The eyes have it

The visual effect of a poem can be as important as its aural impact, writes James Fenton

The most familiar form of syllabic verse is the haiku, borrowed from the Japanese, in which the poem adds up to 17 syllables divided into three lines of five, seven and five syllables respectively. To me this seems like an oriental tradition which, however enthusiastically adopted (particularly in schools, I find), is un-likely to have an equivalent effect in the west. A bit like the tea ceremony.

The term syllabics is usually used to refer to a kind of poetry in which the principle of organisation of the line is by number of syllables and nothing else. That is to say, one does not flirt with traditional metres in a syllabic poem - indeed one struggles at times to avoid them - whereas it may be perfectly reasonable, in a certain kind of free verse, to allow iambic rhythms to creep in. In my opinion, it is easier to avoid iambic rhythms, when writing in syllabics, if you create a line or pattern of lines using odd numbers of syllables.

Can the ear hear a 13-syllable line as consisting of 13 syllables? I don't think so, but I think that a series of 13-syllable lines (supposing that was the length chosen) would, after a while, begin to have a characteristic resemblance. For the most part, though, counting the syllables seems to be something that works, if it works, for the poet. It is a private method of organisation. (Auden once wrote a poem in which the principle of organisation was the number of words per line. He was very proud of having thought this up, and sorry that no one noticed.)

Marianne Moore is the great practitioner of syllabic verse. The first stanza of "Virginia Britannia" will give an idea of the gorgeous descriptive effects built up in the course of the full 12 stanzas:

Pale sand edges England's Old

Dominion. The air is soft, warm, hot

above the cedar-dotted emerald shore

known to the red-bird, the red-coated musketeer,

the trumpet-flower, the cavalier,

the parson, and the wild parishioner.

A deer-track in a church-floor brick, and a fine pavement tomb
with engraved top, remain.

The now-tremendous vine-encompassed hackberry

starred with the ivy-flower,

shades the tall tower;

And a great sinner lyeth here under the sycamore.

How would you read this poem aloud? Not by trying to emphasise that the syllables have all been counted. The rhymes will gently do the work of marking the line-endings, and I think the reader is entitled to as much enjambment as he or she feels like, since the author has left us a large number of weak line endings in the poem, which ask to be run on.

Note that the line "above the cedar- dotted emerald shore" reads as an iambic pentameter, although it has 11 syllables. Any poem in syllabics which features an 11-syllable line will have this problem of approximation, but Moore did not seem to mind. The poem was written to look good on the page, which it does, and to sound well declaimed, although the structure when declaimed is quite different to the one perceived by the eye. No doubt the author had all kinds of other private rules she followed, whose effect is not visible to us. One thinks of parallels in music, where a word has been encrypted into the bass line. You have to be a musicologist to recognise the fact, but it is there none the less, as a principle of organisation.

Writing for the page is only one form of writing for the eye. Wherever solemn inscriptions are put up in public places, there is a sense that the site and the occasion demand a form of writing which goes beyond plain informative prose. Each word is so valued that the letters forming it are seen as objects of solemn beauty. They may not constitute poems, but the art of writing inscriptions might be seen as analogous to the writing of poetry.

The term epitaph itself means something to be spoken at a burial or engraved upon a tomb. When an epitaph is a poem written for a tomb, and appears in a book, we are aware that we are not reading it in its proper form: we are reading a reproduction. The original of the epitaph is the tomb itself, with its words cut into the stone.

The elaborate poems that decorate the tombs and memorials of old English churches have little currency outside their church setting (unless they happen to be comic or otherwise curious). They were written to be read when standing on a given spot in the church. And the criteria that went into the writing of them were special. Dr Johnson's remark that a man is not on oath when writing an epitaph bears this out. One does not expect a balanced judgment of a person's merits to be found in a church epitaph: one expects merits.

The modern epitaph is in abeyance though not dead. Philip Larkin's poems about the Humber Bridge and the university library in Hull are examples of poems to be read on the spot, celebrating the merits of the bridge and the library.

Any form of lettering that draws a particular attention to itself as lettering - the beautiful fonts of the Renaissance, the chunkiest sans serif scripts - may draw such attention to a sentence, a phrase, or a word, that it becomes an object of special aesthetic interest, and therefore something like a poem. This line from TE Hulme's "Images" may look vulnerable on the page:

Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.

Imagine it realised in neon light, on the wall of an art gallery, with a room to itself: we're in business.


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