Structure Reinforces Meaning

The title of this note has been the lesson my year 11 students AREN'T getting... As part of our class, they have to analyze poetry for content (what the poem means), language (how the poet uses words and phrases), and structure (how the poet put the poem together).

Structure is built into the universe. Sub-atomic and atomic particles make up molecules that make up substances that make up everything. Proteins and fibres, cells and genes string together to make everything in the world.

Language too is structured. Built into us from very young children when we first mumble or cry out our first syllables.

Poets especially structure language to reinforce the meaning thereof. They can play with rhythms, images, senses, they can use lines and stanzas to create stories or explode ideas.

Confucius once said "real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." What I'm getting at is, negative reality. You know much more easily if you do NOT know something than to make a list of everything you DO know.

What I'm trying to say, somewhat clumsily is that sometimes we figure things out not by what is, but by what is not.

The other day, my students and I examined a poem with 3 lines per stanza except in the last one. The last stanza had 2 lines. The last stanza was about what we want out of life... and it left it off... it was about dying too soon, and not knowing things. There SHOULD have been a third line, but there wasn't.

The negative space... the absense of the line showed us something was missing, something was wrong. The white space asked us a question of what DO we want out of life... what makes us successful... what should we live our lives for? The white space also showed the wisdom of the poet, knowing he couldn't tell us what life was about... that it's something you have to decide for yourself. These things I emphatically asked my pupils to a sea of blank faces. At 16 years old, they take exams in 6 months and then leave to face the world. Some of them might go to college... some might do training... some might make it to uni... but in 6 months, no one will be telling them how to live.

Another example is the poem "On my First Sonne" by Ben Johnson. Johnson's son died when he was 7 years old. His son had been, as some would say, the apple of his eye... his "best piece of poetry." In his poem he writes in the last lines that he will never love anything so much because he might lose it.

The poem is written like a sonnet, it's about love (the love of a son) and it has other structural things that poets would understand that I won't mention for the general audience, except 2 lines are missing. It only has 12 lines instead of 14. In sonnets, the resolution of the poem comes in the last 2 lines...

The structure of the poem shows that Ben Johnson is NOT resolved to his son's death. It's an almost-sonnet because he is so gut-wrenchingly depressed and heartbroken that he can't get the two lines out what would make it a love poem. He promised NOT to love... and he's withholding those two lines as a testament to his promise.

People who can read structure SEE the extent of Johnson's pain, SEE the big life question in the war poem... they see between the words, they see to the innate core of how the poem has been put together, how the art has been put together...

(I swear this is a legit sequeway)

I've also been watching the tv show Bones... where a forensic anthropologist (a person who studies the human bone structure and culture among other things) solves crimes by being able to SEE how bones have been damaged. She can see the faces of humans from only their skulls. She can tell how bones were bruised and broken... she can SEE what was used to make the damage and uses her knowledge to find out who the people are and how they died.

Ok... so the tie in... life is about SEEING things... SEEING the intended structure. The world, so intricate and amazing, so mystifying yet comprehensible... it has a structure, it has a way it was intended to be... it has a Platonic state of perfection that should exist, either in or outside of heaven (depending on whether or not you like the idea of Platonic forms).

So the big question is, what are we looking at? If the structure reinforces the meaning... what does the structure of our life say about us? Does it show what we really think and believe? Do our eyes see clearly who we really are, or are our eyes clouded, and how would we know anyway?

Fiona Apple wrote a song called "window" which raises some issues here, echoed in any post-modernism searching for truth discussion... lol. I suppose this note, rather than coming to a clear conclusion or solution, poses ideas to get you asking questions... because as we all learn from the Fisher King... salvation for the kingdom comes when you ask the right questions. Happy pondering!

"I was staring out the window
The whole time he was talking to me
It was a filthy pane of glass
I couldn't get a clear view

As he went on and on
It wasn't the outside world I could see
Just the filthy pane that I was looking through...

Because the fact in fact
Whatever's in front of me is covering my view
So I can't see what I'm seeing in fact
I only see what I'm looking through

I had to break the window
It just had to be it was in my way
Better that I break the window
Then forget what I had to say

So again I've done the right thing
I was never worried about that
The answer's always been in clear view
But even when the window's clean
I still can't see for the fact
That when it's clean it's so clear
I can't tell what I'm looking through"