Another post about poetry and how it works, this time on Tone.
There is a famous story about a professor of Linguistics who is explaining double negatives to his students, ‘I can’t not eat the cake’, for example, and how a double negative makes a positive but the reverse, a double positive, does not make a negative. From the back of the room a student calls out, “Yeah, right.”
The words ‘yeah, right’ do not form a negative on their own, in fact most of the time they will be a double positive but in this case the negative was conveyed by the tone.
Another example – you look out of the window and it’s raining and you say, “What a beautiful day” or you lose your keys and remark, “That’s marvellous.” The words themselves are all positive but because of the tone used it is clear to the listener that you mean the opposite.
So what does all this mean for poetry? As we all know poetry was always traditionally recited aloud and even now it’s far easier to understand if it’s voiced rather than silently read. It’s easy to convey tone when speaking but if a poem is only read silently it can leave it ambiguous. Here’s an example, William Carlos Williams’s poem, “This is just to say”
This is just to say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
So, was he really sorry? Probably not. Tone is conveyed by voice but it can also be conveyed by the words used and their context. Going back to the Linguistics Professor and his student we don’t need to hear the student saying, “Yeah, right” to know that he said this with a tone of sarcasm because of the context and also the words themselves. Had he said, “Yes, absolutely correct” we would probably have concluded that this was a keen and slightly sycophantic student – again from the words used – the implied tone.
So, tone expresses a meaning, it’s implied by the words used, their context and by the ways they are said aloud. We can conclude that William Carlos Williams is not sincerely sorry in ‘This is just to say’ because he tells us what pleasure he had in eating the plums saved by the person to whom he writes the poem and he admits that he knew they were being saved for that person’s breakfast. Williams implies an intimate relationship with the other person – whose fridge would you take food from? We know from interviews with Williams that this was a note written to his wife – he was a doctor and often worked night shifts, returning home to raid the fridge before going to bed.
Henry Reed the WW2 poet uses two voices in his famous poem, ‘The naming of parts’
NAMING OF PARTS
To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.
This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.
This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.
And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.
Each voice has a different tone; the first voice is clearly an army instructor explaining in simple, prosaic terms what the soldiers are being taught about weapons, the tone is efficient, explanatory and almost brutal. The second voice is the internal one of a soldier whose mind is wandering away from the weapons lesson and onto the surrounding beauty of a garden in springtime. The soldier’s tone is gentle, dreamlike and Romantically poetic as he looks at the flowers, insects and trees.
The overall effect of two contrasting voices used in this way is a bitter anti-war tone. The brutal matter of fact way the instructor explains the machinery of war is offset by the soldier’s beautiful images which hint at deeper meanings.
- In the first stanza there is a mention of Japonica – a beautiful flowering tree but also a native plant of Japan – one of the countries against which the soldier will be fighting.
- The second stanza makes mention of the trees silent gestures which they (the soldiers) have not got – they will not be allowed to continue in peace, they have to fight the war.
- The third stanza mentions how fragile the blossoms are – we could argue that this suggests the soldiers are just like the blossoms, particularly in light of First World War imagery of poppies in the fields of Flanders.
- The final stanza is full of sexual references – ‘rapidly backwards and forwards’, ‘fumbling’, ‘cocking-piece’ and ‘bees’ all implying that these young men will have this taken away from them because of the war – ‘in our case we have not got’.
So we can see that in Reed’s poem the language, its context and the use of the voices all contribute to the overall tone.
Sometimes poets like playwrights or novelists will use characters in order to express views and ideas and thus giving us an alternative persona for the ‘I’ of the poem. Among the most famous of these are Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ (1842) and T. S. Eliot’s ‘The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1917). Later poets often employed this persona method but in the 1950s and 60s this moved on to ‘confessional’ poetry which leaves the reader (or listener) wondering if this really happened.
John Berryman’s ‘The Dream Songs’ play with tone and use not one but two personas, ‘Henry’ and ‘Mr Bones’. The collection which won Berryman the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 is
“a sequence of sonnet-like poems whose wrenched syntax, scrambled diction, extraordinary leaps of language and tone, and wild mixture of high lyricism and low comedy plumbed the extreme reaches of a human soul and psyche.” http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/6
Dream Song 4
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying
'You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.--Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.
--Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: there is.
Mr Bones and Henry act rather like the angel and devil characters we often see in cartoons which represent base instincts, Freud’s Id or the devil character and the angel Freud’s Superego or the conscience – the remaining part of the personality being the ego or the conscious part of ourselves. Berryman plays with these two contrasting sides of his personality to show us how it feels to suffer from frustrated desire. Henry is ‘dazed’ by this beautiful woman and would jump on her if her husband and four others were not there and he is plunged into despair because she will never be his. Alone Henry’s desires would give the poem a melancholy tone – a desperate lover destined never to have the object of his affections, ‘Brilliance’ with her ‘jewelled eyes’, even if Henry does slip a little into his true baser instincts’ What wonders is she sitting on, over there?’. However, Mr Bones, Berryman’s conscience puts Henry’s longings into context as he points out that the world is full of ‘feeding girls’ and the final witty reply to Berryman’s ego wishing there was a law against Henry (or lust), ‘there is’.
Throughout the poem Berryman uses bathos to give the humorous tone; the mention of ‘chicken paprika’, the ‘husband & four other people’, that she is ‘the hottest one’, the ‘spumoni’ ice cream, her buttocks and the use of colloquial language, ‘de’, ‘wif’. All of this purposely works against any traditionally romantic and high-flown notions which Berryman puts in opposition.
Again we can see that the tone is created by the words used, their context and the voices used by Berryman.
Finally poets can address their poems to a particular listener which lends a different tone – both more intimate and particular. John Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’ is written to the sun.
The Sun Rising
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."
She's all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
This device gives Donne the opportunity to tell the sun how unimportant it is when compared to his lover. The tone is romantic, the first blush of love, which we see particularly at the end of the first stanza, ‘Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,/Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.’ The use of the end rhyme emphasizes the romantic, troubadour style – this is a poem which is easily remembered because of the rhymes and can therefore be repeated to ones lover.
Donne also uses a gently reprimanding tone towards the sun as if it were an elderly badly behaved relative; ‘busy old fool, unruly sun’. This gentle chiding coupled with the romantic remarks about his lover – ‘She is all states’ enforces the sweeping romantic tone – this is a man entirely infatuated; ‘This bed’ has become the ‘centre’ of his world and ‘these walls’ the only place the sun need shine upon.
X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia in their excellent book, ‘An Introduction to Poetry’ explain precisely about tone -
“Strictly speaking, tone isn’t an attitude’ it is whatever in the poem makes an attitude clear to us: the choice of certain words instead of others, the picking out of certain details…..To perceive the tone of a poem rightly, we need to read the poem carefully, paying attention to whatever suggestions we find in it.”
As is always the case with poetry – read, read and read again.
