Interlude: Dylan Thomas constructs a WONDERFUL chiasmus

On the one hand this is one of the more popular posts at New Savanna. Not in the very top rank, but well over a thousand hits. That's one reason to bump it to the head of the queue. The fact that I'm currently thinking about chiasmus, in the extended form known as ring-composition, is a better one.

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Some years ago, before I got a computer, I read. R. G. Peterson, Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature (PMLA 91, 3, May 1976: 367-375). It opens:

That such a superb example of Renaissance elegance and grace as Spenser’s Epithalamion is literally informed by a complicated numerical system and a highly symmetrical structure was announced in 1960 by A. Kent Hiatt. The numbers–365 days, twenth-four hourse, the proportions of day and night at the summer solstice at a given latitude in Ireland, the long and short lines of the poems, the groups of stanzas–coincide with transitional points in the content; the structure depends upon correspondences and parallels between the two halves.

Peterson goes on to report that similar methods “have been used to reveal everywhere in literature hitherto hidden symmetries, correspondences, patterns, and systems of number symbolism.” He goes on to review quite a bit of this work while raising the inevitable question: did the authors actually intend these patterns? And that question bleeds into this one: Are they real?

The questions are real, and serious. But I’m not prepared to address them in full. I’m interested in a single case. Peterson devotes some attention to Cedric H. Whitman’s study, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (1958) and tells us that had also remarked that Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue” formed a “huge chiasmus” – that is, the first line rhymed with the last, the second with the next to last, the third with the next to the next to last, and so forth. I decided to check it out.

Rhyming the Circle

“Author’s Prologue” is the first poem in Thomas’ Collected Poems. It is 102 lines long. Here’s the first ten lines:

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,

There’s no rhyme scheme apparent there, but that’s not the issue. What we’re interested in is the relationship between the first ten lines and the last ten. Before we look at that, however, let’s look at the middle ten lines:

Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage read, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms
To Wales in my arms.
Hoo, there, in castle keep,
You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
The flickering runs and dive
The dingle furred deer dead!

The Jasmine Papers: Notes on the Study of Poetry in the Age of Cognitive Science

I have now collected my posts on "To a Solitary Disciple" and associated discussions into a single working paper having the above title. You may download it from my SSRN page.

The abstract is immediately below, followed by the introduction and then the table of contents.

Abstract: In More Than Cool Reason Lakoff and Turner offer a global reading of “To a Solitary Disciple” (by William Carlos Williams) in terms of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). The reading itself is independent of CMT; any competent literary critic could have done it. Their attempt to explain the relationship between that reading and the poem using CMT is at best problematic and does not seem to be metaphoric as specified by the terms of CMT. Rather, their reading takes the form of little narrative that has the same form as one they attribute to the poem. Beyond the critique of Lakoff and Turner, this paper makes some observations about the poem and suggests that it has a ring form: A, B, C, D, C’, B’, A’. Two sentences by Hemingway and a poem by Dylan Thomas are discussed in counterpoint with “To a Solitary Disciple.” Two appendices discuss ontological cognition in relation to Williams’ Paterson, Book V and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

Introduction: The Poverty of Cognitivism for Literary Criticism

This working paper consists of things and stuff. I drafted some drafted over a decade ago and wrote others on the day or on the day before I posted them.

Several things are going on, but the central thread is an examination of the third chapter of George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason, which is an analysis of “To a Solitary Disciple” by William Carlos Williams. That book is certainly one of the founding texts of cognitive poetics, which is a major school of thought within a broader engagement between literary criticism and cognitive science. As such, that Lakoff and Turner on Williams is a paradigmatic example in this engagement: If you want to use cognitive metaphor theory in the analysis of literary texts, this is how you do it.

It may very well be a good example of the application of cognitive metaphor theory, but it’s an inadequate example of literary analysis. While I have quite a bit to say about their analysis – in A Leak in Cool Reason, Beyond Metaphor: Pattern Matching, and What’s a Global Reading for Anyhow? – my major argument on this point – that it’s inadequate as literary analysis – is presented in The Disciple Revisited and Revived. There I comment on the poem in some detail, but without bringing any particular body of theoretical material to bear on the text, not their theory, not mine, not anyone else’s. To this I would add my discussions of two sentences from Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and of the chiasmus governing Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue”.

Alas, I do not know how to explain what I found in “To a Solitary Disciple”. Nor do I know of any body of theory that can do so. That is to say, I am unaware of any set of principles of mental functioning that explain why poems are LIKE THAT. They just are. Some of them. This one appears to have ring-form – A, B, C, D, C’, B’, A’. No one knows how to explain them. Maybe one day cognitive science will be up to that task. But it isn’t now.

I have come to believe that what a good critic sees in texts is mostly a function of wide experience. That experience may well begin with tutelage by master critics – I learned from Richard Macksey, Donald Howard, Don Cameron Allen, J. Hillis Miller, Earl Wasserman and, in a sense, Lévi-Strauss, though I never studied or even corresponded with him – but it is a craft that must be developed through use. The more you study texts, the more you learn to see in them. Really see in them, not just project your own fancies.

The Disciple Revisited and Revived

Having made some remarks about how Lakoff and Turner have commented on “To a Solitary Disciple” in More than Cool Reason, I would now like to offer some further remarks of my own.

Temporal Structure

Let me take a cue from Lakoff and Turner’s consideration of form. They approach it (by observing that the poem begins with a series of instructions of the form “Rather X than Y” (pp. 155 ff.), where X and Y are things to do. The first three strophes begin with “Rather X” and the first two provide the concluding and contrasting “than Y.” The third does not. What is worse, it overflows (their word, and a good one) and careens into the rather different 4th strophe. Thus:

Rather grasp (12)
how the dark
converging lines
of the steeple (16)
meet at the pinnacle--
perceive how 
its little ornament
tries to stop them-- (20)

See how it fails!
See how the converging lines
of the hexagonal spire (23)
escape upward--
receeding, dividing!
--sepals (26)
that guard and contain
the flower!

They obvserve that the transition from 3rd to 4th strophe is the midpoint of the poem (which is 42 lines long). At this point they go on to offer an iconic reading of these lines, which I’ve already commented on in What’s a Global Reading for, Anyhow?.

I see no need to recapitulate those remarks. Rather, I want to start from Lakoff and Turner's observation each occasion “rather” sets up a syntactic expectation from some contrasting item that may or may not be satisfied. The first strophe is six lines long and begins with “rather.” The contrasting item is cued by “than” opening line five. The second strophe is five lines long and, like the first, begins with “rather.” The contrasting “than” begins the third line (9) of this strophe.

At this point the syntatic expectation cued by “rather” has been joined by another expectation, one about how long it takes to complete a “Rather X than Y” pair: roughly five or six lines (where lines are understood as temporal units). We’ve been through two such strophes and now, so I assert, expect that the third strophe, beginning in line 12, will be in the same ball park.

What’s a Global Reading for, Anyhow?

Let me continue my interrogation – as the kids call it these days – of Lakoff and Turner on “To a Solitary Disciple.” As interrogations are aggressive proceedings, I will, in that spirit, offer a suggestion about their global reading that is perhaps somewhat different from what they intended. My suggestion takes the form of an analogy, to a building, say a cathedral, and the materials of which it is constructed.

The first six pages of their reading consist of “local” readings, discussions of specific metaphors that occur in the text. Think of these as analogous to stone blocks, wooden planks, metal fittings, pieces of stained glass, and so forth, the materials from which the cathedral is constructed. But a cathedral is not just a pile of such things. A cathedral is a carefully designed structure that is built from those things.

What are the design principles and construction techniques? That is why Lakoff and Turner have produced a global reading, to answer that question. Now, they don’t say that’s what they’re doing, and their global reading is not a good substitute for design principles, but then, I said the analogy was an aggressive one. But I want to save that discussion for later. Let’s take a look at some of their local metaphor mappings.

Seeing is Touching, Form is Motion

Here’s an example, More Than Cool Reason (pp. 141-142):

Consider “the sky / is smooth / as a turquoise.” How can something we see but not touch be smooth? How does smoothness apply to vision? There is a basic metaphor that SEEING IS TOUCHING, where the eyes are understood as limbs that reach out and perceive what they touch, as in “Her eyes picked out every detail of the pattern,” “He couldn’t take his eyes off of her,” “He ran his eyes over the page, “ “Their eyes me,” and “His eyes traced the outline of the steeple.” When we run our fingers across something smooth like a turquoise, nothing interrupts the continuous motion. Similarly, when we scan a perfectly empty, clear blue sky, there is nothing to stop our gaze, no clouds, no birds, no variation in visual texture. The metaphor of seeing-as-touching maps the uninterrupted tactile texture of the smooth stone onto the uninterrupted visual texture of the sky.

That works. But note what’s going on. It’s not clear to me that, at this point, we’ve got anything more than a broad generalization, with “seeing is touching” being a phrase that captures that generalization. We don’t yet have a mechanism. What I’d really like to know just how the mind/brain does this but then, I’m sure, so would Lakoff and Turner.

Prose Rhythm, 2 Sentences by Hemingway

I’ve read a great deal of Hemingway, but years ago. He’s noted for his style. Here’s a paragraph from the Wikipedia entry:

The simplicity of the prose is deceptive. Zoe Trodd believes Hemingway crafted skeletal sentences in response to Henry James's observation that World War I had “used up words.” Hemingway offers a “multi-focal” photographic reality. His iceberg theory of omission is the foundation on which he builds. The syntax, which lacks subordinating conjunctions, creates static sentences. The photographic “snapshot” style creates a collage of images. Many types of internal punctuation (colons, semicolons, dashes, parentheses) are omitted in favor of short declarative sentences. The sentences build on each other, as events build to create a sense of the whole. Multiple strands exist in one story; an “embedded text” bridges to a different angle. He also uses other cinematic techniques of “cutting” quickly from one scene to the next; or of “splicing” a scene into another. Intentional omissions allow the reader to fill the gap, as though responding to instructions from the author, and create three-dimensional prose.

He was a master of prose rhythm. That’s what I want to talk about.

I want to look at two sentences from “Chapter Eighteen” of his book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon (1932, 1960). The chapter's opening pages are about fighting style and technique and, for all I know, the entire chapter is about technique; I’ve not reread the whole. Hemingway believed that, at its best, bullfighting achieved an ecstatic magic, “an experience that either you will have in your life or you will never have” (p. 207).

Here is a sentence that caught my attention years ago. It seemed to me that Hemingway was imitating the matador’s movements in the rhythm of his prose. This is a single sentence of 131 words and consists of three major clauses (I’ve colored the background to highlight them, from p. 214):

Gallo, too, was a master of gracious passes made before the bull’s horns, passes made with both hands, changing the muleta from one hand to the other, sometimes behind his back, passes that started as though they were to be natural and instead, the man spinning around, muleta wrapping itself around him and the bull following the spinning loose end of it; others in which the man turned on himself getting close to the bull’s neck and winding him around him, passes made kneeling, using both hands on the muleta to swing the bull around in a curve; all passes that needed a great knowledge of the bull’s mentality and great confidence, were beautiful to see and very satisfying to Gallo to make although they were the negation of true bullfighting.

In order to bring out the rhythm I’ve reset the sentence so that each phrase begins on a new line and no phrase takes more than a single line. The resulting print is rather small, but I’m not asking you to read the lines, simply to note their rhythm:

The first clause is almost as long as the other two combined, and is broken into many short phrases:

1) 62 words: Gallo, too, was a master…

2) 36: others in which the man…

3) 33: all passes that needed…

That first clause consists of nine phrases of varying lengths; seven of those describe various kinds of passes with the cape.

That’s what struck me as being a prose imitation of what the bullfighter does. Imagine speaking those phrases. No, more, actually speak them and as you do so, wave your hand as though it held a cape draped over a sword. You will see that the time scale of Hemingway’s prose is on the same order as the motions he is describing. Even when you are not speaking those phrases aloud you read them in time. George Lakoff (2012)* reports that Teenie Matlock

demonstrated that subjects actually traced metaphorical fictive motion sentences (as in “The road runs along the cliffs above the ocean”) in real time via mental simulation.

A Leak in Cool Reason 2: Pattern Matching

I would like to clarify my earlier critique of Lakoff and Turner on “To a Solitary Disciple” (from the third chapter of More Than Cool Reason) by offering a crude account of how I would characterize the relationship between the text of the poem and their global reading.

Consider the following diagram. We have a fragment of a cognitive system above the double line and a sensory system (vision) below it:

The sensory system contains a simple image schema, one in terms of which we can define two metaphor mappings – IMPORTANCE IS CENTRAL; LESS IMPORTANT IS PERIPHERAL – and one metaphorical inference: ESSENCE IS CENTRAL. While Lakoff and Turner discuss image schemas in the book, they don’t explicitly invoke them in their treatment of essence at this point. The cognitive system contains the concepts underlying the text of the poem, and the diagram only explicitly indicates the moon and the edifice (of the church), which are conjoined as elements of some scene. The moon is linked to (mapped to) the center of the image schema while the edifice is linked to the periphery of the schema. The sense of the diagram, then, is that the moon is central while the edifice is peripheral.

Note that those metaphor mappings (IMPORTANCE IS CENTRAL and LESS IMPORTANT IS PERIPHERAL) are not verbally represented in the diagram, nor is the inference, ESSENCE IS CENTRAL. Such verbal representations aren’t needed. I have replaced those verbal statements with diagramming conventions.

The sense of the diagram is that the moon’s centrality is understood directly in terms of the underlying image schema. In effect, the link between the center of the scheme and the moon node IS one mapping while the links between the periphery and the edifice node is the other mapping. The link (notice the arrow head) from edifice to moon asserts that moon is more salient; that is the metaphorical inference.

A Leak in Cool Reason

The cool reason I have in mind is George Lakoff and Mark, More than Cool Reason (1989), one of the founding texts of cognitive poetics. The leak is in the way they reason about their global reading of “To a Solitary Disciple,” by William Carlos Williams.

The poem presents a simple scene, the moon in the sky above the steeple of some building, a church presumably.

Lakoff and Turner set out to discuss the poem on two levels (p. 141). On one level they discuss cognitive metaphors the poem employs laying out that scene. They find a number of cognitive metaphors: SEEING IS TOUCHING, FORM IS MOTION, and EVENTS ARE ACTIONS. They also note that the poem employs “fresh”, metaphor that is novel and has not been precipitated down into the cognitive unconscious as a fragment of mundane working conceptual structure. This much of their analysis corresponds with the work I have done with Sonnet 129 and to the work that has more generally been done in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence on text comprehension and generation. As such these metaphors are directly related to the words in the poem itself and to their underlying meaning.

These metaphors belong to the cognitive base on which the poem is constructed. It is their second level of analysis that interests me here, for it is quite different in character. And its relationship to the poem itself is, if anything, even more problematic than that of a reading in, say, a Freudian, phenomenological, or deconstructive mode.

Of this second level, they assert “the poem as a whole can be given a metaphorical interpretation, in which the disciple to which the poem is addressed is told how to understand the nature of religion in terms of the scene presented to him” (p. 141). They note that the metaphorical global reading they propose is not the only possible global reading. What interests me is not so much the details of how they construct this particular global reading, but the overall relationship they posit between this reading and the poem itself.

So, first they provide an ordinary reading of the poem. It is this reading they are going to analyze, not the poem itself. Hence it is a reading (in the form of cognitive analysis) of a reading of the poem.