[APPLAUSE]
Do you want me to summarize and repeat?
[LAUGHTER]
You want to go have a big drink?
What is your plan?
What should we do?
Yeah.
I may have missed it, but in the Larkin poem,
why is there no punctuation at the end of the first stanza?
Why is there none?
Yes.
Because the sentence is not-- the sentence
does not look powerful to me.
Long, long the death.
That's just a sentence fragment.
Well--
Yeah?
Grammar would call for something because long, long the death.
It's wide open.
It dies-- something is necessary at the end of death
to let the rhythm work before stanza two begins.
Well, that is a classical temperament
that is making that comment.
[LAUGHTER]
That's exactly what I'm talking about.
If Justice -- If this were Donald Justice,
he would feel the way that you do.
He would feel the way that you do.
He would feel that to have this open stanza that
is so balanced in the first three lines
and then has a sentence fragment so that you have
to press on to make any sense--
Justice would have found that really painful, I think.
That would be very hard for him.
It's not hard for Larkin because Larkin
knows you are not going to stop at the end of the first stanza.
Doesn't matter his rhyme scheme.
Doesn't matter the meter.
Doesn't matter any of this stuff because everything
in your brain is saying where's the rest of the sentence?
Where's the predicate?
Where is it?
Well, if you don't know in your brain
that you're not going to get it because you'll go back--
your brain will smile.
Long, long-- the death that it dies is long.
That is a full sentence.
When its elided, he doesn't say the is because he
doesn't need to say the is.
Why doesn't he need to say the is?
Because he set up parallel lines.
Cut grass lies frail.
Mown stalks exhale.
They belong together, one in three.
So we expect two and four the kind of belong together.
And in fact, they do.
Brief is the breath.
Long is the death.
We put it in there.
That's parallelism.
That's what that is.
Your brain figures that out, but you don't know yet
that that's what--
I mean, because it could be something else
and you're looking for it.
You're waiting for it.
You're looking for it.
And he counts on that.
That's what pulls you, just like Mr Beethoven.
Just like Mr Beethoven.
He's going to pull you across there.
So that's-- he's doing that.
He's trying to set pattern against asymmetry.
And I dare say, I really think all the great poems
in the English language have a play
between pattern and asymmetry.
If they were nothing but pattern,
they would be mechanical.
They would be mechanical.
So even when we think of something
like strict iambic pentameter, if every line of the poem
were-- if there were nothing in that poem but iambs,
we would fall asleep.
There's nothing for Dionysus in it.
So every poem, to some extent, is
going to have this threatening element, this disordering
principle in it.
And in these particular instances that I chose,
that disordering principle is asymmetry.
Its asymmetry-- is the thing that's off.
Now, you've seen in the Lawrence because he
puts it right up there, right?
All the stanzas are [INAUDIBLE] stanzas are uneven in length,
and even the little pieces of them--they're uneven in length.
So it seems to be, oh, wow, this is just-- err.
There's plenty of pattern in there.
Its that the pattern is submerged,
the asymmetry is put on the surface.
OK, what Larkin does is just the reverse.
He gives you all this nice pattern up there, in the meter,
in the way that sentences are made.
And you know, where the stresses fall, in where he puts
the adjective, all that stuff.
And I think that he does it only so he can undermine it.
And this is going to pull you across.
If you find that intolerable, then this
will not be a poem that you will love.
I love it.
I find it exhilarating, I find it amazing.
I find it undermining.
I find it true to the universe.
I find it just like Beethoven, because I love pattern too.
And I want it.
And I want it regular, I want it regular, every time a pattern--
I want to predict it.
I hate the unknown.
I hate change.
[LAUGHTER]
It seems to be giving it to me, and then, he
pulls you somewhere else.
So to be pulled across that stanza like that
after he set it up--
he don't just do this casually, he doesn't just say,
oh, well, I don't care about quatrains.
He cares very much about quatrains.
He can write goes close quatrains
till the cows come home.
So it's not that this is a mistake,
it's not that he's failed.
No, it seems to me just the opposite.
What I was trying to point out is
how much line one and line three exactly mirror one another.
And line two and line four exactly mirror one another.
So we get brief breath, long death.
We can put the is in there, seems to me.