrifying machinery of war. His “wet fur” is an image usually used to describe just-born mammals. The way he wakes up implies he hasn’t understood (until it’s too late) what’s actually happening to him.
Setting: Knowing where you are
Setting (the time, location, or physical environment in which a story takes place) can involve history and locale. Knowing the setting of a poem as well as you can is important, because poets and their characters alike are creatures of their setting. Read carefully for clues about the time, place, and situation the poem presents. Most of the time, poems give you this information straightforwardly. Some poems may mention the time of year (“It was the merry month of May,”), describe part of an exterior scene (“the humming forest,” “crawling traffic,” and so on), or name a place (“welcome to Miami”). But sometimes you may need to do some research — another good reason to have your reference books always near at hand.
When poets describe a scene for you, or even mention one in passing, be sure to stop and imagine the scene in detail. In his poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” the English Romantic poet John Keats writes
The sedge has withered from the lake,
and no birds sing.
Stop and imagine it. Sedge is a marsh plant often growing thickly around the margins of lakes and rivers. But here, all the sedge has withered — an ominous scene, especially when combined with the absence of singing birds. Now perhaps you start wondering why these ominous things have happened. Imagining setting in full will bring you forcefully into the poem.
In “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” the setting is the 1940s, during World War II, in the skies above Europe (at least, that’s where the planes of the Eighth Air Force, planes Randall Jarrell helped guide, were going). Thousands of airmen and civilians were killed in the air war. It was a theater of terror, with new technologies, including radar, long-range flak (anti-aircraft) guns, and fighter planes, increasing the death and destruction.
Situation: Circumstances and their victims
Situation is the circumstances or state of affairs at a given moment in a poem or story. Most poems begin telling the story with the first words. So pay close attention to clues about the circumstances of the poem, the speaker, and the main characters as a poem opens. What characters do or say usually relates directly to the situation they’re in.
The speaker, or protagonist, of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” goes through a series of situations, from birth to the nightmare of war and death, all in this one poem.
Plot: Stuff that happens
Plot refer to the deeds and events in the story, which the storyteller organizes toward a particular emotional or moral purpose. Poems tell stories, but they may not always tell them straight. They may tell events out of sequence, imply important events, or leave out whole steps in a story (to be supplied by you, the attentive reader). Keep track of the plot as you read — ask yourself what you know and what you don’t.
Sometimes, the speaker may want to hide something from you or lie to you. So you need to be on your guard and compare what you’re being told happened to what you think actually happened.
“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” tells a tale in straightforward chronological order — but it has a slight and all-important twist. One thing the speaker of the poem does not narrate is the death itself. One moment he is waking up from the “dream of life,” and the next he is being washed out of the turret. You are, therefore, forced to imagine what happened, which involves you more deeply in that event.
Character: What kind of person would do a thing like that?
The word character, as in “the character of King Arthur,” refers to the fictional representation of an imaginary person. Character is important to poetry. Every character in a poem has a different point of view, a different motive, a different goal. When you put characters together, you get tension and drama.
Consider the people in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” other than the protagonist: the mother, the men who operate the enemy guns and planes, and the faceless “they” who have to hose out the turret at the end. Think of how different they are from the gunner and from one another. You’re told that the mother was in a “sleep,” a metaphor for many things, including the civilian unawareness of the loss and pain of war. The enemy guns and planes are part of a “nightmare,” however — the nightmare that human savagery is real and unrelenting when released. The scrubs who do the hosing belong to the obedient young who, like the speaker, have to do what they’re told.
You may also think of the “State” as a character. Because the fur freezes in the belly of the State, you presume that it’s cold. The shocking last image, the hosing-out, is also cold and wet, unceremonious and without feeling.
Note this irony: If the ball turret is a kind of womb, what is the hose? After the gunner’s death comes a sickening reenactment of the sexual act that led to his conception.
The speaker is also a character, which brings up a neat trick Jarrell turns with the point of view here: The speaker never pities himself — yet you feel the pity. The speaker never says anything against war — yet you get the anger and pathos (the evocation of pity or compassion). How? From the events, not from any protest from the speaker.
Although the poem is ironic, the speaker is not ironic about what happens to him. As a gunner, he is definitely a warrior, a dispenser of death, yet he seems nevertheless innocent. Perhaps the mother should have known better; perhaps the State is at fault, in its impersonality, its coldness, and its unleashing of the nightmare. But one person remains beyond blame: the gunner himself.
“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” operates through both language (its metaphors and its irony) and storytelling (plot, character, speaker, situation, and setting). In this chapter, we run this little poem through the machinery of narration to show you what a little attention can lend to even the shortest poem.
Considering subject, tone, and narrative — following them in detail, keeping track of them, imagining them in all dimensions — can open up a poem and reveal the true extent of a poet’s craftsmanship. If you want to be a poet, reading with such attention can help you see what’s possible, if you work at it.