What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks, or, Some Stray Thoughts About Inversion
No, I am not talking about sexual deviation, but about what some people, particularly those who subscribe to what I think of as the Ezra Pound Rulebook, would refer to as poetic deviation.
My friend, Marcus Bales, has recently posted a poem in response to one of my poems, that merits a look. In fact it has prompted me to have some stray thoughts.
The speaker posits, "Dost thou think that people reading/ Like to see thee words invert?" This is comical, but the central premise, or the implied presumption, that the answer is no--is the premise correct?
The question prompted me to wonder, and, while Shakespeare's line, "What light through yonder window breaks" (from Romeo and Juliet) was the first thing to pop into my head, I soon found myself realizing that many of the most recognizable, memorable and lauded lines in the English language contain just such inversions that the speaker complained of. Could this be accidental?
Furthermore, the deeper I looked, I noticed that many of these inversions occurred, not deep into the body of the poem, but in the very first line! Shocking (according to the Rulebook), because that means the poet could have begun the poem in another manner, but chose not to.
Sticking with Shakespeare, and one of his most noted, Sonnet 116 begins "Let me not, to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments." According to the Rulebook, especially if you're willing to indulge in the metrical bad habit of dropping the first syllable in an iambic line, Shakespeare could have done a much better job if he started the sonnet, "Let me not admit impediments" (which also has the supposed advantage of being a near-flawless iambic pentameter line). But he did not.
Think of how many other of the best loved poems in the English language begin with an inversion:
"Whose woods these are I think I know" (Frost)
"Green grow the rashes, O" (Burns)
"Water, water I desire" (Herrick)
"A slumber did my spirit seal" (Wordsworth)
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure dome decree" (Coleridge)
"My own heart let me have more pity on" (Hopkins)
"It seemed that out of battle I escaped" (Owen)
"About suffering they were never wrong" (Auden)
"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower" (Thomas)
Certainly not a majority, but a good hefty amount, that cannot be explained as a haphazard, last-ditch attempt to catch up with the rhyme. They all could have begun differently.
Of course, it is not merely at the start of poems that we find inversions. Without trying to be exhaustive, let me focus on Blake, whose lyric poems—or many of them—would not have been possible without inversions. "Love seeketh only self to please" can be explained away by the parallel structure of the content; but many other lines have not that excuse, in fact hugely impactful concluding lines to classics of English literature:
Of course, it is not merely at the start of poems that we find inversions. Without trying to be exhaustive, let me focus on Blake, whose lyric poems—or many of them—would not have been possible without inversions. "Love seeketh only self to please" can be explained away by the parallel structure of the content; but many other lines have not that excuse, in fact hugely impactful concluding lines to classics of English literature:
"Babe can never hunger there/ Nor poverty the mind appall."
"his dark secret love/ Does thy life destroy."
"blights with plagues the marriage hearse."
There are others; but to turn away from metrical poetry, we even find something of an inversion in William Carlos Williams. Would his short piece "El Hombre," admired by Wallace Stevens, have been better begun: "You give me a strange courage/ ancient star"? Probably not.
Obviously, something broader at work here than the narrow field of metrical prosody can account for, is responsible for these inversions, and examples all too handy from everyday conversation only strengthen that impression: "Gone are the days...", "Me she doesn't know from Adam" are the sorts of thing the attentive ear may easily pick up.
The crux of the matter lies somewhere in the structure of language itself. English, being partly Latin-derived, retains some of the flexibility which all Latin derivatives do; if never so much as Latin itself. Without touching on the old, long-standing animus against "Frenchified English" (newly held every generation, it seems), I would argue that that inherent flexibility is more of a strength than a weakness. Syntactically bound languages, like Chinese, may have a greater concision and straightforwardness than English, but denotative regularity does not necessarily give one the best means of expression, especially in poetry, even as a straight line is not always the best (or most scenic) way to arrive at a destination.
People like to hear inversions—done, as in the vernacular examples I cited, for the little bit of drama switching things around adds to the conversation, or for the sheer mental delight of having things out of the ordinary. When Blake writes, "I happy am" the disjunction produces an excitement different in effect from its more pedestrian (and prosaic) equivalent.
Pedants and literalists—in fact those who subscribe to the Ezra Pound Rulebook—want to change poetry into prose. It won't happen. The old rulebook is dead.
Obviously, something broader at work here than the narrow field of metrical prosody can account for, is responsible for these inversions, and examples all too handy from everyday conversation only strengthen that impression: "Gone are the days...", "Me she doesn't know from Adam" are the sorts of thing the attentive ear may easily pick up.
The crux of the matter lies somewhere in the structure of language itself. English, being partly Latin-derived, retains some of the flexibility which all Latin derivatives do; if never so much as Latin itself. Without touching on the old, long-standing animus against "Frenchified English" (newly held every generation, it seems), I would argue that that inherent flexibility is more of a strength than a weakness. Syntactically bound languages, like Chinese, may have a greater concision and straightforwardness than English, but denotative regularity does not necessarily give one the best means of expression, especially in poetry, even as a straight line is not always the best (or most scenic) way to arrive at a destination.
People like to hear inversions—done, as in the vernacular examples I cited, for the little bit of drama switching things around adds to the conversation, or for the sheer mental delight of having things out of the ordinary. When Blake writes, "I happy am" the disjunction produces an excitement different in effect from its more pedestrian (and prosaic) equivalent.
Pedants and literalists—in fact those who subscribe to the Ezra Pound Rulebook—want to change poetry into prose. It won't happen. The old rulebook is dead.