Readers,
Ms. Proulx made such a good point last week when she called the rhythm of “The Solidier”’s last line a reversal of the iambic flow. The line with which it rhymes,
“Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given”
is still strictly iambic, that is:
-` -` -` -` -`
(or, duhDUM duhDUM duhDUM duhDUM duhDUM — read it aloud, you’ll see)
but it just has a tiny, extra, feminine (unstressed) syllable tacked on to make the past participle of GIVE. Hardly noticeable. But the last line,
“In hearts at peace, under an English heaven”
Has two iambs, in HEARTS at PEACE, followed by a trisyllabic foot with no stress at all (under an), followed by two clear trochees: ENGlish HEAVen. WTF? As I think Ms. Proulx suggests, it’s just kinda odd to watch a poem so seemingly emphatic end that way. And sometimes we respond to these sorts of choices the way we respond to a decrescendo or a descending scale in music: as if the poem were laying itself down to sleep (the big sleep). We get into dangerous territory when we ascribe meaning to the metrical units themselves (what is the moral value of an anapest, over a pyrrhus?), but, especially when a poet is consciously using a formal verse pattern, those choices do seem to invite further inspection.
A return to form is just going back to what one does naturally, and for me it’s actually a return to FORM, since that’s kinda how I learned to read poetry in the first place. Yes, I know, it takes all the fun out of it. But I enjoy the willful archaism of a modern sestina, as in this example by Deborah Digges. Alert reader Lauren Richey (who works at the veterinary center mentioned in the piece) brought an article on Digges to my attention after we’d read her poem “The Wind Blows through the Doors of My Heart” in August. Here is the full article, if you’d like to read it:
http://www.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2009/features/fugitive.html
For today, though, there’s no better explanation of why the sestina choice works for this poem than what the author, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, says in a couple paragraphs:
“It’s not a simple poem, entwining as it does so many interrelated strands: a landlord, a tenant, a parade, a wedding, a matador, the sea, an orangutan, and a rampant array of specific trees and flowers. Here is both extraordinary vulnerability and powerful uplift. The flower thief herself often seems isolated, temporary, without possessions, and traveling ancient gypsy style. Yet the poem ends with transfiguration. The stolen flowers become the flower in the woman’s hair, which grows “star white. Then she’s gone.”
It’s possible to read this luxuriant poem a number of times without noticing, or even knowing, that it’s a sestina. The sestina is a highly structured form—six verses of six lines each, then a three-line verse—in which the last word in each line follows a special pattern. The form helps her circle round the disparate elements so that each becomes a necessary part of the drama. As in all Deborah’s works, there is an intense engagement with life in this poem. It is, among other things, about living richly in the intensity of the moment.”
The sestina has been around in English since Philip Sidney in the mid-sixteenth century. It was around before that in French and Spanish. If you haven’t seen one before (and if you’ve been following this reading group, you have–Paul Muldoon is among the contemporary writers who have taken it on), just look at the circulation of line endings, and the compression that occurs in the last stanza (a tercet). Now, at long last, here’s the poem. -ed.
THE FLOWER THIEF
Who watches behind curtains her landlord counting his hundred
or so jonquils, or fingering like a scout the dogwood’s
five or six snipped branches, knows the fugitive’s
lust for the wayward tea rose bobbing above the hedges.
She’s cased all winter the sidewalk gardens. She’s gone
at dusk among forsythia and lilacs, the curb-side gutters
petal-clogged, the tulip trees’ sprung husks pouched as gutted
fish. There the streets are littered with the blossoms of a hundred
redbuds blown and drifting like confetti after the parade’s gone
by. As if she were a part of that great wedding and would
greet them at the threshold, she clips the ripest from the hedges,
and for herself a few studded golden sheaths, just a fugitive’s
provisions, enough to set in jars on the leeward sills like fugitive
fires along a bluff above the sea, the camps stone-cold, gutted
by dawn, as clueless as the next, each bud anonymous, the donor hedge
in one moon phase replete. Who’ll know the difference in a hundred
years or care she spends them all in rented rooms? The green wood
tears away. Her hands are pollen-stained and dewy, and gone
at last are any traces of remorse, any self-promised penance, gone
as the roses she once threw to an old matador whose fugitive
soul she thought she’d always love and, grown up, someday, would
come back to. Another year she’d stood before the shit-gutted
cage of an orangutan, his floor a wash of how many hundred
fuchsia blossoms he’d stripped from the hydrangea hedges
