Poetry and Music: a response to Charlotte Geater
by and published in Edition Five of Pomegranate
‘Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.’
As someone geekily excited by both poetry and music, I read Charlotte Geater’s article in Issue Four of Pomegranate with interest, and agreed with a great deal of what she wrote. However, I am not so sure that the distinction between poetry and song exists in the way that she suggests. For example, the above lines from The Tempest are the words to a song: Ariel sings them. Are they also a poem? T.S. Eliot, who used them in The Wasteland, placed them in a poetic realm, as did Sylvia Plath in the title of Full Fathom Five. What’s more, they work as poetry, as, I would argue, do the following lyrics, which manage to prop themselves up without music:
The ice man’s mule
Is parked outside the bar
Where a man with missing fingers
Plays a strange guitar
And the German dwarf
Dances with the butcher’s son
And a little rain never hurt no one
Tom Waits, A Little Rain
He said everything is messed up around here,
Everything is banal and jejune.
There is a planetary conspiracy
Against the likes of you and me
In this idiot constituency of the moon.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, We Call Upon The Author
My purpose is not to knock down Charlotte’s point: lyrics work in a symbiotic relationship with music, whereas a poem on the page must make its own food, and it is wrong to suggest that a song and a poem are quite the same thing. However, a poem is capable of multiple personalities. Ariel’s song, for example, has at least three manifestations: as it exists on the page, as we read it, and as it is sung. It also has at least three voices: Ariel’s voice, the voice of the nymphs enclosed in it, and the absent-present voice of Shakespeare, who wrote it.
A poem on the page is different to a poem on the stage. A poem read is different from a poem sung. But in all these manifestations, the words still exist, as a poem (and a voice, and a song); they are the same and not the same in each rendition, each reading. Poetry began as an oral medium; written words are perhaps only the ghosts of music, the memory of speech. Ivor Cutler performed his poems with the accompaniment of a harmonium, and they are undeniably changed by his Scottish accent, and by the wheeze of breath from the instrument: thus they gain two lives on the spot. Some poems are monologues, some are dialogues; some are even polyphonic. When I read, for example, Tom Waits, PJ Harvey, or Nick Cave lyrics, I hear their voices (‘Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!’) and the music that joins with the words. However, when I read any poem, I will hear it in my head; and the more insistently audible it is, the better.
This may be why there’s such a fuss made about a poet’s ‘voice’, which is mysteriously something the writer ‘finds’, as if it is hiding in a seashell somewhere, and becoming a poet is a matter of beachcombing. We use oral and musical terms, ‘voice’, ‘rhythm’, as compliments to poetry, just as we compliment song lyrics by calling them – rightly or not – ‘poetic’. Perhaps any good creation evokes something outside itself; good writing is ‘real’, ‘vivid’: we think it is alive. William Empson may have hammered this home years ago in Seven Types of Ambiguity, but a poem is more than the sum of its parts, and is capable of metamorphosing, like the ‘sea-change’ of Ariel’s song, into various modes of communication. The lines from The Tempest are arguably a poem, and a song, and a part of a play… and if they lodge in the memory, they are part of life, recalled suddenly at a funeral, or when we are looking at the sea, or putting on socks, or eating a sandwich.
A great poem lives in the texture of our lives; it puts a hand on our shoulder and speaks, whispers, shouts, sings in our ears. To try to restrict the life of words to the page, or to the boundaries of a particular medium – this is a poem, and this is a lyric, and never the two shall meet – is doing the versatility of words a disservice. Eliot’s Prufrock cries: ‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.’ Poets, like Prufrock, want to be sung to. Poems – even inside a closed book – want to sing.
Rebecca Varley-Winter
Rebecca Varley-Winter was born in London in 1986, then moved to the Isle of Wight when she was eleven. She was a runner-up in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Awards 2004, and is currently in her final year studying English at Clare College, Cambridge. She started writing poetry seriously when she was 16; she also like music festivals, night walks, and places with views at the top of them.