Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

Activity 19.1
Unit 19 Deviation
Section 4 Poetic form

Here are two quite separate poems by the American poet, Emily Dickinson (1830-86). The first is about a storm, the second concerns death. They deviate from everyday English in various respects.

Text A

The Clouds their Backs together laid

The North begun to push

The Forests galloped till they fell

The Lightning played like mice

The Thunder crumbled like a stuff

How good to be in Tombs

Where Nature’s Temper cannot reach

Nor missile ever comes

Text B

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air -

Between the Heaves of Storm -

The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset - when the King

Be witnessed - in the Room -

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away

What portion of me be

Assignable - and then it was

There interposed a Fly -

With Blue - uncertain stumbling Buzz -

Between the light - and me -

And then the Windows failed - and then

I could not see to see -

1 Underline some instances of deviation in punctuation in both poems. In what respects are they deviant and what effect or effects can you attribute to the deviations?

2 Identify one instance of unusual word order in the first poem. Can you suggest what motivates the deviation and what might be gained by the unusual word order?

3 The following are representative kinds of word combination, extracted from the COBUILD corpus, involving the phrase ’to push’:

3.1 What is distinctive about the way the phrase ’to push’ is used in the second line of the first poem above?

3.2 What is unusual about the phrase ’the forests galloped’?

3.3 Identify some unusual combinations from the second poem and comment upon their effects.

4 In what crucial way is the second poem deviant as discourse? What advantage does the poet gain from this deviation?

Reading

Erlich, V. (1969) Russian Formalism: History - Doctrine, The Hague: Mouton.

Garvin, P. (ed. and trans.) (1964) A Prague School Reader in Aesthetics, Literary Structure and Style, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Leech, G. (1969) A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, London: Longman, Chapters 2 and 3.

Lemon, L.T. and Reis, M.J. (eds) (1965) Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, especially the Chapter by Shklovsky (1921) ’Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary’, pp. 25-57.

Widdowson, H. (1975) Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature, London: Longman.

Widdowson, H. (1992) Practical Stylistics: An Approach to Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press.