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XXX
Paper 2
20 February 2013
Contemporary poetry is largely dominated by poets that put a variety of line
endings to use. Poets like Mark Doty frequently alternate between what James
Longenbach calls end-stopped lines, parsing lines, and annotated lines. Jane Hirshfield,
however, tends to use the end-stopped line most frequently in her poems. While this
pattern may at first seem a simplistic way to write poetry, Hirshfield uses the endstopped line (and varies it just enough) to create new meanings in her poems.
In “Protractor,” seven of the ten lines end with periods. The other three end with
commas or colons, but even these would make grammatical sense if they ended in a
period. The poem focuses on divisions between objects and ideas, with its images of
“Death on one side of the clear glass, / not-death on the other,” and “what begins near
quickly grows far, once the lines are allowed to.” Because the poem is about separation,
it makes sense that each line is a syntactically complete unit. The lines are individual
sentences, unconnected to other lines with parsed or annotated line breaks. They are
ideas or images in themselves, separate from the other elements of the poem. The line
breaks separate the ideas in the same way the window separates death from not-death.
Good Hirshfield’s pattern of ending lines after punctuated stops also brings attention to
the only point in the poem where there are two syntactically complete units in one line:
“Losses are so. Split into yellows and blues.” Based on the rest of the poem, we’d expect
to see a break between the first and second sentences. Because the second sentence
begins with the word “split,” the division would seem natural. But the break from the
established pattern only draws attention to the concept of splitting in the poem. Despite
seeming simple, “Protractor” uses end-stopped lines artfully to emphasize the meaning
of the poem. Good discussion. Helpful, interesting.
Another of Hirshfield’s poems in Come, Thief that is constructed entirely of endstopped lines is “Fourth World.” Eight of its eleven lines end in periods. In this poem,
however, the end-stopped lines do not merely form to the contours of the syntax. The
three lines that do not end in periods stick out, and none of them are syntactically
complete. The poem begins with three very simple, complete sentences, each in its own
line: “A friend dies. / A horse dies. / A man dies over and over again on the news.”
These three lines are entirely unpoetic and blunt in the way they describe death, which
leads to the next line, a sentence fragment. “Without them,” the speaker of the poem
says, “the fourth world continues.” Because “Without them” appears on its own line, it
seems to be a complete idea, like the three full-stopped lines in the first stanza. Yes
Hirshfield thus emphasizes the idea that there is a place (the “fourth world”) where death
does not matter. The second time the speaker uses lines not ended by periods is in the
next stanza, when she writes, “Absence, anger, grief, / cruelty, failure –”. Based on the
patterns of the poem, it is unclear why these five concepts would be organized into two
lines instead of only one. Neither of the lines is syntactically complete, but to put them
all in one line would follow the syntax of the sentence, which ends with “The fox walks
through them.” Because they appear in two lines, however, this grouping of human
Comment [HA1]: Begs the question of what you
mean by “poetic” in this usage. Not helpful.
emotions becomes more complex, more nuanced, enhancing the point that animals are
simply disaffected by the goings-on in the human world. The poem uses end-stopped
lines to showcase variations in syntax, contributing to the poem’s contrast between the
human and animal worlds. A good point and analysis, but incomplete. One can see
difference and progression in “Absence, anger, grief/cruelty, failure,” for example. The
first seems to comment on the emotions of the speaker who’s lost a friend (in a world of
many losses, as the second and third lines of the poem demonstrate). The second line
speaks more to the world in which our losses happen. These are conditions of human
life, and all life. And remember that the “fox” is first introduced as “the world” which
“continues./Waking fox-red on the flanks of the mountain.” In other words, “fox”
becomes a metaphor for the constant turning of the world and of life itself—the life
force, perhaps. Then the poem ties together this ongoing/neverending life force and
the dead person whom the speaker laments: “It wants, as she had, to live.” The poem
then ends (splendidly, I think) with how difficult it is to be in this world which,
fortunately has “cool…shadows” but also is “hot in the sun,” i.e., uncomfortable in the
light of knowing how things go, how life goes on, even though we (and our friends) die.
Remember that the poem has tied the life force to that red fox, which is a metaphor for
the light of the sun.
Not all of Hirshfield’s poems are built exclusively from end-stopped lines. It is
clear from poems like “French Horn” that she also has mastery over parsed and
annotated lines. But Hirshfield is surprisingly effective in creating meaning by using only
lines ending in punctuation.
A- Very good, but not quite there yet, XXX, in its explanation of how Hirshfield uses
fine distinctions/variations in her lines to create their effects and their meanings. Please
see just above.
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