In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche
reminds us that the Greeks honored two gods of art--
Apollo, God of light and reason, order and clarity,
and Dionysus, God of wine, orgy, rebirth, chaos, and life force.
Lawrence is nothing, if not Dionysian.
An apostle of life force, an asymmetry,
that's the thematic burden of most of what he wrote,
including this poem.
The snake does live after all in a black hole.
We can see it first.
And Lawrence makes this easy by assigning each sentence
in this poem, with only three exceptions, its own closed
stanza.
We can see it first, this Dionysian impulse,
in the tremendous variety in the length of the sentences.
Phrases.
This is what makes-- this makes what Jourdain calls describing
music a series of highly irregular sonic shapes
across the page.
And after Justice's paradigms of line and stanza,
the syntax here seems at first an unchecked centrifugal force
in cult, out of control.
But there are restraints aplenty and a different kind
of pattern.
Those also supplied solely by the syntax and not by the mind.
For instance, nothing really is more orderly
or more predictable and more Apollonian than a list.
And a long compound sentence, that
has a whole bunch of predicates in it,
like sentence number three--
and you can go by the numbers, because that's also
the numbers of his stanza--
is a list.
In the poems first extended series of actions,
the snake reach, trail, rested, sipped, drank.
This is already pretty lively as a list goes.
Transitive verbs are always more active than intransitive verbs.
They have power over an object, after all.
Here, normally, intransitive verbs
like trailed and rested, or just stand there by themselves,
are made transitive and made more powerful by giving them
direct objects.
He trailed his slackness, he rested his throat.
These predicates are then followed by normally transitive
verbs, sipped and drank, set an edgy tension
when their direct object, water, is elided and withheld.
This linguistic vigor is underscored
by putting those verbs all in the same place, readily
available as tethers at the heads of each line.
Meanwhile, syntax gives them all the same function and placement
in the sentence.
Apollo would approve of this, so would Donald Justice.
But Lawrence makes sure that each of those verbs
has anaphora.
It's at the head of the line.
Each of those verbs also pulls a different weight load.
There's a syntactical chunk come in behind it
that's rhythmically different from the others.
And we reinforce that, or that is reinforced by the line,
which is always consonant and never goes
against a chunk of the sentence.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
and trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down
over the edge of the stone trough,
and rested his throat upon the stone bottom.
Do you hear that?
OK.
We've just got three, this is just a list.
There's a compound sentence, three verbs,
he reach down, and trailed, and rested.
That's it, it's a little list.
But this list feels enormously varied.
And that's because it's varied in the phrase--
the length of the phrase, the syntactical chunk
that follows it.
Do you hear that?
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
and trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down
over the edge of the stone trough.
That's all part of this whole modifying the trail.
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom.
The first of those chunks is 14 syllables long.
The second one is 20 syllables long.
The third is only 11.
And then the fourth, he sipped with his straight mouth,
was the shortest at six syllables.
That's interesting.
That's rhythmically interesting.
You see?
Because it's being held stable by repeating that--
making that list out of the verbs,
and then it's like Beethoven.
And we just-- there's no way to know where he's going to go.
And it's tremendously varied in the length
of those musical phrases, the length of those chunks.
There's more subtle variations to come.
Halfway through that sentence, and this time, before the verb
it will modify, Lawrence inserts a subordinate clause
where the water had dripped from the tap in a small clearness.
Then he repeats a so far elided subject pronoun, he sipped.
He drops the conjunction, the and,
and he ends the overall list with a verb phrase,
the same number of syllables as the first one.
Softly drank through his straight gums,
into his slack long body.
But Lawrence likes his lesser resolutions
a little off-balance.
And so, he frames that last verb phrase
with adverbs, made obvious at the start of the lines--
softly, silently.
Thus, we get pattern, from the parallel verb phrases,
simultaneous with variation from the length
and structure of those phrases.
This is, in short, what Frost called a vital sentence.
It enacts something.
And the something is the snake's powerful ease within its body.
Therefore, these longer compound action
sentences comprising an increasing number of verbs.
There are five verbs in sentence three.
There are six verbs in sentence five.
And there are eight verbs in sentence 15,
if we count the two infinitives, but also,
shorter and shorter syntactical chunks being dragged along
by those words.
Check out the links of verb phrases in sentence five, which
is also stanza five, it's the next action stanza.
He lifted his head from his drinking, 9.
And looked at me vaguely, 6.
And flickered his two forked tongue from his lips, 10.
And mused a moment, 5, and stooped, 2, and drank
a little more, 6.
OK?
Those are just a little-- those are the verb phrases.
Varied, and also camouflaged, disguised by a reframe tacked
on to the first two phrases, as cattle do,
as drinking cattle do.
Disguised also by lineation, which chunks together flickered
and mused, stooped and drank.
And disguised by the addition to the last phrase of two
verbless lines of right branching modification
being earth-browned all the way down through Etna smoking.
But it's still a list.
If we strip all that stuff away, it's a list of verb actions.
Meanwhile, this snake action sent as a [INAUDIBLE]
to the previous one and the next one by that last verb,
drank a little more.
It came last in sentence three as well, softly drank
through his straight gums.
But at 15, it will come first embedded in the shortest verb
phrase, he drank enough, to get us another grocery
list of actions.
He drank enough and lifted his head, and flickered his tongue,
and looked around, and turned his head.
That's boring.
It's boring, because they're all apples.
They're all the same weight and heft, that same length
and rhythm.
Lawrence is never boring.
He doesn't leave them that way.
He varies them with right branching syntax.
And he uses the shortest chunks to anchor a bulge.
It looks like this.
Like that.
He drank enough, five.
And lifted his head dreamily as one who has drunken, 14.
Five syllables, 14 syllables.
And flicking his tongue like a forked knife on the air,
so black, seeming to lick his lips, 20.
And looked around like a god, unseeing into the air.
Great.
14.
What model does it like that?
And slowly turned his head.
Five.
That's an architecture, that is a structure.
That's an architecture of sound, of rhythm,
of that phrasing that's happening, OK?
So we get short chunk, longer chunk, much longer chunk,
that did chunk these sounds, down to little short chunk.
And the whole thing, that arc over the whole thing,
is this long musical phrase like the Beethoven.
OK.
I'm going to skip over some other part here.
One other thing that I want to just point out
to you about the Lawrence poem.
And now, we're going to really use
two very sort of technical terms.
Well, I don't know any way around it.
And the two terms are parataxis and hypotaxis.
Impress your friends at dinner tonight
by using one of these terms.
And the way to remember them, para
as a prefix that means "equal," as in paramutual bet,
as in paralegal, as in parallel is the best way to remember it.
They are the same.
And hypo is like hypodermic, right, under the skin.
So hypo means "less than" and what they refer
to is relationship of clauses.