The kind of study we are here concerned with is
commonly pursued at three often interweaving levels namely, graphology,
phonology, and the level of semantics. The level of graphology takes into
account any lingual ‘aberrations’ relating to syntax, punctuation, and the
general structure of the object of study, in the present context a poem by the
title of ‘The Dry Season;’ at the level of phonology the study looks at sound
patterns generally and such other devices as alliteration, parallelism, rhyme
and rhythm, that all together may go to render a poem either ‘speedy’ or
‘jerky,’ ‘soft’ or ‘loud;’ at the level of semantics, the question of
sense-making in the poem is raised, especially as regards unconventional
liberties taken with language whereby the known patterns of sense-making are breached, and new patterns
emerge, sometimes, even in spite of the very language that makes to constitute
this sense. Of course, the underlying understanding in this study is that
language is a code, a set of rules for generating ‘well-formed’ sentences, in
the axiom of the generative transformational grammarians, so that a breach of
this definite code results in ‘ill-formed’ sentences. A follow-up to this is,
perhaps inevitably, that language being rather so indefinite in literature, the
literary artist shows himself forth as notorious in the regard of defying the
definite codes in pursuit of what has been called ‘stylistic effect’ by his
particular ‘style.’ It is these ‘stylistic effects’ and ‘styles’ which often
amount to ‘aberrations,’ at least from the point of view of the definite
language code, that stylistics sets out to trace and possibly account for, with
an arm of it called literary and the other linguistic stylistics.
The latter
is really what we are here concerned with, and will be applying at the three
levels already mentioned, though not necessarily in the order of enumeration.
‘The year is withering’ is how the poem of our specific attention begins, and
it is apparently a conventional sentence at the level of syntax, but the
predicative ‘is withering’ problematizes it at the level of semantics. This has
happened because of the violation of what is called selectional restriction
rule which consists in the choosiness of words as to what words to go with, or
say nouns, what particular verbal forms to co-occur with. For the verbal form
‘is withering’ implicates the subject ‘The year’ as being, in the least,
tangible, non-abstract, which is, of course, the only condition of possibility
of it being withered, of it ‘withering.’
But much more than that, ‘is withering’ also implicates ‘The year’ as
possessing life, succulent, fluid-filled life, so that in ‘withering’ this
fluid-life is sapped from the ‘year’ and it becomes shrivelled up. This sense
is not lacking through the remainder of the first stanza: ‘the wind/ Blows down
the leaves;/ Men stand under eaves/ And overhear the secrets/ Of the cold dry
wind,/ Of the half-bare trees.’ For there is a sense in which the features
/+animate/, /+tangible/, /+fluidy/ which have been communicated to the
intangible, immaterial year in the first line of the poem reappears in these
follow-up lines, whereby the year is seen to share these vouchsafed properties
with the ‘leaves,’ whose very nature make them possessors of the selfsame properties.
But ‘the
leaves’ are being blown down and the ‘trees’ are rendered ‘half-bare,’ and
these arguably ensuing from the ‘withering’ in line 1. In fact, it is arguable
that what is happening is transference of properties from the leaves, the
trees, to the year, or is it from the ‘withering’ year to the leaves, the
trees, so that they are losing, now, their vitality. And we recall too that
‘the wind’ blowing down the leaves and trees is ‘the cold dry wind’ (line 5),
still sustaining the sense of the shriveling up of the year, of the leaves and
the trees. The paradigmatic association found existing between ‘cold’ and ‘dry’
by virtue of their sharing the same grammatical slot in ‘cold dry wind’
somewhat intensifies this ‘withering’ process, so that the objects seen to be
losing their fluid-life are seen in the manner of, first, shedding their sap by
the freezing activity of the coldness of the wind, which then sets the stage
for the shriveling activity of the dryness.
But if this
‘wind’ is capable of the said freezing shriveling activity, is it not because
we are looking at a movement not unlike the one witnessed in ‘The year is
withering,’ where animate properties have been transferred to an otherwise
lifeless object? Is it not precisely because this ‘wind’ is possessive of an
unsuspected secret vitality, dark and sinister—for is it not its ‘cold dry’
nature that has initiated all the deadness, all this dryness that pervade ‘The
Dry Season’? Are we not looking precisely at a similar transference of
properties from an animate object, ‘Men,’ to the inanimate ‘wind,’ so that
henceforth it is the ‘Men’ who are rendered inert, passive, and non-vital,
while the ‘wind’ now speaks ‘secrets’ having been animated by the new acquired
vitality, including the particularly speech-capacities of ‘Men,’ ‘secrets’ to
which they now do the listening, they ‘overhear’? What we find, therefore, is
that the wind has been communicated such features as /+animate/, /+human/, for
the second feature is the only condition of the possibility of its verbalizing
‘secrets’ to which the ‘Men stand under eaves/ And overhear.’ Yet these
properties are also shared by the ‘half-bare trees,’ for in the economy of the
poem, these ‘secrets’ are too ‘Of the half-bare trees’ (line 6).
By the
second stanza of the poem ‘dryness’ itself has gained the tangible materiality
we have been seeing in some of the non-tangible objects of stanza 1. For ‘The
grasses are tall and tinted’ (line 7) with ‘Straw-gold hues of dryness’ (line
8), and the alliterative /t/ sound in ‘tall and tinted’ punctuates the sense of
the colouring process of the grasses, as by the tick-tick movement of a brush
on an artist’s canvass. But the paint for this ‘tint[ing]’ of the grasses in
‘Straw-gold hues’ is ‘dryness,’ whereby the features /+liquid/, /+miscible/,
ordinarily associated with colour-paint, is passed on to it. The stylistic
relevance of this transference is, of course, obvious, for it is only under
this condition that ‘dryness’ can be, that is, is applied, as ‘Straw-gold hues’
and the ‘grasses… tinted’ thereby. The sense of ‘dryness’ having gained liquid
materiality appears to have lingered further down the second stanza: ‘And the
contracting awryness,/ Of the dusty roads a-scatter/ With pools of colourful
leaves’(lines 9-11). After the ‘tinting’ of the grasses in line 7 in the
variegated ‘hues’ of dryness, the variegatedness of the colour-mixing and tinting has,
apparently, resulted in ‘the contradicting awryness’ of the dust-ridden roads
which become the ultimate repository of the ‘colourful leaves.’ And these
leaves are deposited as ‘pools,’ revamping the sense of the feature /+liquid/
it already has acquired.
But ‘the
contradicting awryness,/ Of the dusty roads a-scatter’ not only ‘With pools of
colourful leaves;’ they ‘a-scatter’ also ‘With ghosts of the dreaming
year’(line 12). This line, almost forcibly, takes us back to the first stanza,
for there is where we encounter year for the first time, and in an uncommon
relation to ‘withering;’ and if here now we encounter it as ‘dreaming,’ it can
only be an extension of the already initiated pattern by which ‘year’ is
perceived as possessing the feature /+animate/, and additionally now /+human/,
a feature of course already perceptible in stanza 1, if we make enough room for
the transference of properties among the leaves, trees, the year, and Men
alike. And in the first stanza too is where we glimpse the activity that
accounts, can account, for the scattering of, and the consequent littering with
‘leaves’ of the ‘dusty roads,’ that accounts too for the roads being a-scatter
‘with ghosts of the dreaming year,’ since it is in the first stanza that we
find ‘the wind/ Blow[ing] down leaves’ (lines 1-2). What remains to be
accounted for is the logic of the ‘ghosts of the dreaming year’ being scattered
in the manner of the ‘colourful leaves.’ Which again takes us to our argument
that there is a lingering communication of features and properties between the
items ‘leaves,’ ‘trees’ and so on in the first stanza. For if here we are
looking at ‘The year… withering,’ is it not precisely because it has come to
partake of the nature of the leaves, because ‘The year is withering’ like the
leaves, or more radically, that ‘The year is withering’ a leaf?
The ‘ghosts
of the dreaming year’ may also have been implicated in the ‘secrets’ which the
‘Men stand under eaves’ to overhear in stanza 1. For if these secrets are ‘Of
the cold dry wind’ and the same ‘wind’ we have demonstrated is the force behind
the roads being ‘a-scatter/ With pools of colourful leaves/ With ghosts of the
dreaming year,’ does it not appear then how the otherness of these ‘ghosts’ is implicated and related to the
‘secrets’?
The
irruptive impulsiveness of the hyperactivity that dominates the third and final
stanza of the poem is not totally unconnected to this otherness raised regarding the ‘ghosts of the dreaming year,’ ‘the
secrets/ Of the cold dry wind,’ for once this hyperactivity is initiated, there
is no stopping it, no interfering with it resultants: ‘And soon, soon the
fires,/ The fires will begin to burn,/ The hawk will flutter and turn/ On its
wings and swoop for the mouse,/ The dogs will run for the hare,/ The hare for
its little life.’ We are looking at something not unlike the setting of a lone
dying capsule of ember amid a bunch of highly combustible matter. The ember is
vitalized and the blazing result can only be stopped by the flames wholly
exhausting every single tiny piece of the combustible matter. And in the
figures of the ‘leaves’ which have known the ‘withering’ activity of the
shriveling dying year, known the dark, sinister operation of ‘the cold dry
wind,’ known the ‘tinting’ shading of the ‘Straw-gold hues of dryness,’ and
ultimately are scattered pool-like upon the ‘awryness/ Of the dusty roads,’
there is not lacking such volatile combustible matter that may readily be
chanced upon by the subtle ghost-like ‘secrets’ of ‘the wind,’ so that this
wind, that all along is seen to be only in the activity of destruction, of
drying up and sapping of fluid-life, is not unlikely to initiate, not
altogether incapable of initiating, in this final movement, ‘the fires,/… to
burn’ up and consummate the annihilation process, even as the lone dying ember
of our analogy.
The sense
of the irreversibility of this process, once set in motion, is heightened by
the patterns of repetition found in this last stanza, as in: ‘the fire,/ The
fires will begin to burn,/… The dogs will run for the hare,/ The hare for its
little life.’ This is at the level of graphology, a level already seen to be
operational even from the poem’s very first stanza. In fact, the whole
structure of the poem is such that the ‘withering’ process inaugurated in the
foremost line is really only consummated in the last, evidenced by the
consistent patterns of repetition throughout the poem. In stanza 1 ‘Men stand
under eaves’ overhearing the secrets ‘Of the cold dry wind,/ Of the half-bare
trees;’ in stanza 2 the awryness of the dusty roads ‘a-scatter/ With pools of
the colourful leaves,/ With ghosts of the dreaming year;’ and in stanza 3 the
repetitions have gained in amplitude by the introduction of more frequent
parallelism, and at the level of phonology, alliterations as /s/ in ‘And soon,
soon,’ /f/ in ‘ the fires,/ The fires,’ /b/ in ‘begin to burn,’ /t/ in ‘flutter
and turn,’ /w/ in ‘wings and swoop,’ and so on. Of course at the level of
phonology still, the rhymes in ‘leaves’ and ‘eaves’(stanza 1), ‘dryness’ and
‘awryness’(2), ‘burn’ and ‘turn’(3) are taken in . These, together with all the
other elements considered, work, as in a synergy, to endow the poem with its
steady sustained rhythm from the inaugural ‘withering’ process in the poem to
the mad restive consummation of ‘The Dry Season.’
No comments:
Post a Comment