The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

Repetition, Repetition

Repetition, Repetition Repetition pulls the reader down from the vicarious bardic literary perch and into the preliterate, the childlike, the prehuman body. Repetition is oral-based, undermining the primacy of the written over the heard and reminding the eye, disconcertingly , of the ear’s primacy. It is too easily pleasurable, thus childish , evoking the dangerously tempting certainties of a natural world thought since Romanticism to be too unattainable to dare yearning for. If diffuse subjectivity (lack of a central ego-self in a poem) embarrasses the reader by giving us the poet naked of Romantic lyric authority, then stylized repetition further distances the speaker from the appearance of authentic subjectivity . It is unself-conscious, enacting the process of composition and revealing a poem’s procedural roots, its self-hypnotic underpinnings . And it is time-consuming, insulting the impatient contemporary eye with wasted seconds. Yet the very qualities that make verbal repetition anathema to the post-Romantic reader play an integral part in certain successful lyrics. Repetition’s qualities of unself-consciousness, physical pleasure in form, orality, and slowness of texture are all qualities intrinsic to a particular strain of lyric poetry, the tradition I call “sentimentist.” These qualities connect a sentimentist lyric to its strongest roots in the oral-based poetry of folk tradition and popular ballad or, even further back, in ritual writing and singing. Repetition, of course, plays a key role in effective ritual. Lyric poems that function as rituals of self, emotion, and voice can make good use, not only of the repetition intrinsic to meter and rhyme, but of larger repetitions to perform their magic. 49 Based on a paper delivered at the Louisville Conference on TwentiethCentury Literature (February 1999). Sara Teasdale’s poem “Let It Be Forgotten” is a ritual for forgetting. It uses a subtle texture of repetition to enact the process of forgetting, giving the very word “forgotten” a reiAed presence through insistent repetition and Anally covering up the word itself, like the forgotten thing, in snow: Let It Be Forgotten Let it be forgotten, as a Bower is forgotten, Forgotten as a Are that once was singing gold, Let it be forgotten forever and ever, Time is a kind friend, he will make us old. If anyone asks, say it was forgotten Long and long ago, As a Bower, as a Are, as a hushed footfall In a long forgotten snow. The word “forgotten” occurs four times in the Arst stanza, along with one “forever” and one “Are.” The second stanza has only one “forgotten” and one “Are.” One “Bower” and one “footfall” take the place of two of the forgotten “forgottens”; one “forgotten ” is buried in snow in the Anal line; and the Anal “forgotten” from the Arst stanza has, indeed, disappeared without a trace. The possibility of such a literal level of tangibility, of totemization , of magical thinking, if you will, for a poet’s words, is, needless to say, one of the great gains received in exchange for the too-obvious losses endured by a poet writing in the sentimentist mode. Repetition appeals to right-brain qualities of space, being, and unindividuated consciousness rather than attempting to satisfy left-brain needs for discursiveness and a distinct Romantic subjectivity. In a poem like Teasdale’s “Night Song at AmalA,” the device of repetition links the speaker viscerally with the sky and the sea, echoing through the heart of the poem like a vacuum . At the same time it allows a new feeling to enter the poem, as the mood of the concluding question changes from plaintive to deAant in the echoing silence following the repetitions. It does all this by making use of the unspoken physical quality of repeated presence, independently of the words, because repetition is, paradoxically, a technique that is free of words: 50 Night Song at AmalC I asked the heaven of stars What I should give my love— It answered me with silence, Silence above. I asked the darkened sea Down where the Ashers go— It answered me with silence, Silence below. Oh, I could give him weeping, Or I could give him song— But how can I give silence My whole life long? 51 ...