Читать книгу A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 22

Although this text is part of a longer sequence of poems, it is relatively free‐standing, and can be read on its own. It would be a shame not to discuss it, as it is a fine and moving love lyric. The title, in keeping with the convention of Correspondences: A Family History in Letters, presents the piece as a letter (and, in fact, the poem is so laid out), but it is, of course, not a letter, strictly speaking, but a poem. However, the opening, “Dearest,” and the closing, “Ruth,” along with place and date do give it the appearance of a letter. The body of the text is, however, a five‐stanza love poem, from a married woman to her absent lover. The piece is an extraordinary mixture of the quotidian and the ecstatic. When thinking of her lover, the speaker (writer) enters rapturous states of consciousness (a “brighter isolate planet” [line 3], “these incredible perspectives / openings entirely ours” [lines 45 and 46]), which are contrasted with worlds of children, husband, and chores. These dizzying and electric moments and spaces are, indeed, embedded in a context of others and duty. But the speaker seems so entwined in the everyday that there is no escape. She abides in a “damaging anguish” attenuated by memories, visions, intuitions.

The piece is relatively disorderly, as one might expect with such unassuaged and incurable mental pain. The five stanzas are of varying lengths (as paragraphs of a letter might be). Lines, too, vary in length—from 13 or 14 syllables to 4 or 5. Numbers of main stresses per line are also variable, from 2 or 3 through 5 or 6. There are no obvious rhymes. Enjambment is rife—for example, lines 7–9, 16–19, 21–23, 30, 31, 33, 34, 37, and 38. Only the relatively hopeless last stanza is devoid of them.

But there is phonological patterning, although it is of an astringent sort. Thus, there are hints of end rhyme: in stanza 1, “continually” (which occurs twice) and “unexpectedly,” “live / love,” and “eat / articulate”; in stanza 2, “home / them,” and “habit of / pain of”; in stanza 3, “ago / shadow,” “distance / intensity / miss,” and “stone / sun”; in stanza 5, “say / continually,” “children / friends,” and “perspectives / numbness.” But these are at best hints, half echoes, and far from full rhymes. There is some local alliteration: /d/ in lines 10, 11, and 16–19; /k/ in lines 25 and 26; /s/ in lines 26–34; and /tʃ/ in lines 43 and 44. The most marked patterning device is the prevalence of lines that end on an unstressed syllable: in stanza 1, lines 1, 2, and 6–9; in stanza 2, lines 2, 6 (perhaps), and 7–10; in stanza 3, lines 2, 4–7, 10, and 12; in stanza 4, lines 1–4 and 5–7; and in stanza 5, lines 4–7. That makes 30 lines out of a 48‐line poem.

The function of all the preceding is surely to create an intensely moving but peculiarly astringent and hopeless love poem. The emotion is there in the lexis and in the technical disorder, but rhyme is weak and dissonant (if it is there at all, as more than a shadow of rhyme), and the unstressed line endings conjure a tentativeness, a longing that will not be satisfied ever (as we know from the rest of the sequence it was not).