The study of important words in poetry

Multiple meanings of words even more important than structure and rhythm

Norm Walker

This article on poetry will focus on the ability of poets to look at the multiple meanings in various words. As I said in the last issue, the major concern of good poets regards the rhythmic structure of their poetry, but that is not necessarily the most important aspect of the poem to study. In this issue we will focus mainly on the variety of meaning in some words, but we will first pay some attention to structure and rhythm.

Regarding structure, below are a sonnet by Robert Frost and a free verse poem by E.E. Cummings; both poets pay attention to the structure and the beats in each line. Frost is writing his poem in the form of a Petrachan sonnet (an octet and a sextet; iambic pentameter, the main verse in each line). Cummings does not have a set rhythm, but there is a purpose for the beats in each section. Note these in the second stanza:
whistles    far    and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

This is not a set structure, but it does manage to capture the way young people function on an early spring day. That’s why the names of the boys (eddieandbill) and the girls (bettyandisbel) are rushed together. Note that Cummings varies the beats from trochaic and iambic to anapestic, to capture the vibrant feeling of early spring, especially in children. Another part of the structure lies in the big spaces in line one as opposed to the linking of words together in line two; throughout the stanza there are lines with three strong beats, two beats three times, then one; in fact, the final line contains only one word.

After studying the structure and rhythm a reader will discover much in the imagery and sounds of the poem; but the most useful study arises when, as a teacher, I ask students the question, “Which word in the poem has multiple meanings?” In “Chanson Innocent” students will eventually find the word “wee”, the word that at first describes the smallness of the “baloonman” who is far away from the children; by poem’s end he is no longer an innocent man selling balloons, but is a “goat-footed baloonman”. In other words, the Greek god Pan, who will make sure that the boys and girls find one another as they age. Once the students look at the action of the poem closely, especially discovering who the “baloonman” is, they find different meanings to the word “wee”.  At first they ask if “wee”, written as “we”, could apply to the way the boys are bonded to boys and the girls to girls at the young age. Later, “we” will refer to the Pan-based togetherness of girls and boys.

The other meaning they discover comes from the way I read the poem; when I get to the word “wee”, I raise my voice and pronounce the word “whee”, because Cummings wants the word to describe not only the distance and small size of the “baloonman” early on, but the enthusiasm of the kids playing in puddles, playing games, jumping rope, etc. After talking about the puddles and luscious mud, it’s inevitable for most classes to ask the question about “wee", offering an answer to the realization that small children stay outside all morning, because they’re having too much fun and just like kids in a swimming pool they are experiencing “wee-wee” because of a full bladder. Just as in a swimming pool, their pants are wet, because they never made it to a toilet.

Finally, when the students realize that the “baloonman” is Pan, they recall that he played an instrument, the flute or, in his case, the Pan pipes, full of the sound “wheeeeee”, as nifty a sound as that of the children issuing their joy about the early spring.  

The final clue to the last spelling of “wee” is a French word “oui” which by the way expresses an English word Cummings constantly uses in his poems – “yes!” The word is usually Cummings' way of honoring the relationship between boys and girls or men and women. The arrival of the sexual god Pan certainly asserts the reality that by poem’s end, which may be referring to later years in the lives of the kids, the bond between “eddieandbill” and “bettyandisbel” becomes a bond between “eddieandbetty”  and “billandisbel” (two rhymes) or a bond between “bettyandbill” and “isbelandeddie” (equal consonants or similar vowel sounds). Pan has done his job – brought the boys and girls together. The clue to readers realizing that “wee” has French spelling lies in the title “Chanson Innocent” which has been added onto the poem by Cummings’ admirers; the original poem had no title.

Following is the poem with its added title:

CHANSON INNOCENT

in Just
spring     when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame baloonman

whistles        far       and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old baloonman whistles
far       and       wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring

and
    the
           goat-footed

baloonman      whistles
far
and
wee

Another poem that stresses the variety of meanings in words is Robert Frost’s Design.  We could spend days looking at all the words in this poem, but for the moment it suffices to look closely at lines four and five:

Assorted characters of death and blight.

Mixed ready to begin the morning right…”

For starters, Mixed ready to "begin the morning right,” seems to be a description of the spider, moth, and flower playing roles in the genetic or molecular structure of the morning elements of Nature. To talk about beginning the “morning right” or correctly at first sounds as if the line is about something that is a solid part of Nature. A quick look back at the previous line - Assorted characters of death and "blight” - suggests a negative side to the natural structure. Suddenly, “mixed ready to begin the morning right” can turn into “mixed reddy to beg in the mourning rite.”  All those words would not be about a bunch of plants and insects. But if the poem is referring in some ways to a human ritual, e.g., a “mourning rite” or a funeral just as words in the first three lines of the poem almost make the spider a priestly or medical character: three “whites,” “holding up,” “peace” instead of “piece,” and “rigid satin cloth,” then the word “assorted characters” could be talking about the various individuals who are in this written piece about some special ritual for the significant “death” of the moth and the “blight” of the flower. Ironically, the word “characters” could simply be about the “conventional graphic devices…graphic symbols as hieroglyphs or alphabet letters” (dictionary definition) that create the poem.

It’s impossible to simply accept the meaning “suited by nature, character, or design”(dictionary definition) to “assorted” when the word has a bunch of various spellings or meanings: “as ordered,” “as sorted,” “a sorted,” “a sordid,” or “as sworded.”  Then, too, one can interpret “as” as a Latin prefix “ab” or “ad”, suggesting that the characters are “away from order” or “to or toward order” (chaos or design).

Did Frost exert his meaning through his title or some other meaning through the numerous questions in the sextet? The possible meanings are definitely impacted by the various messages coming through words such as “ingredients”, “blight”, “broth”, “froth”, “kite”, “innocent,” “kindred”, “thither”, “appall”, etc.

DESIGN

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth.

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—

Assorted characters of death and  blight.

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches' broth—

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?—

If design govern in a thing so small.

(A published poet, Walker has taught poetry for many years, most recently at Holderness School.)

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July, 2010