Drama and Poetry

• Let us take for example of Arthur Luvai’s poem in the anthology which he
edited entitled Boundless Voices: Poems from Kenya. The poem is called
“Senior Staff club”.
 Senior Staff club
Super revolutionary mouths drop
In between puffs of cigarettes
Water-tight truths:

The common man i.e.

Working man and woman
To be exact-
Must be helped by us
To wake to their oppressed status
We must raise the masses’ consciousness!
But gesturing left hands
In between
Drop Vampire BAT butts on the floor
Swept daily by women
Faceless and nameless.
In the help-self places
Nani, Wee and Ai-Sei
Clear the directionless mess splashed by the direction-ful
Here, too, in the berry bowls
They find floating yellow butts
The tail-end of bitter truths.
The persona in this poem is reflecting and generalizing on what takes place in a
club which is meant for senior staff. People in this club drink, smoke and talk
hypocritically and frivolously about the common man. Ironically they do not
notice the common man who serves them.
The point to be made here is that there is no story in this poem, although it
describes a deeply-felt experience on the part of the persona. Something happens
at the club but outside a chronological frame. On the one hand the persona comes
off as an ironic observer of what happens at this club, and on the other he feels
what he observes.
This is an important stylistic feature of poetry, the presence of a poetic
persona. In pros fiction the narrator appears to us a detached but sympathetic
observer. The poetic persona on the other hand partakes of the experience of
the poem. We can therefore say that although in some poems we do nave the
first person pronoun, poetry is always about the “I”. This “I” should of
course not be confused with the author or poet. The poet transforms himself
into a new identity, a poetic persona.
You might recall that we said something similar in relation to the autobiographical
persona. But there is a difference. The writer is an autobiography as we saw sets out to
tell the story of his life. The poet describes an experience at a more heightened
emotional pitch. The difference therefore lies in the degree of emotional involvement
between telling a story and describing a deeply felt experience.
Lest you assume that a poem is a kind of emotional outburst, we should point out that
like all literary compositions. The writing of poetry involves some ironic detachment. A
good poem is a fine combination of thought and feeling. It is because of this that
literary critics frown upon sentimentality, an exaggerated and overindulged feeling.
In other words, the poet must accord his poem an aesthetic autonomy by
maintaining an aesthetic distance between him and the experience of the
poem
 The Graphological Appearance of a poem

Poems are written in lines which do not necessarily coincide with syntactic
units. Some poems are written in such a manner that these lines build up to a
sentence which ends with a full stop. In many poems each line starts with a
capital letter, to signal its importance as a rhythmic and semantic.
Some poets therefore use punctuation. Others present their poems as string of
rhythmic units, in which the absence of punctuation creates the impression of a
spontaneous utterance. Some poems take the form of a long loosely structured
sentence, others are written as a periodic sentence with clusters of anticipator
constituents making up the different stanzas.
Poetry is marked for its daring violations of graphological norms. The
American poet Edward Estlin cummings (1894-1930) who preferred the
typographical form e.e. cummings , does not use capital letters in his poetry.
The Russian poet , Vladmir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) experimented with
the graphological shapes on the printed page. These shapes were intended to
reinforce the meaning and the inner rhythmic movement of the poem. This
was the result with many of poems , but in a few the technique degenerated
into mannerism , or literary affection.
Mention should be made of the sonnet , a European classical form with
fourteen lines , including the rhymed couplet at the end. In the
Shakespearean sonnet this couplet is set off graphological from the rest of
the poem. The preceding twelve lines are grouped into quatrains , that is ,
clusters of four lines tied together by a central image. The rhymed couplet
presents a twist or turning point in the argument of the sonnet this is to as the
string in the tail.
 Consider the following example. It is shakespeare’s sonnet 60.

Like as the waves make towards the pibled shore,so do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before , In sequent to toile all forwards do
contend,
Nativity once in the maine of light. Crawles to maturity, wherewith being crown’d
Crooked eclipses gainst his glory fight, and time that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfixe the florish set on youth, and delves the parallels in beauties brow,
Feedes on the rarities of natures truth, And nothing stands but for his sirth to mow
And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand praising thy worth despite his cruel hand
You can see the four quatrains, each ending in a full stop, and the rhymed
couplet which is graphologically set off from the rest of the poem. Each
quatrain presents an aspect of the argument, that time brings everything to
an end. But the rhymed couplet introduces a twist in the argument, that the
persona’s verse and the object of its praise shall withstand times ”cruel
hand”
 The sounds of poetry

In our discussions on sound in literature we pointed out that poems are usually composed to
be recited. This might not look to obvious with respect to our local compositions in English,
and especially since the poets in question hardly get opportunities to recite their poems. But
mashairi are always composed with reciting in mind. We have seen composers of mashairi
reciting them in public and other occasions. Mashairi are composed to be intoned.
The sound features of poetry are perhaps the most obvious. As a literary genre , poetry is the
closest song. But the two are not one of the same. There are song texts that are not poetic in
the literary sense of the word. They do not deal with conflict and paradox in human
experience. Many folk song texts are however poetic in nature. They deal with
contradictions of human exsistence : they are poems put to music
As we have seen previously , classical English poems , and some modern ones , and also mashairi
exploit the resources of metre. Free verse does not have such regularities , but it nevertheless
presents poetic lines as rhymic units. Each line is a tone – unit , or a combination of two or more
tone-units.
Poets make more deliberate use of alliteration , assonance and consonance. In a recitation these
features are heard as peaks of prominence , and enhance the rhythmicality of the poem.
Pause is a special feature of poetry. Usually , is a marked pause at the end of a line of a verse , to
signal the end of a rhythmic unit. Sometimes lines of verse flow into each other phonologically.
The tone unit continues. This phenomenon is called enjambment . Instances of this are however
not very common , but when we encounter the overflow we should try to determine from the
context the reason behind it.
Some lines of verse have medial pauses, in the middle. A medial break is
traditionally called the caesura, and if they are many they would be caesuras
or caesurae. As with a pause at the end, the caesura compels the reader or
audience to pay more attention to the rhythmic unit whose end it signals. We
have time to reflect on the semantic significance of these individual tone-
units within lines.
 Syntax and Meaning

Some literary critics do not associate poetry with syntactic organization. It is of course generally
known that poets often change the subject-verb-complement order of conventional grammar for
metrical and rhythmic reasons. A line may begin with a verb , instead of a subject. It could just as
easily begin with a complement. But these changes are often assumed to occur only within
individual lines of verse.
Syntactic arrangement in the sense of writing sentences is a feature of poetry. Some poets choose
to write sentences that can be identified graphologically , with fullstops. In many poems as we
have already pointed out lines start with a capital letter , which in prose would signal the
beginning of a sentence. In some capital letters and punctuations are dispensed with entirely. But
the syntactic situation does not change. The sentences are built in the poetic structure. They
constitute units of meaning as we know them in prose.
Often we encounter rhetorical features such as parallelism , periodic
sentences , use of parenthesis , forming part of the texture of the poem. In
general however lines of verse appear as rhythmically distinct parts of the
poetic sentence.
 The Notion of Poetic Diction

As we said in our lecture on vocabulary , it was for along time assumed by

critics and writers alike that there was a special vocabulary for poetry. This
was referred to as poetic diction , that is , the choice of words peculiar to
poetry
Poets were expected to use a refined and elevated diction , and
correspondingly to steer clear of “vulgar” words such as were used by
common people. But this idea was later reassessed with the campaign that
was waged in English literature by William Wordsworth and his followers.
Wordsworth advocated for the language of the common man in literature.
Later with the emergence of free verse , poetic diction was liberalized.
However , poetry retained a certain measure of its lexical identity , albeit in
a more liberal , democratic sense. As we saw in the lecture we have just
referred to , certain words are inadmissible in poetry. It would be a must
unusual poem that uses words such as psychotherapy , historiography and
the like. Poets , even more than prose writers , show a special preference for
small , concrete word. They also prefer words that are lyrical , words that
sound pleasing to the ear.
 F. Poetic Experience as Discourse

We have seen literary texts are presented as some kind of spoken matter. There is a speaker
or addresser and a listener or addressee. The listener work therefore acquires a discourse
structure involving communicative interaction between the addresser and addressee.
This interaction takes many forms. The persona might address a particular audience. Such
is the case in Okot P ‘ Bitek’s Song of Lawino in which the persona speaks to her
clansmen. Many are however not specific. In some the addressee might be a “generalized”
but sympathetic listener. Yet in other the persona would address an imaginary or absent or
even dead person. The addressee could even be an object which personified. In Blake ‘s
“The Sick Rose” which we looked at earlier, the persona addresses a rose which then
appears as a person. This mode of poetic discource is called apostrophe
 Summary

In this lecture we have looked at the stylistic properties of poetry. We have

began by defining poetry from the stand point of its style. Then we talked
about what a poem looks like on printed page , that is, its graphological
characteristics. We also discussed poetic style at the levels of sound , syntax
and vocabulary. Lastly we talked about poetic experience as discourse.