STEPPING OUT AND STEPPING OVER: THE FIGURE OF HYPERBATON

Abstract

5 4 Y S T E P P I N G O U T A N D S T E P P I N G O V E R T H E F I G U R E O F H Y P E R B A T O N R O S A N N A W A R R E N Hyperbaton, in Greek, means ‘‘overstepping,’’ and in classical rhetoric it refers to an inversion or dislocation of normal word order. It’s a figure I am particularly fond of for the small shock of arti ficiality it inflicts. In the twenty-first century we’re still playing out an argument about modernism, a conflict between an aesthetics of estrangement from sense, and a counteraesthetics of clarity. Each generation since the early modernists – date it when you like, from Mallarmean obscurity or the Anglo-American fractious allusiveness of Pound and Eliot – has developed its own idiom to describe the contest. Eliot announced in 1921 in his essay ‘‘The Metaphysical Poets’’ that ‘‘modern poets must be di≈cult. . . . The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive , more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if possible, language into his meaning.’’ In his essay ‘‘The Constant Symbol,’’ Frost declared testily (of Pound and Eliot): ‘‘There have been works lately to surpass all records for hardness.’’ Elsewhere, he complained about mystery in poetry: ‘‘And if they want it to be – if they’ve got some secrets, let them keep them.’’ Roughly a century later in the United States the argument is reflected in competing 5 5 R claims to revelatory power by experimental poets on the one hand – say, the Language Poets, or more recently the neobaroque (Lucie Brock-Broido, Brenda Shaughnessy) – and on the other, poets who pride themselves on a talkative accessibility (say, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, and Sharon Olds, in their di√ering modes). Hyperbaton is one gesture among many that poets might use to produce an e√ect of strangeness, formality, and literariness. It has particular force when it appears in a poem whose general method tends toward norms of natural speech. Instead of illustrating hyperbaton in a poet of stylized eccentricity, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, I’d like to consider two poets who usually respect what Frost would recognize as sentence sounds. Ivor Gurney, the English poet and composer, lived from 1890 to 1937. He came from a modest background: his father was a tailor. He fought in the Great War on the front lines in northern France, was wounded and hospitalized, sent back to battle, and gassed at Passchendaele. In June 1918 he su√ered a mental breakdown. He had already published one book of poems, Severn and Somme, which came out in 1917 to good reviews. A second collection, War’s Embers, appeared in 1919, but by this time Gurney was already unstable, bouncing between jobs (as a pianist in movie houses, church organist, tax clerk, farm laborer). In 1922 he was declared insane and placed in an asylum, and three months later he was transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital at Dartford, where he remained until his death fifteen years later, intensely productive artistically but prey to delusions, often psychotic. (Gurney was diagnosed with ‘‘delusional insanity.’’ Long after the poet’s death, the psychiatrist William Trethowan concluded that Gurney was schizophrenic, and Gurney’s first biographer, Michael Hurd, repeated the claim. More recently, Pamela Blevins has challenged that diagnosis in Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty, arguing that Gurney su√ered from a bipolar condition, which would explain his ability to keep composing poetry and music for many years in the hospital.) Whatever he su√ered from, Gurney continued to write poems. ‘‘Smudgy Dawn’’ appeared in The London Mercury in 1924, and Gurney placed it in his collection of poems Rewards of Wonder, finished in 1924 but not published until 2000. 5 6 W A R R E N Y Smudgy dawn scarfed with military colours Northward, and flowing wider like slow sea water, Woke in lilac and elm and almost among garden flowers. Birds a multitude, increasing as it made lighter...