I spent much of yesterday with Donne. He is very exhausting. Here's a bit of what I wrote, and I hope it's true.
***
Lucille Clifton’s poem “sorrows”
opens with “who would believe them winged,” an unpunctuated, uncapitalized line
that is a clear, straightforward question. Her sentence doesn’t
require punctuation or capitalization to convey what Frost called “the sound of
sense.” In contrast, John Donne relies on ornate, heavy-handed punctuation to
demarcate the sentences in “The Triple Foole.” Nevertheless, at first reading
I’m not always convinced that what Donne has marked out as a sentence is, in
the OED’s terms, “complete in itself as
the expression of a thought.”
But what is “the
expression of a thought”? My own thoughts are frequently clotted, unclear, and
ambiguous; and it seems that Donne may have felt the same about his, for not much
in “The Triple Foole” can be called straightforward. Let’s look at the opening
sentence and track how the speaker moves grammatically through his own
perplexity.
I am two fooles, I
know,
For loving, and for saying so
In
whining Poëtry;
But where’s that wiseman, that
would not be I,
If
she would not deny?
The
sentence breaks neatly into halves. The first section, which ends at the
semicolon, lays out a claim (“I am two fooles, I know”) and follows with
supporting reasons. Foole 1 is foolish “For loving,” and Foole 2 is foolish
“for saying so / In whining Poëtry.” Thus far, the sentence seems to express a
coherent thought “complete in itself.”
But
after the semicolon, things get stranger. As the sentence shifts from a
statement to a question, the speaker lays out a series of linked but
incongruous phrases. “But where’s that wiseman,” he asks. Immediately he
undercuts the question with the self-deprecating “that would not be I.” Or
should I read this as an excuse rather than as modesty? Suddenly I find myself
not entirely trusting this speaker. What is he trying to evade? The sentence
continues, deepening my confusion. “If she would not deny?” Deny what? Are
words missing here? The sentence feels as if it’s been chopped off mid-phrase.
Typically, “deny” would be followed by a noun phrase or a dependent clause: for
instance, deny my love, deny that I am a foole. As it is, the question leaves me hanging. I don’t understand what’s
going on. All I know is that I am confused, suspicious of the speaker, and
curious about this enigmatic “she,” this mysterious “deny.”
“The
Triple Foole” is an early seventeenth-century poem. No doubt there’s a
scholarly edition that would translate its archaic sentences into contemporary
English, lifting my spirits and erasing my puzzlement. But even though I honor
such scholarship, I want to argue
for the value of coming to a poem as it exists, unadorned, on the page. I think
it’s important to meet a difficult poem on your own ground, to rely on your own
wits and reactions as you wrestle with it.
Are my reactions
to this sentence “correct”? If I were faced with a multiple-choice question
about “The Triple Foole,” I’d probably get the answer wrong. But when I ask
myself what I’ve learned, I see that I’ve made an important discovery. Pushing
myself to look closely at the structure of the sentence has also pushed me look
closely at the structure of a thought. And what I’ve learned is that, for some
poets, sentences really do seem to mirror thoughts. Clear or confused, simple
or complex, Donne’s thoughts unwind as his sentences unwind. When I read his
lines, I feel as if I am wandering along the pathways of his brain, at one
moment basking in his rational neatness, at another drowning in his tortuous
evasions. “Donne felt his thought as immediately as the odour of a rose,”
writes A. S. Byatt. Now I know what she means.
[from a draft chapter of The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet (Autumn House Press, 2014)]
2 comments:
Now I'm puzzling out the purpose of leaving deny without a "what is denied" to follow it. I wonder if Donne, by using deny without any qualifications to it, is actually using it in a powerful way. Deny, as a verb, is pretty strong. And with no hint as to what is being denied, one can only come to the conclusion that everything is being denied; his love, his suit, an answer, his existence in her world, etc. I tried reading the excerpt with a qualifier added to deny, and found that by doing so the experience of being denied was then limited, and somehow less final. The "she" in the poem does not leave the speaker any recourse, as it's written. There's no "but what if..." allowed, given the way it's written.
I have the same feeling, though, sometimes when I'm reading Frost. He has convolutions in sentence structure that, on occasion, stop me, puzzle me, and beg me to consider what he intends for me to understand. I can't recall right away what the line is, but I know there's one in "The Need to be Versed in Country Things" that stops me every time.
Then I get to wondering, is the syntax archaic, or intentionally obscuring the subject. If anything, at least I'm drawn to consider the poem in many ways, never being satisfied with a cursory reading, followed by a nod.
Carlene, I love what you're saying about "deny." There's something so incredibly powerful in the way it hangs there at the end of the sentence. When I try to fill in the blank, the sentence immediately weakens.
And, yes, Frost: he does the same thing . . . leads us into the morass with a sentence that might be mistaken for a platitude, and then nails us to the wall.
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