I haven't done a poem in a long time.  Since it's another very cold and windy time in Topeka, there's not much new to report, so today seems like a good occasion to explicate a poem.  The only real news is that classes have begun again for Mohamed and a degree audit has confirmed that this is his last semester before graduation.  And we've been notified by the USCIS that Mohamed's green card application has been received and accepted.

The last two articles I published combined my love of linguistics and literature.  The longer one was an analysis of Melville's use of nominalization in his strange (and only heterosexual) novel Pierre (despite the subject, the article was somewhat light-hearted--or as much so as one can be in a discussion of Melville).  The other was a very brief explication of a sonnet by Gwendolyn Brooks:

A Note on Sonnet 2 of Brooks’s THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR

 

What shall I give my children? Who are poor,

Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,

Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand

No velvet and no velvety velour;

But who have begged me for a brisk contour,

Crying that they are quasi, contraband

Because unfinished, graven by a hand

Less than angelic, admirable or sure.

My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.

But I lack access to my proper stone.

And plenitude of plan shall not suffice,

Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone

To ratify my little halves who bear

Across an autumn freezing everywhere.

 

The title of Gwendolyn Brooks’s sonnet sequence “The Children of the

Poor” enunciates the theme and variations of the poems. From the first sonnet

about people who have no children to the last about the death of a child,

Brooks contemplates the uneasy and ambivalent relationships in poor families.

A mother whose children, while making no demands for luxury, still cry

out for a sense of completion that the mother cannot give them narrates the

second sonnet. The octave focuses on the voices of the children; the sestet, in

three sentences, describes the mother’s frustration at having “mode, design,

device,” but lacking “access to my proper stone” (9, 10).

In the last four lines, the only sentence in the sestet to be longer than one

line, the narrative voice says:

 

And plenitude of plan shall not suffice,

Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone

To ratify my little halves who bear

 

Across an autumn freezing everywhere.

 




 

 

 

The word “ratify” echoes the other legalistic language in the poem: “adjudged”

 

and “contraband.” The alliteration of the hard p in “plenitude” and “plan” (and

“proper” in the previous line) contrasts with the liquid l sound so prevalent in

the poem. But what claims the reader’s attention is something quite different

from normal prosodic considerations.

The verb “bear” is transitive. It requires an object. And so the reader

is faced here with a syntactic interpretive choice—nd finally, as for the

narrator, an unsatisfactory conclusion. If one were hearing the poem, the

next word, “Across,” would suggest a common expression—“to bear a

cross”—ut that possibility is ruled out when the listener discovers that

“Across” is one word, not two, and a preposition, not a noun. But what

is the object of “Across”? It could be the gerund “freezing,” modified by

the adjectival noun “autumn.” That leaves the reader with two adverbials

after “bear”— prepositional phrase and “everywhere”—lthough

still without a direct object.” One might also argue that “autumn” is the

object of the preposition, so that there is a shorter, temporal prepositional

phrase (“Across an autumn”), followed by a gerund (“freezing”), which

serves as the direct object, and then “everywhere,” the second adverbial,

one of place.

The problem with that reading, however, is that it violates a constitutive

rule of English grammar. In English, unlike many languages (as any teacher of

nonnative speakers will attest), native speakers do not place adverbs, however

flexible their position otherwise, between a verb and its direct object. Those

for whom English is a first language do not create sentences like “I studied

diligently the material” or “I read carefully the poem.”

Finally, therefore, none of the three readings I have suggested is satisfactory—the first because it

 

cannot be integrated into the rest of the line,

the second because it leaves the verb without an object, and the third

because it produces a sentence that is not English.

And yet that very inconclusiveness is perfectly apt for a poem whose theme

is the failure to complete. The first sonnet in the sequence ends with this

phrase: “And makes a sugar of / The malocclusions, the inconditions of love”

(13–4). Here the reader encounters a sort of “mal-conclusion,” an altogether

fitting trailing off, leaving the reader, like the children, feeling “unfinished.”