Sing to Me in Tongues of Fire

English 205
13 April  2010

Sing to Me in Tongues of Fire

    The oldest shared human experience is gathering around a fire.  Once gathered around the fire—for protection against what lurks in the darkness beyond reach of the fire's light—the oldest shared human interaction is the telling of stories.  These earliest human stories regard our place as humans in relation to the mutually non-exclusive worlds of nature and of the mysterious unknown.  It is in the liminal space where these two worlds come together and separate where we find the source of all human science, religion, story, and poetry.  In that space then, the fire becomes is the metaphor for the source of what is knowable among the mystery, and what is knowable is related person to person through the stories told.  Here is the beginning of the oral tradition which would, thousands of years along in human legacy, become the poetry of our culture.  Not the poetry of the written page, to be pontificated upon from towers of glass and steel, nor read silently in hip and trendy cafés of the Lower East Side, but the poetry of sound and movement, of science and nature, of oral traditional, of what Jimmie Killingsworth called, "the poetry of the body."  Dr. Killingsworth uses this phrase in direct application of the work of Walt Whitman, and it is with Whitman where we enter into the stream of oral poetic tradition.  First, we make the journey backwards, upstream towards that source of early humans gathered around a fire to tell stories of the things beyond the reach of their kenning, what evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins calls "the river out of Eden" (qtd. in Drout 269), to discover anaphora as one of the key devices in making the leap from oral tradition to the written word, before a slingshot return to Whitman in order to follow the wake of his influence on those downstream from him.

    As we venture forth from this metaphoric realm of original stories, it is apropos to note that Whitman begins one of his better known poems with the titular line, "I sing the Body electric."  In doing this, he deliberately invokes one of the earliest-known epic poems to have made that leap from oral to written tradition: Homer's The Odyssey ("Sing to me of the man, O Muse" (Homer)).  Whitman is well aware of his place along the river of tradition and displays in the majority of his work, as displayed by his intricate use of cadence; of meter.  As Michael D. C. Drout observes, "One of the major features of any traditional poetic style is meter, however construed (whether by stress, quantity, syllable count, and other tradition-dependent criteria). Meter serves as an important feature of poetic, traditional language" (286-287).  Even though Whitman does not use intentional rhyme scheme, his meter is precise and carefully composed to reflect the traditional referentiality where his work resides.  Drout goes on to say that "if the meter is a marked feature of the poetry, then it is likely to be imitated, and in fact this is exactly what we see across oral traditions: meter is [...] one of the tests of traditionally of poetry" (287).

    This use of repetition is integral to oral storytelling.  Repetition in this manner is used not merely for alliteration but as a mnemonic to serve the purpose of iteration.  This can be seen in works ranging from The Iliad's seemingly endless "Catalogue of Ships" (which serves to familiarize the audience with the participants of the conflict) to the Torah's genealogical lists of who begat whom (which acquaints the audience with the integral ancestral heritage of the protagonists), to the religious refrain that begins each Sura of the Qur'an.  This sort of repetition shows the importance of the information given.  According to Drout, "important elements are more likely to be able to be re-transmitted and thus spread to other individuals. Thus this cultural poetics helps to explain how information gets put into and accessed from what Maurice Halbwachs in 1950 called the 'collective memory'" (283).  A most effective way to illustrate this is in the use of anaphora—a device Whitman excelled at and used often.

    John Miles Foley points out, as quoted by Drout, that anaphora can extend "beyond the poetic line into formula, scene, and theme."  Given this observation, we can easily find examples in Whitman's work of anaphoric themes (e.g. death, nature, the body).  But in using anaphora strictly in the verbal sense, it may just as easily be understood as to why it originated in the oral tradition: such repetition reduces the demands on cognitive ability to memorize a poem or story.  Since, according to both Drout and Foley—and indirectly by the research of Dawkins—such examples can be found in most every language and culture, we could look back at Dawkins' citation of the river flowing out of Eden to consider his hypothesis that such repetitions are a result of natural process, and part of the make up of human genetics.  This recalls our earlier point from Killingsworth, that Whitman's verse is a "poetry of the body," an idea Amitai Avi-Ram expounds upon at the beginning of his essay, "The Body and the Simulacrum."  "Traditional metrical forms," Avi-Ram tells us, "work by invoking in the reader a clear sense of rhythm, might more properly be called 'poetry of the body.'"  He continues, extending this concept to "ballads, hymns, nursery rhymes, and jingles [which] all seem to invite in the reader a sympathetic response to their rhythms in a way that can be and often is directly reflected in movements and feelings in the body" (93-94)  It is Avi-Ram's conclusion that Whitman's verses:

can be understood not as a simple liberation of the body but as a shifting of the body from a realm of direct experience available through palpable and audible musical rhythms in poetry toward an imaginary item which has only a problematic relation to the body itself, a being whose existence can only be inferred by thought. (94)

This being of thought is akin to the idea of the poetic body's muscle memory; in hearing the anaphoric repetition and the cadence of the verse, the body responds to and remembers that rhythm.  It is that memory that is exercised when repeating or re-reading that poem at a later time.

    But if Whitman's cadence and repetition are remnants of the oral tradition predating Homer, what evidence of a tradition exist leading up to his work?  Whitman certainly did not develop a spontaneous act of aesthetics and suddenly manifest this poetic device in the mid 19th Century after it lay dormant for 27 centuries.  As was stated above, Whitman was (forgive the pun) well versed in knowing his heritage.  Working back from Whitman's own age, we will cite three examples in the English language of works using this "poetry of the body"—the devices of alliterative cadence and anaphora.

    Not long before Whitman began his poetic career, the American Romantic Edgar Allan Poe often used (and some could rightfully argue, committed the perfection of it) anaphora, particularly in his poem "The Bells."  Poe not only uses anaphora to perfection in this poem, but uses the form of the poem itself to resemble the subject matter, with each successive verse he describes the bells building from tinkling sleigh bells to the deafening crescendo of a death knell.  Examine: (verse 1) "To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells, bells, bells, /Bells, bells, bells - / From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells."  (Verse 2) "To the swinging and the ringing / Of the bells, bells, bells, / Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells - To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!"  (3) "Of the bells, / Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells - / In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!"  Until, at last, in the fourth verse, the clamor is almost palpable—bringing us back to the idea of poetry as calling for the body to physically respond with movement:

Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells -
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells -
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

It is such an effect that following an aural rendition, that silence consumes the ear in the absence of the poetic chant.

    Another, briefer, example of this technique of repetition and sound, comes from William Blake in his penultimately famous poem, "Tyger."  His use of anaphroa is not only shown in the words, but also in the punctuation (emphasis mine):

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

    William Shakesphere, bringing poetry to stage presentations in a manner befitting the oral tradition of acting out stories for dramatic effect in the opening scene of Julius Caesar, when Marullus (somewhat rhetorically) asks after Flavius, "And do you now put on your best attire? / And do you now cull out a holiday? / And do you now strew flowers in his way / That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood?"  In this example, the lines themselves do not necessarily call to the body to respond, but instead, the description is of a physical reaction within the body of the subject (Pompey's blood).

    Having stepped out of poetry into the narrative of dramatic theatre, we can reverse our chronological journey, and jump into the wake of Whitman's anaphoric influence, landing squarely in the middle of more blood (Revolutionary France) resulting from the pen of a English literary giant, Charles Dickens (again, emphasis mine).  "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair..."

    A bridge between Dickens and Whitman, between England and America, can be found in the personage of T. S. Eliot.  Though there are several examples of anaphora in "The Waste Land," it is his use of this device in the infamous conclusion to "The Hollow Men" which is of interest here.  "Here we go round the prickly pear / Prickly pear prickly pear..." sounds like a nursery rhyme which calls to the body for response; to, perhaps, literally dance around this poetic prickly pear cactus.  The verse offers one of the most unforgettable conclusions in poetic lore, "Between the desire / And the spasm / Between the potency / And the existence / Between the essence / And the descent / Falls the Shadow... / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."  In a few short, starkly cadenced lines, we've been lead through idea, reality, conception, birth, and finally, not just death of a single body, but the death of the world, the ultimate call which leaves no chance for a bodily reply.

    This conjuring of massive annihilation makes the step from Eliot in the the early 20th Century, to Elie Weisel's description of holocaust in the middle of the century particularly apt.  In another use of anaphora calling to the body to respond, Weisel uses his phrase repeatedly in his narrative memoir, Night, to tell of how annihilation of many bodies caused the death of his God and his hope:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.  Never shall I forget that smoke.  Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.  Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.  Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.  Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.  Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself.  Never.

Additionally, there is a trait in this similar to that of Poe's—the form of the piece resembling what it describes.  "Seven times cursed and seven times sealed," is invoked in the first of seven sentences, all of which begin with the binding phrase.  What Weisel does is not only invoke the wrath of God in his Biblical (Torahian?) narrative style, but he enacts that seven-fold curse through the idea of words as being magical, as is illustrated not only in the Book of Genesis from Weisel's religion (Tetragrammaton: the unutterable Name of God), but a common trait throughout myriad mythologies from Chinese belief in words having come from the web spinnings of spiders, to the Egyptian never speaking their secret names so as to prevent another from holding power over them.  Wiesel spells out the curse in words, sentencing them to the page.

    Between the time of Weisel's experiences and his publishing them, the poet Allen Ginsberg produced a work that shares so many similarities and connections to Whitman as to be almost innumerable.  The very title of Howl is easily seen to be connective with Whitman's "barbaric yawp" from the roof tops of the world (an image that, itself, appears in Ginsberg's magna opus).  The style and device connection is even more evident when Ginsberg, 46 lines in a row and more than a dozen additional to that, uses the pronoun/verb combination "who..." "...vanished/wandered/lit/studied/loaned/thought/jumped/lounged/disappeared/reappeared/burned/distributed/broke/bit/howled," to cite a few.  Ginsberg also is a poet who performed his work, not merely as readings from a page, but enacted with improvasational inflictions, music, and with bodily response to the poetry's call for movement.

    That call for movement from the sound of words itself reveals itself in the latter part of the 20th Century through the lyric poetry of modern music.  Where modern poetry has become introverted, read in silence far more often than aloud—moreso now than had ever been in the past thanks in large part to other forms of media as well as a change in attitude towards poetry itself.  This is where some songwriters have become far more the voices of poetic literature and oral traditoional than do the modern writers who claim the mantle of being poets.  Citing examples is intimidatingly plentiful, but we shall focus on an singular case, and one which is directly and texturally inspired by Ginsberg's Howl.

    Roger Waters, on the Pink Floyd album Animals, displays his poetic tradition proudly. On the lengthy song, "Dogs," eleven lines in a row all begin with a phrase that appears to be asking a question, but like its forebearer in Howl, instead makes an uncomfortable state of simple, if poetic, fact with a pronoun/verb combination: "Who was born in a house full of pain. / Who was trained... / Who was told... / Who was broken... / Who was fitted... / Who was given... / Who was breaking... / Who was only... / Who was ground... / Who was found... / Who was dragged down by the stone."  This despairing alliterative repetition is repeated in Waters' successive work, The Wall.  Anaphora shows up numerous times in not only the lyrical verses, but extends to repeated musical phrases—leitmotifs—as well.  Given our theme in the 20th Century examples, one verse in particular stands out.  Waters tells us sadly:

I've got a little black book with my poems in.
I've got a bag with a toothbrush and a comb in.
When I'm a good dog they sometimes throw me a bone in.
I've got elastic bands keeping my shoes on.
I've got those swollen hand blues.
I've got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from.
    ...
I've got a pair of Gohill's boots
And I've got fading roots.

Amidst a rock opera concerning a child who grew up without a father (who was killed in World War II), we see this ancient device of anaphora and repeatative alliteration citing the exclusively modern paraphenalia of elastic bands, television, and a trendy shop for purchasing the latest in foot fashion wear, as well as the writing of poetry itself.

    In making this journey, we have seen how a poetic device which began shortly after humans first gathered around a fire as a memnonic to be able to recite the stories heard from others as stories of our own became a means to relate history, convery aspects of religion, instruct, entertain, warn, and finally to become the memnoic for silently calling our own bodies to respond to the memory of cadenced words when we recall, to ourselves, the lyrics to a favorite song.  The connecting historical tradition of  anaphora, rhythm, and the oral tradition of poetic storytelling has journeyed a long way since flowing out of that distant mythic Eden in our collective distant past, and splashes us continually, even right where we are sitting now.

Bibliography

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Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.

Waters, Roger. "Dogs." Animals. Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd, 1977. Album.

—. "Nobody Home." The Wall. Pink Floyd. Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, James Guthrie, Roger Waters, 1979. Album.

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Wiley, Autrey Nell. "Reiterative Devices in Leaves of Grass." American Literature 1.2 (1929). Literary Reference Center. Web. 21 Mar. 2010.



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