Lecture 10 ‘Narrative Poetry’
1.
What a story looks/sounds like.
2.
Telling the Story.
3.
Australian Narratives.
4.
Allusion.
5.
Avoiding the Narrative?
6.
Finding the Narrative.
7.
Work Ahead.
Narrative
•
Narrate means to tell a story; a narrator is
the teller of a story…
•
Narrative means what gets told:
–
It is the story.
–
It is also the story quality, or storyline, that runs
through any communications between people.
–
What’s the story?
An Essential Story
There was a girl. There was a boy.
They never met. They never kissed.
They never knew that they had missed,
’cos she lived on the morning side of
mountain
and he lived on the twilight side of hill.
— Traditional.
• Narrative tension
providing
expectation
• Climax that reveals
the sad story
• An alternative story
is nonetheless
implied or
suggested
Telling the Story
•
Many poetic traditions or styles are principally geared towards telling the
story.
•
Much of the earlier poetry in our anthology is narrative – and carries with it
the associated notions of argument and allegory.
– Chaucer 541 The Canterbury Tales – a story of a group of pilgrims who while
travelling to Canterbury tell each other stories to keep themselves amused.
Narratives within a narrative.
– Milton 455 Paradise Lost – a book-length poem written in blank verse about the
fall of Adam and Eve from Paradise and the clash between heaven and hell –
strongly allegorical, dealing with the English revolution.
– We might also look back further to works like the Old English heroic poem
Beowulf and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, from Ancient Greece.
Australian Narratives
• Many Australian bush verses are strong examples of narrative
poetry.
– Eg. Almost anything written by Banjo Paterson.
– But arguably not ‘Waltzing Matilda.’
• ‘Principally geared towards’ means other poetic aspects are
intended to support the story, not outshine or overshadow it.
– Can this ever work in practice?
• Have another look at the ‘Ballad of Moreton Bay’ (from the Book of
Readings):
– Can we say the storyline is the strongest element here?
A Letter to Egon Kisch
• An epistolary poem
– written in iambic pentameter
– set rhyming stanzas
– tells a story.
• More accurately it tells several stories.
– The story of Egon Kisch’s trip to Australia in 1934.
– The story of Australia in the intervening years.
– Sub-narratives of politics, technology, culture and sport.
• An unusual poem insofar as it is book length and tells an integrated
whole story – which is not to say that it is unique.
• Contemporary Australian poets, Dorothy Porter, Les
Murray and Alan Wearne have each published book length
poems.
• Why might a poet write such long poems?
What Poetry Adds to Narrative
• The discipline of structure
– Line
– Stanza
– Pattern
• The ‘music’ of the poetry communicating
beyond semantic textual meaning
• In a sense the story has already
communicated a meaning by virtue of its
being written in poetic form.
Allusion: Narrative by Stealth?
•
Alluding (to a given story) means…
– Saying something that hints at a story the readers/listeners know from
somewhere else.
•
Poems can add a sense of universality to their own stories by hinting at
comparable stories.
– Bruce Dawe’s ‘Life-Cycle’ alludes to a wide range of myths — why?
•
Eg. what does ‘empyrean’ mean? What is it doing in line 9?
–
•
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyrean
Poems can also add depth to their own narrative by alluding to a backstory.
– Eg. Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot tells a unique story about the heroine, but adds little to
the (vast) tradition of stories about Sir Lancelot — instead it draws on them to
establish his character in the poem.
Avoiding the Narrative?
• Here William Carlos
Williams shows us
how a poem can tell
no story at all, and
yet we (readers) still
try to infer narrative
from the few details
we are left with…
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Narrative and its discontents
• There is a more recent tendency in the history of
poetry to eschew direct narrative and rely
on/resort to more reflective or subjective types of
poetry.
• The history of poetry is a struggle between the
objectivity of narrative and the subjectivity of
personal reflection.
• This is a major factor in understanding the
history of human culture, never mind poetry.
• Why has non-narrative poetry come to the fore?
Or has it?
Finding the narrative
• Seamus Heaney’s ‘Punishment’ is a poem that
reflects on the discovery of a body in a peat bog.
• There is something forensic in the way it
discusses the body and sees evidence of crime,
punishment, morality and guilt.
• The poem is a metaphor for ‘finding the
narrative’ in a reflective poem.
• Perhaps it is also a model for the process of
‘finding the narrative’.
Work ahead
• Students who have missed their informal presentation assessments
– Must complete a make-up presentation in order to pass the Unit.
– Have only got one more week to arrange a make-up presentation with
their tutors.
– Cannot do a make-up presentation without special consideration and
the appropriate documents (eg. doctor’s certificate).
• Any questions about the remaining assignments?
1. Long essay.
2. Formal presentation.
3. Presentation of essays.