SYNTAX1
I
want to call you thou, the sound
of
the shape of the start
of
a kiss - like this - thou -
and
to say, after, I love,
thou,
I love, thou I love, not
I
love you.
Because
I so do ―
as
we say now - I want to say
thee,
I adore, I adore thee
and
to know in my lips
the
syntax of love resides,
and
to gaze in thine eyes.
Love's
language starts, stops, starts;
the
right words flowing or clotting in the heart.
In
Rapture
(2005),
CAROL ANN DUFFY
When
looking at this short poem, we feel that the author intends to sound
(and look) striking. The structure, the syntactic parameters, its
lexical density, even the title are tellingly significant. Carol Ann
Duffy, Poet Laureate since 2009, comes from a tradition which is
extremely difficult to classify. Her early love poems differ in
length, subject matter and form from the one she wrote not long
before the appointment. Hence, the whole piece looks interestingly
peculiar here because it may seem what it is not, revealing hints of
tradition and pure contemporariness that readers should pay careful
attention to.
Let
us focus on the structure
of
the poem. Anyone who knows a little something –or quite a lot–
about poetry must have already spotted the right word for the poem’s
form: a sonnet. Sonnets are, by far, one of the most remarkably
famous poetical forms for structuring lines (fourteen to be more
precise) in order to convey an oceanic assortment of meanings in
metaphorical exposure. Choosing the sonnet might have been the
perfect selection of forms and structures for a love poem, an
exceptional choice for a non-risk-taker. However, Duffy is no
non-risk-taker, and her preoccupations about whether to optionally go
for a cliched poetic form for no reason whatsoever, or committing her
choice to conveying second (critical, reader-responding) thoughts
seem more reasonable.
But why is she doing this? Why does
she choose to write a poem that looks sonnet-like? That’s a very
good two-in-one question. The sonnet is one of the oldest poetic
forms that writers have been using to show how deeply, how
poignantly, how ferociously or how miserably they feel about love.
And this poem is just about that: the feelings of love. Loving as a
primitive feeling is sensed and experienced here in two temporally
distinct directions: loving now and loving from the past. Thus, the
pronouns (‘thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thine’, ‘you’), the use of
modern-spelt old English words (‘shape’, ‘start’, ‘kiss’,
‘lips, ‘love’), and the old love tradition of belongingness and
togetherness, very much like Petrarchan in style (‘I want to call
you thou’; ‘I adore thee’; ‘to gaze in thine eyes’), all
these examples clearly acknowledge the speaker’s intentionality of
love-feeling and love itself.
A
nother
important reason why this short poem is a masterpiece resides in the
essence of its musicality. Duffy has always stressed the importance
of reading poetry out loud to make the most of it. And this poem is
no exception. Although its rhyme
scheme is
untraditional (to the eyes of someone expecting a proper sonnet), its
rhythm and internal rhyme, together with the strength and powerful
emotiveness of the vowels and consonant clusters she uses lift it up
to perfection. And because it is a poem about love and loving as a
process, one can imagine that it is a process the poetic voice is
willing for it to be long, as the use of diphthongs in ‘thou’ and
‘thine’ suggests, a
melody of diphthongs that invites to linger on the presence of the
loved one forever.
Also, the sibilance along lines in the poem (‘the sounds / of the
shape of the start’, or ‘love’s language starts, stops,
starts’) together with the length and density of vowels and
diphthongs lead to a vibrant longitude of the emotional
meaningfulness of the text.
However,
the process is not linear, and neither are the sensations emanating
from it. The title,
which strikes us back and around from the very first glimpse of it
until the end, is revealing for the uneasiness, the disorientation
and imperfect ways of being in love. When we think of syntax, we
think of order, structures and organisation. This poem is nonetheless
realistic when we come to terms with its syntactical disorganisation.
And the same occurs when someone loves somebody else: people do not
think in a structured way. We do not feel when or which the right
moment is, what the right word that ‘in my lips / … resides’
will make the heart –our love– start,
pause
and
then
start over
again.
On balance, we are encountered with a
short poem that tells us a lot more after many readings of it; a poem
so touching and so mind-blowing that gets you thinking for a while,
pondering whether love can be felt in such ways that no syntax in the
world can seamlessly explain, just “words flowing or clotting in
the heart” of whoever is to feel and love like this.