Quite nice; the shape effects how it 'feels'. It is after all just convention that we write like this

and

                                             not

                                                                                      like

                                                                                                                                this


which has quite an interesting effect. I suspect there's some kind of left brain/right brain whatnot going on there, some languages scan from right to left, and it would be interesting to look at this in children: presumably, when they start writing its all over the place and the convention of orderly arrangment gets imposed over the top of that.

I phoned the local Community Centre today and there is a Poetry Appreciation group on a Thursday morning.  But that's tap class day and nothing takes precedence over tap dancing!

To A Fellow Poet

You scratch my back, I like your taste it's true,
But, Mister, I won't do the same for you,
Though you have asked me twice. I have taste too.

                                                      (Thom Gunn)

A poem and pint,
A poem and pint,
That's what I undoubtedly need.

A poem and pint,
A poem and pint,
Rhythym and beer,
That's clearly for me.

A poem and pint,
Such devilish fun,
Let's see what mischief transpires.

A poem and pint,
A poem and pint,
Nutritional lit-erary.

I must confess I forgot.

I wonder if you're who I'm starting to think you must be, by the way ...

Just perfect, tinners.

I didn't much like the sound of that poetry group you mentioned either, Susan. The Open University course looks good, although I can imagine it might be frustrating (maybe not, though!) to sit through all the introductory seminars on rhyme, syllable count etc. Not that those things aren't important, but I find them more interesting if I look at them at the same time as thinking about more subtle issues, often ones specific to the poem in hand.

I originally intended this thread as a place where people would introduce poems and then talk about/analyse them a bit. There's no reason why we couldn't still do that, time permitting.

The concept of 'voice' mentioned in that Open University prospectus is often an interesting starting-point. The Eliot above is unusual in that not only does the poet seem to be adopting a very particular kind of voice (the voice of wisdom, but also the voice that shows how wise it is by rubbishing the idea of wisdom), but there are also at least two other voices: the two people depicted in conversation and represented in direct speech.

Direct speech is quite unusual for a poem, if you think about it compared to a novel for example, and it's particularly unusual to have each 'character' speaking for so long at a time. In fact, 'conversation' wasn't really the right word for me to have used. The characters are represented as if speaking to one another, but of course they're really speaking to us, with words that Eliot has given them. Something else that's unusual, given that this is direct speech, is that we're never told the speakers' names, or even who they are.

One of them is the poet - we know that much, as it's signalled very simply by the 'I said' and 'he said' indicators - and it's worth noting that this is only possible because the 'normal' voice of the poem is also a first-person voice. The poem says 'I' not only in the direct speech reported, e.g. 'The wonder that I feel is easy', but also in the 'present tense' of the poet who reports the conversation, e.g. 'I met one walking' (line 9).

So, the poem contains two 'I's and a 'he'. One of the 'I's is the voice speaking the poem, and seems to be Eliot himself (although there's no reason why a poet couldn't write a poem as if it was spoken 'in character' by someone else - there are several examples of this by Robert Browning, e.g. 'My Last Duchess'). The other 'I' is the poet's former self; he only speaks three lines ('The wonder that I feel is easy, / Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak: / I may not comprehend, may not remember'), but he is implicitly present throughout the rest of the passage, as the man who the 'he' is addressing in his long speech about regret and forgiveness.

The 'he' seems to be regarded by the 'I' as a wise person and as an example to look up to, and it might be modelled on W.B. Yeats, an older poet. But of course, the words given to him are given to him by Eliot, and in fact the way he speaks is not terribly different from the way Eliot himself speaks when trying to impart wisdom elsewhere in the poem (in other sections than the one I've quoted). That's voice for you: an author pretending to be someone else, or controlling the impression he/she gives you of him/herself, in order to achieve an aesthetic effect. A form of role-playing, though less obvious than when an actor takes on a role in a play - and also more flexible, in the potential to move quickly between different voices and different personas.

We are most grateful to Madame Pianist for the two translations of Vladislav Khodasevich (1886 to 1939) the intimate of Andrey Bely. We are particularly struck by these passages (in the two translations). They point to the higher truth of mythology do they not. What a rich body of work Russian poetry is! We are tempted to study the language but are at present busy with the Japanese.