All right.
So pattern then in the strict, four syllable 2-foot line.
That's a formal choice.
But variation to the pattern also in how the stresses
are distributed.
But here's what makes the stanza really perfect in my mind,
not that formal arrangement brilliant, though, it is.
All that pattern embedded in the syntax, in the meter,
in the rhyme, is finally overturned.
It is undermined.
It is subverted by an enormous asymmetry.
The tightly-unified stanza itself is incomplete,
open-ended, unbalanced.
It does not make sense.
Cut grass lies frail.
Brief is the breath.
Mown stalks exhale.
Long long the death.
Long long the death, what?
You see?
The mind is still going, where's the predicate?
Where's the predicate?
Where's the verb?
It doesn't make any sense.
So here, you have this closed arrangement
that's highly patterned and the syntax
is pulling it out into the ether.
The syntax is going somewhere else.
And I is said this is enormous asymmetry, asymmetrical.
A restricted clause makes its noun specific.
It restricts its meaning.
Not every chair, but the chair that blank.
The death in line 4 is a particular death.
It is the death that cut grass dies.
But we have to go across that white space of this stanza
divide to fetch up that limiting modification.
This move is a syntactical match to what immediately preceded
it-- the first sentence, which also
ended on a restrictive clause.
But whereas that first restrictive clause
was only four syllables-- mown stalks exhale.
Which breath is it?
It's the breath that mown stalks exhale.
This one-- this restricted clause
will span two stanzas and 44 syllables straight all the way
to the end of the poem.
Nothing in the symmetrical, patterned,
bounced, compressed three lines that
open the poem has prepared us for this second sentence, which
is going to blow the meter right out of the water.
The linguistic principle at work is a common one in English.
It's what the linguists call "right branching."
And if that interests you, there's
a very good account of it in the Steven Pinker
book that's available.
The Language Instinct.
Right branching.
That image of a gravity-defying tree
where no branches over there, but just like all
branching out over here, is borne out
in Larkin's highly asymmetrical second sentence.
Its precariousness becomes even more apparent
if you think of right branching syntax
as a mobile hanging from the ceiling.
The fundament-- subject and predicate--
that's the bar from which is hung a modifier, a word
or a phrase.
And from that modifier, another one.
And from that one, another one.
And we could go on, and on, and on.
That's called-- that's what the linguist called "right
branching."-- right branching syntax.
Larkin's is an especially precarious mobile,
because it hangs not from the fundament, which has
after all a missing predicate.
He just left that out.
But one rung down from that restrictive or subordinate
clause, and it combines right branching
with more of the parallelism that opened the poem.
The death that it does in the white hours.
Which white hours?
The hours of young leaf June with chestnut flowers,
with hedges snow-like strewn, with white lilac
bowed, with [INAUDIBLE] of Queen Anne's lace,
and with that high builded cloud moving at summer's pace.
All those withs, those ats, those are prepositions.
So as soon as they go in there, that's parallelism.
These parallel pieces of syntax--
you don't have any trouble knowing what they mean.
Do you?
It seems to me that this is a very accessible poem,
and the way it gets there is because your brain is
processing that going 'fine'.
With this thing.
And with this thing.
The point here that I want to make is that all of that
describes this secondary business.
It's all part of something that is subordinate.
Is not robbing the sense.
Still with me?
Larkin is terribly sly here with so many prepositions
tethered to the different spots in the restricted clause.
And some of them placed at the head of the line
and some of them missing.
And each of their phrase is punctuated
literally or in pause.
And the last of them dangling, not
from the subordinate predicate, but from a participle
from moving.
It is easy to misperceive the reference.
The five withs belong not to the noun
June, even though the return to dimeter for two lines
would have us think so, of young late June
with chestnut flowers.
Rather, these parallel phrases are adverbs
attached to the verb chestnut flowers,
hedges, lilac, Queen Anne's lace and cloud,
are all also dying right alongside the mown stalks.
He doesn't leave out those withs to confuse us.
We are not confused.
Again, parallelism in the syntax and in the lines
implies what has been left out.
You don't have to say, with, with with, with, with,
with the beginning of every line in the last stanza.
We supply it.
We know it's there.
Elision also, dropping some of those prepositions,
has allowed him to correct the potential boredom of a list.
Lists are always boring.
This is a way to vary it just a little bit.
It also gives him a stanza three some similarities, some pattern
back to stanza one.
Putting an adjective and a noun at the beginning of the line,
you remember cut grass and mown stalks?
Now, we've got white lilac, lost lanes.
So it ties that stands up back to the first one.
It gives us a return back to the metrical pattern
that he started with white, lilac, bowed.
And another initial spondee, lost lanes,
that it sort of rhymed or connected back to the earlier
long, long.
These echoes all restore pattern.
I'll keep the palm glued to the page, but not enough.
Not even with the rhyme scheme to overtake
the galloping syntax.
Syntax stays in charge of what musicologists,
like Robert Jourdain called "large-scale phrasing"
conscripting the line to parse the chunks for us.
And the stanza to organize them.
Hurtling toward the final elaboration of the cloud, which
is the briefest item in the list, which is to say,
the shortest lived.
This arrangement, this architecture
is the essential drama of the poem's composition,
as well as the source of the dynamic shift in tone
from the clipped disinterest of the opening
to the final notes of ennui.
Syntax orchestrates that movement down through the palm.
Larkin knows this.
He is willing to loosen the meter.
He is willing to move away from two beat lines
into three beat lines.
But he consistently reinforces the syntax
by keeping the lines working in concert with it.
They never enjamb across it .
They always, they pause where the syntax normally pauses.
Sometimes with a comma, sometimes there's
no comma there.
But this is the place where we would pause if we were
reading this as a sentence.
So the lines then are what I like to call "consonant."
They're consonant with the syntax
helping us parse the sentence as it opens out
or rather opens up.
The camera that had focused down at the beginning of the poem
onto the grass at our feet now points upward.
Accusingly, it seems to me at the sky.
Syntax and this poem is in charge.
What it demonstrates is the necessary dynamic relationship
between syntax and line that comprises
the prosody of almost all memorable poetry in English,
whether in fixed forms traditional forms, rhymes,
forms, forms, needed forms, or what
we like to call free verse.
The relationship between the sentence and the lines.
Still with me?