Then what? I said.
Then it’s in color and she’s stowed away on a boat to be near her true love, who’s a sailor, a cadet, and she’s hiding in a lifeboat under the canvas covers waiting for the chance to come out and some sailors come and stand round the lifeboat, they’re all eating bread and cheese. And one of them asks another one to play a tune on his harmonica, so he puts his bread and cheese on the cover of the lifeboat and plays a tune, and while they’re all listening to him, inside under the lifeboat cover she sees the shadow of the food and licks her lips and her hand sneaks out and takes the cheese and the bread. The man finishes playing the tune and he looks for his bread and cheese, it’s gone, and he thinks it was a trick by the other sailors, getting him to play a tune so they could take his sandwich, and a squabble breaks out, but inside the boat the girl eats the bread and the cheese with a look of total happiness on her face.
Through all these weeks you’d been back, whenever I’d asked you about the other place you’d been, you’d told me little pieces of story like these, always about this hungry, bright-headed girl. Then you’d say words I’d never heard of, words that didn’t really sound like they were words. It was good, that things didn’t have to mean. It was a relief. It was strangely intimate, too, you speaking to me and me having no idea what you were saying.
Guide a ruckus, you said now. Trav a brose. Spoo yattacky. Clot so. Scoofy.
Tell me what else happens, I said. Say more things like that.
*
To stay anxiety I engrave this gold,
Shaping an amulet whose edges hold
A little space of order: where I find,
Suffused with light, a dwelling for the mind.
(CLIVE WILMER, The Goldsmith)
1: Putting the For in Form
In the beginning was the word, and the word was what made the difference between form and formlessness, which isn’t to suggest that the relationship between form and formlessness isn’t a kind of dialogue too, or that formlessness had no words, just to suggest that this particular word for some reason made a difference between them — one that started things.
‘God, or some such artist as resourceful, / Began to sort it out. / Land here, sky there, / And sea there’ is how Ovid, metamorphosing into Ted Hughes, saw the start of all things. Before that? ‘Everything fluid or vapor, form formless. / Each thing hostile / To every other thing.’ Not that fluid or vapor isn’t form too; it’s the hostility that Hughes highlights: ‘at every point / Hot fought cold, moist dry, soft hard, and the weightless / Resisted weight.’ Until, that is, God, or some such artist, starts throwing weight around. Form, from the Latin forma, meaning shape. Shape, a mold; something that holds or shapes; a species or kind; a pattern or type; a way of being; order, regularity, system. It once meant beauty but now that particular meaning’s obsolete. It means style and arrangement, structural unity in music, literature, painting, etc.; ceremony; behavior; condition of fitness or efficiency. It means the inherent nature of an object, that in which the essence of a thing consists. It means a long seat, or a bench, or a school class, and also the shape a hare makes in the grass with its body for a bed. It’s versatile. It holds us, it molds us, it identifies us, it shows us how to be, it gives us a blueprint in life and art, it’s about essentiality, and several of us can sit on it at once. It can mean a criminal record and it can mean correctness of procedure, both at once. Form can be right and it can be wrong. This is Graham Greene on Shakespeare’s felicity of form even in the slightest of phrases, in a throwaway moment from Troilus and Cressida: ‘“Think, we had mothers,” Troilus’s bitter outburst is not poetry in any usually accepted meaning of the word — it is simply the right phrase at the right moment, a mathematical accuracy…in a balance sensitive to the fraction of a milligram.’
And this is Thom Gunn, talking of Yvor Winters, on the uses of the poetic form: ‘poetry was an instrument for exploring the truth of things, as far as human beings can explore it, and it can do so with a greater verbal exactitude than prose can manage.’
Why? Why can’t prose ‘manage’ this ‘greater verbal exactitude’? Simply because we don’t allocate to prose the lingual attention, the aura, the essentiality, that we do to poetry? Because we want the forms to be different?
Form is a matter of clear rules and unspoken understandings, then. It’s a matter of need and expectation. It’s also a matter of breaking rules, of dialogue, crossover between forms. Through such dialogue and argument, form, the shaper and molder, acts like the other thing called mold, endlessly breeding forms from forms.
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
Gainst death and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
The power of the artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, a form concerned with argument and persuasion, to say so. This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gravestone—and you’ll be made shinier, brighter, by it. In this form it will — and therefore you will — avoid destruction by war, history, time generally; it’ll even keep you alive after death; in fact it’ll form a place for you to live, not die, where you’ll be seen in the eyes of and the context of this love right to the end of time.
But there’s always another story, there’s always another way to see the shape of things: up against Shakespeare’s overweening gorgeous sweet arrogant protective and still very well functioning preservative form, here’s a jarring anecdote from Wallace Stevens:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.