"When I'd had enough of her apple pie": the
when makes it subordinate.
Okay, here's even more offensive.
[LAUGHTER]
"Before I shot my mother, I'd had enough of her apple pie."
That's really offensive because I took the major action
and made that subordinate and then gave
this other trivial thing the engine of the sentence, OK?
But the main thing is that it's hypotactic
because one clause matters more to the sinners
than the other one.
And that's very different from paratactic
where they are all the same.
If you want to learn something about that
would be useful to your own reading and your writing just
use this Lawrence poem, because he goes back and forth
between paratactic sentences and hypotactic sentences.
And guess who gets the paratactic sentences?
The snake gets the paratactic sentences, absolutely.
The snake gets the paratactic sentences.
He gets all those subject and verb
or he gets a compound where we have many verbs.
And the verb phrases then the clauses
are arranged so that they are all equal to one another.
The poor idiot who is telling us this story and he
throws the thing at the snake, the voices of his education
have thoroughly entered his head and he can barely
speak without using hypotaxis, that
is to say without subordinating one thing to the other.
You cannot take them as equal any more than he can take
the snake as equal to his runt to have the watering hole.
He simply cannot.
And there's a little drama that goes on.
I wish you had look at-- in sentence five there's this--
the other thing that you can sort track
is what's happening with that conjunction
that as is pounding is drinking and that's going to come back
around and in sentence 16 it's not going
to be at the end of the line.
Remember, what it says, as cattle do as drinking cattle do
and that's at the end of the line.
That's tacked on, right?
So he raises his head as cattle do, as drinking cattle do.
You see this little--
you know, this little foot at the end.
OK, look in sentence 16.
It's at the head of the line.
It's where formally you can put it so you will most notice it.
It's also at the head of the sentence
and it's also at the head of the stanza.
He has put it in every possible major place.
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole
and as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders
and entered farther a sort of horror overcame.
There is no hope for the snake at this point in the poem.
Because all of a sudden the snake
who got to have all these actions, all
of those verb sentences, sentence three sentence five,
all that was a snake doing that, the guy was just
standing out there looking at even thinking about it.
The snake got to be in charge of his actions.
Here the snake no longer is in charge of his actions.
How do we know that?
Because this is a subordinating conjunction as.
This doesn't stand alone as a sentence.
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
Lawrence no longer says, and he put his head
in that dreadful hole.
So the snake no longer gets his own independent clause,
the man does.
And as he put his head in that dreadful hole
and as he slowly drew up snake-easing his shoulders,
and entered further, a sort of horror,
that's the subject of the sentence, overcame.
That's the predicate.
In short, behind all the variations
that keep this poem lively and plausible,
there is in fact a solid architecture in the poem:
patterns and repetitions, its structure and pace, the story
of the man and the snake.
Like the Larkin and Justice poems,
that structure is built mainly out of syntax.
Unlike those other poems the Larkin and the Justice,
its shape is neither the rocket launching off
into outer space like cut grass nor the highly symmetrical
ellipse that contains an expansion and [INAUDIBLE]
such as the Justice poem.
Rather this is large scale phrasing with a motif.
No longer strictly musical, no longer pure lyric
that extends and examines a moment of intense feeling,
it shoulders a narrative, a movement through time.
The poem's plot line is the struggle
between thought and action, civilization and nature.
And the two wildly different kinds of syntax paratactic
and hypotactic impact that struggle.
If it seems that the snake gets all the long sentences
the speaker the shorter ones, it's
not because of snake as long and skinny.
As Lawrence's novels predict, its action,
natural physical sensual action that usually
gets the longer more sensuous paratactic
or compound sentences.
Thought, the voice of my education, the rational brain,
the civilized man is rendered in the more elaborate even if
shorter hypotactic sentences one thing more
important than another.
Hypotaxis contains an imbalance of power.
One clause is subordinated to another clause.
In contrast to the snake action sentences that I was talking
about before, we had all that--
had the list we had the verbs and we
had that irregular I guess what they were pulling behind him.
Instead of that paratactic or compound arrangement
look at sentences 8 through 11.
But must I confess.
I must confess.
There's a fundamental dissonance.
What?
How I liked him.
How glad I was.
Here's another subordination below that, how glad I was,
he had come like a guest in quiet to drink in my water
trough and depart peaceful, pacified,
and thankless into the burning bowels of this earth.
Oh man, this guy has got his fist around the whole thing.
Must I confess?
How much?
I really liked that dude.
If he really liked him why didn't he
put that up at the beginning of the sentence?
I really liked him.
What is all this I'm asking - you see how that does that?
It subordinates what comes behind.
And then look at this little arrangement.
All the other stanzas remember the sentence got its own stanza
not here.
Was it cowardice that I dare not kill him?
Was it perversity that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility to feel so honored.
OK.
These are interrogatives.
They're different kind of sentence that way.
They're an inverted syntax.
And in that anomalous stanza of syntactically independent line
sentences 9 through 11, that inversion gives us
this anaphora of was it, was it, was it lining up
three abstractions cowardice, perversity,
humility, which will be echoed in the poem's very last word
pettiness.
That's what they will come down to.
Also notice the number of subordinate clauses
throughout the passage.
Liking him, being glad, longing to talk to him
a very fine sentiment but they're
not embraced here in the syntax.
And the poems first half, half the sentences
are short and usually hypotactic.
These are the ones controlled by the speaker.
Meanwhile, the long compound snake sentences
are full of predicates of equal powerful actions
of active verbs.
He lifted his hand and looked at me
and flickered his two forked tongue and mused and stooped
and drank.
Increasingly though even though sentences
began to include subordinate clauses,
the first after but then intruding before the verbs
until that sentence 16 that I already pointed out
to you where the default assignment is flipped me
the snake is subordinated to the man.