Does Syntax Matter?
Look at the following pairs of lines. The first is, of course, written by the poet; the
6.
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7. second is mine. Why are their renditions better?
Something there is that doesn't love a wall.
There is something that doesn't love a wall.
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red
Nothing like the sun are my mistress' eyes
Coral is far more red than her lips' red
So much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow /glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.
So much depends / upon / the white chickens / beside the red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water.
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
This coyness, lady, were no crime
Had we but world enough, and time.
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white.
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous:
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed almost ridiculous--
Almost at times, the Fool.
Yes! I am an attendant lord, and was meant to be;
One that will do to swell a progress,
Start a scene or two. . .
But I am not Prince Hamlet.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood. . .
The Old Masters were never wrong
About suffering. They understood . . . Becky Brown. 1999

A Syntactical Comparison
Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the
American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the postcards that showed things looking a little better than they looked. ("Once More to the Lake" E. B. White)
They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut.
One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him down stairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees. (from In Our Time. Ernest
Hemingway)
She [Mary Cassatt] died in 1926, a year after Sargent, mourned by her nieces and nephews, and largely forgotten by the American art world. It was only with the rebirth of
American feminism, in the nineteen-seventies, that her reputation once again began to rise. She had confronted the great, complicated theme that all feminists sooner or later have to confront: in plain English, what do you do about the kids? The big themes turn, as she spotted with her quick intuition, on the questions of motherhood. Everything else is negotiable--middle ways can be sought, compromises made. But until the bioengineers carve out that womb in a man's tummy only women can become mothers, and every woman is faced, sooner or later, with the essential questions of submitting or denying it.
Cassatt denied herself, and made the best and subtlest record we have of what submitting really looks like. She was the first to see that mothers with children were at once women in love and women at work, and that if their love retained some of the joy of sex their work retained all the dignity and awkwardness of labor. In 1911, she wrote to a friend,
"Almost all my pictures with children have the mother holding them, would you could hear them talk, their philosophy would astonish you." It still does. ( from a review by
Adam Gopnik of Cassatt's retrospective, "Modern Woman." New Yorker . July, 1999)
Becky Brown. 2000
NCTE Spring Conference
<brownr@wfu.edu>

Syntactical Analysis of the three passages
1. Count the number of sentences in each piece. Why are the short sentences effective for Hemingway and the long sentences effective for Gopnik and White?
How does the sentence length effect the tone of the passages? Hemingway's description of an execution and his description of the courtyard, for example, use the same kinds of sentences and sentences of about equal length. Why is this effective in establishing his own distance from the subject--and in bringing us closer to it? Notice that all his sentences are loose except for the last one. Notice how it would change if it were "He was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees when they fired the first volley" or "When he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees, they fired the first volley." Notice how the repetitions of "water" and "rain" take our attention from the execution.
How does the tone of the White passage change at the last of his sentence? Had he started with, "The postcards. . ." how would our perception of the entire "summertime" have changed? Should he have made this long sentence several shorter ones? What is his most vivid image? Why?
Gopnik's review ends with a three-word sentence. Does it work? Look at it against Hemingway's threeword sentence, "It rained hard."
2. Count the number of adjectives or other qualifiers in each work.
Look at the White's "life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable." Why does that work better than "indelible life, the fade-proof lake, the unshatterable woods" or "life indelible, the lake fadeproof, the woods unshatterable?" (Notice the attention to detail with the can of lime by the outhouse.)
Do the writers depend on strong nouns and verbs more than qualifiers? Give examples.
3. Look at the structure of the Gopnik piece. The movement from fact to commentary to substantiation using Cassatt's own words is noteworthy. This is the final paragraph of a multi-page review; does it sound like a good conclusion. Why?
4. Count the number of polysyllabic words in each piece. Does the rule, "The higher the ratio of polysyllabic words, the more difficult the content," hold true in this case?
Look for denotative and connotative words and for euphonious and cacophonous words.
5. Do the SOS activity (below). What new conclusions do you reach about the connections between syntax and meaning?
SOS Activity (adapted from "SOS Sentence Opening Sheet." Cahill, Robert B. and Herbert J. Grebic.
Stack the Deck. Chicago)
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Sentence #
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First Four Words they shot the six
Special Features Verbs shot
No. of
_words_
18 1 shocking, direct, "six"
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___2__________there were pools of__ _pools/water_________ were____ ______8__
3 there were wet dead wet dead/repetition were 11__

SOS Activity (adapted from "SOS Sentence Opening Sheet." Cahill, Robert B. and
Herbert J. Grebic. Stack the Deck. Chicago)
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Sentence # First Four Words Special Features Verbs No. of words
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-A Guide for Advanced Placement: ENGLISH VERTICAL TEAMS