[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
Thanks for coming.
Can you hear me all right?
Can I talk about this level, or a little louder?
Like that?
OK.
So we can do this.
Make sure you have a handout.
You're going to need this.
And I'll just point out to you, I made up a little glossary.
I've been trying to think about syntax now for several years
and figure out a way of talking about it.
And it's very hard to talk about it
without making use of technical terms,
that I, myself, have forgotten what they meant.
And I'd go in the grammar book and try
to look up restricted pause and see what it was.
And I couldn't always even tell from that.
So just for the sake of getting through the points
of the argument that I want to make,
I'm going to have to make some references.
And I had those terms all in the glossary.
I also have three poems on the handout
that I would be looking at per category.
Syntax, syntax the order of the words in the sentence.
The order of the words in a sentence.
It's how we make meaning, OK?
I can take the exact same words that I'm saying now
and scramble them around, and it would be gobbledygook.
You would have no idea what I was
trying to communicate to you.
There are some languages that depend more
on the art of words than other languages.
English is thoroughly dependent on it.
In part because it's no longer a reflexive language.
In other words, the ends of the words
don't tell us the function of the word necessarily.
Sometimes, they do a little bit, like pronouns.
We know whether it's the subject of a sentence,
or we know whether it's an object of the sentence,
a few words do, but mainly not.
In English, it's mainly the order
of the words in the sentence that
tells us how the words are functioning
and allows the words to work together to convey meaning, OK?
Syntax.
What interests me for poets is the fact
that all the evidence seems to show,
and I'll talk about this a little bit,
that we process it in the brain like a rhythm
or like a rhythmic system.
We take syntax in phrases, or in chunks, the same way
that we do with music.
So what that means is for anybody
who's writing a poem in English, the rhythm of the sentence
is your primary rhythmic system.
That's the first one.
And then, against that, or with that,
we add the rhythm of the line.
So that's a little précis of what I'm going to talk about.
I'm going to talk for exactly an hour.
And then if you want to ask questions afterward,
that's probably easier than stopping as I go along.
"Cut Grass."
Page two.
"Cut grass lies frail, brief is the breath, mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death.
It dies in the white hours of young-leafed June
with chestnut flowers, with hedges snowlike strewn,
white lilac bowed, lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
and that high-builded cloud moving at summer's pace."
There were only two sentences in that little Philip Larkin poem.
The first sentence is made of paired independent clauses
yoked by a colon.
An independent clause means a group
of words that has what is called a fundament, a subject,
and a predicate.
And therefore, it can stand alone.
OK?
So, paired independent clauses that
are yoked by a colon, the first of those clauses,
one line long, is 4 syllables.
"Cut grass lies frail."
A compressed, simple declarative sense
that has two adjectives, cut and frail, that flag the fundament.
The fundament is grass, which is the subject, and lies,
which is the predicate.
The second clause also uses the same copula, or linking verb,
is, but with its attached modification.
Line three, it's twice as long.
"Mown stalks exhale", make it twice as
long as that first sentence.
And this time, instead of so-called normal or natural
syntactical order, which always puts the subject first and then
the predicate, this syntax is what we call inverted.
The subject of that sentence is actually breath.
Grief is the breath.
So instead of saying, breath is grief,
that would be that normal order, he flopped it around.
Why would Larkin want to do that?
To switch that around and delay the subject,
other than for the pleasure of that small scale variation,
a way to make line two just a little bit different
from line one, just as good musicians never
play repeated notes at exactly the same dynamic?
One and the next goes is got to be a little bit louder,
a little bit softer, than the one that they just played.
Perhaps, he is already thinking about his next move
in the poem.
His two sentences will be vastly different in length,
only two in the entire poem, remember.
His two sentences will be vastly different in length
in order to tether that energy, which threatens
the poem at every minute.
He needs pattern, some similarities between the two,
a centripetal force to help the rhyme scheme hold
this small lyric poem together.
But those similarities cannot be obvious,
since Larkin is never obvious.
Or boring, because Larkin is never boring.
And short, simple declarative sentences in normal order--
subject, predicate, subject, predicate, subject, predicate--
carry both the advantage of extreme clarity
and the great risk of boring predictability.
By inverting the fundamental subject
and its predicate adjective in the second
and third independent clauses, lines two and four,
he creates a subtle similarity, which is then reinforced
formally by delineation.
All four lines in the first stanza
then can begin with an adjective.
Cut, grief, mown, long.
And those adjectives are exactly syntactically
parallel in lines one and three, cut grass, mown stalks,
and parallel in lines two and four,
grief and long, and thereby, rhyme
the lines syntactically at their heads,
as well as literally at their ends.
Meanwhile, too, lines one and three
are in stopped by punctuation.
Line two is not punctuated, but it's
what I like to call in paused.
The line "break" appears at a natural stopping
place in the syntax.
That little division between the independent
and the subordinate clauses, and this is just a temporary stay,
the sentence completes itself in the very next line
with the rhymed and meter stanza, which brings us back
to a better reason for that inversion in line two.
It allows an even more radical inversion in its parallel line,
line four.
A clause that not only reverses subject and linked modifier
but just leaves the link out altogether.
So syntactically weak, the little copula, so unworthy
of utterance, is, is, is.
And the pattern here implies it clearly enough.
Unbeknownst to you, your brain is inferring
this actual grammatical clause with its curiously transitive
subordinate verb, the death that cut grass dies is long.
That's the translation your brain is making.
This is not unclear.
Larkin is free to repeat the adjective, delay the subject,
get rid of the predicate altogether,
and supply modification far too long and elaborate.
Which is to say, the entire rest of the poem
ever to have been jammed in between subject
and a weak little verb in the normal order.
These particular syntactical choices, parallelism,
inversion, and elision have helped
to make what seems to me one of the most perfect stanzas
in the English language.
Cut grass lies frail.
Grief is the breath, mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death.
It dies.
You see, we have no third, there's
no additional predicate.
But you don't need it, you fill it in.
In a mere 16 syllables, he gives us
four clauses, the syntactical unit of greatest integrity,
all of them matched by where the adjective is placed,
all of them exactly the same length, four syllables long,
three of them independent clauses, thus, syntactically
powerful, and two of those paired
by this inversion of switching around
where the subject appears.
Meanwhile, there's masterful small scale music,
the fabric of monosyllables, the full masculine rhyme,
the dense alliteration of L's, and S's, and B's.
And the meter, which is both steady and subtly varied.
That compressed opening line encloses
four stressed syllables in a row.
Cut, grass, lies, frail.
We call this two spondees, that's
the name for that, where both syllables in the foot
are stressed.
Line two is framed by alliterated
stresses, grief and breath, grief
is the breath, falling and then rising.
Line three is akin to both of those, mown stops, stress,
stress, exhale.
And it has an initial spondee of line one.
And it has the closing iamb of line four.
And this arrangement is then repeated.
Mown stops Exhale, long, long, the breath.
That's exactly the same rhythm.
Exactly the same rhythm.
Same number of syllables, right?
All of this is monosyllabic.
That's pattern, that's pattern.
It's working on your brain, whether you notice it or not.
Cut grass lies frail.
Brief is the breath, mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death.
You hear it?
That's a little musical line.
OK?
Four stresses and then a pair of stresses at the beginning,
at the end, and then two and rising,
and then two and rising.
Pattern, pattern, pattern, and pattern,
and this pattern in the syntax that's reinforced by the line.
Are you with me?
Can you speak a little bit louder?
We have a definite hum back here from the air conditioning.
OK.
[INAUDIBLE]
Thank you.
Sure.
And holler at me if I lower it up again.